The Ecology of Leadership

Just as ecology deals with the relationships of organisms among themselves and to their environment, leadership can be viewed as an ecological system involving the interaction of humans with each other and their environment. This provides us with a new definition of leadership as a systemic relationship between leader and followers within their context.

Applying ecological principles to leadership means to have a leader you must have followers, and if there are followers, there must then be someone leading. For the leader to be effective, the followers must also be effective. What constitutes effectiveness, however, will be determined by the context, because what is effective in one situation may not be effective in another.

If leadership is viewed as a system, it becomes clear that any effort to develop leadership must take into account not only the individual components of that system but the whole of the system itself. This helps explain why traditional efforts to develop leadership are often unsuccessful. Trying to improve an organization’s leadership by identifying leadership traits and then trying to train designated leaders to develop those traits is likely to be ineffective because of a fundamental misunderstanding of leadership. Leadership, in fact, evolves from the interactions of the system’s components. Thus effective leadership development needs to consider the skills of everyone who is involved in addressing whatever situation they face.

© Mitchell R. Alegre

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