Reconceptualizing Leadership and Reeducating Collaborators in the Twenty-first Century

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Abstract

Leadership must be reconceptualized. This new economic era of the third millennium is marked by profound global changes, challenges, and chaos. Now is the time for scholars, practitioners, and professionals to universally adopt a postindustrial definition of leadership for the twenty-first century. In the absence of a universally accepted construct, the study of leadership will fail to advance, and the practice of leadership will fail to address the critical challenges of our global society. In short, we must finally acknowledge that the traditional conceptualization of leadership is entrenched in the industrial twentieth century orientation and remains in a state of arrested development under the influence of the leader-centric paradigm. The overwhelming gravitational pull of this industrial leadership paradigm will not be overcome by simply redefining current leader and follower roles and responsibilities, replacing leaders with followers as the unit of analysis in empirical studies, or by artificially elevating the significance of followers in the popular and practitioner press.

1. Prologue

This essay addresses two overarching essentials related to contemporary leadership in the twenty-first century—reconceptualization and reeducation. This is not just another obligatory reiteration of the leadership literature, nor is it another regurgitation of the customary leadership topics such as leader traits, behaviors, competencies, styles, or standard theories and models. For well over one hundred years, our obsessive proclivity for isolating the leader as the unit of analysis in leadership studies has resulted in knowing far too much about leaders and understanding far too little about leadership.¹ In the same manner, isolating the follower as the unit of analysis would have similar consequences, and only serve to preserve and reinforce the historically destructive leader-follower dichotomy.

In this paper I adopt Rost’s definition of leadership with certain modifications: replacing “leaders and followers” with collaborators, adding enact and significant to modify “real changes”, and interactive signifying “reciprocal influence”.² Collaborator denotes a conjoint role while the words leader and follower imply disjointed roles. Enact and significant specify that changes must not only be substantive but also acted upon. Consequently, leadership is defined here as an interactive influence relationship among collaborators who intend and enact real significant changes that reflect their mutual purposes—which I feel represents a respectful and reasonable evolutionary refinement of Rost’s definition.

I also introduce the reader to the concept of collaborator conjoinment and articulate the paradigm—principles—practices transformational reeducation process which is based upon internalizing the postindustrial leadership paradigm at the individual level, integrating the profound postindustrial leadership principles at the group level, and institutionalizing the postindustrial leadership practices at the organizational level. My aim is to expand the boundaries of leadership studies by reconceptualizing the leadership construct as a mutual influence relationship among collaborators, proposing a unique reeducation process for developing collaborators, and advocating a holistic leadership perspective based upon a symbiotic social relationship possessing cross-cultural relevance and global pertinence.

What is leadership? What is your personal definition of leadership? As a field of study and an area of practice, most students, educators, professionals, and practitioners alike believe they have a fairly good grasp of the concept or construct of leadership. Undoubtedly, most have also adopted a favorite leadership theory or model and formed an implicit leadership mental model of what effective leadership is—their personal leadership paradigm.³ Unfortunately, virtually none of the most popular leadership theories or models that have captured people’s imaginations deal with leadership. Incredible as this claim sounds, it is a surprising fact. Now, I extend a humble invitation to the reader to join me in challenging the industrial leadership paradigm, exploring the nature of postindustrial leadership, and explicating the future of leadership research, development, and practice.

2. Introduction

The Introduction is intended to build a rational and robust framework to support the central thesis of this essay, while simultaneously developing an argument that justifies the necessary reexamination of what many refer to as the “crisis in leadership”. We know that people have been deeply fascinated and preoccupied with the fundamental concepts of leader, power, and authority for over 5,000 years. Markings symbolizing these concepts were engraved in Egyptian hieroglyphics and pondered by ancient philosophers such as Confucius (551-479 BCE), Socrates (469-399 BCE), Plato (428-348 BCE), and Aristotle (384-322 BCE). These essential concepts have not lost their allure or their powerful grip on the contemporary human psyche. Although the word leader has been traced back to antiquity, the use of the word leader in the English language only began around 1300 CE. Much later, Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language included the word influence, thereby enhancing the definition of the word “leading”. When introducing the word leadership for the very first time in 1828, Webster’s simply added the suffix ship to the word “leader” to denote possession—thereby defining it as the state of being or condition and quality of the leader.⁴

From its earliest scholarly beginnings, the study of history has fundamentally been the study of leaders. Leaders were universally thought to possess special inherited traits and were expected to perform well at all times and in all situations. This belief emerged forcefully from the work of Scottish philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle (1793-1881) who defined the history of the world as “the biography of great men”.⁵ Carlyle passionately believed in heroic leadership, and his book On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History is regarded as an early and immensely influential formulation of the Great Man Theory. Francis Galton (1822-1911), (the cousin of Charles Darwin), agreed with Carlyle and proposed in his book Hereditary Genius, that leaders were gifted with special attributes and abilities inherited in their genetic makeup.⁶ Galton also coined the term eugenics and helped to lay the foundations for the Trait Theory of leadership. Both Carlyle and Galton maintained the powerful conviction that great leaders were “naturally born”. Their pervasive ideology was most certainly the direct precursor of the modern-day leader-centric paradigm of leadership.

The Great Man theory rose to prominence and gained significant popularity in the 19th century but did not lack its insightful detractors. Two contemporary critics of Carlyle were the English sociologist Herbert Spenser (1820-1903) and the renowned Russian author Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910). Spenser and Tolstoy proposed persuasive critiques and constructed critical counterarguments refuting the Great Man trait approach. Spenser held the reasoned position that leaders were products of their social environment. In his book, The Study of Sociology, he wrote, “you must admit that the genesis of a great man depends on the long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly grown”.⁷

Also repudiating the Great Man theory from a literary perspective, Tolstoy cleverly delivered a profound counter-narrative in his acclaimed classic novel War and Peace published in 1869. Professor James G. March wrote and narrated the film Heroes & History: Lessons for Leadership from Tolstoy’s War & Peace, which captured the essence of Tolstoy’s provocative message in War & Peace—that the portrayals of heroes and their implicit characterization of leaders as important in history are fundamentally nonsense.⁸ In the film, March emphasized Tolstoy’s frustration that because the customary catechism of leadership proclaims that individual leaders are of singular importance to history, they are universally worshiped, and honored—and have monuments erected in their memory. However, March clarified that Tolstoy maintained the ultimate source of history was not determined by the genius of a few great leaders, but by the will of the people—the millions of ordinary people.

Tolstoy himself proposed that people create hero narratives to make sense and meaning out of the chaos and complexity of history. In essence, these hero narratives are nothing more than the coherent stories formulated by our imaginations that satisfy our human need to believe there is rationality in historical events—but they tragically fail at describing reality. In the end, the teachings transmitted through Tolstoy’s novel affirm that histories are the consequence of many interacting actors and actions—they are essentially the effects of the quiet competence of multitudes of ordinary and minor people. And the crucial lessons for leadership are to understand the profound importance of the common follower while simultaneously being aware of the profound irrelevance of the hero-leader.

Despite historical critiques, the leader-centric industrial leadership paradigm is still very much alive and well. It is obvious to even a relative newcomer to the leadership landscape that the majority of academic leadership literature and the popular leadership press reflect the existence of a common ancestor—the hero-leader. After investigating the top twenty-five bestselling books on leadership in the United States as identified by Soundview Communications in 2020, this author concluded that nineteen of the publications were not books about leadership per se—but basically stories about leaders.

Here, I select five best-selling works to validate my observation that books on leadership are primarily about leaders. Stephen R. Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, is often regarded as a leadership handbook of principles.⁹ However, Covey consistently equates his concept of “leadership” to that of the individual leader. In Jim Collins’ book, Good to Great, readers were introduced to his Level 5 Leadership Model, based on a five-level hierarchy.¹⁰ But Collins’ so-called “leadership” levels are, in reality, a hierarchy of individual managers, leaders, and executives. His references and explanations related to “leadership” are all fundamentally dependent on using the word “leader”. Yet, quite inexplicably, the word “leader” does not appear in his index—while the word “leadership” does. Level 5 Leadership is unambiguously not about leadership—it is fundamentally about leaders.

Another popular leadership “guru,” John C. Maxwell, has authored well over twenty books on leadership. All of his books on leadership can easily be classified as leader-centric in the sense that he considers the words leadership and leader to be synonymous. Two salient examples are The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership and 5 Levels of Leadership. Both books are directed at and apply exclusively to leaders with the expressed purpose of transforming leaders into better leaders. On page xix of the Introduction to The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, Maxwell proudly states that his paradigm of leadership is “the leader serving others”.¹¹ Furthermore, in just the first two pages of 5 Levels of Leadership, he uses the words leader and leadership interchangeably over one dozen times.¹² Curiously, he takes strong exception when the words leadership and management are considered synonymous but appears to have no problem using the words leadership and leader synonymously.

