On Leadership...

Leadership is an emergent quality. It surfaces when needed and submerges when no longer needed.

There's a simple test to see if you are leading: if you're doing something, going somewhere - literally or metaphorically - turn around. If people are following you, you're leading. If no one's following you, you're not leading.

This is not good or bad. It simply is. You might be doing good and necessary things, but at the moment, you're not leading. Leadership and followership are yin and yang. One cannot exist without the other.

This points out the fact that followership is just as important as leadership. Sadly, this fact is missing in virtually all leadership dialogue.

Lastly, the functions of leadership and management do not intersect. The people performing either might be both, e.g. leaders might be managers and/or vice versa, but the functions do not meet.

People might be leaders at one moment and followers the next - or leaders in one instance or context, and followers in another.

These thoughts grew from some studying I did in the late '90s, using complexity theory as metaphor for organizational behavior.

Briefly, complexity theory implies that systems with a few simple rules exhibit rich, complex behavior, while systems with lots of rules tend toward stasis (death).

My interest sprang from a friend's Master's thesis at Augsburg College in 1998, "Managers are Appointed, Leaders Emerge: How New Scientific Paradigms Inform Organizational Leadership."

Obviously, his thesis focused on leadership and followership, while my own personal studies (nowhere nearly as organized or as well documented as his) focused more on overall behavior of organizations.