2. The Interdisciplinary Art of Leadership
A leader must have an excellent understanding of the field in order to perform well, not just of his area of expertise, but also of the field of leadership itself. So, we must necessarily ask ourselves: what is leadership exactly? How does it work? And what are the core competencies of leadership?
These may seem like very basic questions, perhaps obvious ones. But the answers to these questions are anything but obvious. And in fact, if you were to ask many leaders for answers to these questions they might well find them befuddling or judge them to be so simple, and obvious, as to be a waste of time. Nothing could be further from the truth. For indeed, to truly master a field, you must begin with a profound understanding of its parameters, and this understanding is in fact far more rare than one might imagine, especially in today’s rushed culture of management and leadership.
Leadership is one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth.
― James MacGregor Burns, Historian, political scientist and leadership expert
What is leadership? The first level answer is to state the obvious: leadership is the field that concerns itself with leading - leading teams of people (composed of units or departments), and leading entire organizations. It can also be the prerogative of a single, remarkable individual – a retired executive or politician, a writer or artist, a religious figure, a public intellectual; namely someone who has a public platform, from which they exert significant influence on civic life.
The first thing to understand about leadership is that it is an inherently social and public function, starting at the lowest level of leading a small team and incrementally rising from there, all the way to the highest and most prominent levels: leading entire divisions, branches of government or companies, or being a prominent public figure. The first function of a leader is to properly fulfil his social function, namely his specific leadership role equivalent to a specific organizational position. Since leadership is an inherently social function, it will always have at its core the managing of social relations, in different environments and at various levels of complexity.
What social relations is the leader managing exactly in her role? Quite a number in fact, and the higher she rises in the hierarchy, the more social relations she’s dealing with. First and foremost, the leader manages her team, such that the unit she directs is fulfilling its organizational mandate. Therefore, she manages her resources, her staff, and of course, she manages herself, in order to be professional, well-functioning, and successful in her role. The other major component of social relations for the leader is dealing with superiors, following organizational culture, and aligning with larger organizational mandates.
A leader is therefore a peculiar combination of director (of his unit or division) and servant (to the higher-ups and the larger needs of the organization), all within the context of the specific technical expertise at hand (what the unit does) and within the context, always, of social relations. And this combination of director and servant, specific technical expertise and social relations expertise, never ceases for a leader, however high he or she will rise. Even CEOs and prime ministers are leaders and servants (to shareholders, stake-holders or citizens), in the highest sense possible (however well they ultimately fill their mandates).
The dominant trend in the past fifty years has been for a leader to be excellent in his domain and to become a manager or technocrat - and these terms are themselves very revealing of precisely this trend. The modus operandi is technical specialization, and, in reality, this approach is a socio-cultural norm that is to be found across all intellectual disciplines and economic sectors. Even the entire field of economics, from which so much of business theory and practice derives, has for decades conceived of itself as a “hard” science, when in fact it has always been a far larger social science.
What’s bad for the bee-hive is bad for the bees.
– Marcus Aurelius (121-180), Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher
However, what our brief overview of leadership reveals is that a leader cannot properly fulfill his role, if there is too exclusive a focus on technical expertise. Of course, the latter is necessary, however it is not sufficient. Why exactly? Because, in short, leadership - like economics - is not just a technical art. In fact, it never has been and never will be. And so, the technocratic emphasis of the last fifty years, dominant within companies, governments and universities, has been a form of socio-cultural bias, or a limiting intellectual box, that does not serve well either aspiring leaders or their organizations.
Technocracy is not leadership - there we have said it, even though this is not a fashionable statement. And this is exactly why executives, or technocrats, are often not necessarily well developed and well-rounded leaders, adapted to the real challenge at hand. And the far-too-evident crisis of leadership, manifest across many of today’s institutions, is a clear symptom of an underlying, and excessive, focus on a technocratic approach to leadership.
Of course, as we’ve seen, leadership necessarily deals with the technical side of things. However, leadership is also inherently about social relations, or personal and interpersonal psychology (handling oneself well as a leader, managing employees and teams, communicating effectively, serving customers etc.). Furthermore, the more one rises in the ranks, the more one operates in larger and essential spheres of the organization: obtaining primary resources, creating and launching products, business competition, market conditions, ethics (of self, colleagues, superiors), economic cycles, socio-cultural trends, managing and respecting the public good, pollution and environmental stewardship, climate change, globalization ...
We are now in a better position to explain the main components, and the core competencies, of leadership. And, in the process, we can also finally answer the grand question itself: “What is Leadership?” At the very beginning of our inquiry, this question seemed to have an obvious answer: leadership is about leading teams and organizations. On the surface, this is true of course. However, what our exploration reveals is that, given its numerous domains, leadership is something far more profound than this. In reality, leadership is an interdisciplinary art, par excellence.
Management is what tradition used to call a liberal art – “liberal” because it deals with the fundamentals of knowledge, self-knowledge, wisdom, and leadership; “art” because it deals with practice an application. Managers draw upon all of the knowledge and insights of the humanities and social sciences – on psychology and philosophy, and economics in history, on the physical sciences and ethics.
― Peter F. Drucker, Business consultant, teacher and writer
As the father of modern management, Peter Drucker, so aptly says: leadership is an art because it necessarily deals with expertise and applied results (building things, making products, providing services, managing organizations etc.). And it is interdisciplinary – a liberal art – in that it must necessarily concern itself with the fundamentals of human knowledge, and with virtually all of its related domains: technical know-how and efficiency, the physical sciences, personal and interpersonal psychology, economics, history, ethics, geo-politics, and of course the most interdisciplinary of all the disciplines - essential to leadership and wisdom - philosophy.
To become an excellent leader, whether in business or government, it is therefore vital we not reduce leadership to technocracy – however important technique might be – and, even more so, that we not be consumed by the all-too-common pitfall of becoming simply managers. Rather, over the course of one’s career, it behooves us to cultivate the higher form of leadership, namely the interdisciplinary art of leadership.
Putting it into Practice
Read in your field, of course, but also make a point to read widely (in business, economics, history, fiction, psychology, philosophy etc.).
Practice thinking and seeing outside your own views, and the norms of your organization.
Develop a plan to cultivate your interdisciplinary abilities, over the course of your career.
Practice a philosophical or spiritual path, that will widen your intellectual, psychological and philosophical horizons.
Surround yourself with employees and advisors who challenge you to think more broadly, and to develop not only depth but breadth of knowledge.