Reconstructive Leadership

All leaders aim to change things, but the changes they propose are not all of a piece. Variety is especially pronounced in organized or institutional settings where leaders must, as a first order of business, establish a particular relationship between their efforts to change things and the practices and priorities they receive from the past. For some, the past may be lauded as a clear and reliable guide to future action, in which case change might mean completing the unfinished work left behind by predecessors. For others, the recent work of the past may be accepted as a more or less problematic fait accompli, and change is promised to rehabilitate received priorities or to nudge things wherever possible in a different direction. For still others, received practices may be repudiated forthrightly as failed, bankrupt, or otherwise unacceptable solutions to the problems at hand, and change is undertaken with an eye to establishing entirely new standards of legitimate action. This last, [Page 1301]when it succeeds, is “reconstructive leadership” (Skowronek 1997).

To claim a particular warrant for change is to bid for a certain kind of authority and to set up certain kinds of challenges in sustaining it. But leaders do not choose freely from a list of possible dispositions toward change. If they have any savvy at all, they will present themselves and their ambitions in a way that resonates with the circumstances of their rise to power. Someone carried into a position of leadership as the hand-picked successor or heir apparent to a well-regarded predecessor would be hard-pressed to sustain a course of repudiation and reconstruction; so too would someone carried into a position of leadership from the ranks of the opposition by virtue of the defection of one or another faction of establishment support. Reconstructive leadership is associated with a special set of circumstances. Not only would we expect such a leader to come from the ranks of the opposition to established power, and thus to come unhampered by any affiliation with what exists, but we might also expect the reconstructive leader to arise when a crisis of legitimacy is already deeply felt and broadly perceived.

Though reconstructive leadership is a distinctive, even peculiar, type or style, reconstructive leaders are often considered paragons, exemplars of the very essence of leadership itself. The reason for this is to be found in the anatomy of leadership, for while the same constituent components of action are arrayed in all types, an especially felicitous arrangement of these components is operative in the reconstructive type. First, leadership in organized settings always carries an order-shattering component, which stems directly from efforts of all leaders to innovate, to create something new in the presence of a system that is up and running. Even if the innovation is something anticipated or promised by the received course of action, it cannot help but disrupt previously established arrangements. Second, there is always an order-affirming component to leadership in organized settings. This stems from the leader's connection to the organized community or the community values that all its leaders, even those who propose to purge it of present corruptions or degradations, are expected to uphold and elaborate. Finally, there is an order-creating component to leadership, in which the innovations offered and the values affirmed are joined together in a new amalgam that bids for acceptance as the new working standard of action for the future.

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