Applied Leadership: A Synthesis of Theory and Practice

By Iftikhar Ahmed Khan

‘Applied Leadership: A Synthesis of Theory & Practice’ is a holistic view of leadership. It highlights myths and misperceptions existing about leadership and their negative impact on the practical application. The book discusses existing theories of leadership, analyzes strengths of individual theories, and their weaknesses in providing a holistic view of leadership, leading to a need for a holistic approach to leadership. The book builds up a holistic model and plugs in the existing theories to develop a bigger picture. The cardinals of the holistic model are then discussed as individual chapters from theoretical as well as practical aspects of leadership. The discussion of individual cardinals is finally translated into an applied leadership model that presents a comprehensive view of leadership, bridges the theory-practice gap and can be used as a framework for researchers and practitioners of leadership.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Singapore
• Release date: Oct 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781543761597

Iftikhar Ahmed Khan

Iftikhar Ahmed Khan is an Ex-Pakistan Navy Officer. His naval career comprised a diverse range of experience including command, staff, operations and training; a path that provided him a rich experience of dealing with people both as a follower and as a leader. During his naval career, he has passionately been involved with learning of leadership, delivering lectures, conducting workshops and short courses. He had also been a regular guest speaker on leadership to officers command courses of warships, submarines and naval aviation, and to corporate sector organizations as well. He is currently working with UAE Naval Forces Institute where he teaches leadership. He holds a PhD degree in Management from Lincoln University College, Kuala Lumpur, an MBA degree in Human Resource Management from Preston University, Karachi and MSc Degree in Strategic Studies from Karachi University. Besides formal academic degrees, he also holds ‘fellowship’ of Institute of Leadership & Management (ILM), London. He is the author of two books; ‘The Leadership Star’ published in 2012 by Author House (UK) and ‘Motivation-The Right Direction’ published in 2012 by Ferozsons (Pakistan).

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Copyright © 2020 by Iftikhar Ahmed Khan.

ISBN:      Hardcover       978-1-5437-6160-3

                Softcover         978-1-5437-6158-0

                eBook               978-1-5437-6159-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1    An Overview of Leadership

Chapter 2    The Theoretical Perspective

Chapter 3    Holistic Approach To Leadership

Chapter 4    Performing The Task

Chapter 5    Maintaining The Team

Chapter 6    Motivating The People

Chapter 7    Leadership Style

Chapter 8    Leadership Qualities

Chapter 9    The Applied Leadership Model

The Last Word

Bibliography

DEDICATED TO

➢ My father, Ghulam Sarwar Khan, who was a man with a lofty vision of transforming his children’s lives through high standards of education and moral principles, and in doing that, he sacrificed his own life for our better future, living with utmost humility, selflessness, unwavering resolve to achieve what he thought was good, and courage to take and stand by decisions.

➢ And to all those leaders who command love, respect and loyalty of their people and are willingly followed till the ends of the earth; who though are rare but their echoes prevail even after they depart.

PREFACE

It’s almost 35 years that I have been acquainted with the word ‘leadership’. My very first interaction with this word was in Pakistan Naval Academy in 1986 when I was an officer cadet, undergoing basic training. Though fully integrated into our daily training routine, the lecture in classroom, however, meant flowery language, monotonous delivery and boring tempo that would put most of us to half-sleep; we could not afford to close our eyes fully due to threat of getting caught sleeping in classroom and ending up in parade ground after lunch for 7 days, with haversack and a G-3 rifle.

While leadership development continued to be an essential part of our daily routine throughout our Service, I first got into teaching of leadership when I was appointed in Navy’s Human Resource Development Center. It was one fine morning when I was asked by a very dear colleague to deliver lecture on leadership to junior officers’ course as the designated instructor was away on leave. Thoroughly shocked but unable to refuse, I requested for an already prepared lecture which I could click through in lecture hall; I was provided with one and I actually clicked through with little understanding of what I said. As it would happen in any military, next time my name was already there to deliver the lecture and slowly it became a routine. After delivering the lecture 2 or 3 times, I thought of studying about theories and concepts that I usually clicked through in those lectures. As I studied this subject, I learnt that the knowledge I had was just the tip of the iceberg and much more was hidden below the surface. The more I studied, the more it looked unresolved. The pursuit to uncover the hidden aspects developed in me a craving for understanding leadership, as leadership was the life and blood of my profession. Then, a time came when I would deliver lectures on leadership to officers undergoing Command Courses of warships, submarines and aviation. I actually started to like this subject, and so did my audience.

