Exchange theory of leadership: building walls

I wrote a blog yesterday relating to the walls that Nehemiah built and how that experience relates to everyday human crisis or crisis recovery. However, it is also a useful metaphor for work-life.

The leadership series relating to the exchanges that take place between leaders and their followers also has relevance here. One of the great things a leader does is to build walls.

When a leader takes up a new role, there will always be gainsayers like Sanbalat, notwithstanding the seals of the king (management), the favor of God and the resources placed at our disposal (the king's forest and quarries). Gainsayers stalk corridors and market places, looking for ways to vent their personal identity crises against emerging leaders. The reason socialism or collectivism worked at all is thanks to a human need to reduce everyone around us to a common level of misery. However, it also happens in the first world, albeit with a degree of subtlety. Indeed marketing works because we tend to manage our identities through symbols, like visibility, posturing, cars, houses and other meaningless tokens.

Emerging leaders also face rearguard struggles against organizational uncertainties, doubts, the insecurity of their workers and the fact that their roles are always under scrutiny. Initially, their followers are also comparable to the bedraggled bunch of post-exilic souls that returned to the burnt out ruins of Jerusalem.

So, the first role of the leader is to build walls. For Nehemiah that was necessary because without walls they really could not tackle other projects as long as they remained vulnerable to attack. The walls also gave them a symbolic centre, a rallying point for their aspirations and dreams, and an identity. Of course the greatest reason was that the walls laid foundations for their long term recovery and symbolized real progress.

The African Lion is immensely powerful but limited, because his intimidating presence is not for hunting or other pride activities, but to ward off challengers. They are wall builders, who spend every day patrolling the pride “walls” and marking their territory, so that the pride can survive and get on with what it does best.

In the same way, leaders must build walls, to provide a vital refuge for their followers so that they can get on with what they need to do, but also so that they can trade on the emerging stature and identity of those walls. The leader’s role is not to do, but to defend and instill the means to do – to create opportunities, empower people and “lead” them to do what they do best. Equally important is his value in keeping them within the pride boundaries, so that they don’t stray from their collective objectives or lose their way.

The exchange aspect comes in when, like the African Lion, the leader must defend followers from outside interference, distractions, pressures and threats – even to the point of laying his own wellbeing on the line. Leaders meaningfully exchange when they trade protection and empowerment, for the commitment and initiative of their followers - a reasonable exchange.

(c) Peter Eleazar @ www.4u2live.net