 When it comes to leadership, we sometimes get stuck in this mindset that there is just one path. There's only one way to lead properly, and you know, there are good leaders and there are bad leaders, and that's it. We tend to simplify things. A great deal. In fact, leadership is really complex, and there are a variety of ways to get to sort of the same place, right? There are lots of different paths that we can take to get to the same place, and people just tend to do differently. But over time, that has evolved, really, in the way that we see leadership has evolved. So I want to take a moment to look at some of the historical approaches to leadership and how we've come to this sort of study of leadership, how that's evolved and the stages that it's gone through and how those approaches have changed. So I want to start with, you know, initially when we talked about leadership, everything was about the trait approach, right? Great leaders are born. You're either born a great leader or you're not, or you're not. You either have those qualities or you don't, right? So the trait approach basically said, you know, great leaders are born with these things, or they're not. And so as a result, you end up with this list of traits, essentially. These are some of the different leadership traits that the historical approach would have said, this is, you know, if you're a leader, then you're born with these things. You're born with drive, a high level of effort and desire for achievement and ambition, and you have leadership motivation, this intense desire to lead others that exists within you. You have, you know, honesty and integrity. You have self-confidence, this sort of assurance in yourself and all these other things, right? That you have charisma and creativity and originality and, you know, they would have said sex and gender is an important thing, but they would have said, predominantly men are leaders, women are not. We're just born, men are born leaders and women are not. So these leadership traits are either born into you or they're not. So either born a leader or you are not. So obviously we've moved beyond that a little bit. We understand that that leadership isn't just something that's born into you. Certainly some of these things, if you are born with somebody who's just really extroverted and has great charisma, then that will certainly make leadership maybe a little bit easier for you in that regard. You'll have that component built in, but that's not the only thing. And these aren't the only things that create a good leader. And it's certainly not something that you're either born with or not in a general sense. So we've moved past that historically and moved into what people call the behavioral approach. Behavioral approach, in other words, leaders are what leaders do. So if you behave like a leader, then you are a leader. And if you are a leader, then you should behave like a leader, right? That there's all these behaviors that are associated with it. So the behavioral approach, as with many, many other good things in life, started with this Michigan versus Ohio State rivalry, right? And really in not in a sports sense, but in an academic sense. There were kind of competing people, researchers at the universities of Michigan and at Ohio State University of Michigan and Ohio State University that were looking at leadership in terms of behavior and came up with different approaches in that regard. Really though, the people who sort of pioneered this approach, Robert Blake and Jane Mutton, there you see them. And in 1964, they published some work that really lent itself to the behavioral approach and they developed what became known as the leadership grid, the leadership grid. So let's take a moment to look at the leadership grid. There are basically two axes on this grid, right? Two axes. One has to do with a concern for production. So the leader has to be concerned with, are things getting done? You know, basically task orientation. And there also has to be a concern for people, this relational orientation. So we have these two axes, they create this thing. So concern for production and concern for people. Obviously, each of these could be either low or high. You could fall low or high on that scale. And so that creates this sort of four squares. If we were draw a line, you know, in the midst there and create this axis, there's four squares that are created. So you have different areas then. So one would be, for example, what Blake and Newton called indifferent, where leaders evade and elude. So that demonstrates though a low concern for production and a low concern for people. Not very effective as a leader in that regard, but if they're indifferent. You also have leaders that are controlling their behaviors, lend them to a controlling behavior where they're high concern for production and low concern for people. So that leads them to direct and dominate the people that are working under them. Then on the flip side of that, you have accommodating people who are constantly yielding and complying. That shows a high degree of concern for people and a low degree of concern for production, Blake and Newton would say. Then finally have what they call the sound leader, which is where they contribute and they commit the high degree of concern for both people and production. And then in the middle, they added a fifth little area there, right in the middle had to do with status quo. Where you're balancing and compromising, you're using a little bit of each of these behaviors to try and just keep things moving forward, not really growing, but not diminishing either. So status quo is balance and compromise them. In contemporary terms, some people have come up with different terms for these instead of the ones that Blake and Newton came up with. They have the impoverished leader, the authority and obedience leader, the country club leader, the team leader. And then in the middle, you have the middle of the road leader. So just some, again, contemporary terms applied to this leadership grid. You'll see this around. I think there's certainly something to be said for the fact that leaders can demonstrate certain behaviors. But maybe not the end of the only way to go, but one certainly valid consideration for leadership. Another is what we call the situational approach. And that's really where you just say, well, it depends. What is required of a leader? It depends. It depends what makes an effective leader. It just depends. So this was really pioneered by Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard. And 2001 published some work on this on the situational approach, really codifying it and really bringing it to some sort of public recognition in that publication there. And they essentially had kind of the same idea as Blake and Newton in the sense that they're a relationship. They said they're a relationship and they're a task behavior. And they laid it out on a grid. So you have relationship and task behaviors that can range from low to high on either one of those axes. And then again, like Blake and Newton, you have like the leadership grid. You have this kind of grid that's created, this area that's created there. They then said that that really creates four leadership styles. And those styles are laid out in this grid then. You have the telling style, which as you can see is high and high concern for task behavior and low in relational behavior. The selling, which is high in both areas. The participating, which is high in relationship and low in task. And the delegating, which is low in task and low in relationship. So there are these four different styles of leadership that are created then based on this grid. Now, Hersey and Blanchard went a little further though, saying that you must match that style to the readiness. A leader is going to be able to, an effective leader is going to be able to identify what that group needs and what they're ready for. Because groups and teams go through these different phases. So what is it that this team is ready for? Them be able to apply the appropriate style. So if a group is in that kind of S4 block, S4 position in the bottom left, then they need a