Practical Wisdom for Leaders with Scott J. Allen, Ph.D.

The Four Components of Leadership with Dr. Toby Newstead

• Scott J. Allen • Season 1 • Episode 314

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Dr. Toby Newstead is a respected leadership scholar and practitioner at the University of Tasmania, located in lutruwita on the lands of the palawa and pakana people. With a background in corporate change, leadership development, and professional communications, she brings practical expertise to her academic, coaching, and consulting work.

An internationally recognized researcher, Dr. Newstead specializes in virtues-based leadership development, leadership ethics, and leadership in the volunteer sector. Her research appears in top journals. In 2023, she published a book titled Leadership and Virtues: Understanding and Practicing Good Leadership.

Dr. Newstead is an established executive leadership coach and deeply engaged with industry and community. She regularly delivers impactful workshops, keynotes, and facilitation sessions. Dr Newstead’s research, teaching, coaching and facilitation has local and international impact, shaping the leaders of today and tomorrow.


Quotes From This Episode

  • “We cannot develop other people; we can only facilitate their learning and assess if they learned.”
  • “Leadership involves relationships, influence, shared purpose, and collective effort. That’s the stuff that has to be there.”
  • “Leadership isn’t the answer to everything; there are times when management or command responses are what the situation calls for.”
  • “Followership isn’t an afterthought; you don’t have leadership without both leaders leading and followers following.”

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

  • The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. 

About  Scott J. Allen

My Approach to Hosting

  • The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in so


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Scott Allen: [00:00:00] Okay, everybody, welcome to the podcast. We have Toby, Newstead, University of Tasmania, returning guest. Excited for this conversation. Toby, Happy New Year. Thank you so much for being with me. And you've been on some adventures, you've been hosting some podcasts. I was fortunate enough to be on one of those last year, I believe it was in early 2025.

And you've also been hosting some events and. I wanted to ask you on today, a to catch up a little bit, but I wanna get your insights because I think you were working at this interesting nexus of academics and practitioners, and so maybe we take the conversation that direction. What do you think?

Yeah, 

Toby Newstead: absolutely. I love it. 

Scott Allen: Okay, cool. So what are you seeing? What's going on? What's happening down under, 

Toby Newstead: what's happening down under I I You're in the future. 

Scott Allen: What's happening in the future? Down under I, I'm interested in, 

Toby Newstead: Yes, speaking from the future, Scott. I, one thing that I really [00:01:00] appreciate here in Australia and I'm in Tasmania, which is like a microcosm of Australia which is a microcosm of in and of itself.

We're pretty small. Like we're a huge geographic country, obviously big land ma excuse me, big landmass. But we have a pretty small population and we're pretty well networked and what I sense across. The leadership development ecosystem here in Australia is a genuine desire to do more across leadership research and leadership practice.

Okay. In Tasmania that's easy 'cause we're so tiny that all you have to do is pick up the phone and call someone that, you know, and you've interacted with a whole bunch of times and you're probably gonna bump into at the pub next weekend. But I do feel like that extends and there's been work.

Both independently in research. So we've got we've got a network of Australian leadership researchers, and it's also been happening independently in, in practice. So there's a network of leadership development practitioners across Australia. So in some ways, when in 2024 we decided to try to get [00:02:00] researchers and practitioners together, it was easy because we already had networks established in research and networks established in practice.

We just brought those two networks together. Yeah. Now I, I do need to note that. The Leadership Development Practitioners Network is more the community based leadership development work. It's not your big consulting firms. 

Toby Newstead: And it's very few internal od HR type of leadership practitioners.

So it's more the in community or industry based leadership development. Practitioners. But yeah, there is a real desire to come together. So it was easy to easy, what events are like, they're not actually easy, but there was a desire to come together across research and practice.

It's just a matter of now navigating that and trying to make sense of our differences and similarities and shared interests in what it might do for us as a broader field if we're to work more closely. 

Scott Allen: There's a proverb, and I don't know the source of this proverb for listeners.

I'll put it in the show notes, and I don't even know if it's a [00:03:00] proverb. It might just be a poem, but it's, if you ever heard the blind men and the elephant. 

Scott Allen: One thing I've loved about this podcast and here's the story, you all is that you have, I think it was seven or eight blind men.

They're standing around an elephant and each one of them is touching a different part of the elephant. And so one person said, this is a sword, and another person touching the tail says this is a snake and another person touching the leg or the thigh says this is a wall. And so everyone has a little bit of a different kind of vantage point.

