Neocharismatic Leadership: A Comprehensive Self-Coaching Model

By Ghadah T. Angawi

This book introduces the theory of Neocharismatic leadership through a conceptual framework based on research and literature review. This is followed by a gradient of leadership developmental sessions. In the folds, the sessions transcend the leaders to the Neocharismaitc leadership model application through a set of ten behavioral roles across 3 stages. In total, the book comprises of 32 self-coaching sessions that can be conducted by leaders themselves or by other coaches who work with leaders. This all comes alongside explanations, connotations and stories of success. The sessions allow leaders to connect with global and ethical issues and align them with their purpose. In essence, the book addresses, in its folds, the ethical and moral leadership behavior in modern organizations as they interact with stakeholders and make strategic transformational decisions that can affect the global community.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Springer
• Release date: Oct 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9783030554866

Book preview

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

G. T. AngawiNeocharismatic LeadershipManagement, Change, Strategy and Positive Leadershiphttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55486-6_1

1. Introduction

Ghadah T. Angawi¹  

(1)

Neocharismatic Leadership LLC, Centreville, VA, USA

Keywords

LeadershipNeocharismatic leadershipEthicalCoachingSustainable futureGlobal

A correction to this publication are available online at https://​doi.​org/​10.​1007/​978-3-030-55486-6_​8

If you have the same passion for the future state of humanity as I do and want to practically live leadership through every breath you take, then I promise you this is not just another irrelevant leadership book. As you venture into the different stages, roles, levels, and constituents demanded by your position, the last thing you need is repetitive, generic advice and theoretical approaches. It would be a total waste of your time and resources. I hate long introductions, and I usually skip them to get straight into thick of the book, to the real information and knowledge that can add value to my work. So, here is a very short introduction about how this book came to be and why – with a quick scan of the relevant history of leadership in two paragraphs.

The topic of leadership has been the focus of many researchers in the fields of management and organizational studies over the past few decades. The field of leadership was born of the need to differentiate between what leadership is and what management is – to advance a new paradigm in organizational development and effective leadership. Eventually, the leadership field grew and separated from the larger field of management. Today, leadership is not just about businesses organizations, it represents the sustainable future of humanity and the world at large. It extends further than just the city, country, or continent a particular leader operates in. Thus, leaders are accountable for their actions and decisions, regardless of where these actions take place.

In the English language, leadership is a combination of the word leader and the word ship. The combination indicates control and the quality or ability that makes a person a leader or the position of being a leader [1]. Leadership on its own can provoke images of a separate class of human beings, with qualities that only exist in that class – and they are called leaders. It defines and separates a leader from the group and erodes the common ground between them and other human beings. As leaders take charge, they use power. Power exposes a leader to potential arrogance. Through arrogance, a leader can lose the qualities needed for mobilizing the followers through motivation and relation to a greater cause, just by the rise to the position or role. The attribution of leadership then becomes confused with control, and a leader becomes just another individual using power to control instead of influence.

Continuing with the scenario above, leadership often creates resistance among followers, because it challenges others’ desire to control and leverage power to become leaders themselves. The position of leadership therefore often segregates and promotes social injustice and inequality, though it is indispensable for organization and cohesion. The mere idea of leadership can create envy, jealousy, and competition. It is a paradox. With more leaders discovering they can lead and the qualities of leadership becoming available to the ordinary person – in fact individuals are now trained in every stage of their lives and level of their education to lead – more resistance is created naturally by the process and discovery.