The final two books I will reference were written by leadership educators James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner—The Leadership Challenge, 1^st edition published in 1987 (now in its 6^th edition), and Credibility.¹³ In The Leadership Challenge, the first sentence on page 1 of the Introduction reads “Leaders get people moving”. Throughout the book the authors make no serious attempt to distinguish between leadership and the leader. They do not offer a definition of leadership, but they define leaders as those people whom others think of as demonstrating exemplary leader behaviors. Their Exemplary Leadership Model is essentially the composite of essential practices (behaviors) that leaders employ to make extraordinary things happen. In the 25^th Anniversary Edition of 2012 the authors boast that they persist in posing the exact same research question they began asking leaders in 1982: “What did you do when you were at your personal best as a leader?”¹⁴

In Credibility, Kouzes and Posner tell their readers that it was their intense interest in leadership that motivated them to write the book. Yet, it is the word “leader” that appears three times in the opening five lines of their Introduction. Finally, although they entitled Chapter 1 “Leadership is a Relationship”, their definition of relationship is described as a service relationship between leaders and their followers or constituents that is contingent upon specific leader behaviors most admired by the followers. Conveniently, as in the case of Covey and Collins, the word “leader” does not appear in the index of their book.

What is plainly visible in these so-called books on “leadership” is the capricious and deliberate confluence and confounding of the words: leader and leadership—in essence, constructing an erroneous equivalence and creating the false impression that the two words are synonymous. We are in effect being exposed to and conditioned by this leadership ideology on a regular basis. Unfortunately, this erroneous conceptualization is the modus operandi of the leadership industry.

3. The Crisis of Leadership

The thesis of this essay is quite straightforward—we must reconceptualize the obsolete leadership construct if we are to successfully address and overcome the global challenges facing us in the twenty-first century. This reconceptualization presents us with another problem, that being the reconceptualization of leadership development. I have already suggested that the paramount obstacle to this thesis is the leadership industry
itself—“Leadership Inc.”—which is composed of leadership academics and researchers, popular leadership authors, and speakers, as well as a vast majority of leadership consultants, trainers, and professionals. The leadership industry is not only impeding a necessary paradigm shift—it is also actively creating the illusion of pseudo-paradigmatic progress.

It is undeniably true that a common notion of leadership existed in the collective psyche well before becoming a formal field of study. Widespread interest in leadership as a science began in earnest during the 1940s, with what is generally considered the “golden age” of leadership studies roughly occurring between 1970 and 1990. The earliest empirical study can be traced to 1904 and the work of Lewis M. Terman (1877-1956) who explored the psychological and educational factors contributing to the manifestation of leadership ability in children. Terman sought to ascertain the qualities and characteristics of pupils who were identified as “leaders” by their fellow classmates.

Terman concluded that leadership was more common and more intensive with boys. He also observed that girls were rarely identified as leaders because they did not possess the inherent social tendencies that the boys had. The factors considered leader qualities most often possessed by boys included intelligence, dominance, aggressiveness, demonstrating initiative, offering suggestions, and the ability to plan and organize activities. These early studies of children provide us with a rare view of the existence and influence of what could be considered a common social conception or representation of a leader. This evidence points to a cognitive schema or implicit theory of leadership—that leadership is the function of the leader, and that leaders are more often than not males who possess and demonstrate various leader-like qualities, characteristics, and competencies.

It is within this leader-centric mindset that researchers and academics have probed and pondered the secrets of great leaders. The study of leadership from its early years through the 1940s focused exclusively on great-man traits. Disenchanted with the lack of progress, social scientists turned their attention to the study of leader behaviors and styles (1940s–1950’s). The behavioral approach expanded the research to focus on leader behaviors directed toward followers. However, this line of research failed to show any robust connection between behaviors and performance outcomes or find a specific style or set of behaviors that predicted effectiveness. The absence of consistent findings suggested that leadership must be situational and subject to the influence of contextual contingencies. This gave rise to the contingency and situational theories of leadership (1960’s–1970’s). But after two decades of research with contingency models, a series of conceptual and methodological difficulties ended in frustration and disenchantment with this approach.

By the late 1970’s social scientists had gone from a fascination with great-man traits to a search for unique leadership behaviors to an analysis of situational contingencies and finally arrived at the unpleasant reality that many were about to give up on the scientific study of leadership altogether. The lesson to be learned from over 75 years of leadership research appears to be that we cannot understand leadership by concentrating on the traits, styles, and behaviors of “great” leaders. Leadership is something more than who leaders are, what leaders do, and the situations in which leaders find themselves. What becomes self-evident when reviewing the history of leadership studies is that the field has been enamored with leaders and engulfed in a leader-centric worldview.

We often hear the clarion call to acknowledge and address the “crisis of leadership”. Many proclaim that a leadership crisis appears to have infected every organization and sector from the political to the military, to business and industry, and from education to health care and the non-profit sector. In his 1995 essay, A Cry for Leadership, John Gardner acknowledged the crisis by asking why we do not have better leadership. Gardner wondered why there are so few leaders when the tasks they perform are clearly described and the skills to lead can be easily learned. He concluded that people should understand the possibilities and limitations of leadership and make a commitment to support good leaders—observing that for every effective leader, there are conceivably five or ten others with untapped leadership potential.

According to the 2019 Gartner, Inc. global survey of over 4,000 employees, only 50% of employees reported that their team leaders effectively created a compelling vision for the future of the team. Only about half of the 2,800 organizational leaders surveyed admitted they were well equipped to lead their organizations. In the education sector, the leadership crisis has been defined in terms of leader succession issues and the nationwide shortage of school principals. Hammond et al. called for programs to develop women and minorities to be principals and to retain veteran principals.¹⁵ Luna focused directly on the importance of succession planning programs and strategies for addressing the loss of leadership experience and talent.¹⁶ Both studies grappled with the difficult question, “Who will lead educational institutions in the future?”

A 2013 Gallup Poll found that only 8% of managers demonstrate a high level of competence and character for managing others—indicating a shocking 82% of managers are not very good at leading people. Reasons cited included managers becoming corrupted by power and developing inflated egos. Gallup estimated that this crisis of leadership capability costs U.S. companies approximately $550 billion annually. Furthermore, according to the World Economic Forum, 86% of respondents to the 2015 Global Agenda Survey agreed that the world is experiencing a leadership crisis. The two lowest ranked leader categories in that survey were government and religious leaders.

In The Allure of Toxic Leaders, Jean Lipman-Blumen approached the “leadership crisis” by studying toxic leaders and their followers.¹⁷ She wrote about toxic leaders such as Ken Lay at Enron, Al Dunlap at Sunbeam, and Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia—and explored why followers knowingly followed, tolerated, and remained loyal to leaders who were destructive to their employees, their organizations, their constituents, and their nations. In a final example, John Allison, former CEO and President of the Cato Institute, and author of The Leadership Crisis and the Free Market Cure, suggested that one of the underlying causes of recent economic problems is a failure of leadership—a “leadership crisis” at the individual, organizational, and societal levels.¹⁸ He concluded that we need more effective leaders who must: live and communicate the fundamental values and principles; create and communicate the vision; develop and communicate the mission; and formulate a strategy to turn the vision and mission into reality.

As demonstrated by the preceding examples, sounding the “crisis of leadership” alarm has become somewhat of a cliché. These examples provide us with much more than a general impression—they actually paint a very specific, realistic, yet misguided picture of the common understanding of the “leadership crisis”. In a word, it is generally accepted and understood that the crisis in leadership is the leader—and this message is far from subtle. There is little doubt that the only way to interpret and make sense of the meaning behind the message is that the “leadership crisis” is in reality a leader crisis, because seen through the lens of leader-centricity—the concept of leadership is in fact the person of the leader.

