Communication and leadership in organizational contexts

Communication and Leadership

What makes a great leader? How is a great leader made? There is no single answer to that question because there are as many different kinds of great leaders as there are problems in society that need to be overcome. While certainly it is true that many important and effective leaders share a number of the same qualities, it is also imperative to remember that each leader has different challenges that face him or her because of the particular historical circumstances that call that person to be a leader.

This research proposal maps out a plan to study the ways in which African-Americans become leaders in the United States today, looking at the struggles that they have to overcome in terms of the general level of background racism that still exists in this nation. But this is certainly not a research project designed to cast pity on African-American leaders because of the struggles that they have to face but rather to try to come to an understanding of how the particular challenges faced by African-Americans today produce certain kinds of leaders with specific strengths.

As a part of understanding how it is that certain African-Americans find themselves called on to be leaders (and how some of them succeed), this paper looks first at some general ideas about leadership, using tenets pulled from communication theory to help us understand why it is that different leaders choose different leadership styles based on the demands of the moment in history they find themselves in.

This paper also looks at some of the most important African-American leaders of the 20th century as a way of attempting to understand if there are cross-generational values, forms of discourse, and styles of leadership that mark most or even all leaders in this community.

Finally, this proposal describes a research design that will allow for a deeper investigation into the ways in which leadership values and communication skills come together in today's African-American communities to build leaders who are capable of addressing some of the most important issues facing African-Americans today, such as the high incarceration rate of black men, environmental racism, the high rate of single-parent families, and racism, especially by police.

Leadership Styles

It may be tempting to think that all great leaders are the same - that they come into this world with certain traits that mark them as different from the rest of us. But this is not true: Leaders vary in important ways, and not simply because of differences in their own personalities. Rather, leaders are molded by the political and cultural circumstances of their moment in history - even as they also mold those circumstances.

In order better to understand how the best leaders are those whose personal style meets the needs of a particular community at a particular point in time, we may take a brief look at three different men who were all important leaders in their communities. All three of them are very different from each other, but we should hesitate to say that one is the best or worst. It is certainly true that Niccolo Machiavelli would have - had he magically been transported to Selma - made a very poor Civil Rights leader.

Except that perhaps he would have been just fine. Had he lived in a different time and place - had any of these men lived in a different time and place - they would have acted differently and probably even believed in different things. Leaders are not immutable; nor should they be. Certainly, one of the things that marks a great leader is his or her commitment to a set of principles, but it is also true that great leaders understand that it is imperative to change their strategies at least to meet the changing conditions of the world.

We begin this investigation of what might make an effective leader by looking briefly at three leaders - two of them generally considered to be "good" leaders and one of them considered to be a "bad" leader. This analysis should make it clear why such distinctions should be more carefully considered than they usually are.

Both Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi have been judged by history to be good and effective leaders of their communities, men who helped to free and empower downtrodden peoples. In contrast, someone like Malcolm X - or the Italian diplomat and political theoretician Niccolo Machiavelli - was considered by many to be at best power-mad, an untrustworthy opponent who, like Machiavelli, believed that ends do justify means - a dangerous man who should be feared by all.

But a closer look at these three men demonstrates that there are more similarities among them than we might suspect.

This analysis helps us to create an analytic framework that will be used in this research project to help frame the questions needed to be asked to come to a greater understanding of the dynamics of leadership within contemporary African-American communities.

A brief look at the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., should put to rest any ideas that leadership is a mantle that people carry with them their entire lives, for King at first was reluctant to see himself as a leader, as Phillips (1999) describes King's work on the bus boycott.

Martin was something of a reluctant leader at first. He feared that he would take on too much for one person to handle and often related to others that he had been "suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest." "Everything happened so quickly," he said, "that I had no time to think through the implication of such leadership.... I neither started the protest nor suggested it," he admitted. "I simply responded to the call of the people for a spokesman." Having been asked to serve, however, he couldn't say no. "[So] we started our struggle together."

There may be certain inborn qualities that help to make an effective leader, but King's story (like that of many others) suggests that leadership, like nearly everything else that humans do, is something that people get getter at with experience.

King worked tirelessly, without regard to his own personal safety to improve the conditions under which black Americans lived. He believed that peaceful protests against injustice could change the world - and because he himself so clearly believed in such a vision all of those who followed him believed in it to.

People trusted King to be a great leader because he was willing to listen to them and because he came to the Civil Rights movement with an open mind. Of course, he was not unfamiliar with the often terribly conditions in which African-American lived and worked. He was not in any way naive. But he was prepared to approach the problems with an open mind, a distinguishing mark of great leaders.

