Managers and Leaders • HBR C LASSIC
Leaders’ lives are
marked by a continual
struggle to attain some
sense of order.
Third, the manager plays for time. Managers seem to recognize that with the passage of
time and the delay of major decisions, compromises emerge that take the sting out of winlose situations, and the original “game” will be
superseded by additional situations. Compromises mean that one may win and lose simultaneously, depending on which of the games
one evaluates.
There are undoubtedly many other tactical
moves managers use to change human situations from win-lose to win-win. But the point is
that such tactics focus on the decision-making
process itself, and that process interests managers rather than leaders. Tactical interests involve costs as well as benefits; they make organizations fatter in bureaucratic and political
intrigue and leaner in direct, hard activity and
warm human relationships. Consequently, one
often hears subordinates characterize managers as inscrutable, detached, and manipulative.
These adjectives arise from the subordinates’
perception that they are linked together in a
process whose purpose is to maintain a controlled as well as rational and equitable structure.
In contrast, one often hears leaders referred
to with adjectives rich in emotional content.
Leaders attract strong feelings of identity and
difference or of love and hate. Human relations in leader-dominated structures often appear turbulent, intense, and at times even disorganized. Such an atmosphere intensifies
individual motivation and often produces unanticipated outcomes.
Senses of Self
In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James describes two basic personality
types, “once-born” and “twice-born.” People
of the former personality type are those for
whom adjustments to life have been straightforward and whose lives have been more or
less a peaceful flow since birth. Twice-borns,
on the other hand, have not had an easy time
of it. Their lives are marked by a continual
struggle to attain some sense of order. Unlike
once-borns, they cannot take things for
granted. According to James, these personalities have equally different worldviews. For a
once-born personality, the sense of self as a
guide to conduct and attitude derives from a
feeling of being at home and in harmony with
one’s environment. For a twice-born, the
harvard business review • march–april 1992
sense of self derives from a feeling of profound separateness.
A sense of belonging or of being separate
has a practical significance for the kinds of investments managers and leaders make in their
careers. Managers see themselves as conservators and regulators of an existing order of affairs with which they personally identify and
from which they gain rewards. A manager’s
sense of self-worth is enhanced by perpetuating and strengthening existing institutions: he
or she is performing in a role that harmonizes
with ideals of duty and responsibility. William
James had this harmony in mind—this sense of
self as flowing easily to and from the outer
world—in defining a once-born personality.
Leaders tend to be twice-born personalities,
people who feel separate from their environment. They may work in organizations, but
they never belong to them. Their sense of who
they are does not depend on memberships,
work roles, or other social indicators of identity. And that perception of identity may form
the theoretical basis for explaining why certain
individuals seek opportunities for change. The
methods to bring about change may be technological, political, or ideological, but the object is the same: to profoundly alter human,
economic, and political relationships.
In considering the development of leadership, we have to examine two different courses
of life history: (1) development through socialization, which prepares the individual to guide
institutions and to maintain the existing balance of social relations; and (2) development
through personal mastery, which impels an individual to struggle for psychological and social change. Society produces its managerial
talent through the first line of development;
leaders emerge through the second.
Development of Leadership
Every person’s development begins with family. Each person experiences the traumas associated with separating from his or her parents,
as well as the pain that follows such a wrench.
In the same vein, all individuals face the difficulties of achieving self-regulation and selfcontrol. But for some, perhaps a majority, the
fortunes of childhood provide adequate gratifications and sufficient opportunities to find
substitutes for rewards no longer available.
Such individuals, the “once-borns,” make
moderate identifications with parents and
page 8