Thoughts on Leadership
BALANCING ACT
BY MICHAEL DEGROSKY
I subscribe to some online leadership forums, mostly on the LinkedIn platform. There’s some very good content and I encounter interesting and valuable thinking there often. There’s also a fair amount of silliness; people trying to promote a business, sell a book, or otherwise make a mark, making questionable assertions about what leadership is or is not, what it takes to be a great leader, and so on without much, if any evidence to back up their claims.
Common themes that I find troubling include advocating leading with compassion or strength; needing leadership or management; being the boss or being a leader; valuing education or experience – as if any of these represent mutually exclusive concepts. Understanding leaders and leadership is not about creating contrasts but about exploring balance. In my experience, truly effective leaders have a strong sense of purpose and mission, understand the fundamental truth that all leadership is both situational and contextual, are adaptive, take care of both their people and themselves, disperse leadership and, importantly, achieve balance between providing power and empowering others.
Yes, balance. I have rarely seen hard chargers who are short on compassion succeed long term. In contrast, my experience with very compassionate leaders who are weak on purpose and mission is that they can make people feel warm and fuzzy, but rarely do they serve organizations well. In most contemporary organizations the same people hold positions of authority and are responsible for inspiring and influencing other people with soft power; they are both boss and leader.
Yet, spend even a small amount of time in online leadership discussion forums and you will see would-be influencers confidently getting this reality quite wrong, describing their very positive conception of a leader by contrasting it to their very negative characterization of a boss. This is, of course, a false dichotomy. Neither “boss” or “leader” are descriptions of a kind or quality of person or one’s performance; both are roles people play in organizations and both roles are necessary. In many – I would hazard most – contemporary organizations the same people perform both roles simultaneously. One can be a good person or a bad person in either capacity. There are bosses (people who hold positions of authority in organizations) who manage with humility, collaboration and compassion and leaders who are arrogant authoritarians.
One can trace most of the less-than-helpful contrasts, such as between compassionate peoplecentric leaders and decisiveness or between bosses and leaders, to popular leadership influencers and authors and an insatiable drive to satisfy audiences who like leaders and leadership boiled down into simple, easily digested soundbites and memes. Those simplifications often play on peoples’ frustrations with their corporate lives, and that makes them popular and, I assume, lucrative. As a student of leadership who’s really interested only in evidence-based practices, what surprises, and often disappoints, me is the engagement that ensues on the discussion boards with enthusiastic validation for what are little more than opinions with little, if any, empirical support.
I have concluded that many contemporary leaders may not understand, or at least cannot actualize, well-balanced leadership.
I think people working in wildland fire skew to pragmatism and have little time for “a boss is a bad person and a leader is a good person” triviality in their leadership development journeys. Fire people are on the front lines of climate disruption, protecting communities and helping them adapt, restoring fire to landscapes, often managing in high-risk environments and / or at a high operating tempo, and, given those experiences, many wildfire folks intrinsically understand the balance that effective leadership requires.
From what I have seen in leadership discussion forums, I have concluded that many contemporary leaders may not understand, or at least cannot actualize, well-balanced leadership. I think we should view the popular, corporatized leadership thinking creeping into agencies with fire protection and fire management responsibilities with healthy skepticism. By leaning only into leadership models with strong research support, our agencies will favor leadership embodying a balance of purpose and mission, adaptability, person-centricity, and dispersed responsibility; in other words, balance, because that’s what the research supports.
Equally important will be an even-handed approach to how agency leaders, as well as those endeavoring to influence agency leaders and their funders, advocate solutions and use their influence. We are confronting enormous, complex problems across many wildly diverse ecosystems and a bewildering array of governments, politics, land ownership, organizations, systems, land management objectives, and other variables. In the face of climate change, the challenges will only become bigger, more complex, and more widespread with time. The stakes will be high and it seems there will never be enough resources. As agency leaders confront these challenges, I hope to see them – and fuels and fire advocates – balance not only how they lead but what they lead. I am sometimes disheartened when I hear influential voices offering what sounds like parochial, universal solutions to problems that are as varied as the landscapes on which they occur and the communities that are at risk. To that end, effective leadership on these enormous challenges lies not in creating contrasts and competition among solutions; prescribed fire or fire suppression, community adaptation or fire prevention, Indigenous knowledge or that of non-natives. Success will lie in the thoughtful integration of all these approaches and achieving sensible, sustainable balance that produces results.
