Adaptive Work

Our language fails us in many aspects of our lives, entrapping us in a set of cultural assumptions like cattle herded by fences into a corral. Gender pronouns, for example, corral us into teaching children that God is a “he,” distancing girls and women from the experience of the divine in themselves.

Our language fails us, too, when we discuss, analyze, and practice leadership. We commonly talk about “leaders” in organizations or politics when we actually mean “people in positions of managerial or political authority.” Although we have confounded leadership with authority in nearly every journalistic and scholarly article written on “leadership” during the last one hundred years, we know intuitively that these two phenomena are distinct when we complain all too frequently in politics and business that “the leadership isn't exercising any leadership,” by which we actually mean that “people in authority aren't exercising any leadership.” Whether people with formal, charismatic, or otherwise informal authority actually practice leadership on any given issue at any moment in time ought to remain a separate question answered with wholly different criteria than those used to define a relationship of formal or informal authority. As we know, all too many people are [Page 9]skilled at gaining authority, and thus a following, but do not then lead.

Moreover, we assume a logical connection between the words leader and follower, as if this dyad (pair) were an absolute and inherently logical structure. It is not. The most interesting leadership operates without anyone experiencing anything remotely similar to the experience of “following.” Indeed, most leadership mobilizes those people who are opposed or who sit on the fence, in addition to allies and friends. Allies and friends come relatively cheap; the people in opposition have the most to lose in any significant process of change. When mobilized, allies and friends become, not followers, but rather activated participants—employees or citizens who themselves often lead in turn by taking responsibility for tackling tough challenges, often beyond expectations and often beyond their authority. They become partners. When mobilized, opposition and fence-sitters become engaged with the issues, provoked to work through the problems of loss, loyalty, and competence embedded in the change they are challenged to make. Indeed, they may continue to fight, providing an ongoing source of diverse views necessary for the adaptive success of the business or community. Far from becoming “aligned” and far from having any experience of “following,” they are mobilized by leadership to wrestle with new complexities that demand tough trade-offs in their ways of working or living. Of course, in time they may begin to trust, admire, and appreciate the person or group who is leading, and thereby confer informal authority on the person or group, but they would not generally experience the emergence of that appreciation or trust by the phrase “I've become a follower.”

If leadership is different from the capacity to gain formal or informal authority, and therefore different from the ability to gain a “following”—attracting influence and accruing power—then what can anchor our understanding of it?

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