Direction, Alignment, Commitment: Leadership Revisited

After a previous post about Leadership, Jonathan Reams, editor of Integral Review, sent me a fascinating paper illuminating the subject and putting my attempts to think about a new leadership on acid.

“Direction, alignment, commitment: Toward a more integrative ontology of leadership” is a paper published in Elsevier Leadership Quarterly 19, written by Wilfred Drath and 5 colleagues at the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, NC (USA).

They start by stating that leadership has always been based on what can be called a tripod: “In its simplest form [leadership] is a tripod – a leader or leaders, followers, and a common goal they want to achieve”. So basically the act of leadership has been this: leaders and followers interacting with each other to figure out how to achieve their common goal.

The writers noticed a fundamental shift in the emergence of a new form of leadership and decided to find out what is happening. Based on their research, they proposed three new principles for leadership: Direction, Alignment and Commitment (DAC).

This is based on following principles: “(1) direction: widespread agreement in a collective on overall goals, aims, and mission; (2) alignment: the organization and coordination of knowledge and work in a collective; and (3) commitment: the willingness of members of a collective to subsume their own interests and benefit within the collective interest and benefit.”

The reason I was very excited to read this paper is that it takes the focus off ourselves, and puts it onto that which we aim to achieve. It also illuminated situations of success and failure that I had not seen as clearly formulated.

For years I struggled with what is called the tripod, and I think most of us know this struggle. In a world that consists of hierarchies based on leaders and followers, we all pick a place we feel most comfortable with: some at the top, some at the bottom, some safely tucked away in the middle. I often wrestled my way to a leadership position, only to crash down because of arrogance and hubris, incredulous to my own lack of common sense. It took many years to learn to have the humility and appropriate self-knowledge to renounce compulsive interest in positioning, and just be myself. Similarly, I know many people who suffer at the bottom while they have everything in them to deserve being seen and highly respected – but some seem to value the security of the place they suffer most. And there are truckloads of us hiding out in the snug uneventful middle, hoping to have enough freedom to be ourselves somewhat, but not enough visibility to be forced out of our comfort zones.

Leaders then have the noble task of making sense of this and, in more egalitarian environments, to understand and encourage everyone. But it all in all it is a sad picture because the focus tends to be a lot on our interactions and little on what it is we want to achieve!

What started to shift for myself, after I had crashed down often enough to know that my approach had to change, is not that I position myself differently. It is more that I started to lose interest in the whole business of positioning, the energy-consuming act of being leaders and followers trying to figure out how to manifest our common goals. I realised I just want to get on with it, I have my own relationship with the purpose and feel deeply responsible for it. That means working together with others, inspire, respond to what is effective and genuine, and avoid what is inauthentic and bureaucratic, in order to not be distracted by the messy complexity of human interactions but use the best of it.

Leadership in the DAC-paradigm means that the people who are most committed to a clearly defined direction and create the most alignment with those around them will emerge as leaders. It doesn’t mean they are leaders, or try to be, nor that others couldn’t be – it means putting yourself behind the mission with everything you have, and align all possible people and talents.

There is another phenomenon that the writers noticed: DAC is a framework in which there is no specific content, no investment in how it is being used. It is all about the functionality of finding the best way to fulfil a purpose.

This could be anything. With some colleagues I work on an equal footing that doesn’t contradict the fact that one of us is the boss, while the naughty kids next door seem to prefer a forceful shout – at least they always give me a big, generous grin when I shout my “Oy you little monkeys!” In larger situations, I often long for simple, clear structures, which help to facilitate effective, clean interactions.

This puts our ideas upside down. We have reaped the enormous benefits of the postmodern change from ‘command and control’ to mutual understanding and equality, and we have cultivated enough openness for many more people to think independently and live with dignity and respect. Might it be time for us to go a step further and question the entire system that this need for equality arose from?

That’s a challenging thing to do. It is hard to release the stranglehold of our imagined need for control. Many corporate structures hang together in the tripod approach and would fear falling apart if questioned. It might feel threatening to not have clearly pre-defined power structures to rely on. Not everyone might understand the difference between “whatever!” and “whatever works best”. Talented individuals might not want to change their tack after spending a fortune on their MBA. Our society has not changed yet.

But if we really want to make good on the promise of post-modernity – full self-expression for every human being – why wouldn’t we take that in the biggest possible context? How about going a step further and developing the free expression of our deepest passion for purpose, without interference of our interpersonal structures?