Leadership is not about the leader

THESE are unprecedented times, with a crippling pandemic and world leaders being put on the spotlight for their leadership. The year started with the first-ever "live" streaming of the Singapore Parliament. As I watched the civil debates on the use of TraceTogether tokens and data, I reflected on our nation's aspiration for greater involvement of its citizens, both in the political process and in our fight against Covid-19.

Then, like many others, I watched in horror as the US Congress was stormed by Trump supporters when congressmen debated a challenge to the 2020 Presidential election results. We are living through a lesson in how leadership needs to happen in the 21st century - where leadership is NOT about the leader.

Leadership for the 21st century

After over 20 years of developing leaders in organisations and teaching leadership to business school students, my takeaway remains constant: many among us do not understand what leadership is because they are fixated on the leader in the whole leadership process. When one looks at societies, organisations and the mass media today, it seems that there is a common "culture of leadership", where people think of leadership more in terms of the leader than of the collective actions of the social unit.

It was over 40 years ago that the social scientific study of leadership realised this problem, when James Meindl coined the social scientific term "Romance of Leadership". Drawing prior social research on the Fundamental Attribution Error - that people tend to attribute outcomes to persons rather than situational or contextual factors - he reported research showing how people tend to perceive leaders as all powerful and having good intentions, when that is not necessarily true.

Last century's scientific study of leadership began with the Great Man theory that led to the search for leadership traits. In this century, however, social scientists and practitioners of leadership development think of leadership and leadership development not in terms of the individuals at the top, but in terms of strengthening the capacity of the people in social units to align and commit to a shared purpose and direction. Today, social scientists are studying more collective views of leadership through concepts of shared, distributed, collaborative or networked leadership.

Misunderstanding leadership

Many challenges facing organisations, societies and the world today begin with this misunderstanding of what leadership really is. When we witness the challenges or leadership crisis in countries run by dictators, or in organisational crises due to failures, for example the FIFA and the Volkswagen diesel emission scandals in 2015, or even the current constitutional turmoil in the United States, these happen because of the dependence on the leader or the top management team to set the right climate for collective action or to do the right thing.

Age-old cultural notions that associate leadership with the leader take time to change. But in the information age, people have become a lot more empowered to contribute towards the leadership process. Perhaps the notion that "leadership is not only about the leader" needs everyone from leaders to followers to embrace.

Collective processes

The 1970s-1990s debate over leaders versus managers helped organisational scientists realise that leadership and management are different organisational processes, where the former focuses on change and adaptation to the environment, while the latter focuses on stability and control for purposes of efficiency and effectiveness. This is unlike Harvard psychologist Abraham Zeleznik's suggestion that leaders and managers are different kinds of people. Both are needed in any organisational system.

The responsibility for change, ethics and adaptation to new circumstances is not only the responsibility of the leader at the top. It also requires collective effort and aspiration anchored on fundamentals of shared values, purpose and vision - ideas popularised in the 1990s by James Collins and Jerry Porras when they wrote the classic Built to Last.

Psychological safety

The idea that leadership is not about the leader does not mean that leaders do not have a role to play. In an organic view of organisational leadership, those put in positions of power and authority need to act as guiding stewards, role models and facilitators of the conditions needed for change and collective action through shared direction, alignment and commitment.

One of the important facilitative roles of leaders is to create the internal conditions for "psychological safety" - where everyone feels safe to express their concerns and ideas, while also are ready to listen to others to build a consensus. In such a climate, not everyone, not even the leader, knows all the right answers. There is an understanding that failures and mistakes may happen but what is more important is to learn from such experiences.

Google learned the importance of psychological safety when it conducted an internal study of its work teams in 2012-13, which it named Project Aristotle, after the philosopher who coined the idea that "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts". Researchers in Google's HR analytics showed that psychological safety was the most important factor for teamwork, shaped by equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, team members' sensitivity and ability to listen to each other.

Boundary spanning

Leaders can also add value through "boundary spanning" by drawing ideas or resources from outside of the organisation and encouraging such learning, networking and exchange between those inside and outside of the organisation. This is an important role of leaders because social organisations have a tendency towards insularity rather than to engage the external environment. This notion of the leader playing a facilitative, value-adding role in the organisation comes from what was called "Functional Leadership theory", which is in contrast to the political view of leadership, where the focus is on power and how this is centralised or distributed in the organisation.

Power and distribution

Leadership is NOT power; but, with leadership comes the power of a position to control resources for the group. It is when leaders do not know how to deal with the power that they have, for example when they use power for personal or short-term interests rather than for the collective, long-term good, that they can fail their organisations and communities. One can easily think of many leaders - past and recent, and in all sectors of work from politics to corporate settings to the entertainment industry - who have fallen from grace after being caught abusing their power and position.

Social psychologists who study power have shown that experiencing power causes individuals to behave in a less controlled or impulsive, sociopathic manner in relation to others. People who hold power also tend to objectify others. Writing on the "Power Paradox", social psychologist Darcher Keltner notes that today, power is often gained in efforts to achieve the greater good, yet the challenge of power for leaders is to know how to distribute or give it away to others in order to keep influencing the collective towards a better future.

Everyone a leader

In an age that permits or demands more collective, collaborative leadership, it is time to drop the language of "leader versus followers", and for everyone in the social unit or organisation to start thinking of themselves as a leader. Here, everyone has a part to play in shaping the climate and culture of the social organisation towards a better future and to grow and adapt to changes in the environment.

To achieve this, individuals in positions of power or "leadership" must stop thinking leadership is about only them, their personal vision or sacrifice. Everyone - not only the leaders - must be actively involved in upholding ethics and in maintaining accountability throughout the social organisation.

Vulnerability-based trust

Leadership is in fact a collective process but is often experienced within a person. Whenever anyone as a leader finds himself or herself lonely or uncertain about certain decisions, especially ethical ones, he/she could consider sharing the leadership experiences openly with other leaders in the leadership system. All must recognise that no one has all the right answers to problems; all must also constantly seek to find common ground in terms of purpose and values to guide collective actions.

Ironically, such vulnerability-based trust can only happen when there is psychological safety that is vital for collaborative leadership. The latter depends on the leader and everyone else's support for such a culture and climate in the group or organisation in the first place.

When world leaders met at the 2015 World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos, one of the topics discussed was a survey that suggested that the world was facing a leadership crisis. The survey focused on public trust in the leaders of various institutional sectors in different parts of the world. Fast forward to 2021 and Singapore will be hosting the WEF in a world fighting a global pandemic and climate change, and where there is increasing distrust with globalisation. There has never been a more opportune time for a collective, global "reset", one where leadership is not only about the leader.

• The writer is a member of the research faculty at the Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where he teaches leadership.