As our population on earth increases every day, the opportunities to lead is higher; nevertheless the bureaucracy of the organizational structure has not changed much, thus limiting leadership to an elite who fulfill specific performance competencies plus years of experience. When leadership at the top of the hierarchy is only available for a select few in any given organization, competition becomes inevitable and dichotomies are created leading to new rising leaders separating from the group with another baseline of followers acting as a threat to the actual leader, implicitly and with good intentions. If arrogance is not involved, as more and more of these groups rise, official leadership attempt to silence or contain them with the best of intentions. In the process leaders inevitably move away from their original mission at large and become distracted by competition. This causes them to lose the most important feature of their leadership: the purpose and vision. This cycle feeds on itself, and eventually leadership falls into demise, leaving the social and cultural environment in a worse state than it was to begin with. The position is then inherited by the next cycle of leadership that soon realizes they have lots of enemies to conquer, and so the cycle starts again. This is the foundation of my theory of what happens when leadership is not infused with morality and ethical decision-making. It exists in the bulk of research literature as the dark shadow of charisma.

The earliest documented exploration of leadership came from Plato, as an answer to the question, What qualities distinguish an individual as a leader? [2]. Although this may be a very common question, one that has been tackled by hundreds of books and researchers, it is still the same question that every leader asks when they speak with me during a coaching session. A more pivotal question that this book aims to address is far more specific. The answer to it will make it possible to stand out from other leaders, to be unique and exemplary in influencing the quality of work and results a leader creates. That question is: What thoughts, emotions, and behaviors distinguish a leader as a unique moral being?

This book is a simplified practical version of my PhD thesis on the roles of leadership in strategic decision-making in higher education [3]. At the beginning of my research in 2007, my supervisor [4] presented to me ethical leadership [5], as a seminal read on leadership in the business field. His suggestion for me was to test out the theories presented by it in higher education. The book was the last in a series of books on the subject by the authors and was recently released. Not only was I inspired by the content and depth of its application worldwide, but I was also intrigued by how it was labelled ethical leadership instead of its original name charismatic leadership or as the authors argued Neocharismatic leadership [6].

I was close to a decade into my career as a leadership trainer and coach across the Middle East and Arab world at the beginning of the Arab Spring movement. When I started my PhD and was concerned about the morality of the time we live in, I chose this theory to test in higher education because the organizational outcome was focused on people rather than profits. Higher education is different in this respect. Usually the cycle is longer than any profit-driven business cycle, so there is less urgency. I tested the theory with effective leaders who had already achieved positive outcomes over a 10-year period, and none had any idea of what kind of leadership they were practicing, neither their followers. Later in my work of coaching leaders and executives in business and corporate organizations in the Middle East and the United States, I further developed the detailed elements of the leadership roles in the model. In early 2019, I published my work in Arabic [7]. I was then asked to write a book on the subject by many of my English clients in the United States, who have never heard of the term Neocharismatic leadership let alone the practical components of it. I decided to start in 2019 but this time infused with my personal executive and leadership coaching experiences. For me, this book represents a steppingstone towards a global transition towards social justice, peace, love, and harmony through Neocharisma. As an advocate for our global sustainable future, my mission is one of fostering the growth of leadership across all fields and disciplines worldwide.

In the pages of this book, you will find a great deal of my personal journey as I reflect on my leadership. I will also include some of my clients’ stories, though some details have been changed to preserve their anonymity due to clients’ organizations privacy regulations. I may have not had personally experienced the exact situations you are facing in your own leadership journey, no one else ever will, but the stories we tell can help us see the parts of others’ journeys that overlap with our own. Generations have been influenced through the process of storytelling. I encourage you to share your own story with me through email and let me know how my own or others’ have impacted you.

References

1.

Cambridge dictionary online: https://​dictionary.​cambridge.​org/​us/​dictionary/​english/​leadership#dataset-cacd

2.

Takala, T., 1998. Plato on Leadership. Journal of Business Ethics 17, pp. 785–789.Crossref

3.

Angawi, G., 2012. The roles of leadership in strategic decision making in higher education. London: British Library

4.

Sir David Watson, one of the UK’s leading higher education authorities and ex-principal of Green Templeton College, Oxford, died in Feb 2015. He was a member of the Dearing review of higher education in the 1990s and professor of higher education at the Institute of Education (now part of University College London) between 2005 and 2010. As a prolific and influential higher education commentator, he was knighted in 1998 for his services to the sector.

