Chapter Two: Leadership

Over 60 years ago Roy Lewis and Rosemary Stewart wrote that ‘we know more about the motives, habits, and most intimate arcana of the primitive people of New Guinea or elsewhere, than we do of the denizens of the executive suites in Unilver House’ (1958, p. 17). In the last 60 years, those word still hold true, despite the collective efforts of iconic writers such as Warren Bennis, James MacGregor Burns, Peter Drucker, John Kotter, Henry Mintzberg, and John Sayles. In the last 60 years it has become ‘fashionable’ to attempt to conceptually distinguish ‘leadership’ (does the ‘right’ thing) from ‘management’ (does things ‘right’) (e.g. Kotter, 1990; Zaleznik, 1977). Conceptually, this may be achievable, but potentially problematic and most likely unachievable in practice. The question posed by Henry Mintzberg (2011) is a relevant one: ‘would you like to be managed by someone who doesn’t lead … or led by someone who doesn’t manage?’ (p. 8). As Jim March (2004) adeptly puts it ‘leadership involves plumbing as well as poetry’ (p. 173). The debate regarding whether ‘leadership’ and ‘management’ are interdependent, that is, two sides of the same coin, or are mutually exclusive and independent of each other is one that most likely emanated from the work of Kotter and Bennis in the 1970s and 1980s, but continues to this day. In their attempts to reach a better understanding of what leadership is, they provided momentum for a binary view of business behaviours, that is, separation of management and leadership as two separate sets of tasks. Management was simplistically personified as about getting things done daily; in contrast, leadership was cast as charismatically building a vision and responding to change (Witzel, 2013). The difference between managers and leaders, may therefore not just be situated in the conceptual literature, but manifested itself in mindset and executive behaviours. Managers embracing order, process, stability, and control. In contrast, leaders’ psyche is accepting of more disruptive, fluid, and dynamic environments.