With the passage of time, I developed and conducted full day workshops on leadership for officers; opportunities that helped me a lot in understanding leadership through listening to experiences of its practical manifestation. My greatest moment came when I was invited as guest speaker to deliver a talk on leadership to faculty members and around 500 students of Pakistan Navy Engineering College. The moment was further elevated as I had my own teacher as Chief Guest, who was my teacher 20 years back when I was a sub-lieutenant undergoing training in the same institution. The mesmerizing aura of the event triggered me to transform that lecture into a book in an easy to understand language. I did it, and the book got published in August 2012 as ‘The Leadership Star’, by Author House (UK).

As I look back, I can see myself as being naive to the word leadership initially, followed by getting familiar to this word by stroke of luck, then reading about this word due to curiosity, leading to delivering of lectures and workshops and ending up in writing a book. During these 35 years, I have been a follower to many leaders, and a leader to many followers at numerous occasions. This practical experience of leading and being led, together with the theoretical knowledge that I gained from studying leadership, I could identify the gaps between theory and practice that led to leadership problems. In my view, the gaps are mainly due to misperceptions as to who is a leader in an organization, unjustified segregation of leadership from management, limitations of individual theories in addressing the big picture of leadership and undue rush by researchers and practitioners to pursue every new theory for finding solutions to all leadership problems in organizations.

After publishing my first book, I got into a deeper relationship with leadership; perhaps thinking about it most of the times to resolve the queries that I raised to myself. While the first book talked about a few prominent theories, I always thought of capturing all the theories and drawing conclusions for practical application in work organizations. This pursuit led to writing of this book, which could be taken as a 2nd edition of my first book but which captures much more than what I discussed in first book, and hence meriting an independent title.

Like the first book, I have started this book with the confusions and misperceptions existing about leadership. I have extensively tried to discuss and negate leader-manager differences paradigm due to its damaging impact on understanding of leadership. The pinnacle of this book is capturing of almost all the existing theories of leadership, leading to developing a holistic approach to leadership and then using this discourse to develop an applied leadership model. This model presents a wholesome view of leadership by providing a framework that has multiple benefits; for researchers to expand their research and fit it in the bigger picture of leadership, for students to study and understand leadership as a comprehensive field, and for professionals to perform their leadership roles effectively by taking into account all the vital aspects of leadership instead of struggling with individual theories. In this book, I have also talked about followership, the aim of which is to negate the commonly existing negative undertones with the word ‘follower’ and highlight the real value of effective followers, as a leader is nothing without followers.

I am thankful to all those who helped me by providing their very valuable feedback and suggestions for improvement. The encouragement, guidance and comments I received from them helped me in making this book effective.

Last but the most important, I owe a lot to my wife and children for the comfort and convenience I received from them for working on this book. They gave a great sacrifice by allowing me as much time as I wanted to work on this book. They all made me feel highly motivated to complete my work.

Iftikhar Ahmed Khan

1

AN OVERVIEW OF LEADERSHIP

Leadership is one of the most discussed phenomena on earth (Burns, 1978). It is the word which is most commonly used in modern day organizations but equally widely misunderstood. One cannot think of a day when one doesn’t hear this word, which in fact has become a jargon in almost all walks of life; be it corporate organizations, military, bureaucracy, politics, educational institutions, social groups, sports teams, labour unions - you name it and the word ‘leadership’ exists with its full might, albeit with little awareness on what it really means. This existence-awareness gap results in a confusion which makes everyone practice it as per his/her own wisdom and blame ‘other’ factors when failures befall them.

Though most of us agree that leadership is about moving on to the road to future by influencing and motivating people, the problem however immediately starts beyond this academic answer when we try to explain leadership in more detail. Here are some of the misperceptions that exist about leadership:

Leadership is the job of the head and the top management of the organization. It’s these people who have the best picture and thus it’s these people who must lead.

Leadership and management are two different things; leadership determines the vision, mission and sets the objectives where as management plans, organizes and controls resources to achieve these objectives efficiently.

Leadership is the skill of dealing with human part of the organization whereas management deals with the remaining resources like machinery, infrastructure, money, information, processes, procedures etc.

Leaders are born not made; hence it is not possible to become a leader unless one has leadership attributes in his/her genes. Organizations can only groom leadership attributes lying dormant in people but cannot convert a non-leader into a leader.

Leadership is about having qualities like initiative, courage, determination etc. If you acquire these qualities, you can become a leader.

Leadership is about learning some tips and techniques to handle people using a suitable style to be adopted in a particular situation.

