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Let’s Paint a Picture of
Leadership 101: It’s Water Based
Dr. Trent Keough
Why this Leadership 101? Phone Call
“Dr. Keough, can we talk? I’m doing a doctorate on leadership. I’d like to ask
a few questions of you (and 30 other CEOs), please. What’s your leadership
style?” She never took a breath or pause!
After listening to her description of a dissertation thesis, I respectfully but
apparently too quickly declined. Awkward silence. Why not? Yes, she is brave
enough to ask. I tell her. I’m not participating in any MORE doctoral research
studies. I think I’ve already made a fulsome contribution to grad student
confusion.
But thank-you for asking me, I (insincerely) say, and good luck (as I couldn’t
care less what happens) in your studies. Did she feel the parenthetical anger,
rudeness, the faux genuineness? The parentheses were never said or even
then thought at the time.
Wonder what she thought of my intention, though?
Who’s in the Leadership Game?1. for-profit authors (selling insights)
2. pure theorists (the academics)
3. clinical practitioners (the experientials from business or government)
4. executive education problem solvers (dishing out big $ for strategy solutions)
5. quick fix gurus (those seeking followers, soul groupies, those denying self)
6. leaders (those on the job)
7. Followers (those working with ‘One’ on the job)
8. Students (those wanting to be on the job as follower or leader, no matter)
9. You, right here and now! (curious . . . Appreciate you coming.)
10. And then there’s, well me, Trent. (cook, fisher, hunter, reader, idea monger)
11. Or, Dr. Trent, the Ph.D. (who has an academic bias, baffle, discourse agenda)
12. Or, is it Dr. Trent Keough, President & CEO (with a recruitment agenda)
13. As to who’s me, does it matter? What it matters most to effective leadership?
‘Trent, what’s your leadership, style?
Better to have asked what is
your leadership praxis? Why?
What is praxis?
Leadership praxis is the intersection
of doing and self-consciously
thinking about the presumptions,
commitments and reasons for the
actions of leading.
Style is a Launch Pad
Leadership and style are different.
Leadership has definitive attributes; and, style is always circumstantial,
changing, localized to one, if not just a fleeting fad shared by those
momentarily inspired.
Style is a word inaccurate to explicate the chameleon quality of leadership.
Effective leaders, however, all share this chameleon trait.
Of course this is but one of my at-the-ready pat answers.
What’s the intention here?
I’m really intent on taking the inquisitor onward to explore the impacts of:
1. Nature
2. Nurture
3. Auto/biography
4. Language
5. Context/situation/location, and
6. Ideological, epistemological, humanist and existential theories of the praxis
of leadership.
The Practit-
ioner Conceit
Great Person
Theory
Empirical
Study Proofs
Power and
Opportunity
Theory
License
Theory
The
Alchemist's
Promise
The
Accidental
Hero
The
Heteroglossia
Principle
The idea that
anyone’s self-
revelation, i.e.
mine, brings
universally
practical
insights to
others is a
fallacy of
leadership
theory.
Only the greats
share these
qualities and
abilities;
otherwise
known as the
Leadership
Gene Inquiry.
Study enough
leaders and
you’ll
eventually see
what similarity
defines or
excludes
them.
Belief in self is
profound in all
leaders; this
makes them
opportunistic
as they
singularly
want absolute
power.
Leadership is
given to, not
taken from.
Others always
bestow the
power to lead
by voluntarily
following; the
reality is
individuals
receiving it
might not be
leaders
themselves.
The leadership
of emotional
intelligence,
consensus,
transform-
ation,
reengineering,
authenticity,
etc.
The Right
Person in the
Right Place at
the Right
Time.
The possibility
for leadership
is found in the
dialogic
imagination
wherein the
individual self-
consciously
engages the
polyphony of
forces
impacting the
execution of
leadership
activities.
What’s Trent’s intended purpose here?
We agree that there’s always more going on . . . than what is outwardly said.
Is there mimicry of communication theory, and a magnification of the
quandaries of embracing or identifying leadership’s intentional purposes?
How important is it to know your audience, as both leader and author?
What is it that Leaders Do?
Navigation enabling a group’s owning new ideas is a leadership commonplace.
Or is it?
No one needs leading in the familiar territory of home turf or the realm of
what they already think, right?
Oftentimes the exceptional qualities of the ordinary are lost on those
routinely seeing it, not seeing it routinely.
Is leadership, then, always a role play scenario within an unspecified
narrative sharing a common trope of navigation in physical and conceptual
realms?
Who to engage and when?
