For many years I followed the advice of many of my mentors, notably Ed Friedman, who recommended that a mature leader was to stay in good relationship with members of the system while taking clearly defined positions (Generation to Generation, p. 229). He taught that the eyes are located in the head for a very good evolutionary purpose--so that the head could lead the rest of the body with clear vision. So visionary leadership became one of my guiding principles. After several hard knocks in leadership, I now see a flaw in that logic. Friedman, a man of the mid 20th century, took a patriarchal, individualistic perspective on congregational leadership. Almost with an "of course," it was assumed that the rational, intellectual (socialized male) approach was the correct one.
Now there's new mind research that indicates vision is not so much individual as communal. Writers like Daniel Goleman (Primal Leadership, Harvard Business School Press, 2002), and Joseph Bragdon (Profit for Life: How Capitalism Excels, Society for Organizational Learning, 2006) note that we see not only with our eyes and our higher brain, but also we pick up key information on the emotions and insights of others through deeper brain paths. The true locus of leadership, they argue, is not the eyes but the heart.
That suggests to me that leadership is a communal activity, best carried out in concert with as many members of the congregation as possible. It's not my vision, but our vision that counts. In a flat world, with open sourcing as an important variable, leadership in the Wikepedia model is more likely to succeed in the 21st century than leadership on the model of the elite academy.
Maybe the task of the leader, as Harrison Owen suggested years ago (Riding the Tiger, Abbot, 1991), is to "keep the sytem open" for full and rich and complex participation of all the resources at hand.
What do you think leadership is?
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