These are some of many paradigms people hold about leadership in today’s organizations and try to adopt an approach based on their own perception. These perceptions, with their shortcomings and flaws, have led to a situation where leadership has become almost obscured and ambiguous. Nurturing under the influence of these faulty paradigms, leaders of today have created many questions about performance and impact of leadership on organizations. Burns (1978) says that this vague and bleak situation has turned into a crisis of leadership where good leaders have become rare and highly sought after commodities. Despite paying astronomical salaries and choking benefits to their leaders, organizations are in a constant state of turbulence and volatility with their leaders unable to fix the situation.

This chaos has led to a situation where need for leadership is being questioned and researches are looking for alternatives to leadership i.e. substitutes for leadership. People are looking for those characteristics in Subordinate, Task and Organization that can eliminate the need for having leaders. One such approach by Kerr & Jermier (1978) is shown in Table 1-1.

Table 1-1 - Kerr and Jermier Substitutes for Leadership

Let us leave questioning of validity of this substitutes approach towards the end of this book where I will request the readers to re-visit these substitutes in the light of our discourse and conclude whether this is a valid approach or not. However, the point at this moment is why it is so that leadership has become a complex enigma which people are unable to resolve. Since we have seen and learnt that leadership produces miracles, we will assume that it does work. Hence, we can conclude that there must be something wrong with our understanding of leadership which makes leadership look complex and less effective. This book will endeavour to decipher the leadership enigma, using existing theories of leadership, in a simple manner to help people, both professionals and students, to gain an insight into leadership and get their paradigms right. However, as leadership is about humans and it is as complex as humans themselves, I must caution the readers here, as said by Robert Allio, (author of The seven faces of leadership),

This is not the 60-minute or 60-hour treatise that provides all you need to know about leadership in one easy reading. But for those willing to invest time and energy, I promise new insights into leadership and the leadership process.

LEADERSHIP – PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

Since our childhood, consciously or otherwise, we have been leading people and we have been led by people. At homes, parents endeavour to lead their children to the right path by constantly telling them about the good and the bad; at schools, teachers take on the responsibility of leading students to a successful life by making them educated citizens; outside homes, society leads its citizens by influencing them through its social norms, traditions and culture; at work, organizations lead people through their work environment to achieve objectives. While we come across different leaders in various stages of our lives, not all succeed in impressing us. We cherish moments spent with some while we regret those spent with others. Have you wondered, as remarked by John C Maxwell (1999), What makes people want to follow a leader? Why do people reluctantly comply with one leader while passionately following another to the ends of the earth? To this question, in my numerous workshops and lectures on leadership in different countries, I received as many different answers as the number of participants. However, an interesting phenomenon that I have come across is the striking similarity between the list of attributes of good and bad leaders suggested by people from different countries. This showed that humans, wherever they are, have similar views of a good or bad leader and are affected by these traits in a similar manner. Let me list down attributes which participants remembered of bad leaders so that, right at the outset, we know what makes people hate a leader:

Task-only focus, disregard for human needs/limitations

Taking people as means to achieve their own ends

Disregard for human dignity and respect

Insensitivity to work-life balance of people

Not trusting people and seeing them with suspicion

Creating an environment of fear and fright

Rude behaviour with subordinates

Philosophy of punishment and deprivation

Avoiding responsibility, blaming subordinates for failures

Maintaining undue distances from people

Lacking vision, not knowing where to take the organization

Lacking courage to take risks

Curbing innovation, follow-the-book approach

Stagnation, marking time with no productivity

Too much of micro management, not allowing work freedom

Asking for output without providing resources

Having seen the traits of bad leaders, one should be able to derive attributes of good leaders by merely reversing the characteristics, however, let us hear from participants of my workshops and lectures:

Having ‘human first’ approach

Professionally competent

Helpful and guiding

Kind and compassionate

Having a caring attitude towards their people

Effective and decisive

Courageous in taking risk and accepting responsibility

Honest and fair with their people

The point here is that not one or few but many attributes were highlighted to describe a successful as well as a bad leader. Another aspect that emerges from these answers is that these traits are both from ‘task’ and ‘people’ area which imply that subordinates see leadership as not only from a human perspective but task perspective as well.

COMMAND-LEADERSHIP-MANAGEMENT – A TRIAD OF CONFUSION

As I said earlier, the confusions existing about leadership have made it an enigma - and a very significant contribution to this confusion has been made by an unending debate over differences between leadership and management. While the debate is limited to differences between leadership and management in the world outside military, the debate gets even more complex inside military where the dimension of command also comes in. In the world outside military, the debate is relatively focused towards differences between leadership and management whereas command is cast aside as being a military thing. On the other hand, the military world owns command and leadership but gives a cold shoulder to management as being something for and from corporate world. Common to both the sectors is leadership, albeit surrounded by confusions and misperceptions.