5.

Mendonca, M. & Kanungo, R. N., 2007. Ethical leadership. McGraw Hill/Open University Press, p. 165

6.

This was my first encounter with the term and later in other references

7.

Angawi, G. 2019, Ethical leadership Roles in Higher Education, Dar Bayan Publishing, Egypt.

Part IThe Neocharismaitc Leadership Concept

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

G. T. AngawiNeocharismatic LeadershipManagement, Change, Strategy and Positive Leadershiphttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55486-6_2

2. Conceptualizing Neocharisma

Ghadah T. Angawi¹  

(1)

Neocharismatic Leadership LLC, Centreville, VA, USA

Keywords

Neocharismatic leadershipAltruismEthical standardsTransformational leadershipBehavioral rolesLeadership coaching

A correction to this publication are available online at https://​doi.​org/​10.​1007/​978-3-030-55486-6_​8

Neocharisma is a term that expresses the combination of ethical and transformational leadership lending itself to the idea of purpose and vision. The word itself is derived from the combination of Neo which is a new way of looking at and Charisma a Greek word meaning a gift of. This contemporary way of looking at charisma in leadership is not about the superpowers or exceptional sanctity [1] that leaders wield to influence followers but rather the behaviors that allow them to influence. This chapter deals with three issues. The first leadership and how it was viewed over decades of research and inquiry, the second is around the origin of Neocharismatic leadership and what defines it now, and the third is a dive into the ethical and moral positions that Neocharismatic leaders develop as they navigate through their roles and decision-making processes. The chapter can be helpful in gaining an in-depth understanding of the past and the now of Neocharismatic leadership. Though if you would prefer to move directly to the practice and experience what the model can do for you, skip to the next chapter.

Leadership in the Literature

There are many definitions of leadership in literature. Most definitions involve a process describing how influence is exerted over others to guide, structure, and facilitate activities and relationships in a group or organization [2]. But what concerns us here as we bring leadership to Neocharismatic is the influence and the forward movement towards achieving goals that Neocharismatic leaders bring. Attainment of that achievement requires certain behavioral roles and effective communication to be present. Most of this is common knowledge as we will see in this brief literature review but will be expanded on as we further explore Neocharismatic leadership.

Leadership theories were first concerned with attributes and personality traits until research in the field provided no evidence that they contributed to enhancing leaders’ performance and therefore their effectiveness. Weber’s theory of charismatic leadership belongs to this category [1]. The focus then shifted to the behavioral theory that studied what leaders did and how they did it and looked at leaders’ behaviors in two main categories: people orientation and task orientation. Later, researchers identified a third category that took into consideration contextual contingencies and called it change behavior [2]. The model kept adjusting itself over the years as more research was conducted, and the leadership style was thought to be an interaction between leaders, followers, and situations (context) [3]; these were called the contingency theories. A fourth set of theories were concerned with social power and exchange. They are summarized in these two directions: the influence on the followers (social power theory) and the mutual influence between the leaders and the followers (social exchange theory). They suggested five bases of social power: (1) legitimate power earned from a position; (2) reward power, be it material or mental reward; (3) coercive power by using physical and other types of threat; (4) referent power, which comes from liking someone and being inspired by them, as with charismatic leaders; and (5) expert power when one has knowledge or expertise [4]. Usually in organizations a leader gains status and influence over the followers in exchange for task competency and loyalty to the group. On the other hand, a leader looks after the followers’ needs, be it through financial rewards or social recognition, in exchange for compliance and work. A major contribution to this paradigm is found in the transactional versus transformational leadership style. The transactional leader emphasizes social exchange, keeping things as they are without change or improvement. They rely on normal behavioral transactions, such as: in exchange for reward, I would like to get this and that done. The transformational leader focuses on challenging the existing paradigm and engaging followers in a new level of thinking concerned with values and