The views of James MacGregor Burns and Barbara Kellerman are introduced here to provide an opposing perspective and to clarify the “real crisis” behind the leadership crisis. In the Prologue to his seminal work Leadership titled “The Crisis of Leadership”, Burns stated that “leadership has given way to the cult of personality”. He declared that the crisis of leadership was the mediocrity of people in power—but that the fundamental crisis underlying that mediocrity was intellectual. Burns wrote, “If we know all too much about our leaders, we know far too little about leadership”. He went on to suggest that we have failed to grasp the essence of leadership in the modern age, and stated, “Leadership is one of the most observed yet least understood phenomena on earth”. It is clear that for Burns, the crisis of leadership was not the leader, but the failure of the academic establishment to distinguish between the leader and the leadership construct, resulting in an artificial distinction between leaders and followers. He wrote, “…we lack the very foundations for knowledge of a phenomenon— leadership”, and asserted, “…that leadership is nothing if not linked in collective purpose”.¹⁹

Barbara Kellerman depicts the “crisis of leadership” as a multidimensional leadership deficit problem. She asserts that this deficit has resulted in the decline and disrepute of leaders, and the disenchantment and disappointment of followers. In her paper, Cut Off at the Pass, Kellerman references a number of findings to support her claim: 77% of Americans agree or strongly agree that there is a leadership crisis; only 23% of Americans believe the USA is headed in the right direction; a record low 10% of Americans approve of Congress; and only 44% of Americans approve of the Supreme Court’s performance. A key aspect of the leadership deficit Kellerman identifies is the obvious gap between leadership theory and practice. She also acknowledges the need for a new leadership paradigm conveying her concerns about the incessant obsession with leaders and maintaining that the fixation on leader development is misplaced, misguided, and mistaken. She emphasized, “The old leader-centric model, with the leader at the helm controlling the action, no longer holds ─ it’s passé, obsolete”. ²⁰

Still another key aspect that Kellerman calls attention to in her book Professionalizing Leadership —and possibly the most fundamental issue—is that the word “leadership” has not been defined with any scientific precision or conciseness. She observes that this lack of definitional clarity has spawned a number of unsettled questions such as: Who is a leader? What is the role of the leader in leadership? Is leadership a person or a process? How should leadership be taught? Who should teach leadership? The list of rhetorical questions is punctuated with Kellerman’s provocative query: “Why has the leadership industry failed to make progress over the past 40 years?”²¹

This section revealed an interesting phenomenon regarding the “crisis of leadership”—our assumptions direct our thoughts which in turn determine what we see—and what we see becomes our reality. The leader-centric industrial paradigm restricts us to a unidimensional conceptualization of the leadership crisis—the failure of leaders. Yet through the lens of a postindustrial paradigm, the crisis of leadership is seen as the failures of the leadership industry. Clearly, our “crisis of leadership” is perceived and conceptualized entirely by our specific leadership paradigm.

4. A Tale of Two Paradigms

The preceding section of this essay argued that how one conceptualizes and describes the “crisis in leadership” is dependent upon one’s paradigm of leadership. In the Prologue, our quest began with the fundamental question: What is leadership? This question demands that we reflect deeply on how we think about leadership and why we think about leadership the way we do. As presented in the Handbook of Leadership, leadership is considered the world’s oldest preoccupation.²² From its infancy, the story of history itself has been the story of leaders. The concept of leadership is a universal phenomenon among humans, as well as many species in the animal kingdom. All civilizations and societies have created myths and legends about famous leaders and written stories about the adventures and exploits of courageous hero-leaders.

Leadership concepts and writings emerged as early as 5,000 years ago in Egypt. Egyptian hieroglyphics were discovered for the words: leader, follower, and leadership. Based on the hieroglyphic symbols, it appears that the symbol for leadership combined symbols representing the words leader and god. Chinese classics from the 6^th century BCE, including Lao Tsu’s Tao Te Ching recognized the qualities and responsibilities of leaders.²³ Confucius (551-479 BCE) counseled leaders regarding their moral obligations, and Taoism enunciated a model of leader traits for successful leadership. The Greek literary classics were stories about great leaders exemplified in epics such as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (8^th century BCE), which idolized and romanticized heroic leaders. These works identified admirable qualities associated with leadership including judgment, shrewdness, courage, and cunning, while Plato’s Republic (circa 375 BCE) explored leader virtues such as wisdom, and justice.

The Prince, written by Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), the Italian political theorist, is considered one of the first works of modern political philosophy. Machiavelli was a pragmatist who believed leaders should embody certain qualities such as firmness and steadfastness. He maintained that leaders should concern themselves with maintaining their authority and power, as well as strict order in government. The Prince, which forms the impression that leadership is the province of the leader, remains popular today and is often referenced and quoted as a guide for effective, albeit pragmatic and unscrupulous, leadership. This brief historical account demonstrates that focusing on leaders is a purely natural human proclivity. This universal propensity is at the root of our romance with leaders and the origin of our interpretation of leadership. The long history of associating leadership with the person of the leader has created an indelible mark on our psyches.*

It can be confidently surmised that this archaic attributional error had the effect of “blinding” leadership philosophers, historians, and scholars—essentially impairing their ability to see objective reality. It can be argued that a mental model or cognitive schema merging leader with leadership formed subconsciously—essentially making them synonymous. This “blinding” phenomenon is known as perceptual blindness, sometimes referred to as inattentional blindness.²⁴ Initial demonstrations of this phenomenon were conducted by Ulric Neisser and his colleagues in 1975. However, hypocognition, a term first introduced by Levy in 1973, more accurately describes the “leader = leadership” schemata.²⁵ Hypocognition occurs when we lack the necessary concepts or ideas, and the language required to describe them. This in part could explain why people are “ignorant of their ignorance,” and both “know and not know” about things that are not obvious—until they are observed, experienced, and conceptualized.

In his greatest work, Critique of Pure Reason, Emanuel Kant (1724-1804) proposed “perception without conception is blind; conception without perception is empty”.²⁶ He asserted that an excessive emphasis was being placed on sense-perception and showed that the intellect supplies the instruments the mind uses when it creates what is called knowing. Hypocognition, the inability to conceptualize, combined with selective attention, the tendency to process information selectively, together with construct contamination provides a plausible explanation for not seeing the true nature of leadership.† The obsession with hero-leaders distracted attention away from the reality of leadership, and the absence of a concept made it impossible to perceive and put into words the nature of leadership. This could explain the genesis and origin of the leader-centric schemata of leadership that still dominates our thinking today.

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) introduced the term schema (schemata) as part of his cognitive development theory. Piaget defined a schema as: “a cohesive, repeatable action sequence possessing component actions that are tightly interconnected and governed by a core meaning”.²⁷ A schema is a stable cognitive pattern that governs information processing by screening, coding, and evaluating stimuli. In a sense, schemata help to satisfy the human meaning-making impulse. Piaget identified two types of schematic adaptations—assimilation (incorporates new information into pre-existing schema) and accommodation (alters pre-existing schema).

It was proposed earlier that the hero-leader schema preceded a leadership schema. It is hypothesized that because forming a concept of leadership was at some point beyond immediate comprehension, it was absorbed into the hero-leader schema and leader-centric orientation. In other words, the concept of leadership was not consciously limited to a leader schema, but rather, the concept of leader was subconsciously (albeit inevitably) expanded to explain the more complex leadership schema. This makes sense from Piaget’s adaptation framework because historically leadership was neither a new conceptualization to assimilate, nor an old conceptualization to accommodate.‡

It was established that the hero-leader mindset influenced historical perceptions of leadership, which then persisted through history to dominate leadership studies throughout the twentieth century. What is less known is that the academic leadership establishment has been the target of criticism from at least the middle of the twentieth century, and such criticism has continued unabated. In 1940, Chester Barnard wrote that “Leadership has been the subject of an extraordinary amount of dogmatically stated nonsense”.²⁸ In 1948, Ralph Stogdill concluded “Leadership research has produced a bewildering mass of findings,” and “The endless accumulation of empirical findings has not produced an integrated understanding of leadership”.²⁹ In Leadership Dynamics, Edwin Hollander stated, “it seems clear that a source of confusion in the study of leadership has been the failure to distinguish it as a process from the leader who is the occupier of a position which is central to it”.³⁰

Bennis observing an imbalance, stated, “the problem with many organizations is that they tend to be overmanaged and underled”.³¹ Deming found it necessary to specify “the job of management is not supervision, but leadership”.³² Meindl, et al. noted “the concept of leadership remains elusive and enigmatic”; while Gemmill proposed the “concepts of leader and leadership have become psychic prisons”.³³ More recently, Malakyan called for a “shift in research from the leader and follower to the dynamic inter-relational functions of leading and following”.³⁴

In his seminal book, The Fifth Disciple, Senge wrote: “Our traditional views of leaders—as special people who set the direction, make the key decisions, and energize the troops—are deeply rooted in an individualistic and nonsystemic worldview”. He observed that at its heart, the traditional view of leadership is based on assumptions of people’s powerlessness, their lack of personal vision, and inability to master the forces of change—deficits which can be remedied only by a few great leaders.³⁵ Raelin developed an emerging paradigm of leadership, “leaderful practice”, which submits that in the 21st century organization, everyone will need to share the experience of serving as leader, not sequentially, but concurrently and collectively.³⁶

Additionally, Kellerman expressed frustrations that despite contradictory evidence, the dominant leadership model remains resolutely leader-centric and virtually unchallenged. She announced there is “a yawning gap between leadership theory and leadership practice” and called for a new leadership paradigm, stating, “Our incessant obsession with leaders—and our fixation on leadership development is now badly misplaced”.³⁷ Kellerman further voiced concern that “Most leadership experts, especially those who are card-carrying members of what I call the leadership industry, continue to fixate on leaders at the expense of other elements equally important to the creation of change,” and concluded that, “the forty-year-old leadership industry has paid a heavy price for its obsession with leaders at the expense of whoever/whatever else matters”.³⁸ These historical criticisms, though often epistemological, present a strong argument for the re-perceptualization of leadership to undo the original ontological error. It is from this vantage point that we turn again to Burns and Rost to reconceptualize and explicate a new leadership paradigm.

