It is often said that there are asmany different definitions of leader-ship as there are people attempting todefine it. There’s more than a grain oftruth to that. So let’s test this theoryout, but with a twist. I will presenthalf a dozen definitions of leadership.Your job is to discern what is thesame about them (other than theobvious fact that they are all attemptsto define the same concept).

1. “Leadership is a processwhereby an individual influences agroup of individuals to achieve acommon goal” (Peter G. Northouse,Leadership: Theory and Practice, 3rded., Sage, 2004).

2. “Leadership is the process ofpersuasion or example by which anindividual (or leadership team)induces a group to pursue objectivesheld by the leader and shared by theleader and . . . followers” (John W.Gardner, On Leadership, Free Press,1989).

3. “Leadership can be defined asthe nature of the influencingprocess—and its resultant out-comes—that occurs between a leaderand followers and how this influenc-ing process is explained by theleader’s dispositional characteristicsand behaviors, follower perceptions,and attributions of the leader” (John

Antonakis, Anna T. Cianciolo, andRobert J. Sternberg, The Nature ofLeadership, Sage, 2004).

4. “Leadership is an influencerelationship among leaders and fol-lowers who intend real changes thatreflect their mutual purpose” (JosephC. Rost, Leadership for the Twenty-First Century, Praeger, 1991).

5. Leadership is “a process ofsocial influence in which one personis able to enlist the aid and support ofothers in the accomplishment of sometask” (Martin M. Chemers, AnIntegrative Theory of Leadership,Erlbaum, 1997).

6. “[D]efining effective leadershipas successful influence by the leaderthat results in the attainment of goalsby the influenced followers . . . isparticularly useful” (Bernard M.Bass, Bass & Stogdill’s Handbook ofLeadership: Theory, Research, andManagerial Applications, 3rd ed.,Free Press, 1990).

OK, pencils down. What did youcome up with that is the same aboutthese definitions? If you said all ofthem talk about how some individualor group of individuals (usually aleader or leaders) influences someother group (usually followers), giveyourself a gold star. In fact, when onelooks at definitions of leadership inthis light, one is struck by how simi-lar they all are.

This similarity points to the ideathat whatever else it may be about,leadership as it is usually defined isfundamentally about leaders and fol-

lowers and the influence process bywhich they achieve common goals. Inother words, such definitions con-ceive of leadership as being so deeplyrelated to leaders and followers thatthe influence relation between leadersand followers is leadership.

This is a problem. The world ischanging in ways that make this con-cept of leadership much too narrow towork well in the future. This basicidea that leadership is influenceassumes that there is some person(the leader) who is capable of gener-ating more influence toward others(the followers) than others generatetoward him or her. But increasingly,people are working in contexts inwhich that asymmetrical influencerelationship is absent.

Such contexts include, for exam-ple, a self-managed team of profes-sionals, a family in which the parentsare aging and the children are grown-ups in their own right, a cross-functional task force in which severalfunctional leaders are expected toshare leadership, a community coali-tion comprising peers from differentorganizations and walks of life, and agroup of friends trying to plan a vaca-tion together.

Sometimes such contexts formwhen all the members of a group aregenuinely peers. For example, a proj-ect team of scientists representing dif-ferent disciplines trying to solve thesame public health problem may beexpected to work through dialogueand consensus. At other times suchcontexts are created when members

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Issues & Observat ions

Leadership Beyond Leadersand Followers

Wilfred H. Drath

Editor’s note: Issues & Observations isa venue for CCL staff members andassociates to express their personalviews about leadership.

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of the group with more influencedeliberately tamp down that influencebecause they wish to work collabora-tively with the group. This can hap-pen, for example, on a professionalservices team whose formal leaderdecides to share leadership by reduc-ing the influence that comes alongwith the formal title.

In general such situations feature agroup of people who are equals in thesense that everyone has about thesame amount of influence as every-one else. In such groups there is noclear leader—no one with markedasymmetrical influence. And ofcourse with no leader, there are nofollowers either.

But does that mean there is noleadership? Surely, even withoutleaders and followers, people whowork together still need what leader-ship provides. If people are going tolearn to work together in increasinglyinterdependent and collaborativeways, leaderless cannot mean withoutleadership.

LOOKING AT OUTCOMESThese peerlike and collaborative situ-ations deserve more attention fromthose of us who aspire to understandand develop leadership. We need tobe able to frame leadership withoutautomatically starting with the con-cept of a leader and followers in anasymmetrical influence relationship.We need some ways to think aboutleadership beyond leaders and fol-lowers.

Some of my colleagues and I atCCL have been thinking about leader-ship this way by framing it in termsof its outcomes: leadership is aboutproducing agreement on direction, aframework for alignment, and a senseof commitment to the collective work.(For more on CCL’s work in this area,see the article “Direction, Alignment,Commitment: Toward a MoreIntegrative Ontology of Leadership,”in the December 2008 Year in Reviewissue of Leadership Quarterly.) So

whenever people working togetherproduce direction, alignment, andcommitment, we say leadership hashappened—even if there was noleader. Instead of asking, How doleaders influence followers? we havebeen asking, How do people withshared work produce direction, align-ment, and commitment?

A lot is already known about howpeople produce direction, alignment,and commitment (DAC) through theinfluence of a leader. What is lessclear is how people produce DACwhen there is no leader. We want tounderstand better how it can work—how people can accomplish theirshared goals when no one is incharge.

