FORCEFUL LEADERSHIP
AND
ENABLING LEADERSHIP:
YOU CAN DO BOTH
FORCEFUL LEADERSHIP
AND
ENABLING LEADERSHIP:
YOU CAN DO BOTH
Robert E. Kaplan
Center for Creative Leadership
Greensboro, North Carolina
The Center for Creative Leadership is an international, nonprofit educational institution founded in 1970 to advance the understanding, practice, and development of leadership for the benefit of society worldwide. As a part of this mission, it publishes books and reports that aim to contribute to a general process of inquiry and understanding in which ideas related to leadership are raised, exchanged, and evaluated. The ideas presented in its publications are those of the author or authors.
CENTER FOR CREATIVE LEADERSHIP
© 1996 Center for Creative Leadership
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America.
CCL No. 171
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kaplan, Robert E.
Forceful leadership and enabling leadership : you can do both / Robert E. Kaplan
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-932973-74-7 (print-on-demand) — ISBN 978-1-932973-42-6 (e-book)
1. Leadership. I. Title
HD57.7.K366 1996
658.4'092—dc20
95-50993
CIP
Table of Contents
The Tension between Forceful and Enabling
Forceful Leadership and Enabling Leadership as Opposing Virtues
Enabling Leadership as “Virtuous”
Development Needs as Lack of Versatility
Getting involved personally versus granting autonomy
Declaring oneself versus hearing from other people
Making tough calls versus being sensitive to people’s needs
Making critical judgments versus showing appreciation
Having a can-do attitude versus accepting limits
Conveying confidence versus showing modesty, humility
Lopsidedness or Restricted Movement
Case of Overly Forceful, Not Enabling Enough
Case of Overly Enabling, Not Forceful Enough
What It Takes to Increase Versatility
Learning to Emphasize the Underdeveloped Side
Learning to De-emphasize the Overdeveloped Side
The Primary Development Task for Forceful Managers
The Primary Development Task for Enabling Managers
Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge the following people for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper: David DeVries, Phil Doster, Diane Ducat, Rebecca Henson, Bob Hurley, John Lopiano, Stan Sheetz, and Amy Webb. In addition, Bill Drath helped me early on to clarify the basic character of the paper. And Connie McArthur was instrumental, as I prepared to write the final draft, in sharpening my focus.
Preface
In the following report I employ the terms forceful and enabling because they are quite commonly used in organizations to describe roughly the same managerial characteristics that I ascribe to them. The other reason is that it was important to me for conceptual reasons that both terms have positive connotations.
The word forceful, as unremarkable as it is, grew out of years of action-research that I have conducted with executives and my effort to characterize, for them and for me, their basic nature. It occurred to me as I was working with an individual a couple of years ago that he, like so many of his peers, was a “force to be reckoned with.” And how did he get himself into trouble? By being too much of a force. I began calling this category of manager forces, but the suggestion of the use of force, which an acquaintance kindly pointed out, was not what I wanted to describe the desirable form of this approach to leadership. Forceful was better because it did not carry that baggage.
I adopted enabling because I heard executives talking about the need to, for example, “enable people