1 Summary of Arguments
Generally, the literature describes common principles of leadership behaviors and practices that can result in positive organizational or mission outcomes. These include the demonstration of integrity, articulation of vision, development of people (with an emphasis on innovation) mission-accomplishment, collaboration, and teamwork. Directly applying this theme to DHS, the inference is that effective leadership skills are needed for leaders to meet the challenges in DHS’s operational and organizational environment.
76 Cheese, “Disturbing the System,” 56. 77 Ibid.
78 Ibid., 57-59. 79 Ibid., 56.
Effective execution of leadership in today’s environment requires vision, knowledge, dynamism, an urgent response ethos, and mission-focus given organizational, functional, and technological complexity. According to Peter Cheese and Robert Thomas, this is supported by the consensus of industry and government leaders who confirm that the quality and capabilities of an organization’s leaders can enable or disable success and potential for future progress.80
As presented by Michael Harris, the practice of leadership is both an art and a science. Leaders need to refine and combine skills to lead people to the desire to exceed expectations:
• Art: Emotional; individualistic; contingency-based – motivating team
members and energizing the group; addressing conflicts and promoting team work; working with variety of personalities.
• Science: Rational; systematic; information-based; information about
leadership – what people expect (honesty, communication, competence, motivation); planning; programming; prioritizing.81
According to authors Hill, Gordon, and Kim, a common challenge is that, unlike basic practices that can be demonstrated vis-à-vis procedural steps, there are no prescribed methods or formulas that leaders follow to achieve success.82 Thus, the practice of leadership that involves employing a mix of leadership behaviors in various situations has been referred to as an art and a science. As Andrew Garfield wrote as part of his analysis of the Irish Republican Army’s leaders, there is no single leadership practice used by leaders; however, successful leaders tend to combine a number of practices and styles to yield the best effect.83
80 Thomas and Cheese, “Leadership,” 4.
81 Michael Harris, “Leadership in a Time of Crisis: The Shackleton Way” (lecture, Siena Heights
College, Adrian Michigan April 9, 2003).
82 Randall W. Hill Jr., Andrew Gordon, and Julia M. Kim, Learning the Lessons of Leadership Experience: Tools for Interactive Case Method Analysis (Los Angeles: Institute for Creative Technologies,
University of Southern California, 2004), 1.
83 Andrew Garfield, “PIRA Lessons Learned: A Model of Terrorist Leader Succession,” Low Intensity Conflict and Law Enforcement 11, no. 2 and 3 (2002): 282.
However, Keith Grint disagreed with the notion that the demonstration of leadership skills is both an art and a science; he posited that leadership is an ensemble of arts.84 He wrote that four particular arts mirror the central features of leadership:
• The invention of an identity.
• The formulation of a strategic vision. • The construction of organizational tactics.
• The deployment of persuasive mechanisms to ensure followers actually follow.
In summary, leadership is concerned with skills that establish and coordinate the relationships between the who, the what, the how, and the why. While science may help the leader and the organization achieve success, leadership requires fundamentally subjective skills whereby the application is more accurately considered an art.85 The following excerpt from Grint’s book summarizes his art-science argument:
…leadership is not a science but an art; it is a performance not a recipe; it
is an invention not a discovery. If it was a science, we could reduce the essence down to a parsimonious set of rules and apply the result with confidence.86
Robert and Janet Denhardt wrote that leaders must be effective change managers who:
• Assess the organization’s environment and the need for change.
• Plan strategically and pragmatically for change.
• Build support for the change process both through communication and
modeling their behavior.
84 Keith Grint, Arts of Leadership (New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 2000), 27. 85 Ibid., 27.
• Implement changes – and in doing so – encouraging a broader positive
attitude to change and innovation.
• Institutionalize the change.87
The Denhardts also emphasized that a leader’s learning capacity is of utmost importance – especially as it relates to knowing themselves, their values, their stakeholders, their organization, and the governance authorities (business acumen).88 Congruent with the emphasis on change capabilities of leaders, the research findings of W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne find that once the beliefs and energies of the critical mass of the organization are engaged, the adoption of a new idea will “spread like an epidemic,” bringing the change very quickly.89 Citing the theory of “tipping point leadership,” they wrote that such a movement for change can only be realized when the leaders:
• Make unforgettable and unarguable calls for change. • Concentrate their resources in support of this.
• Mobilize the commitment of the organization’s key players. • Silence the cynics.90
John Storey wrote that leaders need to be skilled at handling two very different processes:
• Exploitation of current, configured assets. • Exploration of new combinations of assets.91
87 Robert Denhardt and Janet Vinzant Denhardt, “Leadership for Change: Case Study in American
Local Government,” Grant Report, Arlington, Virginia: PricewaterhouseCoopers Endowment for the Business of Government (1999): 5.
88 Ibid., 5.
89 W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, “Tipping Point Leadership,” Harvard Business Review
(2003): 62.
90 Ibid., 62.
Jim Collins and his research team found that all of the “great” companies had leaders that demonstrated traits of duality: modest, willful, humble, and fearless.92 This translates into the demonstration of the following actions and traits:
• Utmost ambition first for the organization’s success as opposed to their individual gain as well as deep modesty.
• Undeniable modesty (not “false modesty” but rather descriptors like quiet, humble, reserved, shy, gracious, mild-mannered, understated, etc.).