This is where thinking about lead-ership in terms of its outcomes ishelpful. When thinking about leader-ship as DAC, one need not tie leader-ship to any particular process, includ-ing the influence process. Whateverprocess (or processes) a group, team,organization, family, or communityuses to produce DAC is a leadershipprocess. Leaders and followers maybe involved, or they may not be. Withan outcome perspective, leadership isno longer fundamentally about lead-ers and followers; rather, it is funda-mentally about how people produceDAC. Instead of being confined tounderstanding how leaders influencefollowers, we are all invited to thinkabout leadership in the widest possi-ble set of contexts—not just leadersand followers but also peers andfriends, colleagues and partners,competitors and rivals, even antago-nists and enemies.

This could be a bad thing.Thinking about leadership this waycould lead to seeing leadership every-where and making everything leader-ship. The danger is that if everythingis leadership, nothing is. So we needto be careful to make sure that welearn to identify just those processesthat really are intended to produceDAC, and limit our idea of leadershipto those processes.

Limiting our idea of leadership tointended outcomes acknowledges thefact that people working togethercan’t just accidentally drift into get-ting something done. They need toagree first of all on just what it isthey’re trying to do—their shareddirection. They also need to get peo-ple organized somehow to do it—they need alignment. And they needpeople in the group to be committedenough that they are willing to workhard when needed. In other words,for leadership to be present, peopleworking together must intend to pro-duce DAC. Then the processes theyengage in to fulfill that intention areleadership processes.

PEER CONTEXTMaybe this sounds radical, but in factalmost everybody has engaged inleadership in this sense without eventhinking about it. Take, for example,a group of friends deciding how tospend the evening. Because they arefriends, even if they are not strictlypeers from some external perspective,from within their friendship theywant to treat one another as peers.Given this peer context, how do theydecide what to do?

They talk or argue. People throwout suggestions. Others react. “Let’sgo to that new Vietnamese restau-rant,” someone says. “I heard it’svery expensive,” another says. “Wecould go to the watercolor show firstand talk about where to eat whilewe’re there,” says a third person. Andso it goes: suggestion, disagreement,and compromise, going along. Bysome mostly unconscious processthat no one is paying much attentionto, the group gradually comes tosome kind of consensus. They pro-duce a direction for the evening; theymake arrangements; in the best case,everyone is enthusiastic about theoutcome. They get the same kind of

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Build Relationships andNetworks

One of the most important aspects ofleadership is to build and maintainrelationships with key stakeholdersand colleagues, not only within yourdivision and company but also out-side the organization. These relation-ships result in the mutual support thatis crucial when leaders must accom-plish goals and objectives beyondtheir own teams’ resources, whenthey are trying to influence senior

management or keep up with internalpower shifts, or when they are devel-oping support for career advice andadvancement.

BALANCING ACTTechnical professionals in a broadrange of fields are often challengedas they move from the role of subjectmatter expert to leader. This is largelybecause their background and train-ing dispose them to rely on facts andlogical reasoning and to attend less tothe people-oriented aspects of leader-ship. Fortunately, these professionals

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can successfully navigate the trans-formation to leadership by changingtheir behaviors so they can establish a better balance between tasks andpeople.

Barbara J. A. Eiser is a CCL adjunctexecutive coach and president ofLeading Impact, a management con-sulting firm focusing on executive andteam coaching and change leadership.She holds an M.A. degree in organiza-tional psychology from ColumbiaUniversity and a master of city andregional planning degree from HarvardUniversity.

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frequently about Ken’s ability to knowwhat to say and when to say it. Inshort, Ken is a cool customer. Herarely speaks before thinking and hastremendous control over his behav-ioral and emotional responses, even inhigh-stress situations. He meets peopleeasily and they warm to him quickly.

There is one problem with Ken,though, and it’s a big one. It’s allabout him. His EI is used to build

power bases in the organization sothat his influence increases in a waythat feeds his sizable ego. The peoplearound him become dedicated to himrather than to the organization, andat times their loyalty to Ken causesthem to work at odds with the largerorganizational goals.

Intelligence in general (and emo-tional intelligence in particular) isknown to have many facets. Althoughhaving the competencies associated

with EI can potentially provide lead-ers with the tools to be intraperson-ally and interpersonally effective, it israre that anyone has all of the compe-tencies of EI in equal amounts. Beingaware of where one is strong andweak within the EI framework, aswell as knowing when, where, andhow much of those competencies areappropriate and how much theyshould be applied in any given situa-tion, allows leaders to be consciouslycompetent in the use of their EI.

Are There Any Pitfalls to Emotional Intelligence?

Making the Move from Tech Expert to Leader

Continued from page 19

Continued from page 14

results (though not necessarily thesame decisions) they might have got-ten if one of them had assumed aleader role and persuaded the groupwhat to do.

BIGGER PICTUREThinking about leadership in this kindof collaborative context means under-standing how “talking about what todo” can be a leadership process no

less important than the process of aleader influencing followers.Thinking this way encourages us toask, Which beliefs do people need tohold and what specific practices dothey need to engage in to producedirection, alignment, and commit-ment without a leader?

By reframing how we think aboutleadership from a leader-followerinfluence process to a DAC-producingprocess (which may include a leader-follower process), we can create a big-ger picture of leadership that includes

useful ways—who knows, maybesome useful new ways—for people towork together effectively.

Wilfred H. Drath is a senior enterpriseassociate and senior fellow in theResearch, Innovation, and ProductDevelopment group at CCL. His cur-rent research and educational workfocuses on the evolution of leadershipand leadership development towardmore inclusive and collective forms. Heholds a B.A. degree from the Universityof Georgia.

Leadership Beyond Leaders and FollowersContinued from page 21

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