By James MacGregor Burns
The acid test of leadership, according to James MacGregor Burns is this: Does/did the leader achieve real, intended, comprehensive, and lasting change based on fundamental values? (109-10).
In the broadest terms, transforming change flows, not from the work of the “great man” who single-handedly makes history, but from the collective achievements of a “great people.” While leadership is necessary at every stage, beginning with the first spark that awakens people’s hopes, its vital role is to create and expand the opportunities that empower people to pursue happiness for themselves (240).
MacGregor Burns argues that transforming leadership begins on people’s terms, driven by their wants and needs, and must culminate in expanding opportunities for happiness (230).
On Leadership:
Leadership defined:
Leadership has its origins in the responsiveness of leaders to followers’ wants, and in followers’ responsiveness to leaders’ articulation of needs, empowering both leaders and followers in the struggle for change. Leaders express wants and needs most forcibly in the language of values. Wants-as-values both motivate and guide leaders and followers as they seek change and also serve as measures and authentications of outcomes” (147).
Distinguishing Transactional and Transformational leadership: 22-25
Transactional leadership: Transactional leaders bring change, often substituting one thing for another. There is a give and take relationship, an exchange. Examples: Henry Cabot Lodge opposing Wilson and the League of Nations; FDR and the Supreme Court Packing initiative.
Transformational leadership: Transformational leaders bring a metamorphosis in form or structure, a change in the very condition of a group or even a nation. Transformational leaders bring basic alterations in entire systems. Transformational leaders “take the initiative in mobilizing people for participation In the processes of change, encouraging a sense of collective identity and collective efficacy, which in turn brings stronger feelings of self-worth and self-efficacy . . .” (25). “Transforming values lies at the heart of transforming leadership, determining whether leadership indeed can be transforming” (29).
Examples: James Madison and the Bill of Rights (87) “It was an historic act of transforming leadership” at a time when Congress was more concerned with maintaining transactional peace. Constitutional changes in the U.S. in Continental America; Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations; FDR in WWII.
On Leaders and Followers: Students of leadership have their own way of analyzing concord and conflict. They divide people into leaders and followers. On leaders we have a mountain of evidence – biographies, memoirs, letters, archival sources—"thousands of books,” as Garry Wills wrote, but “none on followership. I've heard college presidents tell their students that schools are meant to train leaders but I have never heard anyone profess to train followers. The ideal seems to be a world in which everyone is a leader—but who would be left for them to be leading? (170)
The Burns Paradox (not a formula but a problem): If leadership and followership are so intertwined and fluid, how do we distinguish conceptually between leaders and followers? (171).
On political parties: The classic definition of a party: “a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavors the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed” (125).
Leadership and values: The clues to the mystery of leadership lie in a potent equation: embattled values grounded in real ones and invigorated by conflict empower leaders and activated followers to fashion deep and comprehensive change in the lives of people. The acid test of this empowerment is whether the change is lasting or whether it is temporary and even reversible. Deep and durable change, guided and measured by values, is the ultimate purpose of transforming leadership, and constitutes both its practical impact and its moral justification. And that is the power values (213).
Viewing Transforming Leadership though a biblical lens:
How Christianity grew: In Chapter 12, “The Power of Values,” Burns argues that Christianity grew as a consequence of the dynamics of conflict in ways it steeled itself against constant challenges. When the historian, Edward Gibbon asked, “By what means the Christian faith obtained so remarkable a victory over the established religions of the earth, his answers included ‘the convincing evidence of the doctrine itself’ and ‘the intolerant zeal of the Christians.’” Burns suggest a third cause: Extraordinary leadership is the cause of the faith. Burns was building on his idea of the significant role conflict plays in the dynamic’s leadership. He saw the dynamics of conflict, and how Christianity dealt with it as a factor that would help “steal it against constant challenges in the centuries ahead.”
Assessment: What Burns fails to recognize is the power of the resurrection as a motivating factor. While Christianity has been hijacked by those who would employ “power” to aid its spread, Christianity has always moved on the power of the resurrection of Jesus. Burns does not see this, because as Paul notes in 1 Corinthians 2, “These things are spiritually discerned.”
The most potent doctrine: Burns also notes as “most important” the potent doctrine that invigorated and empowered it, “the Christian belief in the equality of all before God” (202).