On what this is. And I feel like our work is like that some of the time. Doing the podcast has opened my eyes to so many wonderful kind of perspectives and ways of thinking about the work, especially as it's with a practitioner. And then of course. Being with academics, that was my quote unquote home.

But I've spent the last year and a half in industry and really focusing on working with people in organizational life, and that's giving me this other little vantage point on [00:04:00] the quote unquote elephant. And for you and I, we're both passionate about how we better prepare people to serve in these roles.

How do we do that work Well? How do we do that work ethically? How do we do accelerate that so that people can step into these really challenging roles and be effective, right? Yes, it can be this interesting space when you get folks with different lived experiences, different perspectives, different knowledge about the work, on one hand, the practitioners. Know what it's like to be in the organization day in, day out and have lived that and lived with the realities. And on the other hand the scholars have that theory. So I love that mashup when it happens.

Toby Newstead: Yeah. Yes, absolutely. When it happens.

And I think the trick is it takes I think, time and space for it to happen. Not just well, but. Deeply. Yeah. And comprehensively and I think part, I mean there's lots of different factors at play in, and anytime we're talking about research [00:05:00] versus practice, we're gonna make sweeping generalizations that, that, don't apply to a lot of people who have a foot in both camps, so to speak, or have done one and moved into the other much like you.

But I think there are some. Some very peculiar features of our daily realities when we are a straight up and down academic versus a straight up and down practitioner. And again, speaking in very general terms. And I think that when we can understand that more, when we can, it's almost like we need like job rotation or something.

If we are genuine about wanting to be able to bridge research and practice, we need to understand what. What we're actually doing in one versus the other. And one, and this is, I actually feel, I feel like I'm lucky because I sit more on the learning side and this it was a paper that, that David Day and a few colleagues wrote that starts to differentiate the diff between leadership training versus leadership development.

Toby Newstead: And you'll know. David often talks about owning your own development. Yeah. So we cannot develop [00:06:00] other people, which then if we think about the difference between leadership development and leadership learning, I'm quite glad as an academic that my focus is leadership learning. 

Toby Newstead: I teach leadership.

Toby Newstead: I don't, I hope I create conditions that are conducive to the development of leadership among my students. That I do hope that I try that. But really my job and what I can assess is leadership learning, 

Toby Newstead: which is great. 

Toby Newstead: It's great. It's one part of it, but that is much easier to do, to evaluate, to assess than leadership development because I can't develop my students.

I can facilitate their learning. I can assess their learning. But when it comes to development, and I actually think that's a really, I think it's a really important distinction and I think it's something that might help us. Maybe better understand, or at least navigate the space between research and practice.

Because to my mind at least, there needs to be some learning in order to facilitate development, but learning itself doesn't necessarily equate to development. And maybe [00:07:00] we can, I don't know, what do you think? Can we develop without learning? We probably can. Okay, 

Scott Allen: so I love this.

We'll geek out for a little bit and you said that you tried to engineer some debate in some of your podcast episodes, so let's engineer some friendly, fun banter with us. Yeah, I think you, you hit on something really important. A, from a, just a definitional standpoint, we struggle. I did a whole podcast with Dan Jenkins and he wanted me to be talking about leadership education, and I was thinking about that as leader development.

He's defining it in his head as an academic setting, leadership education, and you called it leadership learning. And there's also leadership studies and there's also leadership development. And there's leadership training. Yep. I think at times we don't even have clarity on some of our own definitions.

Scott Allen: And if we are to go to, so I wrote a fun paper with Ron Reggio and Dave Rush, and there's a [00:08:00] famous kind of book in the adult learning literature and it's called Learning in Adulthood and. In this one edition of the book, the authors had this beautiful visual, I'll put, I'll send it to you and I'll put it in the show notes.

But it had these five different orientations of learning, and you could debate these, but it was cognitivism, behaviorism, humanism, constructive developmentalism, and social cognitive, which is basically you learn from your environment and mentors. So they said there's five orientations of learning. So you have the stuff.

The skill, the experience, and the lessons from experience, the mentors who are guiding you. And then you have that humanistic personal growth, Keegan Maslow kind of realm of, that the psychologists have been playing around with for centuries. So if we want to build a [00:09:00] leader, if we want to.

Have a leader, a well-rounded leader, do they have the knowledge? Do they have the skills? Do they have the experience? Do they have the mentors and do they have that kind of maturity and complexity of mind as Keegan would say to hold a space effectively? 

