The Phenomenon of Leadership 9
of which is that leadership is a basic ingredient of human social organization, not
an elective addition to it. As Thomas Wren puts it, “If leadership is viewed as a
process by which groups, organizations, and societies attempt to achieve common
goals, it encompasses one of the fundamental currents of the human experience”
(1995, x). One does not first create an institution and then search for ways to
introduce leadership into it. Rather, leadership occurs simultaneously with social
organization.
Leadership as Relational
One consequence of this perspective is that the term “leadership” always
involves the idea of followership. If no one is following, no one is leading. Lead-
ers and followers (in the generic sense, not as a form of dependency) require
one another for either side of the leadership equation to make sense (Hollander
1993). According to Joseph Rost, “Followers and leaders develop a relationship
wherein they influence one another as well as the organization and society, and
that is leadership. They do not do the same things in the relationship... but they
are both essential to leadership” (1995, 192). The relationship has characteristic
features and patterns of interaction that give it texture and meaning.
Leadership as Sense Making
One of the central forms of reciprocity is effective communication between
leaders and followers about the challenges and issues that they face together.
Leaders seek to influence their followers to adopt the leader’s interpretations
of their shared experience, and they use a variety of linguistic and nonlinguistic
forms of communication to do so. They use symbols and metaphors and tell stories
of identity and aspiration to construct a shared sense of meaning (Bennis and
Nanus 1997; H. Gardner 1995; Goethals 2005). In communicating with followers,
leaders typically express a compelling sense of vision for the future. “A leader does
not tell it ‘as it is’; he [or she] tells it as it might be.... The leader is a sense-giver”
(Thayer, quoted in Weick 1995, 10). Sense giving and sense making offer people
a sense of possibility that an otherwise hostile, indifferent, or incomprehensible
world can be brought under their control.
Moral Leadership
As has become clear in the modern scholarship on leadership, followers or
constituents, especially in a democratic context, are not empty vessels who are
filled by content provided by the leader. At a minimum, followers have to give
their consent to the leader’s goals and priorities. When they are fully engaged,
they are committed to the leader’s program, and frequently to his or her person.
Yet it is clear that followers do not lend their support blindly but do so in terms
of needs and interests of their own that are satisfied by the leader.