delegating leader. They need somebody who's really going to be on top of them and a task master really and somebody's going to hand out items. If they're in that S3 box, then they would need a participative leader and so forth. So they would say that, or they're saying that a situational leader will be able to identify what the needs of that group are and then apply the appropriate leadership behavior or style of leadership to that. The effectiveness of this is influenced by outside forces. Of course, you're not always able to control what outside influences there are in the group and what kind of power you have and what structure there is and so forth. So that is one kind of drawback or thing to note about situational perspective is that it is something that is influenced heavily by outside forces. Then sort of the next phase that people looked at in leadership is called transformational approach to leadership. Really where a leader comes in and says, let's shake things up. There's lots of change ahead. We're going to do things differently. We're going to just start over, wipe the slate clean and do things completely differently. So transformational approach kind of takes that mindset. In transformational approach, you have a leader that comes in. They instill a vision. They've laid out a very clear vision. This leader lays out a very clear vision and sets it in front of the employees. Then they demonstrate a passion for that vision. They really demonstrate that they're rolling up their sleeves. They're getting in behind this vision. They're really doing the work as well. They commit to that mission. That leader commits themselves and that organization to that mission and leaves no doubt that that's where they're heading. Now success though in this situation can be tied to the individual though. Transformational leadership tends to in some ways be reliant on that leader. So for example, one example of a transformational leader was Jack Welch who is the CEO of General Electric from 1981 to 2001. Had been with General Electric for a long time, had been kind of frustrated with the fact that they weren't very innovative and that they didn't allow things to change and weren't very employee friendly, employee centered, I guess. So when he took over in 1981, he flattened the corporate hierarchy, got rid of a bunch of different levels of bureaucracy and things and flattened that corporate hierarchy. He lessened the formality of the workplace. A lot of people address a little more casually and behave a little more casually. He embedded a succession plan and worked really hard on employee development and made that a part of the GE ethos, right? But he was also very aggressive in demanding performance. In fact, he was famous for saying constantly he's telling his managers, fix it, close it or sell it. So either fix it and get it right and make it profitable, make it productive, close it, meaning scrap the whole thing, close everything down or sell it if we can find somebody else who wants to buy it to sell. But if you can't make it work, then we're going to get rid of it one way or the other. And he was very aggressive and had, you know, some really kind of aggressive management styles in a sense, right? Rewarding the top portion, firing regularly, firing annually, like 10% of the people who who were in the bottom performers, even if they were performing well, if they were in the bottom 10%, then they got fired. But and so all of this was effective. He really boosted GE's productivity and profits and through the changes that he made and had this very clear vision and set the organization to that and were very focused on that for a long time. He retired in 2001 and GE, his hand-picked successor, had not nearly as much success. Really, really bottomed out for GE's. And because in many ways, all this was really tied to the personality and the person of Jack Welch. People bought into him as a leader. They bought into his policies. They bought into everything because they could see that commitment, that drive that he had and knew that he was focused on that. That that was going to be the way it was. Once you remove his personality from the equation, it started to fall apart a little bit. So transformational leadership can be tied to or connected to specifically a one person kind of become a cult of personality, so to speak. So that's something to be aware of and cautious of as well when you're thinking about different types of leadership. One other kind of more specific subset of transformational leadership is what we call visionary leadership or the visionary approach to leadership, which is something that's been studied and considered over the years as well. Visionary approach is really fueled by the leaders' dreams of what could be. So again, setting a vision out there, but really imaginative, innovative on what could be. One of the best examples and most notable examples of this would be Steve Jobs with Apple. Of course, Steve Jobs was the partner with Steve Wozniak and starting Apple and but really it was Jobs's vision that fueled Apple's growth. Woz was the tech guy. He knew computers, certainly much more new technology, much more than Steve Jobs, but Jobs had that vision of what could be and where they could go. For example, when they were developing the Mac, you know, the story of he came in and said to his designers, this is what I want this computer to be. I want it to be a singular shell, not able to be open and I want to be this shape and this kind of thing. And it's people all said that's not, you know, that's not how the technology works. It's not going to fit into something like that. Can't be shaped like that and so forth. And his vision was so strong. He just said, that's what we're going to do. That's where we're headed. And by God, they made it work. You know, it was really hard on his people in that way to come up with, you know, make the impossible possible. But his vision of what could be led to Apple's growth, not once, but twice because he left the company and then came back and when they started to falter and did it again with the development of the iPhone. I mean, iPhones are and smartphones are so common now that you don't even realize that wasn't that long ago when that was just not possible. There was no consideration. I mean, your phone was just something you talked into and we were just amazed when texting came around. Let alone, what do you mean put music on it and take pictures now that are, you know, movie quality pictures? I mean, that's all because of the vision that Steve Jobs had in the sense that other people were saying never would have imagined that, but he had this vision of what could be which is great. Again, though can be very much tied to that person as we found when, when he initially was, was ousted from Apple and then they started to falter because they didn't have that vision that fueled Apple's growth. But when he came back, they found that again, and now that he's gone, they've got to, you know, struggled some, but they're trying to figure it out. But these types of leadership approaches can be very much tied to that individual then. So again, when we think about leadership, you know, it's not just one path and we've studied that throughout history, studied leadership from all kinds of different angles and people want to try and pigeonhole it into, you know, it's got to be trait-based or it's got to be situational and that's, that's the only way to look at leadership. But again, the truth is there are many paths to leadership as we've discovered over the years. All of them were studying. Not all of them really as valid as others necessarily. That's not my point, but, but all of them have something to offer and all of them have led to our understanding of leadership in a contemporary sense. If you have questions about communication and leadership or anything related to that, please feel free to email me. I'd be happy to chat with you in that way. And discuss this further. In the meantime, I hope you will continue to study where we've been with leadership and how that informs where we're at now and where we could be with our understanding of what it means to be a leader.