Distinctive Leadership Roles

TOP Note: In using this diagram with colleagues, subordinates or clients, it is wise to be fully conversant with the underlying framework of interacting-for-benefit. It is particularly important to be clear about the difference between the Types and the Modes.

Officer: Job-focus

The leadership challenge may involve doing no more than perform in the job as specified or required by the situation. Other types of leader often expect someone to be an officer ("it's his job, why doesn't he do it!"), when really the social role they should be inducing is that of «follower».

Boss: Power-focus

Leadership entails wielding legitimate authority in a forceful way that demands prompt adequate responses from others.
Line-managers often see themselves as bosses, given that they are formally assigned authority to wield power legitimately and be held accountable for performance. However, that is simply one of their leadership roles.

Expert: Cause-focus

Leadership here involves application of knowledge—this demands:

• possession of the expertise and knowledge relevant to the challenge,

  PLUS

• the conviction and determination that specialized understanding will produce the desired solution or outcome.

Coordinator: Community-focus

Leadership involves focusing on strategic goals by:

• getting agreement on values and objectives required in a situation by the organization,

  PLUS 

• producing the desired outcome despite many diverse leaders within the organization needing to contribute.

Guardian: Kinship-focus

Leadership involves maintaining loyalty to the values of the organization, even when expedience and pressures from co-workers indicate some or many are acting or inclined to act in a contrary fashion. Exactly what action to take will be a function of the level of the post in the organization and the particular situation.

Strategist: Perspective-focus

Leadership involves mastery of complexity, which means dispassionate analysis of the system that includes all organizational divisions, the industry, and aspects of wider society. No relevant factor is omitted. Strategic goals of the Coordinator without a strategy are weak.

Visionary: Reality-focus

Visionary leadership involves:

• an ability to display foresight as shown by a track record of successful and unconventional or unexpected predictions,

  PLUS 

• successful implementation of implications of those predictions.

Given that each new situation is different and seems unpredictable, the leader also needs to be able communicate their foresight in a way that is credible, persuasive and genuinely unites people.

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TOP Note:

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• See the application to teamwork; &

• Check for other useful applications of the interacting-for-benefit framework.

Originally posted: July 2009