The Blunderbuss of Leadership

What?
Antony Flew, former Oxford professor and leading atheist turned deist, refers to Paul Davie's Blunderbuss Theory in his book There Is a God. This humorous theory, or pun, is used to refute the idea that we exist in a multiverse.  The multiverse idea stands opposed to an intelligent design view of the universe we live in. He simply calls the multiverse theory a blunderbuss because "It explains everything and yet nothing" all at once. When addressing intelligent design, the multiverse idea gives us no real answers. It simply proposes a grandiose idea that gets us no where.

Connecting this thought to leadership - in my brief study of leadership I seem to have run in to a blunderbuss of my own. When searching for a simple (and agreed upon) definition of leadership, I find everything and nothing all at once!


So What?
A rather intriguing book by Jackson and Perry (2011) tells us the "not-so-good news" about leadership in that it "is a phenomenon that everyone has an opinion on but few of us seem to agree exactly on what it really is." How does a storied idea like leadership remain so youthful in its definition? In their article Asking the Right Questions about Leadership, Hackman and Wageman (2007) seem to add insult to injury when they state "there are no generally accepted definitions of what leadership is, no dominant paradigms for studying it, and little agreement about the best strategies for developing and exercising it."

And then to add to the confusion, there remains specific types of leadership such as: authentic, transformational, ethical, shared and new-genre leadership. At this point the blunderbuss theory rears its ugly head.

Now What?
Hackman and Wageman continue and imply that we've quite possibly been asking the wrong questions about leadership. In doing so, it seems we've muddied muddy water. An appropriate, or right question to ask of the topic is "Not do there exist common dimensions on which all leaders can be arrayed, but are good and poor leadership qualitatively different phenomena?" This question and more importantly its answer, points us in a firm direction toward defining leadership. The authors keenly point out that in their studies "Poor leaders were not individuals with low scores on the same dimensions on which good leaders excelled; instead, they exhibited entirely different patterns of behavior."

To say that poor leadership and good leadership have different dimensions and behaviors is to take a refreshing step forward in defining leadership. I realize the complex nature of leadership and acknowledge that it is a daunting task to narrow the scope of our definition. However, a world in desperate need of leadership doesn't need a blunderbuss answer - it needs a clear definition of what exactly it's looking for in its leaders.