The fact that he did not see himself as a leader initially was a part of this psychological openness. That intellectual openness included not only a willingness to try to come up with innovative ways of looking at the problem of racism but also a willingness to reconsider that he might be able to view himself in a different light as well, as Phillips (1999) describes:

While it's true that the people chose him to lead because, among other things, he had no known agenda, he had a high rate of energy, he was perceived as someone who would try to do the right thing, and he could communicate effectively -- Martin, by his own admission, was "unprepared for the role." "This is not the life I expected to lead. But gradually you take some responsibility, then a little more.... You have to give yourself entirely. Then once you make up your mind that you are giving yourself, you are prepared to do anything that serves that Cause and advances the Movement. I have reached that point. I have given myself fully."

King became a leader because he was capable of and willing to listen to those around him who had more experience than he did as well as because he was, later on, convinced that he might help others if he could get them to listen to him.

This is one face of the leadership role that King played. But there is another one that is equally important to remember. King was involved in a dialogue, or rather a series of dialogues. And these dialogues shaped his leadership strategies because they helped him to acquire what linguists refer to as register - the overall social and cultural tones that obtain in a given speech act.

This is essential to remember because King did not develop as a leader of the Southern black community without a cultural context. He talked to other people, who talked to him, and this process of dialogue helped shape his style as a leader.

The most obvious way in which the communicative dialogues that he was engaged in shaped his leadership goals was in the way that they shaped his dedication to the importance of non-violence. This does not in any way mean that he was not a man of principle. But men - and women - of principle act in different ways in different generations and cultures because they are constrained in different ways, and King learned to be (and was) a leader in a very specific historical context.

Part of what he learned through the process of dialogue that he carried on both in the African-American community and in the larger community of the South was that non-violence was an ideal strategy. It not only accorded with his own personal beliefs (based in large measure on Christian doctrine) but it was an effective strategy. By choosing to be non-violent when his opposition might well be violent, King knew that the Civil Rights Movement would sway the hearts of many who saw the non-violent actions of his followers.

But even as King was aware of the fact that non-violence had an important appeal because it would give to Civil Rights workers a place to stand on the moral and ethical high ground, he was also aware that there was relatively little risk to choosing this strategy.

This is not to say that Civil Rights workers - and Southern blacks in general - were not sometimes subjected to violence. But King, who was far from naive about the American political system, knew that there would not be a wholesale massacre of blacks by National Guard officers.

Although King knew, as did any black man of his generation, that justice in America is certainly not colorblind, the rule of law still always has some force in this nation. King knew that the National Guard would never use tanks to mow downs hundreds of innocent people.

Such an assumption about the basic civilized nature of the leaders of the opposition is not always a luxury that leaders have. We admire King for decrying violence, but we must also acknowledge that this leadership strategy depends on a certain type of social structure. This is not an attempt to diminish the accomplishments of King but merely to remind ourselves of the deep intelligence he brought to bear in his own analysis of situations and the ways in which he framed his communication both to those inside and out of the Civil Rights Movement.

In order to understand what an important point this is, we may look to an historical case that is analogous - up to a point. The leaders of the pro-democracy protesters in China in 1989 also decided to use non-violent means to try to bring about changes in their society.

One of the most compelling visual images of the 20th century is that of a young soldier standing in front of a tank in a square in Beijing that most of us had never heard of before. It was the archetypal image of a belief in the power of non-violent protest. He, like hundreds of other protesters, were most probably killed by the Chinese government. They disappeared under the treads of those tanks, or were executed or - like so many others who have tried to protest highly efficient oppressive regimes - just disappeared.

It is, of course, true that King himself became the victim of violence.

But the U.S. government never reacted to the Civil Rights Movement in the way in which the Chinese Government reacted to the pro-democracy protesters. There was never the kind of open, wholesale violence in the United States that there was in China. This is a reflection of the different kinds of societies that these two nations hosts and was an important element in shaping King's own leadership style.

King's life reminds us that leadership styles are in part shaped by purely internal forces, in part by the needs and demands of the people that one is leading, and in part by what we may call here (for lack of a better word) by the opposition. Leadership is not something that exists in a vacuum but rather a quality that is constantly being shaped by the people with whom one is engaged in creating dialogues.

King, as Nalty (1996) argues, believed that nonviolence was an essential path for African-Americans to take because only be decrying and eschewing the kinds of casually inflicted everyday violence that African-Americans had themselves for so long been subject to could they be assured of not becoming as morally bereft as the white racists that they were battling.