Leadership is one of the most intensely studied and written about areas of management, yet it remains an indescribable, complex, and controversial topic. The questions managers attempt to resolve are all together basic and complex. What is leadership? What do leaders do? Are leaders born or made? How do you develop leaders? These are difficult questions since leadership, organizational, environmental, and societal needs are continuously changing. Leadership is almost impossible to define but you know good and poor leadership when you see it.
When I first started contemplating leadership and studying our text on the subject, my initial response was to identify the common characteristics, attributes, traits, and abilities of "great" leaders, past and present, in order to identify similarities, differences, patterns, and trends. What I discovered is that there aren't any. Next, I took the time to distinguish leadership's elemental parts. Again, I experienced failure. One great leader's strength was another equally successful leader's weakness. The defining characteristic of another great leader was noticeably missing from others. Finally, to my comfort, and dismay, I soon discovered that others have met the same frustration. Each manger's findings and conclusions were contradicted by another's research and findings. I believe the desire to analyze leadership comes from our desire to understand, acknowledge, and control this thing called leadership. If we can reduce leadership to a few key elements, a list of characteristics, or a simple formula or recipe, we will then be able to identify, recruit, train, promote, and reward leadership, moving ourselves and our organizations towards success. .
We are searching for simple, predictable, and stable answers when leadership may be unstructured, constantly changing, and uncontrollable. It is as much an art as a science, and likely a well-designed blending of the two.
