What qualities should an organization look for in a leader? Seems like a reasonable, straightforward question. Hardly. Pick it apart and you first have to answer what kind of organization we are discussing. For present purposes, let's consider three types of organizations: a military unit, a business unit, and a community unit. Each type of organization is set up to reach certain goals. Ideally, each type selects the style of leader best able to accomplish those goals. Let us also consider three general styles of leadership: autocratic, democratic, and laissez-faire. When there is a mismatch between leadership style and organization, the organization is sure to suffer.
Each leadership style offers positive and negative features. Most people can understand how an autocrat could thrive in a military unit while a laissez-faire approach would invite chaos and destruction. Mensa is more of a community. For it to function effectively, it needs the type of leadership that is successful in community functioning.
What are some of these community-functioning characteristics? First, it is important to understand that most of the people who take maintenance and change roles in Mensa are volunteers. This automatically makes their motivation different from the fighting soldier seeking survival or the salaried worker seeking advancement. Second, reaching goals will take a lot of collaboration and teamwork to avoid the burnout that plagues most community organizations.
Leadership styles from all models do not always translate successfully into a community setting. While many leadership characteristics that are successful in a military or business setting can be adapted to the community environment, some are counterproductive. Not many people support the notion that the general has to ask the private to approve the battle plan. While the chief executive officer (CEO) may ask the sales force for their opinions, the CEO still decides what to sell, and when, and where. If a community leader develops a plan without seeking feedback from all elements of the organization and then incorporating that feedback into the final plan, that leader runs the risk of alienating a part of the organization.
Another thing to ask is the personal motivation of the leader. Often the autocratic leader seeks domination over the organization — to subsume it to his personal will to power. The democratic leader generally seeks to clarify and advance organizational goals. "Whatever" often seems the only goal of the laissez-faire leader. This position is sometimes defined as an aggressive status quo.
The nature of many community organizations is that they operate with small financial capital resources, but have much larger human capital resources upon which they can draw. The effective community leader should then seek to develop this human capital to full productive capacity while maximizing the impact of limited financial resources. This means that the combative, competitive business leader involved in issues of personal ego gratification may suppress large elements of human capital resources for personal aggrandizement. This becomes especially true if that same leader actively seeks to suppress dissent and offers continuous self-serving justification for financial management.
The effective community leader recognizes that it is the existence of the group itself that affords the leadership opportunity. The leadership style most likely to bear long-term success is the democratic leader who can accommodate diverse viewpoints and blend them into an effective team performance. That same leader seeks to actively develop leadership skills throughout the organization so that the maintenance and change activity burden does not fall on a single small cadre. The organization should seek to constantly refresh itself and its leadership. To do otherwise is to risk stagnation and decay.
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