It was James MacGregor Burns who had the greatest influence and impact on the vegetative-like state of leadership studies in the 1970s. In 1978, Burns single-handedly breathed life back into the study of leadership with his ground-breaking work Leadership. He presented the most important conceptualization of the leadership construct in over half a century—transforming leadership. He proposed that leadership was not so much about leader traits, behaviors, or situations—as it was about the very nature of the relationship between leaders and followers. Burns’ personal mission was to restructure the leadership construct and build a school of leadership. He understood and warned that a serious failure in leadership studies was the bifurcation of the leadership and followership literatures. He wrote, “Surely it is time that the two literatures are brought together, that the roles of leader and follower be united conceptually…”, and asserted, “…leadership is nothing if not linked to collective purpose…”.³⁹

Burns was attempting to elevate the role of followers by envisioning a leader-follower relationship based on morality, motivation, and mutual purpose. He proposed that this interaction takes on two fundamentally different forms: transactional leadership and transforming leadership. Transactional leadership occurs when one person initiates contact for the purpose of an exchange of valued things, such as a trading of votes or a swap of goods. Transforming leadership occurs when one or more persons engage so that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality, and their purposes become fused.⁴⁰ Power bases are linked “not as counterweights but as mutual support for common purpose”.

Notwithstanding mutuality, Burns conceived of the leader in a decidedly traditional light—the leader-centric paradigm. He considered leaders as the independent force in changing the follower’s motive base and imagined that the study of leadership in general would be advanced by the study of leaders in particular. Throughout his literary opus, Burns relentlessly personified the word leadership as the leader. Although he endowed leadership studies with the construct of “transforming leadership,” he neither ushered in a paradigmatic shift, nor established a new school of leadership. His theory was tragically highjacked and diluted by the academic leadership establishment, primarily Bernard Bass, whose work focused on augmentation rather than Burns’ reciprocal process for shared meaning and collaboration.⁴¹

Burns labeled his struggle with the ambiguity of leader and follower roles the “Burns Paradox”. This paradox asked: “If leadership and followership are so intertwined and fluid, how do we distinguish conceptually between leaders and followers?”⁴² He concluded that the paradox ultimately disappears if the process is seen as a system where the actors move in and out of leader and follower roles.⁴³ This conclusion, however, did not ameliorate the problem; instead, it served to perpetuate the leader-centric narrative and the leader-follower dichotomy.

Joseph Rost was an admitted devotee of Burns, crediting him with refreshing the subject of leadership and renewing the study of leadership by introducing the concept of transforming leadership. However, Rost indicated that after years of hindsight, Burns’ work was best interpreted as only restructuring the traditional construct. Rost noted that in analyzing Burns’ framework, he was struck by the “significant bits of industrialism that are still embedded in it”. He concluded that Burns was “not successful in his attempt to build a new school of leadership”.⁴⁴

Rost observed that the majority of authors concentrated their attention on the periphery and context—not the nature of leadership. Their thinking remained conventional under the influence of leader-centricity, producing only a reconfiguration of the historical concept. Rost concluded: “the Burnsian model of leadership is about what the leader does to influence followers to accept his/her purpose. Thus, we are solidly in the mode of thinking that leadership is what an individual leader does”.⁴⁵

Rost’s objective was to critique the twentieth-century efforts to understand leadership based on the values and cultural norms of the industrial paradigm and move understanding forward toward the postindustrial paradigm. Rost reviewed approximately seventy-five years of literature (1910 through the late 1980s). He sought a unifying theme. He found that most authors failed to provide a definition or ignored it, and it was common for authors to confound and confuse leadership with management.

Rost’s research confirmed five general discoveries 1) there was only one dominant paradigm; 2) basic ideas had been recycled for over 100 years; 3) most scholars did not articulate a clear definition; 4) leadership and management studies were consistently linked; and 5) the words leadership and leader were consistently used as synonymous throughout the 20^th century.⁴⁶

Rost formulated a definition representative of the Industrial Era: “Leadership is great men and women with certain preferred traits influencing followers to do what the leaders wish in order to achieve group/organizational goals that reflect excellence defined as some kind of higher-order effectiveness”.⁴⁷ He stated that this industrial conceptualization was pervasive and asserted, “… the individual leader is the essence of leadership in the industrial paradigm…”.⁴⁸

Rost considered himself a futurist, and was convinced the industrial paradigm was losing its powerful hold. He predicted a major transition period that would result in the rejection of industrial values. He decided to reconceptualize and rebuild the construct upon a 21^st century foundation—that being a relationship. The new construct could not reflect industrial values: the structural-functionalist view, individualized focus, obsession with goals, and a rational, linear methodology. Rost declared: “The problem with the industrial leadership paradigm is that it increasingly ill serves the needs of a world rapidly being transformed by a massive paradigm shift in societal values”.⁴⁹ He envisioned a postindustrial leadership paradigm embracing core values such as collaboration, common good, participation, diversity, civic virtue, dialogue, and mutual purpose.

Rost warned that uncertainty about leadership would make it impossible to frame a new paradigm for the twenty-first century. He concluded that leadership studies had created a pervasive culture of definitional permissiveness and relativity. Rost set out to ensure his definition met strict empirical criteria: 1) clear and unambiguous wording; 2) precise criteria to distinguish it from other phenomena; and 3) usability by scholars and practitioners.

Rost stated “The key is to think about leadership as a relationship. Leadership is not what one individual labeled a leader does. Leadership is what leaders and collaborators do together”. His revised postindustrial definition was: “Leadership is an influence relationship among leaders and collaborators who intend real changes that reflect their mutual purposes” Rost concluded: “The problem is that nothing else will work. We have tried all the easy ways—the one-minute leader, situational, contingency, great person, nice guy/tough guy trait approaches—and they don’t work”. ⁵⁰

The central question remains: What is leadership? If the first questions pondered are centered on individual leaders—then we are already lost. The industrial paradigm has only resulted in the accumulation of knowledge—not its advancement.⁵¹ It has failed to account for the vital role of followers or acknowledge mutual influence and mutual purposes.

The endeavor of “ushering in” and advancing the postindustrial paradigm constitutes a logical progression. The word usher implies a person who assists and guides others. “Ushering in” the new paradigm must not be a matter of advocating or coercing. Max Planck stated that a new scientific truth triumphs because its opponents “eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it”.⁵²

Philosophical paradigm shifts are preceded by individual paradigm shifts. This transformation involves unlearning and relearning. Changing at the individual level requires an examination of one’s implicit role and self-schemas. Early exposure (parental admonishment: “don’t be a follower, be a leader”) and media play a pivotal role in shaping subconscious schemas.

The current dominant leadership schema is the industrial leader-centric leadership paradigm, an obsolete paradigm predicated on a mythological ontology that stands in conflict with increasingly collaborative organizational cultures. Even contemporary leadership models that purport to be non-leader-centric such as Integrative, Adaptive, and Complexity Leadership retain the lurking legacy of leader-centricity. Integrative Leadership emphasizes visionary leaders; Adaptive Leadership features risk-takers; and Complexity Leadership focuses on administrative and managerial processes.

In fact, much of the most renowned leadership literature is based on purely leader-centric research. Bennis and Nanus interviewed ninety leaders, asking only three questions focused on personal strengths, weaknesses, and career decision points.⁵³ Kouzes and Posner gathered their data by asking leaders about “their personal bests”. Collins based his Level 5 Leadership Model on eighty-four interviews with senior management.⁵⁴ These studies are more accurately characterized as leader research, contributing to the calcification of the leader-centric industrial leadership paradigm.