• Steadfast resolve – getting done what must be done.93
Research by the Corporate Leadership Council revealed that having high-quality management is a top employee preference (it ranked second in importance behind base pay), and this preference has significantly increased in importance over time.94 That is, higher skill level (thus, the higher the quality) possessed by a management team translates directly into more value that employees place on the job.95 Likewise, they found that there is a significant penalty (from the employee’s perspective) associated with a poor quality, less-skilled management team.96
An interview by McKinsey Quarterly with Richard Rumelt revealed that the most important skill requirement of a leader is for him or her to be adept at absorbing a significant chunk of the ambiguity in the situation and delegating much less ambiguous problems to subordinates.97 In short, the leader defines and clarifies the problems and challenges for his or her entire organization so that everyone else can get to work.98
92 Jim Collins, Good to Great (New York: Harpers Collins Publishers, 2001), 22. 93 Ibid., 25-30.
94 Corporate Leadership Council, The Compelling Offer Revisited, Changes in Employee Preferences Across Time (Washington, D.C.: CLC Solutions, 2002), vii.
95 Ibid., 24. 96 Ibid., 25.
97 The interviewee specifically uses the term “manager” but then describes an example with the CEO;
thus, this has been interpreted to mean “leader” in this context.
98 Dan P. Lovallo and Larry T. Mendonca, “Strategy’s Strategist: An Interview with Richard Rumelt,” McKinsey Quarterly, (2007): 8.
As quoted by Naill Fitzgerald, the former Chairman of Unilever, in Stephen M. R. Covey’s book on trust, “You can have all the facts and figures, all the supporting evidence, all the endorsement that you want, but if you don’t command trust, you won’t get anywhere.”99 Covey wrote that trust is a combination of two leadership attributes: competence and character.100 He asserted that the ability to grow and foster trust is not only vital to one’s personal well-being, but it is the key leadership competency of today’s global economy.101 He wrote that when leaders build and foster trust in an organization, they will reap the following organizational dividends: high collaboration and partnering; effortless communication; positive, transparent relationships with employees and stakeholders; fully aligned systems and structures; and strong innovation, engagement, confidence, and loyalty.102 Covey referenced the methods of recognized leaders as well as existing theory to support his “competence + character = trust” formula:
• Jack Welch (former CEO of General Electric) judges managers on how they “live the values” (character) and “deliver results” (competence). • Warren Buffet (CEO of Berkshire Hathaway) emphasizes “integrity”
(character) and “intelligence” (competence).
• Ram Charan (author and consultant to Fortune 500 CEOs) emphasizes being a “leader of the people” (character) and a “leaders of the business” (competence).
• Leadership theory is about what a leader “is” (character) and what a leader “does” (competence).
• Performance modeling considers “attributes” (character) and “competencies” (competence).
• Ethics theory says, “Do the right thing” (character) and “Get the right thing done” (competence).
99 Stephen M.R. Covey, The Speed of Trust (New York, Free Press, 2006), 4. 100Ibid., 30.
101 Ibid., 2. 102 Ibid., 24.
• Decision-making approaches attempt to balance the “heart” (character) with the “head” (competence).103
R. E. Quinn, Crossan, and Mazutis wrote that executives must be skilled in carrying out eight distinct roles at the same time: innovator, broker, facilitator, mentor, coordinator, monitor, producer, and director.104 Similarly, to affect organization-wide performance, it was posited by Quinn (as well as Hart) that chief executives must be highly skilled in four areas: vision-setter, motivator, analyzer, and task master.105
Specific to homeland security leaders, authors Leonard Marcus, Barry Dorn, and Joseph Henderson synthesized the skills that they deemed critical for a concept about “meta-leadership” (which is further described as a leadership strategy in paragraph F).
1. Courage – despite significant resistance, persists in forging the system- wide mission, focus, and connectivity necessary to build a network of readiness.
2. Curiosity – approaches challenges with a calculated measure of humility and curiosity.
3. Imagination – envisions what cannot otherwise be seen.
4. Organizational sensibilities – envisions and constructs complex networks and capacity to enable critical decision-making connectivity.
5. Persuasion – makes the case for seriously accepting threats and then promotes a sound strategy and plan to address them.
6. Conflict management – steps in to resolve emerging differences and keeps everyone on mission and on track.
7. Crisis management – prompts a coordination of effort within the moment of crisis that maximizes the response system’s capacity to reduce mortality and morbidity.
103 Covey, Speed, 31.
104 Robert E. Quinn, Beyond Rational Management: Mastering the Paradoxes and Competing Demands of High Performance (San Francisco: Josey-Bass, 1988) in Crossan and Mazutis, “Transcendent
Leadership,” 132.
105 Stuart L. Hart and Robert E. Quinn, “Roles Executives Play: CEOs, Behavioral Complexity, and
Firm Performance,” Human Relations 46, no. 5 (1993): 543-574 in Crossan and Mazutis, “Transcendent Leadership,” 132.
8. Emotional intelligence – derives steadiness, security, and support from within themselves.
9. Persistence – brings and maintains ample perseverance by keeping pace with the flow of surrounding events.
10. Meta-leadership as a valued effort – understands and values the importance of social networking and its direct impact upon the effectiveness of their work during an emergency.106
2. Literature Critique
The literature on leadership skills is vast. The key challenge for this subtopic was determining which publications had the greatest degree of equities to the leadership skills that are needed to be successful in the DHS environment. Most of the literature conveyed themes of the particular traits and skills that leaders need in order to be successful. The differences across the literature were noted as they related to the “ideal” skills that a leader should possess. That is, the differences were noted in terms of the authors’ views on the priority that each of the skills or behaviors should have (i.e., differentiating which skills or behaviors that are most critically needed).