There’s no use in trying to engage the genuinely disinterested but what of the
unknowingly ignorant, the adjacently oblivious?
Leaders are expected to reach out to these two typecast characters found in
all organizations.
To be plainly unknowing isn’t the same as it is to be consciously resisting, is
it?
And, as we know resistors are by circumstance both followers and an
audience within the larger one sometimes populated by other stereotypes
with unique personalities: voyageur innovators, adventurous followers, the
joyously domesticated and entrenched, and the historically entitled, the
provocateur trickster who morphs occasionally into the organization’s version
of the sociopath.
Apathy, Indifference & Lateral Aggression
Leaders must contend with disinterested audiences, their followers’
ignorance to opportunity, and the protection of status quo or the stability of
place or practice that stifles the possibility of imagining differently.
How audiences/followers interact with their leaders and each other is
another source of potential confusion and conflict. But it is always revealing
of group character.
Inquisitiveness is an essential quality for all leaders.
Lack of predictability, once referenced in leadership skills inventories as a
'high tolerance for ambiguity', is the only constant?
Leaders must consistently reconfirm what they know or presume of their
audiences/followers, test for prevailing opinions within them, and verify what
locals hold to be facts or as the Trump Administration says, alternates to
them!
Knowing when to question, when to listen, and when to shut down dialogue
itself are essential leadership skills.
When Organizations are Silent
Squeaky wheels draw attention; safety check says, failed bearings because of
poor maintenance. As chief navigator, how does a leader undertake bearing
checks?
Leaders should be drawn not only to the chorus but to organizational silence.
They must demonstrate curiosity, through both public query and private
reflection, for the social complexities muting dialogue or inspiring
cacophony.
Not enough leaders spend time examining, assessing and knowing the
language of common parle within their organizations.
Culture outs change; language changes culture
A leader needs to be able to tune in to language that increases productivity and excise from use that which does not.
Changing the language use of an organization is to transform its culture. As Peter Senge said, “People don’t resist change. They resist being changed.”
What Leaders Do, Language Revisited
Leaders understand that introducing new ideas or processes require
careful considerations of language.
Leaders prepare adoption strategies when introducing new
vocabulary.
Leaders anticipate temporary remorse and lingering anger when
naming new taboo words/practices.
Leaders have the responsivity for authorizing sanctioned language
and protecting the organization’s lexicon.
Leaders ‘ARE’ their actual, their self-perceived and
others’ appropriated uses of their Language Authority: She
said, ‘Trent said.’ But did he?
Leaders must have a more heighten sense of their individual ontological
being in and as language than those that follow them.
Why?
Why is leadership seldom addressed as a political construction defined by
valorized states of being established as language?
The Plain Language Game: Unconscious
Competents Can Be Baffled by their Own
un/Doing
Leadership is an abstract epistemological construct as well as a measurable
assessment of applied knowledge and skill.
Perhaps you fall to the latter category of leadership enthusiasts.
Accessibility to a common language with precise vocabulary highlights the
cognitive dissonance barring academia from the real world! Fortunately, there
are some stories that can be told by many different voices and in innumerable
places while sharing a single trope.
Are you what you say?
Leaders must have a more heighten sense of their individual
ontological being in language than those that follow them. Why?
Because the audience seldom has an accurate knowledge and
therefore memory of the leader’s intentions, let alone its own
responses to and behaviors towards intention.
Unlike the leader, the audience has no immediate self-reflexivity, no
internal voice of reminder or caution as it is a collective.
Discombobulation & Disambiguation
Leadership isn’t only defined by the presence of a series
of role responsibilities, generic abilities or life
experiences.
Leadership is also an existential expression of an
individual’s working to become a replete self, a whole
person, and sometimes establish ontological being in
language itself.
Heteroglossia
In any written text there is an exchange occurring between what is being
said, call it the narrative, and the how of its being both communicated, e.g.
form and the meaning of meaning in semiotic theory, and the political
reception/interception anticipated by application of yet another's dialogic
imagination.
When I write, leadership, you and I are automatically predisposed to thinking
certain things about it. We are programmed to make specific qualifications
and conditions on its meaning, and we are guaranteed to affirm generally
held cultural assumptions validated in language use.
Not all of this is self-conscious, but it can be made so.
M.M. Bakhtin on Knowing
This socio-political conditioning of our knowing leadership is more precisely
explained by M.M. Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia.
Leaders routinely ask themselves a variation of this question: What makes
me think it is this, has to be this, or couldn’t ever be other than this or even
that?
Leaders routinely ask what defines perception of the present in order to
propose a vision of the probable future. The dialogic imagination makes this
leadership activity possible, and very probable.
