Open Climate - 4. Leadership: Introduction

The Basics: Leadership in Scientific Organizations

I will distinguish between leadership, governance, management, administration, and coordination. This entry focuses on leadership, which is a more abstract term and suggests some elements of an individual’s style and values.

In the organizations in which I have worked, “leadership” has often come to mean the group of people, executives perhaps, that sit at the top of a hierarchical organization. These people are often imbued with leadership by virtue of their position. However, from the point of view of leading transformational change, those in leadership positions may or may not be effective leaders.

Leadership can be described simply or with great complexity. Simply, it is leading an organization or group of people. I have seen the definition as simple as anyone with followers; for example, the tour guide at the Acropolis. Leaders have influence. There is a notion of setting directions and making decisions.

From a more complex perspective, there have been studies and analyses of leaders, leadership, and leadership styles for decades. Military leaders and coaches of sports often top the list. There are many taxonomies of leadership. There are industries of teaching leadership and motivational speeches by leaders. The complexity arises because there are many individuals, many types of organizations, and many types of goals that require leaders. There are many ways to achieve goals. Some individuals are the right leader, at the right time, for a certain set of goals. At other times and for other goals, they are not the right leader.

My most serious source of formal leadership training is through the work of Edwin Friedman and the counsel of Patricia Esborg who studied and coached Friedman’s principles of leadership and organizational change. Those principles will be detailed later.

Here, I outline some attributes that I have found to be true of leadership in the organizations of scientists where I have worked.

My job was to lead groups of scientists towards common goals. The organizations in which they were housed were viewed to be entrenched in behavior that needed to be transformed in some way or another. Many would say that what was required was a leader who was strong and decisive more than expert in the particular discipline of the scientific endeavor. Indeed, this was part of the philosophy of management in the George W. Bush administration, where a good executive was asserted to work as effectively in the Social Security Administration as at NASA. There are examples of CEOs in the private sector being successful in disparate organizations; there are, also, counter examples.

I have not seen this discipline agnostic principle work in scientific organizations. If the leader is not well credentialed with some success in research and development and a practitioner of the scientific method, then it flirts with impossibility for that leader to gain the trust of the organization.

There are some general characteristics of leadership:

For a scientific organization the leader must be credentialed and respected as a scientist.
It is critical for the leader to different themself between their personal selves and the organization’s well being.
It is critical that the leader differentiate themself from the individuals in the organizations and to act for the benefit of the organization.
There is the need for the leader to act in different roles, to be adaptive. Just as an effective communicator must be able to read and adapt to different audiences, effective leaders have to adapt to individuals, organizations, and changing external influences. There is often a need to act against personal preferences or intuitive experience.
Because of the need to act in different ways in different rolls and situations, there is substantial emotional work. This emotional work is extraordinarily draining, especially if the leader is acting contrary to their personal preferences.

These attributes have proved to be true in all of the organizations I have led.

As a leader with the mission of transforming an organization, it is important to understand the culture of an organization and the barriers to change. The goal is transformative change, which requires challenging the existing power structures. This requires understanding who has power within the organization, which may not be apparent by their job title. In many cases, power holders have adapted to be successful in an organization’s dysfunction, and therefore, they are disinclined to change.

Transformative change stands in relationship with transactional change. The transactional characteristics of an organization are related to management practices, policy, and procedure. This includes who reports to whom, how resources are handed out, or how individual performance is evaluated. All of these attributes can be associated with the structure of the organization. In most of the organizations that I have led, there is a long history of reorganizations which have not proved effective. This proverbial rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic is comfortable because it feels as if a problem is being addressed and does not have to confront the more difficult cultural problems of an organization.

The transactional characteristics of an organization are strongly influenced by the culture and leadership of an organization. Therefore, a relatively small number of individuals in leadership have influence throughout an entire organization. For example, in an organization infected with destructive sexism, this can be entrenched or changed by the values of the leader and their leadership team.

What is especially pernicious, however, is when a destructive practice such as sexism has become so engrained that an organization’s structure perpetuates the practice. In any entrenched organization, there will be behaviors and practices that are engrained. This is the source of organizational inertia.

Organizational inertia will be perpetuated by training and hiring managers and leaders from within – “this is the way we have always done things.” Therefore, effective transformational leaders cannot simply have a set of values that would benefit the organization. They must also understand how the structural attributes of the organization contribute to the deleterious entrenchment of the organization. Then, of course, they must have the skills and willingness to lead change – to get the organization to follow their leadership.

To close this description on leadership, I reiterate that in the organizations I have led, there is always the presence of fragmentation. A characteristic of that fragmentation is that individuals or small groups are behaving, largely, independently of each other. Therefore, they need to act more as whole. This will require a rigor of internal organizational communication and maintaining continuous focus on organizational rather than individual’s goals. It will require coordination, but beyond that, it will require a diligence of management that will advance and hold back individual’s contributions to assure the right balance to provide successful organizational outcomes.

4. Leadership: Introduction

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About the Author: Richard Rood