Cranfield School of Management
Interview: Professor Keith Grint
The Arts of Leadership
TT
Why leadership, why now?
Grint
Good question – here's the short answer to that. I think people have
been interested in leadership for thousands of years, but there is an
issue about why has it come to the fore now. I suppose it has been
building really since the end of the Second World War which is
when a lot of so called professional leadership research starts, and
its fruition in the last decade or so, I guess, to me looks like a
desperate desire on the part of several people to find somebody
else to explain or blame for the current situations that we find
ourselves in. So if you look historically there was always some
new way of explaining what is going on and eventually you end up
with something called leadership as an explanation for what is
going on. The implication of that would be that – and perhaps
leadership is just another fad or fashion which will fade away in
time, although I think again if you take the longer perspective there
always is something about leadership – it's just that under certain
circumstances and certain timeframes it appears to become more
important than others, so my guess would be that in times of
uncertainty people very often look for certainty and it may well be
that what we have entered in the last decade is a period of
significant global uncertainty and under those conditions people look
for the answer and one of the aspects of leadership is it's allegedly
the provider of answers. The fact that it probably doesn’t provide
many answers is a separate issue, but I think that is probably an
explanation for why leadership and why now.
TT
So given that uncertainty then, how would you frame that, coping
with that uncertainty through leadership.
Grint
Well, I think there are two diametrically opposed ways of
understanding that question – one is to take the conventional
assumption that we could work backwards from Durkheim, a French
sociologist writing at the end of the 19th century, picks up on the
notion of the sacred for leadership, and for him there is something
to do with leadership which provides this certainty for followers and
followers are desperate for something which is above and beyond
them, which they can look for and aspire towards.
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Professor Keith Grint
But simultaneously that notion of the sacred involves the opposite
side of the coin, which is the scapegoating role. So for Durkheim
leaders are both saints and scapegoats and that is the kind of deal
that you get. You provide the certainty allegedly, and then when it
is exposed because actually you probably aren’t going to be the
certain provider, the certainty provider, that is when you become the
scapegoat. So on the one hand there is a kind of traditional way of
explaining the notion of the search for certainty is this desperate
search by followers for certainty in the motives and destinations of
the skills of the leader. And the opposed side of that is work by
people like Ronnie Heifetz who has argued that the primary role of
leaders is actually not to take on the responsibility of the certainty,
ie to push back the answers for those kinds of questions about what
we are doing and how we should be doing it, which direction we
should be going in, to push that back up on the followers because
ultimately leaders can’t supply the answers. So, Heifetz’s argument
is that the important role for leaders, and the most difficult role,
because this runs counter intuitively, is not to provide certainty, not
to provide the answers, but to provide a forum whereby followers
can construct collectively answers to very difficult problems.
TT
So you seem to have got several things there: you have got
followers, you have got certainty, you have got leaders, but in your
books you seem to critique some quite cherished and common
sensical, if you can call it that, notions of leadership. What is with
the critique? Why are you trying to unsettle those aspects?
Grint
I think it is trying to understand it from the same perspective as
Heifetz to a certain extent, that actually when you look historically
at what leaders have achieved, first of all it is actually very difficult
to know whether they are directly responsible for the achievements
– so we attribute all kinds of things to leaders, but we seldom have
the empirical evidence to be able to say X did this. What we can
say is X was there at the same time as this happened, but that
doesn’t necessarily mean anything – it's just a correlation rather
than the causation. So there is always a difficult issue about trying
to understand the particular role that leaders play. And the other
element of that is to think well, if we are not absolutely sure, why is
it that we seem to be absolutely sure? And I think this runs back
into the Durkheimian perspective that there appears to be this
desperate need by people to look for certainty and under those
conditions what I would argue is that leaders get the followers they
deserve, and vice versa. So, if your leader appears to be an
arrogant and godlike creature, it is probably because you as a
follower are not doing enough to constrain that approach.
TT
Or whether you want that approach.
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Grint
Or if you want that approach that is precisely what you get. So this
relationship between leaders and followers strikes me as being one
of the most important aspects of leadership. That we have focused
for far too long on the characteristics and the competencies and the
traits of individuals, and not enough on what is the relationship
between leaders and followers, or leadership as a collective
phenomena rather than an individual phenomenon. So that seems
to me to be able to explain much more than just an assumption that
if you get the right leader you can just relax and get on with your life
because somebody else will take the right decisions and you are
not responsible. And I think ultimately that issue of responsibility
seems to me to be critical. Leadership is a way of avoiding
responsibility because we attribute things to people and allow them
to do things that we shouldn’t allow them to do, but because that
enables us not to be responsible for subsequent events it's actually
quite a kind of both risk avoiding and a comforting approach to the
way that organisations and life is run through.