And, but I don't know that we're always really we do the cognitivism in higher ed really well.

Scott Allen: A lot of times in faith-based organizations, they're doing the humanistic stuff and in the student affairs space, they're doing the humanistic stuff. No one that I know of really does skill building really well. Like we are gonna ensure that you are skilled at negotiation or conflict management or running a meeting or giving a presentation.

And then that leadership experience, that's the realm of industry. We have a lot of people out there doing leadership. Like out there, but they may not have any real formal training on no theory, no cognitivism, [00:10:00] no skill building, or they've learned it all kind of OJT on the job. 

Toby Newstead: Yeah.

Scott Allen: So I'll let you react to that. 

Toby Newstead: Yeah. And I think yes, there, there are so many facets to it. And I'm in my own mind I'm being pretty simplistic when I talk about the difference between learning and development. 

Toby Newstead: And I love the learning side just 'cause it makes my job easier because I can assess whether or not someone has learned because I test the intended learning outcomes.

They pass assessments. They don't easy. I also think it's important because we need to learn, I think and my students get to do it because they're enrolled in my units and have to pass my learning outcomes. But it's important to learn where the field of leadership has come from and important, I think, to learn how to take a bit of a critical lens.

Two things, where we might be making assumptions about 

Toby Newstead: Gender or ability or, ethnicity and there, there's some really important stuff that has been baked into conventional approaches to leadership that I think [00:11:00] we need to learn our way around and out of. 

Toby Newstead: But.

Learning about that stuff is very different to doing something about that stuff. 

Toby Newstead: it's probably more the knowing doing thing that I'm talking about. When I'm talking about learning and development. I'm talking more about knowing and doing so I can know, a dozen different theories of leadership.

I can know my own and 10 other definitions of leadership. I can know, some good leader prototypes. I can know that there's some, harmful assumptions out there. But it's different for me then to go do leadership in ways and we know, you gotta actually change how you behave and you need to put your thinking into practice and get feedback on that, and then adjust and then repeat and habituate different ways of being.

And that, in my mind, that's more the development. 

Scott Allen: Yeah. 

Toby Newstead: Versus the learning is just knowing about it. 

Scott Allen: And, if you go across those different domains, I can assess learning pretty readily. Yeah, skill I can [00:12:00] do, it's gonna take longer, but I have to get these 17 people through CPR or watch these 17 people perform karate at a black belt level.

And that just takes longer to assess skill. The humanistic how do you measure that? I guess Keegan is, the subject object interview and they're trying to figure out how we can measure someone's cognitive complexity. Mentors, I don't even know how you would, and then learning from experience or making sense of experience that now you're you move from this very kind of quantitative to qualitative, the spectrum, right?

But. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's, 

Scott Allen: If you think about what we do oftentimes, at least in college as a business, where I came out of. Or even in some of the training I'm doing right now, you're sitting in a room talking about it. And that's an important critical part of the learning based on what you said.

Yeah. But I'm not gonna have a chef at the end of that. I will have someone who knows about culinary arts. Exactly. Or someone who knows [00:13:00] about surgery. I don't want that person 

Speaker 4: working on me yet. No. No. 

Toby Newstead: No, but I also probably don't want someone working on me that has no Yes. Knowledge of it. Yes. Just, they've been fiddling with some scalpels for a while, 

Speaker 4: that's what I'm gonna call the episode. They've been fiddling. 

Toby Newstead: Yeah. And I do, I know. Sue Wilson, she's been on your podcast a couple times and Yeah, she's, I love working. And it was I think it was a passing comment from her on this paper. We're working on it. And I wouldn't actually mind talking about that a little bit 'cause I think it ties into this conversation.

But she made this passing comment and we're going back and forth on revisions and she's yeah, all these things are easy to clarify conceptually and impossible to clarify and practice. Yes, because everything is so subjective. Like we can. Say, oh obviously, leadership involves influence.

That's great. And influence is different to other forms of power because influence is defined as, there's a genuine giving of a granting and [00:14:00] claiming of influence. And it's not coercive. And it's not manipulative. And that's great and we can get very clear conceptually, but then you and I.

Could watch the same thing or have the same conver we, you and I could interact the two of us Yes. And walk away with very different subjective understandings of whether or not that was an influence exchange or coercion, 

Scott Allen: or manipulation or Yes. Or manipulation. Yeah. Yes. 

Toby Newstead: So it's, yeah. 

Scott Allen: Yes. As soon as the pretty boxes in the textbook.

Kind of interface with humans being 

Exactly. I had a woman on the podcast and she said something really beautiful. This one really stuck with me, but she said, you had just mentioned power. She said, I think oftentimes people say power corrupts. And she said, and I think it can corrupt.

She'd worked with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer at Microsoft. She'd coached. Them. She wrote a book and so we had this really wonderful conversation, but then she said, but I also think pressure corrupts, these individuals are under such [00:15:00] pressure. That interesting Maladaptive behaviors show up because they're feeling such intense pressure and their kids are in school and they have to have their mortgage paid for, and they feel pressure to produce.

And, the pretty boxes don't account for the pressure. That, that humans are under and the stress that they're under and the chronic stress that people are under. We were talking before we started recording the reality. I see people in organizational life meeting these quarterly metrics or quarterly goals and living in that kind of pressure cooker and the time stressors associated with that.

Very different than what some of our models can take into consideration, right? 

Toby Newstead: Absolutely. Yep. Absolutely. 

Scott Allen: And there's, and, 

Toby Newstead: and I think we do, we do ourselves, our people and our field a disservice by over-prescribing leadership because for leadership to happen and be developed often, especially in [00:16:00]context like you just described.

It's like sometimes it can't, like you, you can't always afford the time personally and relationally to do the work. That good leadership, as it's described in our models and our papers and our consulting brochures and everything, you can't always take. But that doesn't mean you can't have productive, effective.

Group dynamics, but it might just be the situation actually calls for more of a command response or you need some good management tactics here. And I think I, I see a lot in practice, everything. Everything is wrapped up under the bow of leadership and it's not. 

Toby Newstead: Yeah. And it shouldn't be.

And I think that contributes to the pressure, unfair pressure, unnecessary pressure on people that, you have a really. Tough task ahead of you, and then you're supposed to do it all through these soft tactics of leadership, which is impossible. And then if you're claiming it as leadership, you're gonna tarnish your own reputation because there's no, there might be opportunities for leadership within [00:17:00] the massive downsizing that you have to do, or the raft of terminations.

But yeah, so I think there is a need to claw back. What leadership is and isn't. Because it's not the answer to everything. And if that, especially when that means we then underinvest in developing and supporting other things that need to happen in organizations like management training.

Then I, yeah, I think that and that's 

Scott Allen: a whole nother can where just. As I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn and my approach there has been how do I engage the conversation and nudge I, I'm not gonna come in on, leadership is co-created and that's what we, that is very far from a lot of the mind where a lot of the minds are.

But even that distinction between leadership and management, I think we've lost, it's just synonymous. It's all in the soup and it's all mixed up. And unclear as to what [00:18:00] those functions, the difference. Yeah, and I think even at times, as scholars we're unclear about some of those definitions and it's almost as an industry, we haven't, as a field I should say, and as an industry, we don't have some of the basic definitions that are agreed upon to then from which to build.

And that causes a lot of confusion. 

Toby Newstead: So I, I know we, academics tend to like our precise definitions. And there, there is a piece of work that, that I'm almost ready to start sharing with the world in a written format, which is ironic 'cause it's actually a underpinned my approach to teaching for a long time because I haven't been.

Willing to wed myself to any specific theory of leadership. Same. Nor does any specific definition really satisfy leadership in all its different guises. So for a long time I've taught leadership not based on precise theory or precise definition, but based on what it [00:19:00] involves. And we're now trying to work this into a component-based approach to leadership development where we can.

Understand leadership as distinct to these other things, not because this is the precise definition versus that precise definition, but because leadership involves certain components that help us understand how and when it might be different to some other social dynamic going on. So the components we're working on and I.

These components. I think we've, we're working with the, terms we have landed on to describe these components. Often they're known by synonym. Yeah. But the components we're working on are relationships. And I think we're pretty well squared away on, on our understanding that leadership does involve relationships.

Most people agree to that. So there's, that's the first component. The second component is influence. And this is where. Depending on your audience, you could go much more, ethical, philosophical debates on the nature of influence and influence as one form of power or [00:20:00] whatnot. But influence, there is that sort of, that aspect of affecting how other people are thinking, feeling, or what they're doing.

So there's relationships, influence, and then something around shared purpose. And sometimes this is, common objectives or strategic direction or whatever it is, but there's something. Usually we're not static when we're doing leadership, it's about some sort of momentum or direction.

So that idea of shared purpose. And then the last one is collective effort, and that's where there is actually that sort of gen generativity where we're doing things together. And then the important thing. About these components is that they're all enacted by individuals and there comes your huge diversity in terms of how all these things look and they're enacted in context.

Toby Newstead: Which means, again that they're all gonna look and feel and sound very different all the time. But if we can think about those things as the basis upon which we learn about. Leadership. Yeah. Try to develop our own practice of leadership. [00:21:00] Yes. Try to understand why maybe leadership is failing in a specific instance.

Like what is, what's missing here? Are the relationships not quality? Is there no trust? Is it, are we not really sure on our shared purpose? Are we all just milling about with no clear, 

Scott Allen: I was with an organization today where they were str people were like, yeah, I don't know where we're headed. Yeah, 

Toby Newstead: yeah.

Scott Allen: Yeah. Yeah. So that would be the leadership side of the house, correct. 

Scott Allen: And then if we have the management side of the house, that's interesting. How do you think about that? Have you all defined that or is it not, we're not trying to go to that place. We're just focusing on how to think about this activity of leading others or the, yeah.

Yeah. Okay. 

Toby Newstead: Yeah so we do a little bit, and part of this is, again, it's not definitional specificity, it's more. Understanding what leadership is and what leadership is not. And yeah. And I think one of the, one of the clearest distinctions in my mind between leadership and management is just a different [00:22:00] source of power.

When it's management, you've got legitimate authority. So you can hire, fire, promote demote, allocate resources, withdraw resources. Yep. You've got actual levers of control. 

Whereas leadership is more that reference. Power. So it's the power of liking and trust and rapport, which comes from relationships and that's why relationships really are the bedrock.

Yep. And of course, this is again, the whole really clear in, in concept. Really murky in practice because you might have a really good relationship with someone who is positionally superior to you. Yes. So then when they suggest something, is that influencer or is that legitimate authority? Because they have both. So it is, it, in practice it's much harder to disentangle, but I think if we can have a clearer way of thinking about what leadership involves. 

Speaker 4: Yes. It 

Toby Newstead: might allow a little bit more coherence across. Okay, if we're then trying to learn, if we're trying to develop, if we're trying to diagnose leadership breakdowns, it's not because, oh you didn't use [00:23:00] my definition.

That's why it didn't work. Or you didn't adhere to my theory. That's why, or this isn't working in that. That's just because you need leaders that are more X or Y and it's no idealized 

Speaker 4: influence. That's why it broke down. Yeah, exactly. 

Toby Newstead: Yeah. It's 'cause you're not transformational enough, Scott.

Yeah, 

Speaker 4: it's a very 

Scott Allen: contingent reward. 

Toby Newstead: Yeah. 

Scott Allen: You said something there that I liked. You know what leadership isn't? 

I don't know. I for a long time, I've thought. I wish at, and I know that, I think at the ILA years ago, they, and Sin Cherry talks about this, they tried to convene a group of people to come up with some grand definition.

And I understand that's in some ways a fool's errand. Are there a group of people who get together and say, this is how we're gonna think about it. This is how we're gonna define these things. And it, not everyone has to be involved, but just a faction of people who are like, we're gonna explore this for a period of time with these kind of parameters in [00:24:00] mind and go a lot of different directions.

But these are some of the definitional spaces that we're gonna focus from and orient ourselves to, and. I don't know. I think that would be really interesting because even having done this for 20 plus years, I did a whole podcast with Dan Jenkins and didn't know what we were talking about.

He kept leading me with new questions and I wasn't answering them how he wanted me to because we were defining things differently.

Toby Newstead: Yeah. 

Scott Allen: And again, even as David and I, we just wrote a paper together as it was so fascinating, Toby, and maybe you experienced this with David, but he would give feedback on a revision.

And I'm like, oh, okay. You're defining this way. Cool. Awesome. Now I know that, but that's interesting because I define that kind of a little bit differently, but you're considering this only leadership. Okay, I get it. Or this activity is not leadership at all and interesting, huh? 

Toby Newstead: And to go back to our whole research practitioner thing, [00:25:00] like when.

When some sort of mismatch in definitional precision can lead to that big a misunderstanding between co-authors that know each other well, working together closely. Yes. Then imagine all those conversations we have across research and practice where I think I'm being perfectly clear. 

