The Phenomenon of Leadership 19
actual choice processes of academic organizations. In a collegiate setting, strate-
gic decision making involves the governing board, the president and other top
officers, much of the administrative staff, and at one time or another many of the
faculty. Whether in committees, departments, schools, or the university itself,
issues that touch on questions of purpose and direction always raise the question
of leadership.
In all these contexts and many others, both the faculty and the administration
know the need for effective leadership but are also keenly aware of their peculiar
lack of authority. It is in the nature of things that most colleges and universities do
not have mechanisms of authority that can readily create or implement a vision
of the future. In hierarchical organizations, on the other hand, the development
of a vision may require involvement from many quarters, but once adopted it is
implemented through a clear system of authority.
One symptom of the tension in academic organizations is that leaders often
yearn for clearer authority and support in a chain of expectations that ends, for
presidents, with the governing board. Many other leaders reason tacitly that if
only they could improve their skills in leadership, they could create far better
results for their organization. Although the goal is worthy and important, even if
they could transform themselves and their talents, leadership as the creation and
enactment of a shared vision for the future is disproportionate to the skills
and practices of leaders considered in isolation. The dialectic between leaders and
leadership beckons us to move in a new direction and to draw systematically
on contemporary insights about leadership. By attending to relational leadership
and its role in both empowering and engaging individuals and groups in a col-
laborative strategy process, it offers a new way of thinking about both the tasks
and the authority of leadership. In this approach, leadership can be closely tied
to the methods and systems of decision making in a legitimate institutionalized
process. Effectively implementing the steps in the process does not require deci-
sion makers to reinvent themselves or their responsibilities, but it enables them
to mobilize and to amplify their existing authority and talents by drawing them
into a method of leadership.
Some years ago, James MacGregor Burns signaled with some urgency the need
to better understand and evaluate leadership as a phenomenon that shapes our
lives profoundly—in politics, the professions, science, the academy, and the arts.
He went on to lament that “There is... no school of leadership, intellectual or
practical” (1978, 2). Since that claim was made, schools, centers, and programs
on leadership have proliferated within and beyond universities, and resources for
understanding it have continued to grow through the efforts of many scholars and
reflective practitioners. Leadership has become a self-conscious interdisciplin-
ary field of study with a range of theoretical and practical achievements. Yet we
would go further. Theory gives rise not just to knowledge about leadership, but to
methods of decision making for leadership. An understanding of leadership as the
enactment of shared purposes can frame the construction of an applied and inte-
grative discipline for the exercise of strategic leadership. To effect that translation
between theory and practice is the aim and the subject of this work.