How a leader influence his follower?

Traditional Approach: An Individualistic Perspective on Leadership vs Network Perspective on Leadership

Traditionally a leadership is assumed as a born quality, however here we make a comparison of traditional aspect of leadership with the network perspective.

All the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership. John Galbraith(1979)

The art of leadership is saying no, not yes. Tony Blair

Leaders need to be optimists. Their vision is beyond the present. Rudolph Giuliani

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower. Steve Jobs

Some of the best business and nonprofit CEOs I’ve worked with over a sixty-five-year consulting career were not stereotypical leaders. They were all over the map in terms of their personalities, attitudes, values, strengths, and weaknesses. Peter Drucker

In view of recent prominent leaders a leader should have an certain traits critical thinker, optimistic, ambitious, innovator, and on the behavioral side “ability to face challenges”, “must not give up hope”, “ability to say, no”, or “willingness to confront people anxiety”. In view of management a leader should have several qualities like openness, humility, charisma, assertiveness, etc.

In reality, “Leadership is intrinsically subjective, and an attitude, strength or value that makes someone a leader might not work for someone else” Galo.

In future, personal qualities will not be enough to grade someone as a good leader rather how he influence his followers.

Who could be a good Leader

In the previous post three different groups were given to identify leaders independently and their role on their followers. Following is map of interaction of people, where nodes are humans and edges are ‘communicate’ and it can be emerged from several contexts:

· Management science students playing football shown in group 1, students of same department playing soccer in group 2, and students from different department playing both games in group 2.

· Researchers working in an institute on similar topics in group 1, researchers working on different topics at same institute in group 2 and researchers working in another institute having research on different topics group 3.

· Friendship networks of employees with similar departments in group 1 and group 2 and their friendship with another department in group 3.

For instance, consider students sports group case. Students are interested in electing some leader: A leader which will be influential in his own group with have enough influence to other groups to convey and propagate adequately. Each student have its own characteristics to be a leader, can we use the friendship or communication network to choose the leader?

Suppose if we choose Graham as a leader, would James be a good candidate?. He has only one friend or communicating with one student in group 2 and have no connection with any member of group 2 and group 3. If Graham would have to persuade most of the fellows in his point then he has very little leverage to do so as he don’t know much of others. If there were an important problem that student of group 3 would want to address, Graham might not know that unless it affects him too. Indeed, Graham would not be a good leader for his community. Notably how Graham could have all the above mentioned traits of the best leader but still not be a good representative due to lack of means to influence the rest.

Then what about Julia, she has the highest degree (the measure of the number of links) among all students. She is in a better position to identify the problems of the group as she communicates or friend with a lot of students. She should also be able to use her ability to influence, persuade and follow her neighbors in the link graph. Is Julia then the best leader for all students group? She might. But there are some reasons to be noticed:

Julia might suffer an information/friendship overload. Lot of people communicate with her, lots of students wants support from her which make it difficulty to exert influence and she become unable to process all the information.

Julia does not communicate with anybody in group 2, and she has only very few connections in group 1. She will find it very challenging to exert her influence with those students in group 2. Therefore, she might be unaware of the issues concerned with group 2.

Julia communicates with a lot of people, but she might not have any friend among them. So what we can call this situation that a marginal role in a “deeper” network.

Then who should be the best leader here? see u soon

Ins Network Advisor

Note: Influenced by Edoardo Gallo in “A Network Perspective on Leadership”