Two sides of the same coin: Leadership

James MacGregor Burns is a senior fellow in the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond, Virginia. He has been instrumental in establishing leadership studies as an academic discipline.

Ritchie McKay is the Head Coach of the University of New Mexico Lobos men's basketball team. Mr. McKay joined UNM after spending two years at Oregon State University where he was the youngest head coach in the Pac-10.

Interview with James MacGregor Burns

Berg: Most people are probably aware of your work Writing about Roosevelt1 and Kennedy2 but I'd like to focus on the work you've done in the area of leadership. To begin, what lead to the development of your 1978 book Leadership3?

Burns: Well, I had done essentially two things before that. I had been, as you suggest, a biographer. The trouble with being just a biographer is that one learns a great deal about a particular leader but not necessarily about leadership. The other thing I had been was a professional political scientist. But I found that political science was a bit too narrow for me, that the kinds of questions I was raising were historical and psychological and philosophical. Hence, I had to move outside political science into the various fields represented by leadership.

BCg: Since you wrote your book in 1978, what changes have you seen in the field of leadership studies?

Burns: Well, that's a long and difficult question. I guess-and this is the big change-that the study of leadership had more coherence 30 or 40 years ago, and today it's lost that coherence. I think the main aspect of the study of leadership today is its fragmentation, almost its pulverization. We're finding leadership being studied in many, many venues. Of course, that's as it should be. But the theory of leadership has become fragmented so we don't have a kind of central theory of leadership.

Berg: Is trying to bring together some of that fragmentation what was behind the Jepson School4?

Burns: I think the original purpose of the school was simply to do a good job with teaching leadership to students, to undergraduates. But your question is a good one because one thing that's happened with me and my colleagues at the Jepson School and elsewhere is the feeling that fragmentation has become quite extreme. So, this year we had a meeting with practically the whole faculty of the Jepson School plus people from other institutions working on this problem. We actually set up a bold hope which might lead us to develop a general theory of leadership, but we took a more modest approach and we're seeking an integrated theory of leadership. We met for several days and made a start on that effort.

Berg: I have learned that some people are critical of contemporary leadership training programs and refer to them as "the flavor of the month." The feeling is that it's a way for the big names to make more money but the programs don't really do a lot of good.

Burns: Essentially that feeling reflects what I'm talking about. What's happening is that a great deal of the teaching of leadership is done in very specific situations. So you get teaching in educational leadership, business leadership, etc. Given the nature of the field, I think that's inevitable. The problem is that the more you educate people in specific fields of leadership, the more you may be "un-educating" them in other fields. For example, there's a great deal of teaching of business or managerial leadership these days and often the focus is on experiences in particular corporations like General Electric. That's fine, except one gets to be an expert on leadership in a very specialized sector and does not learn much about leadership generally. So, the bottom line is that we need more teaching of leadership theory. And of course critics will say, "Well, you're teaching general stuff, not very practical, not very applicable," and my answer to that is that if we teach leadership as a general theory or an integrated theory, we should be able to teach leadership that applies to all situations. Ideally, in approaching a particular leadership situation, the student of leadership has a general background which he or she can use to apply to the specifics of that situation.

Berg: I know that at my college, the Vice President is investigating starting a leadership training program for our faculty and staff. What kind of ad. vice would you give to him as he's looking into leadership training?

Burns: Well, I'm afraid I'd have to just sound the old song that I have been: the best approach to leadership is to combine the disciplines of political science, history, philosophy, psychology-especially psychology, in my view-anthropology, sociology. All these fields have something to contribute to leadership just as leadership has something to contribute to them. I think the best approach is nothing new. It's a kind of liberal arts approach. But I think it doesn't have to be all hazy and overly general. There are ways of reducing the general study of leadership into something that's still broad, but also applicable.

Berg: Can you think of an example of combining those disciplines, a specific idea from the discipline that we would want to take to a program?

Burns: I think, once again, as one gets into the application of leadership one really has to combine disciplines. Let me give a specific ex. ample. I think others might relate more to economics.

Berg: That would be helpful.

Burns: One crucial aspect of the study of leadership is the study of power, leadership as power. Now that calls for a lot of definition, particularly of "power." The economist would approach power in terms of money as a financial resource, whereas the psychologist would approach it in terms of money as a motivator. We think of money as being very motivating but often it isn't. My favorite, rather crude, example is someone going down to the river to drown himself and he's accosted on the way by a robber who says, "Your money or your life!" And the suicidal man will say, "Well, go ahead and shoot. You just saved me a trip down to the river." In other words, money in that situation is not motivating. You can think of many other examples. The political scientists measure power by the number of votes a politician gets, which is naturally practical in terms of winning elections. But if a politician who would like to be a leader is winning votes by doing a great deal of compromising and consensus building rather than taking a strong stand, as I believe a leader should, then the political science approach is not enough. You need an almost philosophical approach.

