The connecting leader. Aligning leadership theories to managers’ issues

“During performance reviews we had to assign A-E ratings to our employees. However, to maintain a normal distribution each manager was handed pre-decided ratings from HR. That round I was handed two Bs and a D. I had to review three team members, who in my opinion were two As and a B. I tried to influence my boss to get me a better hand of grades, but not only I failed in securing that, I was also told not to disclose the forced rating mechanism, which was a confidential organizational policy. I still remember the tears of this ambitious, and diligent young lady who received a D from me. I wanted to explain that I really meant to give her a B, but I couldn’t. By doing that I would have let down my boss, and the company. She left after 6 months.” (Middle-Manager, Financial Institution) The middle manager in the opening vignette appears as performing an ordinary, mundane, bureaucratic activity: assigning performance ratings to direct reports. It is one of those activities that would fall into the category of “manager”, rather than “leader” - according to a long lineage of literature (Bennis and Townsend, 1989; Zaleznick, 1977) that sees managers as strategic administrators, and leaders as inspirational influencers. Despite more and more scholars are seeing this longstanding division as obsolete (Collinson and Tourish, 2015), the performativity of our writing influences business students, as well as MBAs and executive development programmes through publications exploring “How managers become leaders” (Watkins, 2012) or “When managers become leaders” (Chiu et al., 2017). 40 years after Zaleznick’s paper, scholars still proceed by asking MBA students whether these terms are “synonyms or separate” (Kniffin et al., 2019), reinforcing an outdated contradiction. The contradiction survives because most leadership theories are not adequate to analyse the complexity of managers actions. On the one hand they romanticise leaders and depict them as heroes who can save followers, distancing them from the day to day mundanity of administration (see servant leadership, Van Dierendonk, 2011; authentic leadership, Avolio and Gardner, 2005; transformational leadership, Bass et al., 1996). On the other, they deny the existence of the concept of leadership as a redundant extra-ordinarization of management, depriving managers from opportunities of reflection on how to influence and connect (Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2003; Learmonth and Morrell, 2017). However, another way to look at leadership is emerging (Collinson, 2014, 2020; Jaser, 2017, 2020), one that considers it as a relational, dialectic process, in which leaders face and deal with dilemmas and conflicts, in the process of connecting multiple relationships (Fairhurst, 2016). The Connecting Leader: Serving Concurrently as a Leader and Follower (Jaser, 2020) is an edited collection of chapters that aims to develop this perspective further. It is published in the Leadership Horizon series (edited by Michelle Bligh and Melissa Carsten, and founded by James Meindl), and follows in the footpath of previous books that aim at overcoming romanticized conceptions of leadership (see Uhl-Bien and Ospina, 2012; Uhl-Bien et al., 2009). For a connecting leader (CL), leadership involves struggle, crossing power differentials, engaging with dilemmas.