Rost and Burns were adamant that the “leadership crisis” was not simply a call for yet another leadership model or a new leadership predictor or criterion variable to study. The crisis of leadership calls for a reconceptualization of the leadership paradigm itself. This naturally requires a change in beliefs and assumptions—a shift in thinking—a paradigmatic shift. Rost concurred with Tolstoy: people attribute leadership to individuals because they want to believe that leaders cause things to happen rather than analyzing complex social forces or dynamic influence relationships.⁵⁵ This ideological view condemns leadership to a cultural myth and a social ideology.

Thomas Kuhn articulated the Kuhn Cycle in his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions consisting of six stages: pre-science, normal science, model drift, model crisis, model revolution, and paradigm shift.⁵⁶ Relying on the Kuhn Cycle as a diagnostic tool, leadership is diagnosed as operating in the normal science stage. Evidence indicates progression into the model drift stage due to failures to solve anomalies (follower role, Burns Paradox). It is argued that the industrial paradigm is experiencing a “paradigm swing”—caught between model drift and model crisis. This liminal state is maintained by the leadership illuminati afflicted with “paradigm paralysis,” creating a religious-like leadership paradogma. This ideology protects and propagates the multi-billion-dollar leadership enterprise.

5. The Evolution and Elaboration of the Postindustrial Leadership Definition

Rost’s original seminal definition of leadership emerged from his singular, unvarnished scholarly critical analysis of the field of leadership between 1920 and 1990, coupled with his futuristic predictions regarding the dominant values of the twenty-first century. Rost’s work marks a watershed in leadership theory by challenging dominant beliefs and offering a reconceptualized postindustrial paradigm. This new paradigm focuses on influence relationships, collaboration, and change reflecting mutual purposes. His analysis remains paramount in reframing the study and teaching of leadership, moving it beyond the debilitating limitations of managerialism and leader-centrism.

Rost profoundly questioned the ontological efficacy of perceiving and conceptualizing leadership as merely “what a leader does”. He was insistent on ensuring that his definition accurately reflected the fundamental nature of leadership and met stringent scientific standards and criteria. In the first edition of Leadership for the Twenty-First Century, Rost defined the postindustrial paradigm of leadership as: “Leadership is an influence relationship among leaders and followers who intend real changes that reflect their mutual influences.”⁵⁷ He carefully chose every word to convey specific meanings that contained certain assumptions and values necessary for a transformed, postindustrial model of leadership.

Rost was careful to stipulate that his definition would not be the final word on the subject, acknowledging the inevitability of future scholarly contributions and allowing for his own continued evolution of thought. Six years later, in his article Moving from Individual to Relationship: A Postindustrial Paradigm of Leadership, Rost presented his revised definition: “Leadership is an influence relationship among leaders and collaborators [emphasis added] who intend real changes that reflect their mutual purposes”.⁵⁸

This revised definition is critical because Rost substituted the word collaborators for the original word followers. Rost consistently maintained the belief that followers did not do “followership”; rather, he believed that both leaders and followers did leadership. He intended to carry Burns’ ideas to their logical conclusion by rebuilding the leadership construct upon a completely different foundation—that of a relationship. When conceptualized as a relationship, it becomes obvious that leadership cannot be what one individual labeled a leader does. For Rost, the concept of collaboration became one of the most critical variables in the leadership construct.

This author agrees that the word collaborator is the most critical variable in the postindustrial definition of leadership. After reviewing the literature and Rost’s final writings, the author observed the heightened emphasis on the word collaboration in academia, as well as Rost’s personal final sentiments and impressions on collaborative leadership. Since Rost introduced the postindustrial leadership paradigm in the 1990s, the use of the words “collaborate” and “collaboration” in leadership discourse has indeed steadily increased. The literature confirms that pre-1980s, leadership literature was dominated by terms like command, authority, and control, with collaboration rarely emphasized. However, the vocabulary of leadership began to shift in the 1990s, with a marked rise in the term collaborative leadership. In the 2000s and 2010s, collaboration became a recurring theme across nearly all studies. Recent research in the 2020s highlights collaborative leadership as one of the most frequently cited approaches in leadership and organizational studies.

Business school and practitioner-oriented outlets, such as the Harvard Business Review, have dramatically increased their use of collaboration since the mid-2000s, often framing it as a core leadership competency. By 2019, the usage of the word collaboration was roughly 3 to 4 times higher than in 1950. Overall, there has been a nearly 200% increase in the frequency of collaboration-related terms since the early 2000s. Additionally, before his death, Rost began using the term “collaborative leadership” when he spoke about leadership, essentially changing his own title from postindustrial to collaborative.⁵⁹

Rost also provided an astonishing glimpse into his future-oriented sensitivities with the quote: “Some people have suggested that we use the word people, as in ‘an influence relationship among people who intend’. That really takes leaders out of leadership, so I have not been willing to do that yet [italics added]. If other people want to promote that wording, more power to them”.

It was this context that ultimately motivated this author in 2021 to revise Rost’s 1997 definition and redefine collaborative leadership as: An interactive influence relationship among collaborators who intend and enact real significant changes that reflect their mutual purposes. This definition is intended to take Rost’s postindustrial conceptualization to its logical conclusion. This revision is radical and reforming because it removes the word “leader” itself from the definition and refers to all people in the leadership relationship as collaborators.

6. Understanding the Role of Collaborator, Collaboration, and Conjoinment

The traditional leadership literature is riddled with theories and models that are essentially variations on the leader-centric theme, consistently failing to question their fundamental ontological assumptions. Rost’s revised definition of leadership offers a fresh perspective, standing apart from the conventional leadership echo chamber. In line with Kant’s notion that perception precedes perspective, Rost’s perspective, grounded in his ontological perception, successfully freed leadership from the labyrinth of traditional leadership literature by shifting the focus from leader-centrism and managerialism toward leadership as a relationship-centric collaborative process.⁶⁰

When Rost publicized his revision substituting the word collaborators for followers in 1997, this author had some initial doubts that Rost fully appreciated the significance and impact his decision would ultimately have. The significance of this revision is that it deconstructed the leader-follower dichotomy. Rost perceived that it was impossible to simply define postindustrial leadership into existence; a fundamental change was necessary. The essential change was transforming the role of the follower into a collaborator—literally changing the nature of one of the only two roles historically involved in the leadership relationship as articulated in Rost’s original 1991 definition.

Rost may not have fully appreciated or predicted the full impact of his use of the word collaborator because, in his mind, it was merely a necessary step in rehabilitating the follower role and homogenizing the leader-follower relationship. Rost’s framework inevitably results in the vast majority of people engaged in leadership being collaborators and only a small minority being leaders. This raises the question: Did Rost imply that leaders “lead” collaborators? I do not believe this was Rost’s intent, as that would mean collaborators were, in essence, glorified followers—collaborators in name only. Consequently, using Rost’s reformulation, it can be concluded that the same person can be a collaborator in one instance and a leader in another—and that the person is not following in either role.

This raises an intriguing internal problem: A person cannot occupy the role of leader and collaborator simultaneously. Therefore, when a person is identified as a leader, they cannot be considered a collaborator. This conclusion leads to the final conundrum, what is precisely the role of a leader if they are not collaborating?

This simple logic chain derived from Rost’s reformulation of the postindustrial paradigm can be instructive:

• followers do not do followership and therefore are not following leaders when participating in the leadership relationship
• as collaborators, followers are doing leadership and therefore are collaborating with leaders in the leadership relationship
• since leadership entails influence, real changes, and mutual purposes, collaborators contribute to the influence relationship of intending real changes reflecting mutual purposes
• if leaders can become collaborators and collaborators can become leaders, they are both collaborating by influencing each other, intending, and enacting real changes, and developing mutual purposes.
• therefore, leadership requires both leaders and followers to collaborate

The concluding statement of this logic chain insinuates that leadership is a collaborative enterprise performed by all the people in the leadership relationship. If this reasoning is valid, it suggests that it is not sufficient to become a “collaborative leader” or a “collaborative follower”. Instead, leaders and followers must abandon their traditional roles and both become collaborators. Leaders do not lead collaborators into a leadership relationship. People cannot be led into a leadership relation; rather, people are developed to become collaborators who, by definition, engage in the leadership relationship. When leaders and followers become collaborators and practice leadership together, they move beyond their traditional roles of leader and follower because, in a collaborative environment, hierarchical distinctions no longer matter.