Berg: I think that's a good example. Often people don't recognize that there are multiple motivations. Consider the appeal of release time for college faculty members.

You were talking about some of the characteristics of a leader taking strong positions. Are there two or three characteristics of an effective leader that you can identify?

Burns: Yes, I think the most important thing for an effective leader is conviction. A leader has to believe in something. Examples are legion, not so much today, but in the past. You take someone like Theodore Roosevelt who was absolutely committed to what he was doing. And hence, he was very effective. And on the Republican or conservative side, I've always been much less of a critic of Ronald Reagan than some because Reagan stood for the conservative tradition in American life, which is an important tradition and he stuck to it, and to a great extent he made it work, at least on his terms. Conviction is the number one; I would add two or three others. Compassion. That relates to conviction because it can't just be any conviction. Adolf Hitler had a lot of conviction. It has to be conviction measured by fundamental values, and I think that relates to, again, good conservatives like Reagan or good liberals like Franklin D. or Teddy Roosevelt. You can measure what they wanted to do by looking at the values they professed. In the case of FDR it's simple; just look at the Four Freedoms [freedom of speech and expression, freedom to worship God, freedom from want, freedom from fear]. You can find equivalent things on the part of Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater. Others could be added but I would say, again, conviction, compassion, and I'll just add courage, in a John F. Kennedy kind of approach.

Berg: If we believe that part of our job is to train leaders in our classrooms, how might we go about doing that?

Burns: Again, I would emphasize the kinds of things you're asking about. I mean, the kinds of questions you're raising are exactly the kinds of questions that I would raise in the classroom. I would use a lot of examples of leaders, making clear that no leader necessarily is a totally good leader; no office-holder is necessarily a good leader. The criteria of leadership must be applied to the people we study. As a teaching device of course, it's much better to use actual examples. Consider Gandhi or name your person and talk about the values that leader embraced and how difficult it was, probably, to communicate those values to people who disagreed and to get changes made. That's the kind of thing I'd do in class.

Berg: How might a leader in general Or, at the risk of sounding fragmenting, a teacher-leader create that vision, motivation or momentum in the classroom?

Burns: Again, probably by choosing historical figures. Everybody loves to read about the great figures and maybe lesser figures and also women leaders, because we tend to talk so much about men leaders. After looking at their lives and seeing their dilemmas, get back into questions of leadership theory, such as convictions or values or compassion.

Berg: To play devil's advocate, I imagine someone saying, "Well, that's easy for you to do as an historian, but I'm a math a teacher and I need to get through algebraic equations. It won't Work in my class."

Burns: Are you talking about a teacher who's teaching a mathematics class and also wants to teach leadership in the process?

Berg: Let's say my math colleague is interested in not just teaching the mathematics but also in helping her students develop as future leaders in the country. She wants to help them be effective once they get out into the work world. What might she do?

Burns: I think there have been great leaders in mathematics, great leaders in science; that might be one way. There is a book and a film out, as you know, called A Beautiful Minds in which a potential leader goes against the grain. Study the way that such a potential leader overcame trouble because his or her views were unorthodox and maybe even controversial, but kept the absolute commitment-or conviction-that the avenue he or she was pursuing was the correct one and made a breakthrough.

Berg: Let's say that in our classes we wanted to study you as a leader. How did you develop as a leader?

Burns: Well, I think in two ways. One, working in the field of leadership itself taught me a lot about leadership. As I did that work, I changed some of my views about actual leaders, how I measured them, and so on. The other was being quite active in politics myself.

I ran for Congress as a Democrat from a district that had not gone Democratic for decades and did just what I'm talking about-tried to show commitment to a different philosophy, the Democratic Party's philosophy of FDR and LB) and JFK and so on. It raised the whole question, to what extent should I compromise my views in order to win votes? Well, I did not. I ran as a straight liberal Democrat. I'm sure I made certain concessions, but essentially I ran as a Fair Deal/New Deal Democrat, and I lost. Predictably. I think in that sense I've learned quite a lot about a certain aspect of leadership, which I'll say a word or two about because it's very important to me.