Assessment: Important, yes, but once again Burns misses it. John (John 14:6) and the Apostles (Acts 4:12) note that the “most important” doctrine is the person and work of Jesus.
The Leadership Touchstone: In Chapter 13, “The People, Yes?” Burns argues that “the pursuit of happiness must be our touchstone. As means and end, it embodies the other transforming values – order, liberty, equality, justice, community. It encompasses the highest potential maladies for transformation, both in peoples situations and in themselves” (214-15).
Assessment: Christians recognize a foundation under that stone, i.e. the glory of God. See 1 Corinthians 10:31, Colossians 3:17, 3:23 et al.
Words to ponder and repeat:
On thinking: There is a simple reason why you rush around rather than stop and reconstruct. THINKING IS DIFFICULT (caps and italics mine), as it calls not only for recall but for patient analysis (51).
On the Revolution: Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams: “I like a little rebellion now and then.” And later in a letter to Abigail’s son-in-law: “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure” (80).
British Prime Minister Gladstone on the U.S. Constitution: “The most remarkable work known to me in modern times to have been produced by the human intellect, at a single stroke (so to speak), in its application to political affairs” (83). Gladstone took a lot of heat in Great Britain for that one.
On Louis XVI: “Louis XVI reigned but rarely governed, and could not lead.” Could be said of many politicians (100).
FDR in 1937: “If we do not have the courage to lead the American people where they want to go, someone else will” (140). FDR was addressing the national problem that one-third of the nation remained “ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished” (140).
Power: Power come from “the possession of things that men covet” (196, see the more extended description that Burns includes).
On leadership abuse: Only leadership can overcome the abuses of leadership. Sociologists Michel Crozier and Erhard Friedberg.
Leadership and listening: Here is the first step in any strategy of leadership — to listen (235).
On leadership and conflict: As Warren Bennis wrote, exemplary, corporate leaders, not only accept descent – they encourage and reward it. And leaders cannot be effective in the long run if they are simply power holders – rulers – and fail to see the moral and ethical implications of their work (231).
Is “leadership” a neutral thing or a good thing? In other words, is it a mechanical process or power potential available equally to a Hitler and a Gandhi? Or should it be defined as a good thing?
Creativity, conflict, empowerment, efficacy – these and other causal elements make leadership, the single, most vital force in struggles for real, intended, durable, comprehensive change (227).
Of particular importance to me in my role:
Values (Chapter 12) the strengths of even the most potent values are enormously enhanced if they are a part of the cultural value system … in such a system, values not only exist, side-by-side, but intertwine and interact, immensely strengthening their collective impact (206).
Solving problems: Addressing whether a new approach to solving the needs of the poor could work, Burns asks: could such a program work? Only if directed by a leadership strategy, that scrapped failed strategies of the past and offered a new way of approaching the problem lying at the very root of most of the world’s other problems (233).
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Can we use the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a key document in discussing our unified efforts for philanthropy in Lancaster?
Lessons:
1. A key question leaders ask: This from Chapter 4, “Leaders as Planners.” “What is the situation? This is the most commonly asked question in military operations. . . . Battle planning can be defined as constant groping for an understanding of the situation. The next question is predictable too: what can be done to maintain or change the situation? General must be analysist of causation” (57).
2. Utilize the force of a group to initiate: This from Chapter 10, “The Leader-Follower Paradox.” “FDR moved, wrote political scientist Mario Einaudi, “with imagination and with the skill of a ‘creative artist’ among the tangle of conflicting and confusing views and interests.” In the very process of developing his programs, Roosevelt reached out early to build a following. The Social Security Act was shaped long before its passage by Congress in 1935, with FDR soliciting support not only from the interests involved—doctors, hospitals, social workers, nurses, insurance companies, labor, industry—but from ‘just about everybody,’ as one participant said, ‘who had every written anything’ on the subject” (180). FDR proved that situations were not intractable, that they could yield to the power of agency (181).
Application: Build coalitions when it comes to initiation. Utilize the force of a group, not simply the power of mandate. Shift to a Global Faculty position with increased income for these professors who have this credential.
3. Recognizing Inheritors and Innovators or Initiators: The inheritors of an existing system or structure are natural defenders of the status quo: The Hoover Republicans. The innovators or initiators bring creative insights, new ideas and approaches, into proposals for change that affect the existing system, suggest the means of realizing such change, and emerge as an alternative leadership: Roosevelt and the New Dealers.
