environmentally friendly strategies in dealing with waste? How do you effectively lead
in a student group, in which everyone is a peer?
Leadership at the grassroots level in organizations does happen. Harvard Business
School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter discusses examples of people who saw something
in their workplace that needed changing and took the responsibility to do so upon
themselves in her book The Change Masters.^82 Employees were more likely to take on extra
responsibility when organizations permitted initiative at all levels of the organization
rather than making it a tool of senior executives only.
Leading without authority simply means exhibiting leadership behaviour even though
you do not have a formal position or title that might encourage others “to obey.” Neither
Martin Luther King Jr. nor Mahatma Gandhi operated from a position of authority, yet
each was able to inspire many to follow him in the quest for social justice. The workplace
can be an opportunity for leading without authority as well. As Ronald Heifetz of
Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government notes, “leadership means taking responsi-
bility for hard problems beyond anyone’s expectations.”^83 It also means not waiting
for the coach’s call.^84
What are the benefits of leading without authority? Heifetz has identified three:^85- Latitude for creative deviance.Because one does not have authority and the trap-
pings that go with authority, it is easier to raise harder questions and look for
less traditional solutions. - Issue focus.Leading without authority means that one can focus on a single
issue, rather than be concerned with the great number of issues that those in
authority face. - Front-line information.Leading without authority means that one is closer to
the detailed experiences of some of the stakeholders, such as co-workers. Thus
more information is available to this kind of leader.
Not all organizations will support this type of leadership, and some have been known
to actively suppress it. Still others will look aside, neither encouraging nor discouraging
it. Nevertheless, you may want to reflect on the possibility of engaging in leadership
behaviour simply because you see a need rather than because you are required to act.
CONTEMPORARYISSUES INLEADERSHIP
Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco found herself under severe criticism when the state seemed
to have greater difficulties with its emergency evacuation plans compared with two other
states hit by Hurricane Katrina: Mississippi and Alabama (states led by men).^86 Michael Brown,
then director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), even described Blanco’s
response to the disaster as “confused” compared with the governors of the two other states.
In the early days after the levees broke, Blanco expressed some frustration that aides to
President George W. Bush did not seem to respond to her pleas for help in a timely manner.
FEMA director Brown asked her: “What do you need? Help me help you.” Blanco’s commu-
nications director, Robert Mann, said Blanco could not believe that FEMA could not anticipate
some of the state’s needs. “It was like walking into an emergency room bleeding profusely
and being expected to instruct the doctors how to treat you,” he said. Could gender differences
in leadership styles and communication have played any role in how the reactions to Hurricane
Katrina played out?Is there a moral dimension to leadership? Do men and women rely on different lead-
ership styles, and if so, is one style inherently superior to the other? What are the chal-
lenges of online leadership? In this section, we briefly address these contemporary
issues in leadership.278 Part 4Sharing the Organizational Vision
6 What are some of the
contemporary issues in
leadership?