True collaboration transcends the traditional leader and follower roles. Therefore, when true collaboration occurs, the distinction between leading and following becomes irrelevant. Instead of distinct roles, the collaborators form a collaborative that benefits from collective intelligence and collaborative consciousness. In this space, leadership itself becomes a communal enterprise no longer the sole purview of the leader. This higher level of awareness emancipates leadership from the destructive leader-follower dichotomy. Collaboration makes the concepts of shifting roles and role interchangeability unnecessary and meaningless. Ultimately, collaboration is not about leading or following; it is about working together as a collaborative using noncoercive multidirectional influence and persuasion to intend and enact real significant changes based on common vision, values, and principles that reflect mutual purposes. Leadership is essentially collaboration in action.

The word conjoinment captures an important nuance—namely, the obligatory aspect of voluntary participation in the episodic leadership relationship. Although participation is voluntary, once individuals choose to engage in the relationship, they become conjoined in common purposes. The word collaborator connotes an individual identity and a dynamic relationship formed through the psychological binding aspect of conjoinment. From a psychological perspective, conjoinment functions as an internalized commitment that fuses cognitive awareness with motivational energy. The concept of conjoinment reflects a psychological phenomenon where individuals internalize obligations by connecting their internal personal motives with their external collaborative commitments.§

The traditional roles of leader and follower are complementary, distinct from one another, and dependent upon each other. The role of collaborator is fundamentally different because it conjoins the qualities and functions of both leader and follower into a single, unified role. Collaboration is not a dyadic exchange of roles or a simple rotation between them; it is a new, integrated construct representing a unitary role. It is the conjoining of leaders and followers that brings the role of collaborator into existence. Ironically, Rost resolved the Burns Paradox by literally removing the role of the follower from the leadership definition, though Burns remained steadfast in his leader-centric perspective, stating his leadership definition in probably his final interview as, “Leadership is followership and followership is leadership”.⁶¹

In a remarkably similar fashion, in taking Rost’s conceptualization to its logical conclusion, I literally removed the role of the leader from the leadership definition. How ironic it is that the final “nail in the coffin” of leader-centricity was to eliminate the word leader itself from the postindustrial definition of collaborative leadership.

The term collaborator now holds deep conceptual and etymological significance, resisting the reductive binary of leader-follower and instead embodying a process orientation. In the postindustrial paradigm, the word collaborator is deliberately elevated beyond its everyday meaning to acknowledge the ontological reality of leadership as a fundamentally social phenomenon and relational alliance among people.

Leading followers and following leaders is not leadership. Leaders and followers trading places or exchanging roles is not leadership. When collaborators engage in the practice of leadership, they are neither leading nor following. Collaborators are developed through intense and rigorous education, personal growth, and professional development. Becoming a collaborator is neither a “demotion” for a leader nor a “promotion” for a follower.

Interestingly, Hollander noted that leaders and followers are not sharply distinctive, nor are the concepts of leadership and followership. A 1955 study by Hollander and Webb found that for all intents and purposes, leaders and followers are more similar than different. They argued that the relationship is fundamentally interdependent, not opposite ends of a continuum, with shared competencies and reciprocal influence.

In summary, when leaders and collaborators conjoin to establish a collaborative, they are both engaged in collaboration—the mutual influence relationship designated as collaborative leadership. The people engaged are collaborators. This is the big secret and small wonder of collaborative leadership: there are no leaders or followers—only collaborators. This realization leads to the ultimate conclusion: the fundamental problem with the word leadership is that it begins with leader. Even though the word leader cannot be removed from leadership, it must be removed from the leadership definition to finally free us from the paradigm prison of leader-centricity.

7. LEAD Program – Leader Education and Development: The Journey of Discovery

Just as the definition of leadership has been reconceptualized for the twenty-first century, so too, leadership education and development must also be reconceptualized. The maxim holds true that definition determines action. Most conventional leadership training follows a formulaic canon determined by the obsolete twentieth-century industrial leadership paradigm definition. This definition is predicated on leader-centrism and managerialism. It is conspicuously focused on goals, excellence, and performance, and preoccupied with the preferred traits and characteristics of special (“great”) men and women.

This obsolete conceptualization has produced a number of leadership style, model, and leader attribute competency-based training courses. It is obvious that leadership training has become fragmented and overly commercialized, offering various options but lacking conceptual coherence and ontological grounding. The conventional definition of leadership has resulted in a proliferation of individualized leadership styles and models, accompanied by an equally diverse range of leader-centered, competency-based training programs.

Even though all traditional leadership training programs have some redeeming qualities, the problem is not so much the actual program content but the training program’s intended audience and its faulty assumption. By design, these programs are exclusively intended for leaders under the faulty assumption that leader development is equivalent to leadership development. Criticisms of the leadership training industry and training programs have increased in number and intensity from many scholars and practitioners.⁶²

The LEAD Program (LEAD) is an interactive, experiential learning laboratory. It focuses on concepts related to human behavior, psychology, neuroscience, planned change, organizational culture, and postindustrial leadership, all designed to build a foundational knowledge base of profound scientific principles and a platform for reflective practice. LEAD is not a leadership model, nor is it based on any of the traditional leadership models. The acronym LEAD simply stands for leader education and development. The program was initially designed and delivered to leaders (defined as managers at all levels) because organizations were eager to fund leader training courses, and because the author believed it was the leaders (managers) who needed to be reeducated before a personal paradigm shift occurred and any real organizational changes could be undertaken. (Today, LEAD is offered and delivered to organizational members at all levels.)

LEAD participants are exposed to contemporary concepts and scientific principles compelling them to confront and question current personal paradigms and assumptions that influence and determine their beliefs and behaviors. Learning scientific principles is critical because principles operate regardless of one’s awareness of them or belief in them. Principles are the centerpiece of the program. The focus is not on learning how to do something; the focus is on learning why to do something. LEAD consists of five Foundational Principles and sixty-four Guiding Principles. Armed with these principles, participants can apply them with confidence given their unique situation or circumstances.

Empirical research conclusively shows that to change the way a leader thinks, he/she must first change the way they think about leadership.⁶³ This type of re-thinking requires a principle-based “inside-out” approach. Inside-out means starting with one’s deepest self—with one’s paradigms, assumptions, and motives. Throughout the program, the principles are presented, dissected, and discussed in open forums. Small groups work on probes, exercises, case studies, and a simulation to understand, apply, and think critically about the principles. Program pre-work consists of readings, questionnaires, and writing an autobiography. Participants maintain a personal mindful journal and engage in post-program coaching.

LEAD is normally presented in a series of six workshops. The goal of each workshop is to have participants shift their paradigms and revise their assumptions. As stated earlier, the program does not teach how-to skills or techniques. The program is a facilitator-led learning process of self-discovery. It can initially produce more frustration than education because it presents participants with disconfirming data that forces them to challenge their superstitious learning and common knowledge. This process will generally create anxiety—but learning anxiety is a necessary and essential aspect of change.

The workshop facilitators do not engage in motivational rhetoric, nor are they performers or entertainers. Their role is different from that of a trainer in a standard behavior-based seminar or popular leader personality program. The facilitators make a conscious effort not to become the center of attention. The facilitators are guides, not gurus. LEAD is not about training individuals in the traditional sense; it is about individual and organizational learning and change. Learning requires un-learning, and that in turn requires questioning one’s deepest beliefs and assumptions. This process of cognitive restructuring takes time and requires help. The LEAD facilitators act as guides who accompany the participants on their journey of self-discovery. The workshop intersessions include individual and small group projects, as well as one-on-one coaching.

LEAD’s underlying learning theories include: Vygotsky’s Theory of Cognitive Development; Piaget’s Constructivist Theory; Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle; Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory; Mezirow’s Transformational Learning Theory; Kegan’s Constructive-Developmental Theory; Schein’s Cognitive Redefinition Theory; Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)—Cognitive Restructuring; and the 3-I System of Organizational Learning: internalizing, integrating, and institutionalizing.⁶⁴

Through the integration of these learning frameworks, the LEAD Program functions as a multi-level, multi-theoretical ecosystem, linking cognitive development, social learning, reflective transformation, and systemic knowledge institutionalization into a coherent architecture for personal growth and professional development. Although LEAD has a rich theoretical underpinning that accounts for its unique and high impact design, the program does not overwhelm the participants with unnecessary theoretical detail.

The instructional design of LEAD is as critical as the learning theories and has a strong grounding in evidence-based educational science and practice. Instructional design is about how learning is structured and delivered, while learning theory explains why learning occurs. Instructional design acts as a blueprint for developing educational programs. Learning theory is explanatory, while instructional design is operational.

The underlying practices of LEAD’s unique instructional design include: andragogy (self-directed or autonomous facilitated adult learning); heutagogy (self-determined learning without a facilitator); synergogy (a systematic team-directed peer-to-peer learning approach); normative-reeducative (a participative learning approach predicated on altering norms, values, beliefs, and assumptions); disequilibrium (a cognitive mechanism to establish a temporary schema imbalance that motivates reframing and cognitive development); and finally, corollary building (a logical thinking practice in which students elaborate and reorganize personal meaning as part of the internalization process to form a new cognitive foundation).