4. What transformational leaders do: Transformational leaders raise “the intrinsic value of effort and goals by linking them to valued aspects of the followers’ self-concept, thus harnessing the motivational forces of self-expression, self-consistency, specific mission-related self-efficacy, generalized self-esteem and self-worth.” Or using Jane M. Howell’s terms, “socialized leaders” recognize followers’ needs, respect their autonomy, and engage them, while “personalized leaders” dominate followers and ignore their needs except when necessary to advance their own ambitions” (184). See “On Leadership” above.
5. Creative leadership as both destructive and constructive: Creative leadership is more than a critique. The “decomposition” of old meetings meanings opens “new spaces and new prospects for action” where the creative mind can roam to find fresh and vital answers to basic questions amid complexity, conflict, and change. The creative insight is, in short, transforming. It might raise a fundamental challenge to an existing paradigm or system, calling for its overthrow and replacement, or it might call for a deep restructuring, or the inclusion of significant excluded elements, or perhaps a revitalization, a new birth of “founding principles.” So the spark of creative leadership is both destructive and constructive, through a process that analysts of collective action call “framing work” (167).
6. Leaders embrace conflict as necessary (and even desirous at times): No leader can lead without seeing that conflict is not only inevitable but often desirable; as Warren Bennis wrote, exemplary corporate leaders not only accept dissent—they encourage and reward it. And leaders cannot be effective in the long run if they are simply power holders—rulers—and fail to see the more and ethical implications of their work (231).
7. It is not a “great man” but a “great people” who bring change: “In the broadest terms, transforming change flows not from the work of the “great man” who single-handedly makes history, but from the collective achievement of a “great people.” While leadership is necessary at every stage, beginning with the first spark that awakens people's hopes, its vital role is to create and expand the opportunities that empower people to pursue happiness for themselves (240).
Critique:
1. Great theory. Needs more illustration to put “skin on the theoretical bones.”
As he does in Leadership, here his strength of mind and academic background creates a tendency to write void of illustrations, or only utilize illustrations drawn from historic anecdotes, some of which are lost on the average reader. However, when he utilizes his experience as a parent—raising teenagers in the sixties—his ideas and explanations come to sharper focus.
2. NOT Boring, thorough!
I read one reviewer who said of this book, “Boring.“ There’s an underlying assumption in that review that tedium cannot be tolerated if something is to win the attention and affection of a certain group. However, it is just that historical tedium that Burns possesses due to his years of careful historical observation, research, study, and teaching – and employs throughout Transforming Leadership – that enables him to draw time-honored principles rather than take a simple populist approach or the latest “this-is-my-experience-it-can-work-for-you.”
3. His focus on followership. Because leadership and followership or so tightly bound together, to NOT understand followership through personal experience leaves the so-called “leader” at a distinct disadvantage. Chapter 10, “The Leader-Follower Paradox” was helpful as was his passage from Gary Wills, Certain Trumpets.
4. His focus on values: As Ronald Heifetz notes, “We may like to use leadership as if it were value-free, particularly in an age of science and mathematics . . . . Yet when we do so, we ignore the other half of ourselves that in the next breath speaks of leadership as something we desperately need more of. We cannot talk about a crisis in leadership and then say leadership is value-free. . . . We have to take sides.” Or to use the words of Carl Friedrich (Burns’ professor at Harvard): “To differentiate the leadership of a Luther from the leadership of a Hitler is crucial for political science that is to ‘make sense’; if a political science is incapable of that, it is pseudoscience, because the knowledge it imparts is corrupting and not guiding” (207).
To Read:
Jane M. Howell, “Two Faces of Charisma: Socialized and Personalized Leadership in Organizations,” in Conger et all., pp. 213-36.
Gary Wills, Certain Trumpets: The Call of Leaders
Recommendation:
Burns asks, “Where is leadership a causal force?” “Almost everywhere,” is his reply (222). I agree. And because leadership is needed as a causal force, leaders need a well-rounded, carefully constructed idea of leadership that leads not to simple transactional change, but to real transformation, the causal force of shared values moving toward a common goal.
As few others do, James MacGregor Burns provides such a careful explanation and construct. This is a book, to borrow from Sir Francis Bacon, that must be “chewed and digested.” Approach Transformational Leadership from that perspective and it will yield insights aplenty!
