Real Leadership, Dean Williams: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2005. 291 pages.
Real Leadership is one of the few books that I cannot resist going back to every other day, for reasons beyond it being on the syllabus. Followed by my initial impression of the book, which was “wow, what a comprehensive guide,” I could not resist swiftly drifting into considering it an ideal prescription for the disease of lack of real leadership. I read, but ignored the lines which warn the reader of the risk of treating leadership as a set of characteristics applicable in any setting. I was becoming a blind follower, exactly what the book discourages you to become, and exactly what I used to be for more than a decade of my life, as I explain below.
I am still struggling with the desire of following this amazingly put together prescription, but I also believe that it is this struggle that may help me in addressing the internal adaptive challenges that I face as a person. In addition, the struggle to figure out the how, what, where and when of applying leadership in different contexts is going to be a major leadership challenge in itself, both for leaders with and without authority.
Real Leadership is about addressing adaptive challenges, a process that involves shifts in “values, habits, practices and priorities,” and therefore necessitates patience and long term approach towards change. By virtue of this, real leadership is more of a process of evolution than revolution. However, the proposals put forward by the book are not less of a revolution for countries like Afghanistan, where the dominant dynamic is of leader-follower and goal and not leadership-group and reality. It is this amalgamation of an exterior marked by gradual and directed evolutionary process and an interior characterized by a revolution in the making that gives this book a unique dialectic dynamic of its own. The strength of Real Leadership lies in its capacity to stretch from one extreme to another without losing the balance point and without getting stuck in any of the extremes. In one of his Red Books, Mao spoke of his attempts at striking balance in the Chinese Communist Party’s policies which drifted 12 times towards right and left extremism. With all the respect that I have for Mao, I wish he could have had a chance to read Real Leadership.
I could not but appreciate the metaphor of “dance” in “dancing with the reality of the context” and “being flexible in the style of intervention.” In a literal sense, it reminded me of my inability to dance with a different beat merely because I could not let go of my version of dance. In a non-literal sense, it challenged my pre-occupation with my way of looking at things and highlighted my failure in putting aside the years old rigid frame despite a series of personal attempts in the past years.
I find it interesting to observe that though the book, as it says, “is primarily about exercising leadership with authority,” its ideas and discussions resonate with different stages of my life, in all of which I have had no authority. What follows next is a discussion of some of the ideas proposed in the book through a dissection of certain periods of my life, which I spent amongst different adaptive challenges, at personal, group and organizational level, without knowing for the most part. The focus of the discussion is mainly around three types of adaptive challenges: activist, transition and maintenance challenges.
I was born in the middle of a political movement in Afghanistan. For the values that it represented, the movement was “walking on the razor’s edge.” It threatened radical Islamic fundamentalist structures in a serious way. In this the organization faced an activist challenge. And for which, it lost its leader and her husband.
However, the leadership of the movement, unlike Odin, did not believe in the “pursuit of insight and wisdom;” they did not want to listen to their younger generation by putting aside their notion of “truth.” Internally, young members of the organization faced a different challenge, which I now identify as an activist challenge. The activist challenge that the young members faced was to get the leadership to see the transition challenge that the organization was facing, and to convince them to see the part of the reality they were avoiding to see. This avoided segment of reality was concerned with the idea that real leadership is not about “dominance and control,” and that too much control can be destructive to the sustainability of the organization in the longer run.
As young members, we tried to raise this issue, and seek leadership’s help in addressing it. But we failed. There were a couple of factors contributing to this failure. We failed because we were presenting the challenge through our personal grievances that appeared out of context to the movement leadership. Perhaps we could not give context to our attempts at “calling [leadership’s] attention [to the serious and costly] contradiction in [the organizational] values.” We did not succeed in building a relationship between our grievances and the greater risks that the organization was up against. There was lack of communication which was caused by a mutual failure of the leadership as well as the young members in putting their respective notions of “truth” aside, listening to each other’s story of “us” and “them” and then analyzing the problem, principles that are at the heart of the process of diagnosing the principle challenge as given by Williams.
We assumed that the leadership is aware of the challenge that the organization is facing, only to realize later that we were wrong. The leadership did neither know nor could see the “contradiction in [its organizational] values.” On one hand, the movement stood in defense of women’s rights, freedom of expression, human rights and democracy. In order to build its ranks, the movement nurtured and trained vocal and outspoken cadre, with capacity to argue freely, express opinion and criticize. But on the other hand, the movement’s strict control oriented and dominance driven organizational structure and norms, conservative approach to interpersonal relationships, and replacement of internal organizational democracy with the principle of democratic centralism was making life unbearable for its young members, who unlike their parents, could not tolerate extreme controlling measures. They were children of a different age; their treatment required a different approach. So, the dichotomy was between the movement’s drive to produce outspoken and rebellious youth on one hand and its organizational norms of control and extreme dominance over all personal aspects of individual life on the other.
The leadership was unable to see the transition challenge they faced as an organization. Circumstances had changed, while the movement was busy promoting its version of “truth” and thus only speaking and expecting followers, and not listening. Despite its perceived strong fence against imperialism, individualism, private property and self interest, forces of globalization were connecting the young generations of the movement to the strange, dangerous and appealing world that existed outside of it.
Of course, this story can have a different direction, and thus lead to a different diagnosis if told by the movement. The principle of democratic centralism was at the heart of the movement’s organizational structure. It had proved, over the years to be a useful principle in maintaining organizational order. Therefore, it was critical for the movement to ensure that values feeding on this principle and in return affecting it are maintained, despite perceived changes in the circumstances. From the movement leadership’s perspective, the only challenge they could have faced was a maintenance challenge in the face of vulgar forces of imperialism, capitalism and globalization. With this mindset in place, the leadership perceived their values as worth preserving and the values of the young generation as outsider and dangerous, in particular because the initial sparks of this rebellion became visible when the levels of exposure of its young members to the world that existed outside of the movement increased. The process was initiated with the decision to allow for certain young members to be educated in Pakistani educational institutions.
As Real Leadership explains, the movement needed its very own Odin, or perhaps needed to become the Odin of its times. While the leadership at the movement pursued the greater purpose of defending women’s rights, when it came to insight and wisdom in particular for internal organizational leadership, they believed that they know what is there to be known, and only they could know what could be there to be known. They needed “quest for insight,” ability to realize that they could have “flaws,” and that their “knowledge” could be “incomplete.”
Our failure to understand and address the activist challenge that we faced as the young generation of the movement contributed to its failure to address its transition challenge, leading to hundreds of young members leaving its ranks forever, and thus depriving the organization of its future leaders on whom the movement had invested years of energy, training and resources. Unfortunately, this trend continues till today. The leadership of the movement must realize and address this transition challenge before it becomes a crisis challenge.