Mary Parker Follett: Freedom and Co-ordination

I HAVE tried to show you certain changes which are creeping in to our thinking on business management. As I have said in the more progressively managed businesses an order was no longer an arbitrary command butthe law of the situation. A week ago I defined authority as something which could not rely be conferred on someone, but as a power which inhered in the job. Now I want to show the difference between the theory of leadership long accepted and a conception which is being forced on our attention by the way in which business is today conducted. What I call the oldfashioned theory of leadership is well illustrated by a study made a few years ago by two psychologists. They worked out a list of questions by which to test leadership ability. Here are some of the questions: At a reception or tea do you try to meet the important persons present? At a lecture or entertainment do you go forward and take a front seat? At a hairdresser's are you persuaded to try a new shampoo or are you able to resist? If you make purchases at Woolworth’s, are you ashamed to have your friends know it? If you are at a stupid party do you try to inject life into it? If you hold an opinion the reverse of which the lecturer has expressed do you usually volunteer your opinion? Do you find it difficult to say No when a salesman is trying to sell you something? What do you do when someone tries to push in ahead of you in a line at the box office? When you see someone in a public place whom you think you have met, do you go up to him and enquire whether you have met? And so onthere were a good many more. But what on earth has all this to do with leadership? I think nothing whatever. These psychologists were making tests, they said, for aggressiveness, assuming that aggressiveness and leadership are synonymous, assuming that you cannot be a good leader unless you are aggressive, masterful, and dominating. But I think, not only that these characteristics are not the qualities essential to leadership, but, on the contrary, that they often militate directly against leadership. But I cannot blame the psychologists too much, for in the business world too there has been an idea long prevalent that selfassertion, pugnacity even, are necessary to leadership. Or at any rate, the leader is usually supposed to be one who has a compelling personality, who can impose his own will on others, can make others do what he wants done. One writer says that running a business is like managing an unruly horse, a simile I particularly dislike.