TT
Interesting. So the question around – this rather popularist question
around – are leaders born or made, it would seem that we need, we
want and need leaders. How do you even approach that very
basic question?
Grint
Well, the quick answer to are leaders born or made is that all
leaders are born in the sense that as far as I know there are no
leaders that have not been born. So that answers that question.
Second question is what is the role of the made bit in this and I
think one way of understanding of it would be to look at significant
sports people. If you take Jonny Wilkinson or David Beckham
who have been prodigiously talented. So some people appear to
be born with more talents than other is certain areas, but that
doesn’t necessarily make them great – what makes them great is a
huge amount of practice and dedication. So, in terms of are
leaders born or made, I am sure there are some people who do
appear from very early on to have great potential, but whether they
fulfil that potential depends on what they do with that potential in the
first place. It's almost – it's not an insignificant question, but it's not
a relevant question in the sense of, well if you are born there is
nothing we can do about it anyway. So, in that sense, it is an
irrelevant question. It's relevant in the sense that can you therefore
pick out certain kinds of people, or certain kinds of personality traits
and does that lead to significantly improved leadership. I think the
answer to that is very confused. I haven’t seen a great deal of
empirical research looking at children and tracing through their
leadership abilities across time – there simply isn’t that kind of
material. There are individuals that we know about as young
children, but there doesn’t seem to me to be a great deal in the
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Professor Keith Grint
literature which says when you trace a thousand children, you pick
out the leaders and they end up as leaders. We don’t know that to
be the case at all and there are always individuals that turn out to
be significant, like Adolf Hitler for example, who as a child and as a
teenager is a nothing and a nobody going nowhere. So it is difficult
to say that all these people who are significant start out as
significant, with significant leadership abilities. It doesn’t seem to
be the case.
TT
But would the lack of uncertainty – if you can put it that way –
around that correlation, what does that imply in the development of
leaders. Are we asking the wrong questions – how does that relate
to development of leaders?
Grint
One of the consequences of this assumption about the role of
leaders and the effectiveness of leaders strikes me as running back
into one of Machiavelli’s rather nice lines about everybody can see
the leader, but few can touch him in his terms. The implication of
that is that we actually don’t know very much about leaders, we see
them on TV all the time and we hear them, but we don’t know
whether in fact they are as good or as bad as they seem to be and
what Machiavelli I think is suggesting is that this distancing
mechanism is an important aspect of successful leadership – that
when you get closer to people, you realise that they have like
everybody else, lots of warts, but when they are distant they don’t.
So the closer you get to significant individuals, these leaders that
we are talking about, the more they appear to be quite normal like
everybody else, but if you are distant from them, they don’t. So
one of the things that comes out from this, I think, is that the skill
with which successful leaders control media sources and media
influences and their public personas and if you are not in control of
that then you probably have a problem because I think we still have
this assumption that our individual leaders are significant, so what
do we know about them? The answer is very, very little, but what
we do know about them is either controlled by their media or else
they are under control of the media. So it's really an issue in terms
of how much information do you have and how much do you
actually know about both the individuals and situations – and the
answer is very little.
TT
You make it sound like some kind of alchemy there, and you call
this book Arts of Leadership. Is there a reason for it being art as
distinct from science of leadership?
Grint
I think the alchemy bit is quite interesting. I think one way of
understanding this is to think about the worst thing which is
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prevalent now – the Labour government, for example, has often
been damned as one full of spin, but that implies that there is both a
truthful version and a spun version of the truth and to go back to my
previous point about lack of information and knowledge, we almost
never know whether something is actually true or not. What we
have is a basis of trust for taking people’s opinions as truth, so
whether there ever were, for example, weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq was never really based on information about which we could
verify, it's really based on trust. Do you trust the people saying that
there are, or trust the people saying that there aren’t? And it's not
about empirical data – none of us, virtually none of us have got
have got the empirical data to be able to answer the question one
way or the other. So the alchemy bit is quite interesting in that it
implies there is a lot of smoke and mirrors, but there is almost no
way of getting beyond the smoke and mirrors – that is the point,
there isn’t a transparent version of leadership. There is just
different versions of leadership.
Transcript prepared by Learning Services for the Knowledge Interchange
www.cranfield.ac.uk/som
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