Understanding leadershipNovember 5, 2017

Book: Praxiswissen Führung

My book provides foundational knowledge for anyone who wants to engage seriously with leadership. It offers reflection for managers and HR leaders and encourages questioning your inner attitude. (Flyer) Starting point is a question students often asked me: "Why do adults voluntarily submit to alien authorities?"

1. How do leading and being led work today and in future?

The first chapters are shaped by fundamental questions about the origin, development and future of leadership. What can history teach us about leading? 1.1 Under which social conditions does which kind of leadership arise? Over millennia, as life and work became more organised, principles and models of leadership differentiated too. 1.2 Which psychosocial conditions make leadership relations emerge and stabilise? How does the ancient interplay of domination and submission connect leaders and led? Leadership relations arise in interaction. Not the strongest or smartest become leaders, as history of "great leaders" shows. They stabilise through social construction. Everyone has their own reality and constructs their world so that as little as possible must change. 1.3 What does the future of leadership look like? Will the "digital economy" drastically change work and leadership? Or will workers and leaders organise in solidary stakeholder networks?

2. What does a leader do today and how do you become one?

To get closer to the phenomenon of leadership, the book clarifies its dimensions today and the tasks and roles of a leader: 2.1 What is leadership today and what is a leader? People in companies are led both by the company's leadership system (structural leadership) and by their direct managers (personal leadership). Leaders have at least three fields of impact: they are supervisors, partners in social interaction, and co-shapers of work structures and culture. 2.2 How do you become a leader today? Companies invest heavily in finding the "right" people for leadership roles, assuming certain traits predispose someone to lead. Selection uses aptitude tests, assessment or development centres—but diagnostics often promise more than they deliver.

3. What core competencies must a leader have today?

A leader needs the ability to shape relations with staff productively, including insight into basic drivers of human coexistence. Key dimensions of leading and being led are motivation, responsibility and self-responsibility, communication and conversation: 3.1 How do motivation and motivating work? Performing and shaping our world purposefully is a basic human need—so motivation strategies demotivate in the long run. A leader's task is not to "motivate" staff to perform but to create good conditions and maintain capability through training and health promotion. 3.2 What do responsibility and self-responsibility mean for a leader? Hierarchies create responsibility-shy people who legitimise hierarchies—every company gets the staff and leaders it deserves. Self-responsibility means being in charge of one's own concerns; leaders must foster it and learn to work with self-responsible staff. 3.3 Communication and conversation—how to make yourself understood? No communication, no leadership relation. Models from communication science help—from sender-receiver to vicious circles, styles and transactional analysis for productive talks. Knowing rules of productive conversation, arguing well and spotting rhetorical tricks and "killer phrases" pays off.

4. Structural leadership – reflection for HR

Leaders must also engage with the framework their company's leadership system offers and its limits—rules, norms and processes shaping structure, culture and staff. The book covers leading with values, power, change, employment relations and health promotion: 4.1 Leading with values—what is the benefit? Leadership should orient, convey meaning and mobilise people for a common cause—whether that exists depends on shared commitment to trust and justice. 4.2 Micropolitics—how is power handled in organisations? Companies are not as tidy as organigrams suggest; people pursue their own goals and build their own rule systems. Formal structures are overlaid by influence across functions and levels—how leading works when this is taken seriously. 4.3 Change management—how are change processes led? Change is constant; sustainable change needs need, capability and readiness. Local staff have their own expectations—"What's in it for me?"—to integrate for lasting effect. 4.4 What should leaders know about employment relations, labour law and co-determination? Trust and commitment are fundamental—the "psychological contract". For leaders, company-level labour law matters most: managers, staff with contracts and employee representation meet directly. 4.5 Health-oriented leadership—own health and staff health? Companies lose billions through absence and reduced performance. Securing health and wellbeing demands much of leaders: how to adapt practice, legal requirements, promoting health and health management systems.

5. Contents at a glance

- Emergence of leadership as a social process - Leadership as social construction - Images of humanity and leadership styles - Leadership and selection of leaders today - Motivation and motivating - Responsibility and self-responsibility - Communication and conversation - Leading with values - Micropolitics – leadership and power in organisations - Change management – leading change processes - Employment relations, labour law and co-determination - Health-oriented leadership

6. The view of Alfred A. Neumann

Leadership literature is mostly written from the perspective of scholars or consultants. My book does too, but differently: the fictional Alfred A. Neumann, a skilled worker, is interviewed on leadership questions and interrupts me with practical objections—representing the perspective of the led as "empirical basis".

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