Are All Superiors Leaders?

Much has been researched, written, read and taught about leadership and authority. Experts have classified leadership depending on the approach adopted. Types of leadership and levels of authority enjoyed notwithstanding, everyone, including those at the very end of the chain wish to rise in hierarchy. Inevitably everyone, in due course, gets to be entrusted positionally with authority. While methodology of exercising authority is personality driven, effectiveness of leadership depends on how subordinates receives it.

Superiors, irrespective of realm and reach, yearn for unquestioned acceptance, wholehearted adherence, enthusiastic compliance and unfathomable respect. But, history bears testimony to the fact that different individuals occupying the same position of authority over the same chain, evoke dissimilar responses in terms of acceptance, adherence, compliance, relevance and reverence.

Are all superiors leaders?

Superiors

Since functional hierarchy is unavoidable for an organisation’s survival, everyone in the chain would either be superior or subordinate to someone else in the chain. Simplistically put, anyone ahead in the chain of hierarchy becomes superior and those below subordinate. Anybody, regardless of personal qualities, can become a superior in the chain of hierarchy and superiors enjoy ‘positional authority’. In order to ensure viability of the hierarchy, legal obligations on adherence to directions of superiors are invariably built into the system. Transgression of positional authority thus risks liabilities and creation of obstacles to one’s forward movement within the hierarchy.

Leaders

Leadership is all about people, their values and aspirational goals. It is the noncoercive ability of an individual to compel or motivate those around him to accept his ideology and perception so as to synergise their thought and action in convergence with his. It is a ‘soft power’ that an individual wields over others. There is something in a leader that evokes the nature of subordination witnessed. Scholars often attribute it to charisma. Real leadership charisma comes through competency and ability to irrefutably place others’ interests much before one’s own.

Human beings, though social, are selfish in nature. People willingly surrender autonomy of their thought and action to another individual only when their individual aspirations are really or seemingly furthered, even if it is in the long term. Individuals become leaders when others, individually and collectively, continually transfer autonomy of thought and action to that individual. An individual capable of motivating those around him to willingly surrender autonomy of thoughts and accept the resultant agentic state commands authority of leadership.

Authority

Authority is the ‘right’ of an individual to exercise powers conferred upon him and enforce compliance of his directions by those placed under him. Hierarchical and constitutional positions come with prescribed authority and everyone subordinate to such authority is normally aware of the limits of such authority.

There are instances of individuals, normally referred to as despots, wielding unlimited authority. Though propaganda machines endlessly hail them as great leaders, they are not. They subordinate masses through repressive regimes. Such subordination ceases when kernels of dissent, over time, become storms of resistance that blows away oppression.

Positional authority enjoyed by superiors dictates and demands allegiance and adherence. However, superiors’ area of influence remains restricted to functional and geographical limits prescribed by the organisational structure. Subordinates eventually accept positional authority only where such position is of relevance and only as long as it suits their interests.

Authority that stems from leadership transcends positional authority and breaks organisational barriers. Unlike the authority granted by position, authority from leadership is normally conferred by the very same people who have invested their faith and allegiance to that individual's leadership. Authority wielded by a leader is personal, voluntarily ceded by followers and therefore the least resented. Authority inherent to leadership that evokes willing subordination of the masses is sublimely different. Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela are glowing examples where masses willingly accepted agentic state granting them unassailable authority. Even adversaries had to cede ground.

The Choice: Superior or Leader?

Modern markets do not offer much space and time for experimentation. Cost of investments that bleed organisations and uncertainty of market dynamics necessitate ruthless policies to push up bottom lines, decimate competitors and reap profits, fastest and earliest. HR assets, for most managements, happen to be just another element of the complex matrix, that must be exploited towards profitability.

Faced with unnerving turbulence, organisations opt to pack its hierarchy with ‘superiors’ known to set stiff targets and flog their team to achieve the impossible. They don't hesitate even to poach even from their own competitors. These individuals, focused on devising means, right or wrong, to manoeuvre earnings, may through stick and carrot elicit compliance and adherence. But they are the least of leaders. They may succeed, short term, but they inspire neither their subordinates nor superiors. Sooner than later, they lose out to smarter ones who device faster, meaner methods to push up bottom lines.  Attrition, of the team they work in and of themselves, normally consumes this breed. They impede organisational growth.

Leaders on the other hand command allegiance of those around, eliciting performances beyond what even their followers think they are capable of.  They forge unity within the team and instill a strong sense of belonging. It does not mean that ‘leaders’ cannot be aggressive and will not be able to achieve short-term targets. With every follower, considering himself a stakeholder for success or failure, probability of success far outweighs that of a failure. Success under a leader lasts longer for an organisation than the gains made by a flogging superior. 

Organisations are faceless, deaf, dumb and mute entities.  Life, nature and culture of an organisation comes from its people. It makes good business sense to staff organisations with people for whom success of the organisation is seen as their own.

Leaders alone can make that happen. It makes sense to invest in grooming leaders rather than creating superiors.