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    Forceful Leadership and Enabling Leadership: You Can Do Both
    Forceful Leadership and Enabling Leadership: You Can Do Both
    Forceful Leadership and Enabling Leadership: You Can Do Both
    Ebook75 pages2 hours

    Forceful Leadership and Enabling Leadership: You Can Do Both

    By Robert Kaplan

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    About this ebook

    Leaders need to be forceful--to assert themselves and their capabilities and to push others to perform. Leaders also need to be enabling--to tap into and bring out the capabilities of others. The problem is that many executives see forceful leadership and enabling leadership as mutually exclusive, or strongly prefer one or the other, and therefore lack the versatility to be truly effective. This publication explains how executives can overcome the emotional barriers to expanding their skill sets in one direction or the other.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCenter for Creative Leadership
    Release dateMay 1, 1996
    ISBN9781604916928
    Forceful Leadership and Enabling Leadership: You Can Do Both

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      Book preview

      Forceful Leadership and Enabling Leadership - Robert Kaplan

      Preface

      In the following report I employ the terms forceful and enabling because they are quite commonly used in organizations to describe roughly the same managerial characteristics that I ascribe to them. The other reason is that it was important to me for conceptual reasons that both terms have positive connotations.

      The word forceful, as unremarkable as it is, grew out of years of action-research that I have conducted with executives and my effort to characterize, for them and for me, their basic nature. It occurred to me as I was working with an individual a couple of years ago that he, like so many of his peers, was a force to be reckoned with. And how did he get himself into trouble? By being too much of a force. I began calling this category of manager forces, but the suggestion of the use of force, which an acquaintance kindly pointed out, was not what I wanted to describe the desirable form of this approach to leadership. Forceful was better because it did not carry that baggage.

      I adopted enabling because I heard executives talking about the need to, for example, enable people to innovate or enable the organization to perform at high levels.

      A few years ago I wrote about what I termed the expansive executive and distinguished between the desirable case and the extreme case (Kaplan, 1990, 1991; Kaplan, Drath, & Kofodimos, 1992). This forerunner of the idea of forceful leadership was much more fully developed at that stage than was the precursor to enabling leadership.

      Once this opposition of forceful and enabling leadership crystallized in my mind, I developed with help from my colleagues a draft instrument for measuring it. This report is based on the quantitative data from our early use of this instrument as well as the qualitative data from our service work.

      In treating the notion of forceful versus enabling, I do not for a moment regard it as constituting all of leadership. I do, however, think that understanding it is important if we are to improve the effectiveness of leadership as it is practiced today.

      Introduction

      What is the goal of management development? The obvious answer is: to make managers more effective. But how do we define effectiveness? Everyone—managers and students of management alike—has an opinion, some more informed than others. There is no one way to define leadership effectiveness, but I have found it helpful to think about it broadly as versatility. The objective of management development, then, is to help equip managers to handle a wider variety of situations.

      To get beyond this general definition I will explore what versatility means in terms of two approaches to leadership that I have found to be prevalent in my work with executives: forceful and enabling.

      I am not the first to observe these two approaches. In fact, there is a long-running controversy about which is better. In one camp are people who hold that being enabling, or empowering, is the way to go. Gaining strength since World War II (and expressed in such terms as participative leadership and Theory Y), this idea of leadership came into great favor in the last ten years as organizations mounted a collective effort to improve quality, innovate, and stay competitive. In the other camp are people who, partly in reaction to the empowerment movement, hold that strong individual leadership is critical, especially when fundamental change is needed.

      Which approach is better? Which do we want an individual leader to take, especially the senior leader? The answer, perhaps obvious, is that it is a mistake to choose. Allowing for the fact that any individual will tend to favor or specialize in one or the other, both approaches are required of the senior leader. In the face of the varied and ever-changing demands on managers, especially senior managers, versatility is the name of the game.

      Let me emphasize: Versatility is a range of diverse capabilities, not a nondescript, shapeless blend.

      Total versatility may not be attainable, at least by most managers. Even if it were attainable, we do not know for certain whether total versatility is synonymous with ultimate effectiveness. Managers who favor one approach over the other may be more effective in certain conditions. My work with executives has convinced me, however, that managers who emphasize one to the point of sacrificing the other put themselves and their organizations at risk.

      Managers face a number of obstacles in the pursuit of greater versatility. The root of the word versatility means to turn around or to pivot. What limits a person’s range of movement,

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