The overarching structure of LEAD reflects a “paradigms – principles – practices” learning progression. The participant’s paradigm shift—from industrial leadership to postindustrial leadership—is the initial aim of the program. Participants are introduced to the concept of paradigm early on Day 1 of the LEAD Program. They measure and determine their personal leadership paradigm (using a validated instrument) and also come to realize the ubiquitous influence of the dominant leader-centric industrial leadership paradigm. The guided process of reperceiving and reconceptualizing leadership as a relationship begins in earnest during the first workshop.

Principles are the centerpiece of the LEAD Program. Due to the fact that many myths, misunderstandings, and platitudes permeate traditional leadership training, the author made it a point to identify, debunk, and replace them with scientific principles. Each main module contains relevant profound principles, totaling sixty-four guiding principles and five foundational principles.

The five Foundational Principles are:

1. B = f P x E: Kurt Lewin’s behavior formula, stating that behavior is a function of the person interacting with their environment.⁶⁵
2. Input – Process – Output (I – P – O): von Bertalanffy’s model based on his general system theory.⁶⁶
3. Stop versus Start: A classic organizational development principle stating that before applying a principle, we must first stop violating the principle.
4. Through versus To: A classic organizational development principle stating that we must always focus on doing things through people, not to people.
5. Similar versus Different: This principle is referred to as the Bedrock Principle, which states that we are all more similar than we are different.

Although the main focus in LEAD is on cognition—not behavior—the ultimate purpose is the manifestation of behavior resulting from internalizing principles at the motive level. All behavior is preceded by cognition. Motives result in behavior by generating internal states that energize, direct, and sustain actions toward goal/need satisfaction. Behaviors not grounded in underlying cognitions and motives are described as performative rather than authentic. When actions do not arise from internalized motives, they lack durability, are less likely to persist over time, and are more susceptible to reversal.

Learned behaviors have limited impact because they need reality reinforcers and supports. But learned thoughts—which are symbolic acts—have unlimited impact and influence and can be applied to any unique circumstance. Internalized thoughts such as principles have greater generalizability than learned behaviors.

Rost clearly distinguished between leader development and leadership development based on his postindustrial definition. He stated that postindustrial, relational, mutually beneficial, and deliberative leadership is desperately needed. Rost admitted that training and development programs based on the new paradigm would be much more difficult to design and execute than popular programs of the past. The enterprise of broadening the field is hard: “Including collaborators is hard; avoiding cookbook recipes is hard; not emphasizing leaders traits, style, and behaviors is hard; creating practical models of the new paradigm of leadership is hard; teaching the new models is hard. The whole enterprise is fraught with immense difficulties”.⁶⁷

Rost concluded that instead of focusing on leader development, we need leadership development. When leadership is viewed as an interactive influence relationship, traditional training models must be restructured. Rost provided six general categories to guide the construction and delivery of new leadership development programs: stop concentrating on the leader, conceive of leadership as an episodic affair, train people to use influence (non-coercive persuasion), develop people to work within non-coercive relationships (mutual purpose, collaboration), help people understand the nature of real transformative change, and reconstruct people’s world view about working toward a collaborative orientation.⁶⁸

The LEAD Program is an education and reeducation process—an action learning experience. Participants come to realize that collaboration is equivalent to leadership when collaborators are engaged in an interactive non-coercive multidirectional influence relationship. Understanding collaboration is critical because leadership education must be aimed at all people in the relationship—to learn to collaborate authentically, effectively, and purposefully. Participants also engage in dialogic inquiry and learn that dialogue is the flow of meaning through one another.

LEAD is unique because it is state-of-the-art and grounded in the postindustrial leadership paradigm. It challenges implicit ideas, mental models, and theories, and creates a postindustrial principle-based cultural consciousness. LEAD focuses on internalizing profound principles, integrating them as natural behaviors, and institutionalizing them as organizational culture.

In contrast to obsolete approaches, LEAD is not based on a leadership model, but on a school of leadership. It is not focused on leader style, but on leadership paradigm. It is not interested in leader behaviors, but in leadership cognitions. It is not concerned with leader practices, but with leadership principles. Finally, its facilitators are not self-proclaimed leadership “gurus”—they consider themselves students.

8. Summation

“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.”

– John Maynard Keynes

The journey of discovery is an inherent human quest, and each step along this journey is accompanied by a fundamental question. We started our formal inquiry in the Introduction of this essay with the essential question: What is leadership? Our journey now continues in this Summation with a final, provocative query: Where is leadership going? In a way, this question must be considered simultaneously rhetorical and reproachful. Rhetorical in the sense that we either do not expect or will not receive a definitive response, and reproachful in the sense that we are implicitly expressing criticism and frustration with leadership studies for lacking clear direction, conceptual coherence, and meaningful advancement in the twenty-fifth year of the third millennium.

The purpose of this Summation is to mobilize a call to action. This call is necessary to help usher in and advance the postindustrial paradigm of collaborative leadership in this century. This is an invitation to everyone concerned and interested in bringing postindustrial mobius thinking to bear on the future of leadership studies and practice.^¶ Rost issued just such a clarion call thirty-two years ago.⁶⁹

Rost argued forcefully that leadership scholars would have to think new thoughts about leadership based on postindustrial assumptions regarding human beings, organizations, societies, and the planet Earth. He implored scholars to establish a new school of leadership that is genuinely grounded in what is real—in what actually happens when people engage in leadership. But he also warned that scholars would not be able to shift the industrial paradigm alone. Essentially, Rost’s call to action was directed to everyone—scholars and students alike, professionals and practitioners alike, and people everywhere. In collaboration, we all have the ability to impact the direction of leadership—and actually determine where leadership is going.

It has been said that leadership may be the world’s oldest obsession. I would clarify that by suggesting our obsession is actually with leaders—not specifically with leadership. Essentially, the industrial leader-centric paradigm has been a subjective interpretation of the leadership phenomenon imposed upon society in general. Virtually all of what people know about leadership can be attributed to the leadership industry and the ubiquitous indoctrination people are subjected to virtually on a daily basis.

At the very heart of this essay is an unabashed challenge to mainstream leadership thought in questioning the ontological veracity and validity of the dominant industrial paradigm. But challenging is much easier than changing the leadership industry. The story of leadership with its main characters being the powerful and charismatic leader and the powerless and common follower is an oversimplification of epic proportions. This essay and its arguments all rest upon the assertion that an original ontological error occurred which set in motion the history and the story of the study of leadership. Regarding current leadership research and development initiatives, Wood strongly suggests they “must rise to the ontological challenge of process rather than things”.⁷⁰ Rost had concerns about definitional and other ontological problems with conventional leadership studies and practices, warning, “There is no possibility of framing a new paradigm of leadership for the twenty-first century if scholars and practitioners cannot articulate what it is they are studying and practicing."⁷¹ The industrial paradigm maintains a chokehold on the leadership industry—we must ensure it does not become a death grip.

Rost’s critical review of leadership provided the license to rethink the old leadership construct and leadership development—and a new paradigm for the new millennium. In my humble opinion, there could not be two words more inappropriate for describing leadership than “leader” and “follower”—and the biggest problem with the word leadership is that it begins with the word leader. The words leader and leadership are not synonymous, and followership is not the flip side of the “leadership coin”. Leadership was never the sole purview of the leader. Leaders and followers there will always be—but leading followers and following leaders is not leadership. Leaders and followers exchanging places is not leadership. Leaders and followers leading concurrently and collectively is not leadership. Leaders creating more leaders is not leadership. Everyone becoming a leader is not leadership. Everyone leading is not leadership. This explains in large part why there are many good leaders and many good followers who are not good at leadership. Leadership is an interactive influence relationship among collaborators who intend and enact real significant changes that reflect their mutual purposes. When collaborators are engaged in the practice of leadership, they are neither leading nor following.

