The Connective Edge: Leading in an Interdependent World

Citation

Kramer, R. (2000), "The Connective Edge: Leading in an Interdependent World", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 21 No. 7, pp. 366-367. https://doi.org/10.1108/lodj.2000.21.7.366.1

“Quite simply, a masterpiece”, says Warren Bennis. Move over John Kotter, James McGregor Burns and Rosabeth Kanter. What dazzled Bennis is this breathtakingly brilliant book by Jean Lipman‐Blumen, the Bradshaw Professor of Public Policy and professor of organizational behavior at the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management, Claremont Graduate University. A powerful new voice has entered the debate on what constitutes authentic leaders, a voice that will have to be reckoned with by all future writers on moral leadership. A voice of passion, integrity and courage.

“The terror of death compels us to search for leaders, gods, and belief systems – religious, political, scientific, and artistic – to protect us”, writes Lipman‐Blumen. “Leadership turns our attention away from our personal death and directs it instead to a conscious discourse about pervasive societal issues, a discourse that allows us to deal symbolically with our unconscious personal fears” (pp. 328 and 332). The role of leadership, therefore, is essential. But what, exactly, is “connective” leadership? This is a leadership, says Lipman‐Blumen, that is consciously created in response to our unshakable need to deny death – more pragmatically, in response to the life‐long dialectic between our fear of, and desire for, separation and union, difference and likeness, individuation and embeddedness. This universal and unresolvable dilemma, argues Lipman‐Blumen, is at the root of the human condition itself. As Becker (1973) writes so powerfully in his Pulitzer‐Prize winning The Denial of Death:

On the one hand, the creature is impelled by a powerful desire to identify with the cosmic forces, to merge himself with the rest of nature. On the other hand he wants to be unique, to stand out as something different and apart …

You can see that man wants the impossible: He wants to lose his isolation and keep it at the same time. He can’t stand the sense of separateness, and yet he can’t allow the complete suffocation of his vitality. He wants to expand by merging with the powerful beyond that transcends him, yet he wants while merging with it to remain individual and aloof… (Becker, 1973, pp. 152‐3).

The role of leader has always existed in human history. According to Lipman‐Blumen, the most important task of future leaders is to help their constituents connect, free of overwhelming anxiety and guilt, to the dialectic described with such heartbreaking beauty by Becker – to connect to themselves, as it were – in a more productive, more life‐affirming, potentially even death‐transcending, way. To live the creative life, we must deliberately choose our fate by willingly saying “yes” to the “must”. We must deliberately choose the impossible. The “connective leader” simultaneously connects us to ourselves, to each other, to society, to the world and, in the largest sense, to the whole cosmos, to what the psychologist Otto Rank (1978), who strongly influenced Becker, calls “the ALL” (Rank, 1978,p. 155).

Deeply grounded in ethics and accountability, fully recognizing his or her own mortality, Blumen‐Lipman’s leader, practicing a “politics of commonality”, can help us creatively integrate the dialectics of individuation and relationship, diversity and interdependence, self and other, I and Thou, the individual and the organization, the nation‐state and the global community, without sacrificing either pole, in a whipsaw of opposites, to the demands of the other. This, then, is Lipman‐Blumen’s breathtaking vision of connective leadership. A vision that encompasses a far wider repertoire of behaviors than traditional leadership. A vision that sees leaders as simultaneously forceful and enabling, competitive and persuasive, powerful and entrusting, individualistic and collaborative. “With an eye for diversity”, writes Lipman‐Blumen in Connective Leadership, “they integrate and encourage multiple visions; accept ambiguity and reject orthodoxy; and assemble changing coalitions where followers shed passivity for active constituency, eventually to emerge as leaders themselves” (p. 344).

Reaching out dramatically to friends and foes alike, connective leaders go around intellectual defenses to reach directly into the emotional solar plexus, according to Lipman‐Blumen. Such persons “use” themselves and everyone else as “instruments” or servants to accomplish their cause, practicing a service‐oriented instrumentalism, an ethical Machiavellianism, whose purpose is not to advance the leader’s power or glory but to allow us to reach beyond our narrow self interest, our self‐imposed boundaries, to serve a larger whole.

