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Barbara Kellerman on Leadership

Barbara Kellerman's research deals with leadership theory and practice. She is research director of the Center for Public Leadership and lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government. Kellerman's most recent book is 'Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters.'

Q: When you talk about bad leadership, how do you define leadership in general, and bad leadership specifically?

Kellerman: The truth is that there is generally no real agreement among leadership scholars as to what leadership means. Most people use the word to imply a moral imperative. In other words, a leader is somebody who does good things and gets other people to do good things. But I see leadership as a value-free activity - a leader is someone who gets other people to do things he or she wants them to do - whether these things are good or bad.

Q: What are the most common pitfalls for leaders?

Kellerman: First, I should note that bad leadership can be defined either as immoral leadership or as ineffective leadership. Sometimes these two go together and sometimes they do not. Thus there are times when the pitfalls are pitfalls of character. Then there are those occasions that are difficult for leaders to deal with because of circumstances that arise such as followers who for one reason or another refuse to go along. In short, the pitfalls vary from situation to situation: sometimes they relate to the person and sometimes they relate to the circumstances.

Q: Where do followers fit in?

Kellerman: To ignore the followers and focus only on the leaders is to not fully to grasp that leadership is a dynamic activity. There is no leader without at least one follower. Understanding how the relationship unfolds between leaders and followers is crucial.

One example of the dynamic between a bad leader and his followers is that of Marion Barry. Marion Barry was elected to be mayor of Washington, D.C. four times. Especially during elections three and four, it was widely known, to coin a phrase, that he was addicted to 'sex, drugs and rock ‘n' roll.' The particularly interesting part of this story is not Marion Barry, but rather the electorate of Washington, D.C., and also those of Barry's friends, family and close advisers who protected him. The voters elected him into office even though he was widely known to be 'steering Washington into an abyss,' as they said in Washington at the time. So the story of Marion Barry is not only a story of a bad leader, but it is every bit as much about followers who willingly went along with a leader they knew was seriously flawed.

Q: Does leadership differ by society or by country or by region?

Kellerman: The answer is yes - and no. Meaning that leadership in the United States - the way it unfolds, the mores and traditions and laws that are associated with it - are not the same as those associated with leadership in China, or in Canada, or in England, or in Argentina. So there are some profound differences in how leadership is exercised and what the expectations are. However, having said this, there are also some principals of human nature - some of the ways we relate over and over again to issues of power, authority and influence - that I would argue are typical of humankind as a species rather than of individuals in particular. So there are some universals that underlie leadership even though there are of course national and cultural differences.

Q: In your research you look at leaders in various areas, such as business and politics. What steps can organizations and societies take to encourage good leadership and safeguard against bad leadership?

Kellerman: What interests me is that we pay or have paid so incredibly little attention to bad leadership even though I consider it a virulent and often lethal social disease. I call it a social disease. So we attack diseases like AIDS and cancer and heart disease but for whatever constellation of reasons we have not attacked the disease of bad leadership which, as I said, can sometimes have hideously lethal consequences. My research has been an attempt to understand how it is that we might at least slow bad leadership, if not stop it. There are things that individuals can do; there are things that organizations can do. In particular, I would argue that followers need to understand their own role in allowing bad leadership to happen.

There are signs that, because of the cultural changes - for example, the general decline in respect for authority, and technological changes which allow cell phone communication in new and startling ways - followers are increasingly starting to take matters into their own hands. I might give as an example the Harvard case. The President of my own University, Lawrence Summers, was the recipient of the first-ever vote of no confidence by Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. There are similar examples in the corporate sector where shareholder activists and boards of directors are taking aggressive roles in new and different ways. Finally, there are examples in the streets, as in Ukraine and Lebanon recently. The street protests in Shanghai against the Japanese were very much the consequence of new cell phone technology. I think it is just possible that we are seeing a slight but potentially seismic shift in the balance of power between leaders and followers.