The Dialogic Imagination
“This means that everything anybody ever says always exists in response to
things that have been said before and in anticipation of things that will be
said in response. In other words, we do not speak in a vacuum. All language
(and the ideas which language contains and communicates) is dynamic,
relational and engaged in a process of endless redescriptions of the world.”
Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialogic
Form and content chat incessantly; each alters the other in a muted dialogue
thwarting normal active listening techniques. The possibility of meaning is
relative to the two intersecting positively with the historical practices of
language and the valorized power structure presently maintaining its status
quo.
Heteroglossia and Me
My dialogic imagination has been informed by the writings and teachings of
philosophers, fictional literature, academics, social critics, and of more
critical importance to my understanding of leadership praxis island culture
and my life-altering experiences with two sea gulls, one a real black-back
with no name and a fictional one named Jonathon.
As a public identifier ‘leader’ rarely provides insight into the complexity of
self-conceptual character. Here, I’ve not given you enough information to
read my projected self-presence as the conceptual self, or my biography.
Have I? But some of you have ‘known’ me for extended periods of time?
Leaders need to put energy into managing the meaning of their individual
narratives with full self-awareness of the quantifiable room for
interpretative error, judgement, and aversion.
Reading a Leader
Effective leaders are conscious of others’ readings of their spoken and written
words, as well as their body languages.
But with heteroglossia in tow the real tells of leadership are perhaps found
with the conceptual self and its definition by others.
Are all the facts of that conceptual self historically verifiable? Probably not.
My perception of living can’t be documented by another nor do I need
another’s validation of it to make it real to me.
Have the facts of my conceptual biography been embellished, emboldened for
effect? How often are a leader’s intentions correctly read?
we Judge Leadership, but based on what knowledge,
authority?
Leaders understand the incipient inequality defining relationships within
their environments. They insure that that inequality is protected and that it
transforms according to organizational need.
Effective leadership can simultaneously engender and out a false
egalitarianism.
‘I don’t know, what I don’t know.’
Leaders oftentimes run possible scenarios and anticipate outcomes for their
decisions, words and actions.
Why is the presumption or anticipation of another’s response a uniformly
dangerous activity?
Some Touchstones
Leadership isn’t only defined by the presence of a series of role
responsibilities, generic abilities or life experiences. It is polyphonic in the
dialogic imagination and informed by heteroglossia.
Leadership is also an existential expression of an individual’s working to
become a replete self, a whole person, and sometimes a self in language
itself.
Leaders must be able to demonstrate passion to persevere when challenged
by physical, emotional, psychological, conceptual, or spiritual obstacles,
barriers or situations.
Heteroglossia and Localized Contexts
Can water influence a person’s worldview so as to make it unique to a
segment of leaders?
Is the island ferryman’s view of the world different than that of a landlocked
farmer?
Now how, can, might or would an island-origin influence leadership?
Islanders
Islanders have no choice but to be horizon watchers.
They will invariably manifest tendencies to explore other physical places to
escape the known, familiar, ordinary, boring, mundane, ritualistic.
If located in trade locations, islanders embrace diversity of cultures and
welcome foreigners; correspondingly, when travelling these islanders don’t do
well when treated as foreign by others.
Islanders know themselves to be temporarily present in any community not an
island, or a physical variant thereof like remote living, as the inherent
compulsion to horizon watch anticipates a comforting emptiness.
Islanders can become nomads of places or intellectual voyageurs who are
constantly seeking newness, innovation, and clarity of vision.
Island Leaders: Water Leaders
Leaders born on islands are naturally disposed to identify cognitive patterns
of isolation originating with physical dislocations and cultural adjacencies.
Leaders born on islands present comfort with the fact of physical and
conceptual separations from those they lead or would commune with.
Leaders born on islands are keen observers and interpreters of the horizon by
anticipating then naming on-coming threats and opportunities.
Water leaders are kinetic, motion filled and never wish to be becalmed in any
way.
Island Leaders: Water Leaders
Leaders born to islands quickly identify tribalism manifesting itself as the
garrison mentality.
Leaders born to islands acknowledge the influences of physical landscape on
the conceptual spaces available to their followers.
Water leaders are open to spiritual connectivity without the attributes of
formalized religion.
Water leaders watch for rhythms in organizations and tell their stories within.
Island Leaders: Water Leaders
Water leaders have a pronounced ability to remain calm when identifying and
responding to complex, confusing or dangerous situations.
Water leaders test for limitations so as to know the group’s competency set
before faced with adversity.