I divide leadership into two types, transformational-or transforming-leadership and transactional leadership. Transactional leadership is what we do almost all the time, in our homes and our companies and schools and so on, we negotiate with people, we work with people, we bargain with people. If we have differences, we try to work them out. That's a fundamental and important part of any country or any culture. The trouble is, it's often not enough. All of the bargaining and agreeing and so on may take care of immediate problems or immediate interests but they may not relate to much more fundamental needs of a community.

So the other kind of leadership that I'm more interested in, and would have liked to pursue if I had become a congressman or a senator, is transforming-or transformational-leadership, where you try to rise above the political marketplace, the giving and taking, the bargaining and so on, and you try to carry out a vision which is measured by basic values. I mean, if I were trying to do that, I would evoke FDR's Four Freedoms. I would evoke his Economic Bill of Rights [e.g., the right to a remunerative job, the right to adequate food and clothing, the right to a good education, etc.] that we had a long time ago. I would evoke the great writings, the great thoughts of American leaders. It might not work in a particular constituency, but I think it probably would work in the long run. To me, leadership is a change element. How we make the changes, the nature of the changes, how we measure the changes, are the elements of transformational leadership.

Berg: That was going to be my last question, but because you mentioned trans formational leadership, I need to ask one more. The president of the college where I teach has asked the Board of Trustees to change the mission statement of the college. The key sentence in his proposal states "The mission of the college is to provide a transformational learning experience designed to increase the capacity of individuals and groups to achieve intellectual, social, and economic goals." Given what you've been saying, do you think that he's on the right track for training the leaders of tomorrow?

Burns: I think that's a wonderful statement. That statement goes to the very heart of what I've been talking about.

Interview with Ritchie McKay

Berg: Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you. First I'd like to ask, as a coach, what does leadership development mean to you?

McKay: When you're in coaching at the inter-collegiate level there is certainly a responsibility and a commitment to developing young people not only as basketball players but as people. So I would say because of the impact that coaches had on my development as an 18- to 22-- year old, I've had a passion to make an impact on my player's lives, the same impact that was made on mine. I'm very much committed to not only adhering to the responsibility of leading young men, but also building into them life-changing intangibles that may allow them future success.

Berg: Can you think of a particular incident when you were 18 in which one of your coaches helped you become the leader you are today?

McKay: There's a multitude of incidents that I can remember and reflect back upon. When I was a student athlete at Seattle Pacific University, Claude Terry, my college coach, had a great impact on me spiritually. He was the first man I ever met who read the Bible. I thought that was a unique thing, that here was a man who was in his late 30s, yet still trying to learn God's word to mature his mind, body, and spirit. It helped facilitate my beliefs, my personal beliefs and convictions as a Christian. I was fortunate enough to have men around me who were very committed to the process of leading and not just to their positions or the success they had professionally.

Berg: Let me ask, how do you try to instill that in the men you work with today?

McKay: I think it's in developing the individual, in not only teaching them by word, but by living in example, a life that's worthy of following. We have pillars that we've developed in our program that state objectives and define what character we would like to have represented in our program-characteristics such as humility, which is to know who you are. Passion is not to be lukewarm. Servanthood, unity, discipline, and thankfulness are pillars that they take from our program. If they embrace them after being with us three, four, or five years, one day they can be not only leaders in their homes, but leaders in their communities and in their workplaces.

Berg: I'm sure you're aware that there are a lot of different leadership programs out there. They're often criticized as being "flavor of the month." Do you see that in other places?

McKay: I think individuals who are entrepreneurs and have learned to capitalize on the system, so to speak, will maybe change an opinion or two, but for me and the way I want our program to be represented, we've stuck to doing what we know. By that, I mean I don't want to be someone I'm not. I can't be Colin Powell. He's one of the most respected and successful leaders that our nation has ever seen. I've got to be Richie McKay and that's part of what we try to do in developing leaders-teach them to certainly learn from peers and colleagues and mentors but define their own personality and style in knowing who they are. It's critical for every individual's success that they be true to themselves and they be able to manifest their heart convictions and personal development. That will hopefully develop them into who they are.

Berg: I could imagine some of our readers saying, "Well, it's easy for a coach to develop leaders because you need leaders on a team. How can we do it in our classrooms?" What kind of advice would you give to someone like me who wants to do leadership training in an English or history class?

