By Donald Brown

Introduction
This final directed reading, On Becoming a Leader, by Warren Bennis, is a fitting capstone to “Doc’s picks”. This well known work is appropriate not in its congruence with the first four books (The Prince, The Human Enterprise, The Human Organization, Organizational Change through Effective Leadership) but instead in its seeming lack of alignment. This reader, having spent considerable time and effort studying and working in the applied behavioral sciences, first experienced significant dissonance in reviewing Dr. Bennis’ work. On the following pages I would like to isolate the viewpoints proposed by Dr. Bennis that appeared to resist integration with the work of the four previous authors. I will then summarize the conceptual organization of the book, and finish with key learnings for me personally.

Viewpoints
I believe that the overwhelming message reflected throughout the first four books of this series – the sentiment in common - was best captured by Dr. Douglas McGregor; “the manager, vis-à-vis the social sciences will one day be no different than the engineer vis-à-vis the physical sciences or the doctor vis-à-vis chemistry or biology”². The singular theme was that of understanding and predicting human behavior toward the end of leadership as effective influence. Yet, Dr. Bennis’ perspective, bluntly stated on the first page of the original 1989 edition, is that “leadership isn’t nearly as exact as, say, the study of chemistry…the social world isn’t nearly as orderly as the physical world, nor as susceptible to rules…people, unlike solids, fluids, and gases, are anything but uniform and anything but predictable”¹.

Dr. Bennis early on in chapter two differentiates between leaders and managers – in a fashion I also find in apparent conflict with the works of Machiavelli, McGregor, Likert, Guest, Hersey and Blanchard. That “the manager focuses on systems and structure; the leader focuses on people…the manager relies on control; the leader inspires trust”¹, are just two of several instances in which Bennis’ separates what Machiavelli or Hersey would consider simply two sides to the same coin of leadership into distinct currencies of leader versus manager. To begin his fourth chapter Dr. Bennis posits that one of the problems with leadership courses is that they “focus exclusively on skills and produce managers rather than leaders”¹.

These conflicting foundational messages took considerable effort on my part to satisfactorily resolve, but Dr. Bennis’ musical definition of “resolution…the progression of a dissonant chord to a consonant one”¹ aptly describes my own epiphany – the resolution lay within the definition of leader and leading (all of the following definitions are displayed on page 743 of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 1975):

• Does leadership mean “one who gives orders or takes charge”, or “one who shows the way…goes in advance”?
• Does leading mean “to direct the performance or activities of others” or “to be ahead of, to be first”?
• Does leadership mean “to act as commander, director or conductor…tending toward a certain goal or result” or “to go as a guide” or can lead even be defined as “the principal role in a dramatic production”?

Dr. Bennis himself gave me the resolution I was looking for in Chapter 7 in beginning with “Leaders are, by definition, innovators. They do things other people haven’t done or don’t do. They do things in advance of other people. They make new things. They make old things new”¹. This for me was how to synchronize the concepts of becoming a leader, in Bennis’ terms, and the collective perspective of the four previous works - what I had come to internalize as perhaps not becoming, but being a leader! Dr. Bennis interviewed some 29 leaders…individuals that shifted paradigms in their respective fields from Norman Lear to Gloria Steinem, from Frances Hesselbein to Herb Alpert, about their personal path to leadership. From what Dr. Bennis learned through the interviews he positions what it takes to become “a leader” as he defines a leader to be.

Concepts
Dr. Bennis begins within the introduction to the revised edition with four essential competencies inherent in all leaders; “able to engage others by creating shared meaning…a distinctive voice…integrity…and adaptive capacity”¹. Within Chapter 1, Mastering the Context, Dr. Bennis then paints a very vivid picture of the turbulent environment in which a leader finds him or herself today – with 21st century updates for the revised edition. A very telling comment on the context itself is found in Dr. Bennis’ discussion on current CEOs, “They are perfect expressions of the context; driven, driving, but going nowhere”¹. This short-term fixation is felt to be both cause and effect to some of our current lack of effective leadership in organizational and political arenas. The overall process for a leader mastering rather than surrendering to the context was seen to involve four steps, “(1) becoming self-expressive; (2) listening to the inner voice; (3) learning from the right mentors; (4) giving oneself over to a guiding vision”¹.

Dr. Bennis then establishes what he calls the basics in noting that all leaders also share three key ingredients – vision, passion and integrity, followed by several chapters in the formative process of Knowing Yourself, Knowing the World, Operating on Instinct, and then Deploying Yourself in the role of leader. The last four chapters of the book combine process and context with the image of first Moving Through Chaos, then touches the side of leadership that practitioners may be more familiar with in Chapter 8’s Getting People on Your Side, additional contextual positioning in Chapter 9 by describing the forces in play today of technology, global interdependence, mergers, regulation and demographics, and finally projecting the context into the future in the final Chapter 10.

Key Learnings
Even with a conceptual struggle in reading this work, or perhaps because of the struggle, I benefited from several meaningful take-aways from the experience:

• Becoming versus Being – neither goal more noble or more critical to our times. What McGregor or Likert might bring to us in reference to being a more effective leader is no more important that Bennis’ insights into how to become a leader in your personal field of endeavor
• “The Lone Ranger is dead”¹– as quoted in the revised introduction may apply at strategic and transformational levels, but I think that masked man is alive and well at tactical levels. As a front line supervisor or manager one often finds oneself alone, in charge and responsible – there is no one else to turn to
• Knowing Yourself – I found Dr. Bennis’ Chapter three on self-knowledge through being your own best teacher, accepting responsibility and blaming no one, accepting and living that you can learn anything you want to learn, and understanding through reflection to be profoundly applicable to all human beings, not just leaders. His observation that “feelings are memories of past behavior”¹ as a conduit to behavioral change was especially poignant.
• Freedom – in this case, freedom to “express ourselves rather that endlessly trying to prove ourselves”¹ was also particularly succinct
• Desire – Bennis quotes former CalFed Chief Executive Robert Dockson in reference to desire or intrinsic motivation in saying that “it can’t be taught, but it can be activated”¹– how powerful within a leadership context
• Vision – Probably the single most meaningful take-away I received from the book has to do with the concept of vision. We all know how important vision is to leading, yet for me there was always something lacking in my understanding of just what a vision means (is it some psychedelically-induced view of the future?). Dr. Bennis quoting Emerson in likening vision to a “blessed impulse”¹ that when we don’t give it due consideration we end up hearing it “coming back to us from the mouths of others”¹ gives me a much more visceral understanding of what it take to lead via vision – thank you Dr. Bennis…I won’t ignore the blessed impulse.

Questions for further discussion include:

1. Back in 1987 when we developed and produced the Situational Leadership® Interactive Videodisc Instruction, Dr. Bennis was kind enough to contribute on video the program’s introductory piece – what was your relationship with Dr. Bennis at the time? Had you ever collaborated with Dr. Bennis on other works?
2. What do you find the most meaningful message to be taken away from Dr. Bennis’ work (not just this book)?
3. As you weave all the classic works of the applied behavioral sciences into a single cloth, how do you integrate Situational Leadership and Dr. Bennis’ work?
4. Why did you choose On Becoming a Leader for this directed reading process?

References
¹Bennis, Warren. (2003) On Becoming a Leader, Updated Edition. Cambridge, MA: Basic Books

²McGregor, Douglas. (2006). The Human Side of Enterprise, Annotated Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill