.In this Harvard John F Kennedy School of Government Q&A he talks about modern day approaches to leadership and how they relate to power:
'Q: Your latest research focuses on modern day approaches to leadership and how they relate to power. Please discuss some of your most compelling findings.
Nye: I am interested in “soft power,” the ability to get what you what through attraction rather than coercion and payment. I had originally applied that idea to international relations, but in my new book I try to apply the concept of soft power to individual leaders. What I’ve found is the way we talk about leadership is quite inaccurate. We have in our minds a sort of a leader as the person who gives orders, the king of the mountain, and the orders sort of cascade down to below. And that fits with hard power, payment, or coercion. But if you think about a networked world, that we have in the information age, then you realize that a leader isn’t the king of the mountain. The leader is in the center of the circle and he or she has to be able to attract people to them and that requires soft power, the power to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion. So as we think about leadership there’s a great danger that we say – as President Bush has said – the leader is the “decider.” More important is how do we pick the goals? How do we decide who decides? How do we decide the timing of deciding? What I’ve discovered is the leader has to have these soft power skills to attract people, not just give orders.
There are three skills that are most crucial in the exercise of soft power – the first is emotional intelligence, the ability to control your own emotions and use them to reach out to others; second, the idea of composing a vision of the future that attracts others; and third, communication skills including both rhetorical skills and also the ability to use non-verbal communication tools. Those three crucial soft power skills have to be combined with hard power skills in organizations, in politics, and so forth. When we restrain our definition of leadership to only top-down, king of the mountain, we miss the crucial role of soft power in effective leadership.
Q: When we discuss leadership we must also discuss the ability to persuade and to bring about the changes that you as a leader wish to affect. Can you expound on that topic?
Nye: An effective leader uses soft power to bring others to share his or her vision of where we should go. Now, that vision of where we should go may be partly developed by the leader in consultation with others. It may also be a vision which the leader has developed from his or her background, but the ability to persuade others that this is where they want to go is absolutely crucial.
One way to examine leadership is through a model in which most people lead from the middle. A leader in the middle has to think in terms of a compass. There’s a boss above them, sort of to the north, and they have no hard power with the boss; they have to persuade him or her. There are collaborators to the east and the west, who are the different agencies, organizations, or groups over whom they have no authority, and they have to attract them to get cooperation. Then they have followers or subordinates over whom they can use their hard power to get what they want. But, frankly, they must also be able to get those subordinates to buy into their vision, which is very difficult to do by coercion alone.
So persuasion as an aspect of soft power becomes particularly important. Most of us are really leaders from the middle. Very few of us have no boss above us and very few fail to require cooperation from people on either side of us.'
For Professor Nye's view on the importance and use of 'smart power' on the international political stage see - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8udhM8QKxg
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