#359 from Innovative Leader Volume 7, Number 9          September 1998

Art, Science, and Leadership
by Dick Richards

Dick Richards is an organization development consultant, training designer, workshop leader, and speaker.  This article is adapted from his book, Artful Work: Awakening Joy, Meaning, and Commitment in the Workplace (Berrett-Koehler hardback, 1996, and Berkley paperback, 1997), which won the Benjamin Franklin Award as best business book of 1996.  Dick is located in Cincinnati (phone 513-624-7477, e-mail dkrichards@aol.com).

Several years ago a few colleagues and I created a questionnaire to provide feedback to leaders about their “leadership behavior.”  We created a leadership model, designed a questionnaire and feedback process that had a sound methodology and has proved useful to many people.  We did our homework, validating the instrument with more than three hundred leaders.  The questionnaire, like others of its kind, describes behaviors and characteristics of leaders.

During the time we worked on the questionnaire, I felt a vague sense of discomfort about our efforts; something seemed missing, but I couldn’t grasp exactly what it might be.  I figured it out during a seminar on writing.

Art Through Newton’s Lens

In a crowded stifling room, fifty people are sitting on metal folding chairs at the evening seminar.  The leaders are equipped with overhead transparencies showing data they collected during a comprehensive research study.  Somehow they identified the dozen most-admired contemporary American writers and calculated the average number of words per sentence and average number of sentences per paragraph in those writers’ works.  The presenters believed that writers would maximize their chances of being successful by paying strict attention to these formulas.

The bored audience collectively cheered when a woman in the back of the room stood up and said, “Isaac Beshevis Singer is a friend of mine, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that he doesn’t give a damn about any of this.”

Good writing is not gauged solely by the scientific study of average words per sentence.  It is acclaimed, but not quantified, by the artistry it contains.  While measures like those gathered by the researchers may provide useful guidelines, merely understanding them and applying them is not likely to produce good writing.  Certainly if every sentence in this article were longer than, say, twenty words, it is unlikely you would have read even this far.  However, it is foolish to assume that we can understand good writing by measuring it.  There is mystery—perhaps magic—within writing and other art forms.

Having tried to be a good scientist about leadership, I seem to hear a voice from the back of the room saying, “Leaders don’t give a damn about any of this.”  Leadership cannot be adequately captured through Newton’s lens—the view of science.  Leadership, like writing—or painting, or pottery—is an art form.  When we attend to behaviors and characteristics, we are attending only to the surface.

Just as good writing is not measured solely by average words per sentence, good leadership is not measured by how often a person behaves a certain way or by personal characteristics.  I know of a company that has created a list of eighty-two “leadership behaviors.”  The company intends to use their list in performance evaluations of managers.  I suspect this process will breed compliance rather than leadership.

I have known effective and well-admired leaders who were deeply introverted, and some whose gregariousness seemed to overwhelm whatever space they were in.  I have known some who seemed gentle and caring towards the people around them, and others who were irascible and hard-edged.  I have known some who involved themselves deeply in details, and others who preferred to hold to the big picture.  I have known some who were collaborative, and others who were tyrannical. 

Some leaders are very precise about their vision.  Others are vague.  I know one very effective leader who absolutely refuses to elaborate on the very brief vision, “Creating the intelligent universe.”  He says, “I know the people here want me to elaborate on that.  If I do, they will stop thinking about what it might mean.  We are getting a whole lot of wonderful ideas from people who are wondering what the hell ‘intelligent universe’ might mean.  As soon as I start defining it, they will stop.”

Leadership as an Art Form

There are only two things that I can say with any degree of certainty about leaders.  First, you know what they care about.  Second, they are interested in having you care about the same things.  Exactly how they let you know what they care about, and how they work to interest you in the same things, is the leader’s art form.  Like any art form, there are wide variations in technique and interpretation.

Leaders make their dreams, and the dreams of others, come true.  This is the art of leadership.  A leader’s dream is most often called a vision.  As artists, leaders swim in their own emotional and spiritual undercurrents.  Visions emanate from the undercurrents.  Creating a vision is not a purely rational exercise.  It is an act of both inspiration and aspiration.  As inspiration, the act is “in spirit.”  The inspiration of a visionary emanates from a mysterious source.  As aspiration, creating a vision expresses a desire to move “toward spirit.”  The aspiration is the dream, the attempt to create a superior reality to what currently exists.

Creating a vision is an artist’s act of deciding both what is to be created and why it is to be created, whether the thing is a pot, a book, a poem, or a product, process, company, or manufacturing plant.

So leaders must learn to trust their interior voices, the artist’s voice, especially the small quiet voice that visits in moments of silence and solitude.  The voice is not always logical.  Art teacher Robert Henri wrote:

“There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual -- become clairvoyant.  We reach then into reality.  Such are the moments of our greatest happiness.  Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom.  It is in the nature of all people to have these experiences; but in our time and under the conditions of our lives, it is only a rare few who are able to continue in the experience and find expression for it.”

A leader strives, or may be compelled, to be one of those rare few.