In addition to helping transform passive followers into active constituents who voluntarily choose their fate, the “connective leader” connects, with the utmost authenticity and compassion, to other leaders (especially former enemies) and to other leaders’ constituencies, providing life‐expanding opportunities for all. They take people on a search for meaning, says Lipman‐Blumen. They invite their constituents to participate in causes bigger than themselves, offering people the opportunity to ennoble themselves – for the purpose of offering them a fleeting taste of immortality, of greatness, a symbolic but palpable transcendence of mortality.

The world today is torn by contradictory forces, says Lipman‐Blumen. Diversity and interdependence pull in opposite directions. Following Rank, who spun out, like a double helix, the implications of this dialectic in all of his writings, Becker calls these two forces the twin ontological motives. Paradoxically, these two forces call out each other. The two forces go in opposite directions but each creates and calls for the other. Diversity sets us apart and affirms our differences but too much independence makes us lonely for others. Interdependence, especially in the business and political worlds, drives us to collaboration, teams, alliances, and networks but too much embeddedness in “the crowd” makes us feel that we have lost our identity, sacrificed our difference, our uniqueness. “Will people ever learn”, Otto Rank (1958) once asked poignantly, summarizing his life’s work in one sentence, “that there is no other equality possible than the equal right of every individual to become and be himself, which actually means to accept his own difference and have it accepted by others?” (Rank, 1958, p. 267).

For leaders in the coming generation, what Blumen‐Lipman calls the “connective era”, both of Becker’s twin ontological motives must be fully accepted and integrated into their souls. If leaders try to use the same one‐dimensional behaviors that they’ve used in the past – authoritarian, charismatic, ego‐driven or even naively collaborative – they are going to fail. The new leadership involves a paradoxical way of being, neither authoritarian nor simply participatory, neither command‐and‐control nor anarchic, neither arbitrary nor self‐sacrificial.

The “connective leader” lives and models, as a way of being, maximum individuality within maximum community. This requires an exquisite balancing act, and presupposes that leaders, in businesses, local communities, national politics or international relations, have the emotional intelligence to accept the compatibility of what are usually seen as irreconcilable or contradictory needs – that is, the emotional intelligence to accept, what Becker calls, the impossible. There are deep existential reasons, says Lipman‐Blumen, why “connective leaders” may be more effective in coming generations. For leadership in an era when physical and geopolitical boundaries are dissolving, when century‐old ideologies are dying, the false dichotomy between interdependence and diversity, union and separation, likeness and difference, ally and competitor, friend and enemy, must be transcended. This, above all, is the role of the “connective leader”.

The richest and most creative energies of the human being seem to emerge out of connection, out of the transitional space between I and Thou, the individual and the group, the leader and the organization, the artist and society – a space of pulsating energy, writes Rank (1989) in Art and Artist, in which the edges of self and other are fused but not confused. There is an eternal oscillation between the need for individuation and the need for attachment, the will to separate and the will to unite, independence and dependence, diversity and interdependence, aloneness and intimacy – between the invigorating, creative solitude of freedom and the love and acceptance obtainable only within community. Both are necessary, at once.

To “organize” a human system, whether on a local microcosmic scale or a global macrocosmic scale, means nothing less that to have all its parts in regular contact with, and listening closely to, each other. In the workplace, the organization is a human system of interlocking perceptions, emotions, wills, meanings, communications and relationships, a latticework of selves and others.

Paradoxical to its core, managerial leadership for Lipman‐Blumen is truly a performing art: a creative process of growth and learning that binds leader and follower together, integrating and celebrating multiple visions, bringing together changing coalitions, courageously bridging the fear of death with the genuine possibility of connecting, even if only fleetingly, to the ALL, in a mutual and continuing pursuit of a larger whole. “Paradoxically”, writes Lipman‐Blumen in Connective Leadership, “in the act of immersing ourselves in the greatest expression of Other, that is, some larger purpose, we emerge as our most unique selves” (p. 334).

Bennis’s judgment of this book is no exaggeration. This is a splendid book for graduate‐level courses on management or leadership. If you do not read Lipman‐Blumen, I am afraid you may never truly understand the future of leadership.