Wizards as Leaders

Facilitating superior performance and outcomes through a strong team effort requires contingent and highly adaptive leadership processes. To this point, the significant amount of research focused on effective leadership comes no where near a definitive conclusion on a singular model, despite the steady stream of leadership hacks on display at the airport bookstore.  

In this formulation as a contingent and adaptive process, effective leadership relies on a number of key capacities successfully enacted by the team leader(s). 

• The ability to "read" a situation and the team in order to determine what exactly is needed from leadership in order to produce the desired outcomes. 

• The ability to perform a variety of leadership roles as needed within the situation. In some contexts, a strong and decisive voice is needed. In others, building a coalition is needed. In others, resolution of intergroup conflict is needed. In short, there is no shortage of possible roles a leader may need to play. Successful leadership requires a robust quiver, and/or an ability to learn quickly. 

• The ability to extrapolate, showcase, and leverage the diversity of strengths, ideas, and perspectives from across the team.

A supervisor once described my leadership with a particular project as wizardry. To this day, I consider this one of the highest professional compliments that I have received. When a leadership process is contingent and adaptive, it can look and feel like positive results just happen, almost as through some sort of magical intervention. In my view, leadership is less about fulfilling some projected social role as leader, and more so about adept actions and interactions that clear the way for the power of the team to unfold within the particular situation.