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LEADERSHIP FROM WITHIN
Conversations On The Leading Edge Of Knowledge and Discovery With Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove COPYRIGHT (C) 1998 THINKING ALLOWED PRODUCTIONS Reprinted with permission from Thinking Allowed Productions JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. We live in a time of change, a time when the certainties of yesterday are rapidly becoming the uncertainties of tomorrow. The times require that we move beyond the routines of our workaday lives toward a new vision of the future. The times demand that workers and managers, teachers and students, develop a new leadership quality -- leadership of vision and commitment. Our topic today is "Leadership from Within." With me today is James M. Kouzes, author of The Leadership Challenge: How to Get Extraordinary Things Done in Organizations. Since 1969 he has trained over fifteen thousand executives and professionals. He has served as director of the Executive Development Center of the University of Santa Clara, and is currently president of Tom Peters Group Learning Systems. Welcome, Jim. JAMES KOUZES: Thank you, Jeffrey. It's a pleasure to be here. MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to be with you. KOUZES: Thank you. MISHLOVE: You know, you draw an interesting distinction, which seems to be becoming more and more important to people today in the business world and elsewhere -- the difference between being a manager and being a leader. Why don't we begin by defining that? KOUZES: Sure. If you look at your hands, Jeffrey, we have two hands. The difference between managing and leading is between what you can do with your hands and what you can do with your feet. We came to that realization actually when doing our research, looking it up in the dictionary, looking up the word manage. The word manage has as its root the word manus, which means hand. The word lead has as its root definition the words to go, to travel, and to guide. The difference between leading and managing is the difference between what you do with your hands -- handle things, control things, type letters, use the telephone, write reports -- and what you can do with your feet -- move in particular directions, move in new directions, move left, right, back, forward. The difference between a leader and a manager is the difference between somebody who guides us in new directions towards new horizons and a manager who simply tries to control and contain the way things are. MISHLOVE: In other words, it seems as if managers -- it almost sounds like manhandle, the way you use the word -- but managers are involved in a steady-state kind of system, maintaining the status quo, seeing that business as usual takes place, that things run smoothly. And leaders are moving us forward. KOUZES: Absolutely. My favorite illustration of that is a poster that I got from a colleague named Reno Taini, who happens to teach high school, and is involved in teaching high school kids about life and leadership, and who with his wife Randi duBois runs an organization called Tree Top Challenges/Proaction. They're responsible among other things for helping to develop young people in an organization named Operation Raleigh, which was started by Prince Charles. In the poster there is a headline, and in the headline it says, "Adventurers Wanted." I thought, what a perfect description of the kind of people we want as leaders. They're appealing to people between seventeen and twenty-four to take expeditions with them to learn not only that community service -- that sort of Outward Bound, Peace Corps -- but also to learn about leadership development as one of their goals. And that headline is followed by a photograph, and under the photograph it says, "Join the voyage of discovery." And that, I think, is a perfect illustration of the kinds of language that symbolize what leaders are about -- leading, guiding, discovery, challenge, new places. MISHLOVE: It seems to me as if there might be two forms of leadership -- the really extraordinary leaders, the Martin Luther Kings, the Gandhis, who make massive changes in our way of looking at things; but there's also subtle forms of leadership, I would think, and that might involve anybody -- working in the kitchen, working in a schoolroom, working in business, in which one chooses to view one's work not as a routine, not as a job, but as you said as a discovery. KOUZES: In the research that we've done on leadership we intentionally avoided the Martin Luther Kings and the John F. Kennedys and the Lee Iacoccas and the other people who are typically mentioned, the Margaret Thatchers -- those folks who if you were to ask, the general public might mention -- and in fact asked people to think about individual experiences that they had had, where they would consider themselves to have done, in their opinion, an exemplary job of leading a group of people. And in that process of thinking about their own experience -- whether that person was a high school teacher or high school principal, a college dean, or someone in the army who wasn't a general but who was a sergeant or a lieutenant, or someone who just have been a middle manager in an organization -- we asked those people to relate those experiences. And we found something very simple, that everybody has at least one story they can tell. We concluded that there's a leader within everybody, whether that person's role is school, church, community, home, or business. MISHLOVE: And of course your book describes the commonalities of these leaders, and I find very interesting a remark that you made to me a little earlier about your investigation of Joseph Campbell's work in the hero's journey, and how the commonality amongst leaders, even people in their everyday lives, when you look at the qualities of leadership, they seem very much like the mythical journey of the hero. KOUZES: Absolutely. I just made this connection the other day, when we were watching the PBS program on Joseph Campbell. It struck me when Campbell was describing the universal myth, the vision quest. It begins with some sense of dissatisfaction, some sense that there's an opportunity out there -- I'm not quite certain what it is, but I feel some internal struggle about that. And then it leads one to set off on some kind of journey to find that. And typically they meet some mentor, or some experience happens where they learn some new lessons, and they become more and more aware of their own inner strength. That typically is the story of the people that we interviewed, and that typically, I think, is the story of the new mythical hero in the world today -- at least one of the new ones, the entrepreneur, the business person who is dissatisfied with large corporations and wants to set off and start up a new venture outside of the mainstream. I think there's a perfect connection between what Campbell is saying about mythology and what we and others are discovering about leadership. End Part I. Join us next month for Part II of this interview
with James Kouzes.
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