Take Me to Your Leader--a Real One

In America this year, August looks to become the foolish month.

Consider the endless yakking about “leadership.” From the podiums of the two main national political conventions, poseurs orate about America’s need for “new” or “bold” leaders. There’s just one problem. America does need leaders--lots of them. But not the conventional kind.

The new leadership that’s needed is more about you than about them. When politicians call for new leadership, they are talking about themselves. That’s because so many of them are egomaniacs. They want to be the leaders and they want you to be the followers.

But to internationally recognized leadership expert Jean Lipman-Blumen, a Claremont Graduate School professor, real leadership in these increasingly global, multicultural times means a different kind of leader than you are likely to see at the podium in San Diego or Chicago this month. Says the author of the provocative new book “The Connective Edge,” “The John Wayne-Fidel Castro leadership tide is finally turning.”

Looking back over the full sweep of this American century--from Henry Ford’s days through the anti-Vietnam War movement to the computer age--Lipman-Blumen writes admiringly of the leadership styles in China and Japan that emphasize the group over the individual. She is far less enamored with macho American leaders for whom consultation is more of a means to stay on top than a way to solve problems. In such Asian cultures and in Asian political groups such as the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations, she finds powerful values that support the rise of what she calls connective (network-weaving) and instrumental (specific task-oriented) leaders whose styles “open up the path to community and the politics of commonalities.”

The world is changing rapidly and the old-style leaders just can’t keep up. America’s true new leaders will have to be fast on their feet, as, she says, “short-term coalitions, changing kaleidoscopically, will replace long-term political and business alliances.” And in our increasingly globalized and interdependent world, where today’s helpful ally can and often does become tomorrow’s obstacle course, “leaders whose repertoires are limited to the more traditional behaviors of dominating, competing and collaborating,” she writes, “will be left far behind.”

Funny she should say that. For the exact same thought occurred, independently, to the thinkers at the Sacramento-based California Center for Health Improvement, which takes a very broad view of the term “public health” and believes that the overall health of society can be improved by citizen participation in public life. While the Claremont professor writes about new styles of leadership on the grand, global stage, the center brings the issue home. In its report “Getting Involved,” the center says flatly that old leadership styles stand in the way of new solutions. American renewal will be found not in any new individualism but in a sense of local community.

“Out of the rubble of budget cutbacks, voter anger and impossible-to-meet public expectations, a new politics of local government must be created,” says the center’s report. “Civic infrastructures must be built to synergize the hundreds of new groups springing to life in communities across the state to find solutions to various community problems.”

Independently, Lipman-Blumen concurs: “In a world connected by technology but fragmented by diversity, leaders need to build community, where everyone wins something at least some of the time.” Leaders who fail to create alliances and arrange for dynamic local interactions would do best simply to get out of the way. Politicians will still have a role in America’s political renaissance, but it will be a far different one. Predicts the Sacramento study: “Politicians who develop the skills to convene, facilitate and catalyze the energies and resources of civic associations may come to populate California’s local government posts, irrespective of their formal political affiliations.” In effect, says the center, politicians will have to get off their high horses and stay in town longer, rather than riding off into the sunset.

And we, the people, have to rely less on government bureaucracies. They can do no more than sand down the rough spots of our social and economic difficulties. Real problems can be solved only by real people, at the grass-roots level: “Getting involved really matters. Higher citizen participation has been shown by researchers to help bring communities better job opportunities, stronger economic growth, safer neighborhoods, higher performing schools and even longer and healthier lives.”

OK, it’s a motherhood-and-apple-pie message. But doesn’t it ring true?

Politicians pontificating from the podium about the need for new leadership have scant idea about what is needed if they think what’s needed is more of them. In reality, what’s needed is more of you. The new leaders will arise from the old followers. Lipman-Blumen, co-director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Leadership at the Peter F. Drucker Graduate Management Center in Claremont, suggests they will be drawn from sources like volunteer organizations (“where leaders must attract dedicated workers without the crutches of financial incentives or formal authority”); private-sector entrepreneurs (“agile movers and shakers”); innovative women (who “fuse familiar female styles of collaboration, nurturance and altruism with power and instrumental action”); and successful entertainment industry leaders (because they constantly assemble and reassemble new teams of talent for particular tasks and avoid empowering rigid bureaucratic structures).

“Autonomous decisions have become a thing of the past,” says Lipman-Blumen. That’s probably also true of autonomous decision makers. And that’s probably a very good thing.