[MUSIC] In this final module of our course we're going to be talking about leadership. Now as we get started we should note that there's a lot of advice out there about how to be a better leader. There are thousands of books written on the subject by consultants, current and former executives, academics and others. Airport stores are filled with books that claim to have the recipe for successfully leading your organization. It's a vast space, and we're only going to scratch the surface in this module. But hopefully, we can help you put some structure on this vast topic and give you some useful ways to think about your own leadership and how you might be a more effective in a leadership role. We'll touch on questions like what is leadership? How much do leaders really matter? How have people thought about and tried to study leadership? Is leadership the same thing as management? What are some useful frameworks to help you think about your own leadership abilities? And how does leadership relate to the other topics that we've discussed previously in this course? To begin, I want you to think for a minute about someone you admire as a leader. Who comes to mind? I would imagine that there are a wide variety of responses to this question. Some of you are probably thinking of a very public person. Maybe the CEO of a large corporation, a political leader, or some other larger than life figure. I would imagine that others are thinking of someone that is much less well-known. Maybe it's a boss at work, or maybe it's someone who doesn't even have a formal leadership positions such as a co-worker. And some of you may be thinking of someone completely outside of work such as a parent or a mentor. Leadership can mean lots of different things to different people and it seems that people can be leaders from a variety of different positions. So what do we mean when we talk about leadership? Well, leadership is all about influence. In particular, it's about the ability to influence others towards an organizational goal. You can think about leadership from our different lenses that we've discussed throughout this course. From a rational system perspective, we might think of leadership in terms of where you sit in the organizational hierarchy and it's true that your position can give you influence in the organization. But we've probably all seen people that had a position of considerable authority that just weren't very good leaders, so it's not just about your position. Remember that the natural system perspective helps us recognize the human element of organizations and the fact that organizations often have multiple even competing goals. From this perspective, leadership is about motivating people, building culture, and negotiating with different individuals and groups who may have varied goals so that ultimately they can cooperate towards common purpose. If we take an open system perspective leadership is all about recognizing what's going on in the external environment and helping the organization to secure resources and adapt to changing circumstances. You can start to see that to get a true sense of leadership it's helpful to view leaders through all three of these lenses. Now let's turn to the question of how much do leaders really matter? Most of us have this intuitive sense that leaders matter a lot. We've all had occasions to witness leaders who were competent, who inspired us and others to do better. We've probably also had experiences with leaders who were less effective. But in reality, it's quite hard to tell how much leaders matter in an objective sense because there are so many factors that contribute to organizational success that it's hard to isolate the leader effect. Some scholars have suggested that perhaps we give leaders way too much credit when things go well and place too much blame on leaders when things go poorly. This tendency to over attribute outcomes to leaders is sometimes called the romance of leadership. There is research that suggests that we tend to explain organizational level outcomes by focusing on the leader even when those outcomes they're affected by a variety of other factors. If you follow sports you've seen this phenomenon when a coach who is heralded as a genius when the team is winning is shortly thereafter considered totally incompetent when the team struggles. I mention this just to help us understand that while leadership is important it's not the only thing that matters. And we need to be careful about falling into this trap of over attributing outcomes to a single leader when things are usually a lot more complicated and situationally determined. So let's talk for a minute about how people have tried to make sense out of this vast topic of leadership in organizations. So I'm going to try and give you a brief overview of the history of leadership in just a few minutes. Specifically, we'll talk about how research has evolved from looking at traits, to examining behaviors, to a more nuanced contingency approach. Now, the earliest work on leadership was fueled by a search for the traits that made a great leader. This work rested on the basic idea that leadership is something that is innate to some people, the idea of the born leader. What you'll find is that after many years of looking for this Holy Grail of leadership traits this research has not really been able to pin down the exact formula for effective leadership. That said there have been some insights from this stream of work that are worth mentioning. Traits like drive, self-confidence, cognitive ability, integrity, the motivation to be a leader, and knowledge of the business have shown up in multiple studies as important characteristics of leaders. It's also true that people tend to refer to various traits when they speak about leaders and evaluate leadership abilities. So it does seem like there are characteristics that we tend to view as being compatible with good leadership. That said many of the traits that have been studied including various personality characteristics they often have mixed results when we think about the effectiveness of the leader in different situations, and so they seem to depend on the circumstances that the leader is in. So as this earliest research on traits proves somewhat unsatisfying some scholars moved on to see if perhaps leadership was a function of leaders' behaviors rather than internal traits. In some ways, this is a more optimistic view of leadership because it suggests that leadership is something that could be taught rather than something that you're either born with or not. Many of these behavioral perspectives focused on the styles of leadership that individuals' employ. For example, some of the most famous work distinguish between behavior is focused on the task at hand versus behaviors focused on cultivating relationships. So here's an example of a tool that came out of that research called the Managerial Grid. The Managerial Grid creates five different types of management styles. On the x-axis we have concern for results. On the y-axis we have concern for people. Now, we can try to measure a leader's behavior along these two dimensions. As we do so, we'll start to see different styles of leadership emerge. For example, some leaders may have a very high concern for people but not much focus on results or getting things done. This is what is called Country Club Management. Other leaders might be the opposite. They may be very task focused and concerned with the results but not as concerned with people and relationships. That's what we'll call Produce-or-Perish Management. Some leaders are low on both dimensions. That's known as Impoverished Management. Other leaders find themselves in the middle on both dimensions which is what we'll call Middle-of-the-road Management. The best leaders recognize the importance of both concern for results and concern for people. The Managerial Grid suggests that this upper right-hand quadrant known as Team Management is where we're likely to get the best results. This Managerial Grid is a quick and simple way to think about your own leadership style and perhaps recognize areas where you could change your behavior and improve your leadership. At the same time despite much research about leader behaviors it turns out it was really hard to find one style that strongly and consistently predicted success. So following work on traits and behaviors, then the study of leadership began to recognize an account for some of the complexities of leadership in the variety of situations that leaders encounter. Things started moving away from a search for universal traits and behaviors in favor of a more contextualized theory of leadership. Remember our prior discussions about contingency theory? Remember the right answer is always it depends? Well, this turns out to be true in leadership as well. There is not one leadership style that works in every situation. Rather what works under one set of circumstances may not work at all under a different set of circumstances. We'll talk more about a specific example of a contingency theory of leadership in our next video. So there you have it a very brief review of the history of thinking about leadership. Now, there are other leadership theories out there, but this gives you a brief overview of how thinking about leadership has evolved over the years. You'll notice that the approaches to studying leadership have become more complex and nuanced as we've realized that maybe there aren't simple answers to the question of what makes a great leader. The good news for all of us is that leadership is not something that you're either born with or not. All of us can work to develop our inherent abilities learn, leadership behaviors and then learn to apply those behaviors in the right set of circumstances. In other words, all of us have the potential to become better leaders.
