According to Sanjay Pradhan (World Bank 2010, 2):

“Equally important in this [catalytic] paradigm is the emphasis on institutional change instead of a passive focus on training, technical assistance and systems development. We are shifting from the traditional capacity development focus on individual skills and organizational systems towards higher units of aggregation—to entire leadership teams, multi-stakeholder coalitions, or broader or conflicting social groups to forge consensus for change.”

For this perspective to materialize, I believe it is the small ‘p’ that matters. The small ‘p’ as Rosalind Eyben (2010) shows is about building and leveraging relationships to build trust and mutual accountability to achieve the results we desire.

DLP’s argument, in fact, is that leadership as a political process has been poorly understood analytically thus far. The literature on leadership tends to focus too strongly on individuals and their qualities, traits, values etc. and not enough on leadership as a collective process, involving leaders’ relations to their followers and vice versa but also, critically leadership as a (small-p) political process. Leadership as an analytical concept used by DLP, is about more than ‘big men’ (or big women for that matter), ‘champions of reform’, or ‘picking winners’. As we conceive of it, leadership is about the interactions between coalitions, organisations, elites, those with power. It is a process that forges, embeds and legitimates institutions; it is informed by and shapes the context around it.

One of our biggest problems – the jargon issue again – is that when most people hear the term leadership, they think of ‘the leader’, the organisational leaders, or the political leaders, of the powerful CEO or the strong President. This may be because research into leadership overwhelmingly comes from the fields of business or organisational psychology – along side some historical tomes recalling the ‘great men of history’. Leader-ship, particularly in the context of weak or fragile states, isn’t and cannot be only about individuals or about conventional rules-bound structured systems of management or hierarchy.

I don’t like to use the old adage – if only you read my paper you’d understand! – but I’ve tried to set this out in my DLP background paper on Leadership, Politics and Development. You’re concern that our research agenda tends towards conclusions of ‘decent chap-ism’, however, makes me think we need to make this much clearer throughout our work, so thank you for pointing this out!

Of course this one came out as a disaster – one of the “accepting failure as the price of occasional success”? When it has involved death squads, land grabs, and complete violations of the rights agenda, then we can we really accept that as the “price of occasional success”?

Yes lets think and work politically but aid people need to bring a rights perspective about WHO to work with and on WHOSE behalf.

Interesting to compare to leadership theories in business where Jim Collins research over a decade ago underminded the old idea of the strong leader.

Empirical research showed that the companies with the best results over 15 and more years were led not by charismatic egotists but by self-effacing, humble but committed leaders. They understood leadership to be about gathering the right people, building teams and a shared sense of purpose.
Management may be about rules and control (as seen in all the controls agencies put in place to keep country programmes in line), but leadership is about shared purpose and trust.
Now that sounds more palatable!