The tranquilizing effect of leader-centricity and the sense of dependency it has produced must be reversed. Rost identified what he believed to be the most important work for leadership scholars and practitioners in his own writing and reaffirmed it in the opening lines of his Foreword to Barker’s book On The Nature of Leadership, that “there is no more important work for leadership scholars and practitioners to accomplish than to determine what leadership is”.⁷²

In closing, we are finally emerging from the shadows of the industrial leadership paradigm, escaping from the leader-centric epoch. But this is an inflection point—only the incipient stage of the actual postindustrial paradigm shift. The postindustrial collaborative leadership message will most likely not ring true in the industrial leader-centric leadership echo chamber any time soon. I am quite conscious of the fact that this essay will not change or have a direct impact on the academic leadership establishment or the commercial leadership enterprise. In the final analysis, the author is hopeful that the story, concepts, and insights presented in this essay have an impact on you—the reader. This is a personal individual appeal to the reader because together we can usher in and advance the postindustrial paradigm of collaborative leadership one collaborator at a time. My call to action is to become part of the crusade to change the leadership paradigm one collaborator at a time in their day-to-day personal and professional lives. To the final question, How much longer will the field of leadership be held prisoner of the obsolete leader-centric industrial paradigm?—the answer is no one really knows. But what is known is that the answer will be up to us.

In the absence of acknowledging that we are subject to and operating under the original ontological error, and reperceiving and reconceptualizing leadership as a collaborative relationship—no amount of research and no amount of exploration will move us forward. Research within the erroneous obsolete leadership paradigm will not shift the leader-centric industrial paradigm or advance the study of leadership—it will only continue to accumulate within the constraints and limitations of leader-centrism. Exploring new lands without having new ways of seeing and thinking will not lead us to new discoveries or allow us to more clearly see reality. A global paradigmatic scientific revolution begins with a personal reperception. The paradigm shift in leadership starts in our own minds. Ushering in and advancing the postindustrial collaborative leadership paradigm is in our own hands.

“For the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen
but to think what no one yet has thought about that which everyone sees.”

– Arthur Schopenhauer

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Notes

1. James MacGregor Burns, Leadership (New York: Harper & Row, 1978).
2. Joseph Rost, Leadership for the Twenty-First Century (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993).
3. Dov Eden and Uri Leviatan, “Implicit Leadership Theory as a Determinant of the Factor Structure Underlying Supervisory Behavior Scales,” Journal of Applied Psychology 60, no. 6 (1975): 736–741.
4. Rost, Leadership, 39-40.
5. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (London: James Fraser, 1841), 47.
6. Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (London: Macmillan, 1869).
7. Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1873).
8. James G. March, Heroes & History: Lessons for Leadership from Tolstoy’s War & Peace (film, Santa Clara University, 2008).
9. Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989).
10. Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t (New York: HarperBusiness, 2001).
11. John C. Maxwell, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You, rev. and updated 10th anniversary ed. (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2007).
12. John C. Maxwell, The 5 Levels of Leadership (New York: Center Street, 2011).
13. James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner, The Leadership Challenge: How to Get Extraordinary Things Done in Organizations (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1987); James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner, Credibility: How Leaders Gain and Lose It, Why People Demand It, rev. ed. (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2003).
14. James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner, The Leadership Challenge, 25th Anniversary ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2012).
15. S. Hammond, S. Largiem, and F. Mahomed, “Leadership Succession Planning in Education: The Problem of Principal Shortage,” Educational Management Administration & Leadership 29, no. 1 (2001): 21–34.
16. G. Luna, “Planning for an American Higher Education Leadership Crisis: The Succession Issue for Administrators,” International Leadership Journal 4, no. 1 (2012): 56–79.
17. Jean Lipman Blumen, The Allure of Toxic Leaders: Why We Follow Destructive Bosses and Corrupt Politicians—and How We Can Survive Them (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
18. John A. Allison, The Leadership Crisis and the Free Market Cure (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
19. Burns, Leadership, 1-3.
20. Barbara Kellerman, “Cut Off at the Pass: The Limits of Leadership in the 21st Century,” Governance Studies, Brookings Institution, 9.
21. Barbara Kellerman, Professionalizing Leadership (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 6.
22. Bernard M. Bass, Bass & Stogdill’s Handbook of Leadership: Theory, Research, and Managerial Applications, 3rd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1990), 3-4.
23. Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Arthur Waley (Ware, England: Wordsworth Editions, 1996).
24. Arien Mack and Irvin Rock, Inattentional Blindness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
25. Robert I. Levy, Tahitians: Mind and Experience in the Society Islands (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973).
26. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Marcus Weigelt (London: Penguin Classics, 2003; originally published 1781).
27. Jean Piaget, The Origins of Intelligence in Children, trans. M. Cook (New York: International Universities Press, 1952), 7.
28. Chester I. Barnard, The Functions of the Executive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940), 80.
29. Ralph M. Stogdill, Handbook of Leadership: A Survey of Theory and Research (New York: Free Press, 1974; originally published 1948), xvii.
30. Edwin P. Hollander, Leadership Dynamics: A Practical Guide to Effective Relationships (New York: Free Press, 1978), 151.
31. Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus, Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 21.
32. W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 54.
33. J. R. Meindl, “The Romance of Leadership as a Follower-Centric Theory: A Social Psychology of Leadership,” Administrative Science Quarterly 30, no. 4 (1985): 567–589, 78; Gary Gemmill, “Postmodernism and Leadership: A Space for Re-thinking Leadership?” Human Relations 45, no. 1 (1992): 53–75, 114.
34. P. Malakyan, “Depersonalizing Leadership and Followership: The Process of Leadership and Followship,” World Journal of Social Science Research 2, no. 2 (2015): 227–250, 227.
35. Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 340.
36. Joseph A. Raelin, Leadership-as-Practice: Theory and Application (London: Routledge, 2005), 18.
37. Kellerman, Cut Off at the Pass, 6, 9.
38. Kellerman, Professionalizing Leadership, 83.
39. Burns, Leadership, 3.
40. Ibid., 19–20.
41. Bernard M. Bass, Leadership and Performance Beyond Expectations (New York: Free Press, 1985).
42. Burns, Leadership, 171.
43. Ibid., 185.
44. Rost, Leadership, 102.
45. Joseph C. Rost, “Moving from Individual to Relationship: A Postindustrial Paradigm of Leadership,” Journal of Leadership Studies 4, no. 4 (1997): 3–22, 5.
46. Rost, “Moving from Individual to Relationship,” 6-7.
47. Rost, Leadership, 180.
48. Rost, “Moving from Individual to Relationship,” 10.
49. Rost, Leadership, 181.
50. Rost, “Moving from Individual to Relationship,” 15-16.
51. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
52. Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, trans. F. Gaynor (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), 33–34.
53. Bennis and Nanus, Leaders, 24.
54. Collins, Good to Great.
55. Rost, Leadership, 30.
56. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
57. Rost, Leadership.
58. Rost, “Moving from Individual to Relationship”.
59. Joseph Rost, “Followership: An Outmoded Concept,” in The Art of Followership: How Great Followers Create Great Leaders and Organizations, eds. R. E. Riggio, I. Chaleff, and J. Lipman Blumen (San Francisco: Jossey Bass/Wiley, 2008), 57.
60. Joseph Rost, “Toward a New Paradigm of Leadership: The Post-Industrial Leadership Paradigm,” in The Center for Creative Leadership Handbook of Leadership Development, eds. C. D. McCauley and E. Van Velsor (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007), 3–24.
61. G. R. Goethals, interview with James MacGregor Burns, Jepson School of Leadership Studies, University of Richmond, 2010.
62. Kellerman, Cut Off at the Pass; Kellerman, Professionalizing Leadership; Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time (New York: HarperBusiness, 2015); Joseph A. Raelin, “From Leadership-as-Practice to Leaderful Practice,” Leadership 7, no. 2 (2011): 195–211; R. A. Barker, On the Nature of Leadership (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002); Rost, Leadership.
63. David H. Burnham, Inside the Mind of the World Class Leader (Burnham Rosen Group, 2024).
64. L. S. Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978); Jean Piaget, The Equilibration of Cognitive Structures: The Central Problem of Intellectual Development (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); David A. Kolb, Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984); Albert Bandura, Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1986); Jack Mezirow, Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1991); Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Edgar H. Schein, Organizational Psychology, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975); Edgar H. Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership, 4th ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010); Aaron T. Beck, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders (New York: International Universities Press, 1976); M. M. Crossan, H. W. Lane, and R. E. White, “An Organizational Learning Framework: From Intuition to Institution,” Academy of Management Review 24, no. 3 (1999): 522–537.
65. Kurt Lewin, Principles of Topological Psychology (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1936), 4–7.
66. Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications (New York: George Braziller, 1968).
67. Joseph Rost, “Leadership Development in the New Millennium,” Journal of Leadership Studies 1, no. 1 (1993): 91–110.
68. Ibid., 109.
69. Rost, Leadership.
70. M. Wood, “The Fallacy of Misplaced Leadership,” Journal of Management Studies 42, no. 6 (2005): 1101–1126.
71. Rost, Leadership, 6.
72. Rost, Leadership; Barker, On the Nature of Leadership, vii.