This ‘differences paradigm’ has blurred the situation and has cast dense fog over understanding of these vital aspects in the minds of military commanders and corporate professionals. They are unsure as to what they actually are. Are they commanders and not managers, are they managers and not commanders, or are they leaders or not? Or, if they are commanders then what do they do different from leaders and managers, and if they are managers then what do they do different from leaders and commanders. Both the commanders and managers live with these blurred perceptions throughout their careers, defending their stance with vague logic and not seeing across the self-erected barrier. During my lectures and also in general interaction and discussions with people, these differences appeared as strong dogmatic beliefs which even senior and learned people were not ready to give up. On some occasions, some senior people even got annoyed with me and refused to discuss leadership any further when I challenged this paradigm.

Let us take up the challenge of confronting this paradigm and setting the stage right. We will see whether these differences are a reality or are mere perceptions, and come out with a true understanding of these vital aspects of professional excellence. This may help professionals in understanding and practicing their roles clearly and effectively. Let us first analyse the debate on differences between leadership and management.

Leadership v/s Management – A Puzzling Duo

The existing debate on differences between leadership and management is usually summarized in the following table (Bennis, 1989) (Table 1-2):

Table 1-2 – Leader-Manager differences

These differences are also supported and professed by renowned writers, professors and professionals. Their views on these differences are:

Luthans (2005), a distinguished management professor, says that one can be a leader without being a manager and be a manager without being a leader.

Covey (1989), a famous writer and author of ‘7 Habits of Highly Effective People’, suggests that leadership is not management; leadership has to come first and management second and further adds that management is a bottom-line focus whereas leadership deals with top line.

Covey (1989) adds that management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.

Bennis (1989), a famous organizational psychologist says, The manager asks how and when, the leader asks what and why.

Bennis (1989) adds that leaders conquer the context – the volatile, turbulent and ambiguous surrounding that sometimes seem to conspire against us and will surely suffocate us if we let them happen – while managers surrender to it.

Jones and Gosling (2005) quote Royal Navy First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Jonathon Band, who stated that leadership is about instigating change and that management is about maintaining the status quo.

DuBrin (2013) says that leadership deals with the interpersonal aspects of a manager’s job whereas planning, organizing and controlling deal with administrative aspects. He has quoted John P. Kotter, a prominent leadership theorist, that managers must know how to lead as well as manage. Without being led and managed, organizations face threat of extinction.

Perot, a famous American businessman and founder of Electronic Data Systems, says, Lead and inspire people. Don’t try to manage and manipulate people. Inventories can be managed but people must be led.

Sutton (2010), professor of management, says, I am not rejecting the distinction between leadership and management, but I am saying that the best leaders do something that might properly be called a mix of leadership and management.

From these perceptions, one may be led to believe that leadership and management are two entirely different and distinct concepts and practices. It seems that leadership deals with people and management deals with inventories and machines. The impression also emerges that leadership sits at the top and works in the broader business context with primary focus on the future whereas manager is at the lower tier, works to efficiently achieve whatever has been directed by the leader and maintains status quo. This perception gives positive undertones to leadership and negative undertones to management or, in simpler words, leadership is something primary and high whereas management is something secondary and low.

A critical analysis of above statements reveals that even these prominent professors / practitioners have professed a varied and conflicting understanding of leadership. For example:

If one can be a leader without being a manager and be a manager without being a leader (Luthans), but a manager must know how to lead as well as manage otherwise his/her organizations would face threat of extinction (DuBrin, 2013), then a leader who is not a manager, and a manager who is not a leader, are severe threats to their organizations.

If one can be a leader without being a manager and be a manager without being a leader (Luthans), then how would a leader get the answers to how and when, and how would a manager get the answers to what and why (Bennis), the two sets of essentially interdependent and interlinked questions that must be answered at the same level to come out with a viable, feasible, pragmatic and a sustainable course of action. In my view, such a half-cooked and a deficient leader or a manager remains handicapped, is dependent on others for formulating the strategy, achieving the aim and is potentially very harmful for the organization.

If leadership deals merely with interpersonal aspects of a manager’s job (DuBrin) then when would leaders deal with top line focus (Covey) and when would leaders ask ‘what and why’ (Bennis); aspects that are much more than merely dealing with interpersonal aspects of an organization.

If leadership is limited to dealing with interpersonal aspects (DuBrin), then does determining the right wall for leaning the ladder (Covey) fall in interpersonal