The Three Faces of Leadership: Manager, Artist, Priest

Citation

Taylor, S.S. (2007), "The Three Faces of Leadership: Manager, Artist, Priest", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 20 No. 1, pp. 150-153. https://doi.org/10.1108/09534810710715342

Book after book speaks of the “art of leadership” or claims that “leadership is as much an art as it is a science.” This usually means that leadership cannot be defined with precision, that it cannot be reduced to a set of skills and techniques, or that there is something deep and unnamable about leadership. Seldom does it mean that the book is going to take seriously the idea of leadership as an art. Hatch, Kostera and Kozminski's book is a rare exception that actually treats leadership as an art form and in their words, “explores the aesthetics of business leadership.”

The three faces of leadership (manager, artist, and priest) echo a long tradition that goes back to the Greeks' concern with the true, the good, and the beautiful. It is only in the last three hundred years that we have really separated these into instrumental, moral and aesthetic spheres of existence (Wilber, 1998) and only in the last hundred years that the instrumental has come to so completely dominate our thinking about management. Because there has already been so much written about leadership from an instrumental perspective, the authors spend little time on the manager face and instead focus on the leader as artist and priest.

This focus comes from their own reactions to the empirical sample that is the heart of the book. Hatch, Kostera and Kozminski started with a study of all the CEO interviews that appeared in the Harvard Business Review between 1989 and 1998. Throughout the book these interviews are analyzed in a variety of ways and quoted extensively. The stories provide an enjoyable break from the more academic analysis and show us something of the charisma these CEOs display as artists and priests.

There are three analytic frameworks used in the book. The first considers the stories that the CEOs tell within the interviews and categorizes them into comic, tragic, epic, and romantic stories. The second considers the interviews as embodying dramatic form and classifies them into morality plays, modern drama, happenings and global shows. The third framework looks at the CEOs as they reveal themselves in the interviews and classifies them based on which Greek gods they embody, Hermes, Athena, Demeter, Zeus, Ares, Hephaestus, Persephone, Hades, and Heracles.

Overlaying these three analytic frameworks and a discussion of how the Harvard Business Review interviews play a role in forming our ideas of management is the idea of the three faces of leadership: manager, artist, and priest. The manager is concerned with organizing and controlling, the priest with ethics and empathy, and the artist with creating and provoking. There is no simple mapping between the three faces and the three frameworks, but rather the frameworks and the three faces are woven together in a rather complex way.

The complexity of the approach and the willingness to dwell with these different frameworks places this work more within a literary tradition than in the tradition of popular management texts. There are no simple summaries or prescriptions, no seven steps to artistic leadership or three keys to priestly leadership. Instead there is the richness of the CEO interviews combined with critical analysis that draws upon the frameworks and faces. Which of course raises the question, what does a more literary tradition have to offer leadership scholars and practitioners?

First let me first divide writing about the arts into two parts (recognizing that this represents more of a continuum than a dichotomy): criticism and practice. Criticism is about how we make sense of artistic forms, while practice is about producing artistic forms. Criticism can be about a critic judging the art and then offering an intellectual explanation for that judgment. For example, an art critic might say Lichtenstein's Cow Going Abstract is a great painting because of the ironic juxtaposition of the figurative comic book style, the gestural abstract style, and the everydayness of the cow. Criticism can also be about developing a more sophisticated appreciation of art. These two are related in that we need to have a sophisticated appreciation in order to be able to articulate the judgments we make about art. That is to say, we need to know something about what figurative comic book style is, and what gestural abstract style is in order to articulate what we like about Cow Going Abstract.

The link between criticism and practice is less clear. Just as there is with much of management theory, there is generally a belief that a better and more sophisticated understanding of something will somehow translate into better practice. A cursory look at the art world shows that even though some critics are competent artists and some artists are competent critics, there is hardly a strong causal relationship. In leadership, we see the same lack of relationship between critics/scholars of leadership and leaders. I would hazard a guess that a sophisticated understanding is helpful, but not sufficient for producing art and leadership. Nonetheless, this seems to me to be the pedagogical theory behind using the case method in teaching MBA students – if they analyze real world business problems they will somehow be better managers in the future. We see this in the arts as well, for example a bachelor's degree in theater usually includes courses in dramatic literature.

However, the bulk of the courses for the degree in theater will be practice‐based. This is the area that I think The Three Faces of Leadership is missing. Where Hatch, Kostera and Kozminski ask us to identify stories as being comic, tragic, epic, or romantic practice based storytelling, literature might talk about the content of the story and how to connect with the audience (Lipman, 1995). Similarly, where Hatch, Kostera and Kozminski ask us to identify leadership drama as morality play, modern drama, happenings or global show, Stanislavski (1936) would tell actors to be clear about their concrete objectives and Clurman (1972) would tell directors to focus on the spine of the play. The difference is that the practice based writing focuses on the technical aspects of the art rather than taking a critical approach. This technical approach is common within the arts: as Hatch, Kostera and Kozminski say, “put a group of drummers together in a room and it will not be long before you hear them talking about the relative merits of different drum pedals (pg. 132).” However, within the arts the technical discussion always occurs within the context of the practice as an art – something that can get lost in modern technical discussions of leadership.

I used the book as one of several texts in my graduate course titled, “interpersonal and leadership skills for technological managers” and I use a more practice based approach to storytelling and drama in my class sessions to complement the book. I teach at a technical university and my students are by and large technologists. Three Faces of Leadership provides them an intellectual argument for moving away from their dominantly instrumental framing and approaching leadership as an art. It also provides a framework for the start of a more sophisticated appreciation of leadership storytelling and drama when they encounter it. None of this is easy for them and the book has been very helpful in providing the conceptual basis for an arts‐based approach to leadership (which is not an easy sell to technologists).

The real issue that this book raises is about an arts‐based approach to leadership. What do we get from taking the idea that leadership is an art seriously? As Hatch, Kostera and Kozminski show us, it opens up new ways to critically engage leadership. My personal answer is that we get greater authenticity as leaders seek to develop their own voice in the way that artists do (Bryan et al., 1998). I also see the opportunity to make the leap from effective to exceptional – to take an idea from positive organizational scholarship (Cameron et al., 2003). And perhaps most importantly, there will be those artist leaders that redefine what the very practice of leadership looks like.