Planet+Challenge

=
The visit to Planet Challenge looks at trait and transformational leadership theories. The time capsule visits trait-type leadership theories of the old millennium.=====

Composition of a Leader
The uphill battle for credibility for DE, to embrace the dissensus in HE, and bring order, function and purpose to higher education requires the traits of an outstanding leader. A[| trait] is an habitual pattern of thought, emotion, and behavior.

//"Leadership as distinct from managerial functions is defined as a set of attitudes and behaviours that create conditions for innovative change, enable individuals and organizations to share a vision and move in the appropriate direction and contribute to the management and operationalization of ideas//." (Beaudoin, 2004, p.519)

Much has been written about the necessary traits of leaders. Here is a formula for leadership capacity.

EQ + IQ + SQ = LQ (Gill, 2007,p.81)

A person who is high in emotional intelligence, intellectual intelligence, and spiritual intelligence will also be high in leadership intelligence. Is this a tautology? Many leaders fall far short in some of these categories.

Leadership scholars may also categorize people according to the Myers-Briggs type indicator based on Gustav Carl Jung's theories (Gill, 2007).

Trait theory lacks a predictive capacity and seems idiosyncratic.

Often the traits of leaders are learned through the case study method. The overwhelming preponderance of leaders have been men.

Transformational Leadership
DE has been blessed with two great and transformational leaders: Charles Wedemeyer and Lord Perry. Transformational leaders have an abundance of vision, charisma, energy, strategic thinking skills so as to make the world a different place. Charles Wedemeyer pioneered distance education in Wisconsin and Lord Perry is responsible for the first Open University. The kind of determination needed to transform the status quo is rare and verges on zealotry and the messianic. In a sense neither were transformative leaders because their causes, their work and their trail blazing succeeded their lives living on in the many others who heard their message and picked up on their work or copied it over into their own situations.

A weakness of transformative leaders is that work pivots around them to the point of dependency upon them and initiatives stalling without their input. In appreciative inquiry(AI), organizations can be transformed through a distributed process of leadership. Every member of the community is charged, trusted and empowered to deliver the best work/product,to create the optimal work/customer relationship, and to perform in an extra to role manner to contribute to a larger purpose than themselves. AI represents a kind of cultural evolution that is very suitable for DE because the best, most energizing, alive and valued aspects of past functioning move to the present and future without the baggage from the past. The crisis in HE will select out in an evolutionary way the best aspects of HE to transform HE; AI allows for the best of the past to move forward in the functioning of organizations while leaving behind its the worst aspects.