McKay: That's a great question. I think that in any quality relationship you see an investment of time. You have a captive audience in ages 17 to 20. If there's a way to invest time and energy into them, so they can see your genuine concern for them outside of the classroom, then I think you can build in their lives. As long as your agenda is not your own and it's for the betterment of their development, then I think you'll see a person that follows. It's a Biblical principle: before one can lead he must first follow. If you're true to what you believe in and are passionate about the righteous steps that you have to take to be a leader, then I think certainly people will follow. We've seen cases, David Koresh 6 and others, in which leadership took people down the wrong path. It's our responsibility to take them to a higher level and a higher path, one that honors not only our country but most importantly, for me, the Lord.

Berg: I can imagine someone saying, "As a teacher, how can I follow my stu. dents? How can I be a follower? That doesn't make any sense."

McKay: It's a lost art in our society, the ability to serve one another. I think we, especially as men, are taught to be so individualistic that we sometimes don't think about the broader picture of how we can make our community, our city, our nation better. I think if you're going to follow, you have to learn to serve. You have to learn to go outside of yourself and do what you don't naturally want to do. You need to think of someone else's well-being as more important than yourself.

Berg: What is something specifically I might do, say, when I see my students tomorrow?

McKay: Ask them about something outside the classroom. Instead of basing everything on their performance, find out about their home life or about their convictions or passions, what they dream about. Again, the more you invest in any relationship, the better it's going to be.

Berg: Along those lines, the vice president of Schoolcraft College is investigating starting a leadership training Program for faculty and staff. What kind of advice would you give him?

McKay: That's a tough question. I would think, if there's a vision that he has and a purpose behind developing that type of program, he needs to first stay committed to it, and second to carefully practice what he preaches. I think people sometimes see the contradictions in our actions and therefore we disqualify our leadership. He should get a lot of input from mentors and others that he respects and holistically develop the program.

Berg: The president of our college recently asked the Board of Trustees to change the college's mission statement. A key sentence in his proposal states "The mission of the college is to provide a transformational learning experience designed to increase the capacity of individuals and groups to achieve intellectual, social, and economic goals." Does that sound like it's the kind of mission for a college that wants to develop future leaders?

McKay: I think certainly that it sounds purposeful. Obviously, the language is written toward achieving that goal so I would think you're certainly on the right track.

Berg: We covered this a bit when you spoke of the pillars in your program. Could you identify two or three key characteristics of a leader?

McKay: Passion. Anytime you're successful at any of your endeavors, it's usually because of your passion, whether that passion is to be suc. cessful or master the trade you're in or the assignment that you have, you've got to be passionate about it. Secondly, discipline. I don't think you can succeed in life, long term, at anything unless you have discipline. Third, leaders must acquire knowledge, through experience in the workplace or through educational opportunities, in order to effectively lead.

Berg: You mentioned that some of your coaches set an example to help you develop as a leader. From the time you were eighteen to the present day, what are some key things that have helped you develop as a leader?

McKay: Finding mentors, whether they were other coaches or pastors, surrounding myself with men that would hold me in account for the way we were developing and shaping the program that we lived in. I think-this is going to sound funny-but marriage has helped me to lead because I was responsible for not only my life but for someone else's as well. And having children, having started a family-- again, the pressures of those responsibilities and the commitment one has to his family are, obviously, going to be great enhancers towards effective leadership.

Berg: I wanted to follow up on mentoring for a minute. You've said that effecfive leaders have mentors, and that you are a mentor to the men on your team. If someone is looking to me as a mentor, how can I be open to it?

McKay: That's a good question, Steve. Whether it's positive, negative, or indifferent, there's going to be a life behind your message. The words that you communicate to young people, they're going to see in the actions you display. I think if you connect with one, two or many individuals in regards to their being able to identify your character or your passion or your convictions, then it's going to put you in a great place or promote you into a place that you could build into their lives. It's an age-old adage that actions speak louder than words, but I think the message that you communicate in your day and in your hours with these young people will qualify or disqualify you as a mentor.

Notes

1 Burns, James MacGregor. (1956). Roosevelt: the lion and the fox. New York: Harcourt, Brace.

Burns, James MacGregor. (1970). Roosevelt: the soldier of freedom. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

2 Burns, James MacGregor. (1960). John Kennedy: a political profile. New York: Harcourt, Brace.

3 Burns, James MacGregor. (1978).Leadership.New York: Harper and Row. 4 The Jepson School of Leadership Studies, University of Richmond, Virginia.

5 Nasar, Sylvia. (2001). A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash. New York: Simon and Schuster.

6 Leader of the religious group known as the Branch Davidians. The group clashed with Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents in Waco, Texas, in 1993.

Steven L. Berg

Dr. Berg is an Assistant Professor of English and history at Schoolcraft College, Livonia, Michigan.

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