Leadership: Leaders, Followers, Environments

Communication: adaptation and sense-making

If power has limits, then how do effective leaders engage, persuade, and motivate followers within the organizational settings and cultures where they interact? Totalitarian rulers and dictators, of course, use force to coerce and to bend followers their way. This is why large police states and vast military forces are ubiquitous in countries such as North Korea, China, Russia, Syria, and in the rest of the former Soviet satellites. But even in those settings, leaders must use more than force. They resort to a range of persuasive skills and even to dramaturgical and theatrical performances, such as U.S. General George Patton standing in front of a huge American flag delivering a speech or U.S. Civil Rights legend Rosa Parks iconically sitting in the front of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. Leaders are figureheads who are constantly “on stage,” being watched and analyzed. Leaders symbolically dramatize mission, values, and strategies of organizations and companies. Communication in all its manifestations is the real work of the leadership process.

Think about any top manager or leader. The higher up the organization, the less they actually do in the functional areas like production or marketing. This might seem strange, but they have to rely on others to do the work in the various areas while they oversee the process. The top bosses don't normally write code, design software, fly the airplanes, take bank deposits, or teach university ...