Speaker 4: Yes, 

Toby Newstead: but God knows how that is being interpreted or understood, or then put into practice by people who probably are just going to hear what they think they wanted to hear in the first place anyways.

Right? 

Toby Newstead: And interpret it all with their own filters and lenses of what they're already doing. And who. Yeah. Who anyone can see any theory of leadership and be like, oh yeah, that's what I do. And that's one thing I try to actually work very critically with my students on that's great.

You might identify as an authentic leader or a transformational leader, but there is no possible way you are all of those dimensions of any of those theories all the time, right? No, actually think about it. Yeah. And. And [00:26:00] I, and that's and the definitional precision. That's our bread and butter in academia.

Wow. But I also think when it comes to leadership at least this thinking I'm working on now with this components based approach is that I don't know if we, get definitional precision because of. Individual differences and the issue of context. 

I don't know that you're gonna get one definition that satisfies, where, what it looks like when you have a sports person leading their field versus a manager leading a, an operational team versus, a social movement versus I just don't, I don't think, I don't think the conventions of definitional precision will allow us.

To create something. And I feel like the longer definitions get maybe the more encompassing they are, but then also who's gonna remember that and who's gonna actually understand that. 

Toby Newstead: And I don't know if we need one, I think we need clarity on what leadership involves.

Like the building blocks, like what it's like the, if we think about.[00:27:00]

Like compounds, like what elements need to exist for the compound of water to be water and not something else? You need two hydrogen, one oxygen. Yeah. And if you have different elements, you have something different. Yeah. But if you have those element and then obviously water comes in lots of different forms and qualities, but it's either water or it's not.

Scott Allen: Yeah. O okay. My head's in five places. I love this nathan. Eva had written that paper a few years ago. They did a blog post about it and basically it came down to look, is it all just about relationships? I think some things we can hang, and you gave some examples, I think it was four of 'em a few moments ago, like direction and purpose and relationships.

I think we can hang it like 30,000 feet and be fairly, this is probably gonna hang across a lot of different contexts. Every context. Yeah. No. For sure. Is this all the details? No, but if you start here, I had a gentleman sitting in front of me. He had just taken over an oral surgery practice and he was afraid, he's an incredible oral surgeon, but he's now leading a practice and [00:28:00] he's like, where do I, what do I even begin?

How do I start? And I can't say, well from a situational leadership perspective. 

Toby Newstead: Yeah, exactly. Just be transformational. Yeah. Just 

Speaker 4: intellectual stimulation. 

Toby Newstead: Yeah. 

Speaker 4: Sorry, Bruce 

Scott Allen: Lio and Bernie Bass. But, so I just said focus on relationships. Spend the first 90 days learning and building relationships with your team.

And if you start there, it's probably a good place for you to begin and spend a little bit of your time. Don't make any large proclaims, don't set any strong vision. Just get to know people. Build relationships and listen and learn. Yeah. And he was like, he, it was like you could see him just feel, so I think, there's.

I think there's some of that's in there for sure. And I think that's important. I also think though, in psychology, which is in some ways because it's dealing with human beings insanely complex. You have youngens, you have adlerians, you have cognitive behavioral therapists, you have a number of [00:29:00] different kind of streams that have defined things for themselves and gone.

Like you have people practicing cognitive behavioral therapy and they're learning, and they're seeing how this theory interfaces with the world. I don't think in leadership, we, and maybe I'm wrong, so listeners push back, Toby, push back. I don't know that we've, we have enough data on how transformational leadership interfaces with the world in the real world.

I don't know that we have that. There's been a lot of studies, but I don't know that there was anything conclusive. There's a few on the development of transformational leadership. Obviously there's meta-analyses on transformational leadership. So I'm interested in what's the cognitive behavioral therapy stream of leader development that could interface with the world?

And we could learn what's the Jungian. Version and flavor, and again, a faction of people might make some definitions and then go and we learn and, [00:30:00] but I don't even think we're there. I don't know. Push back on that. Disagree. 

Toby Newstead: I so from. My understanding, most people working in the leadership industry have some sort of model or definition or theory that they're working on.

A lot have a model or theory they've developed for themselves. A lot of practitioners have their, model, some even trademark them and everything of leadership and that clearly that's working for a lot of organizations. Make a mint selling their leadership development stuff and in some ways I think that's maybe what they're doing.

They're saying this is our form of leadership and then all of our development stuff hangs off that. And we do a smile chart at the end, which tells us we've developed it and voila. 

Scott Allen: Okay. 

Toby Newstead: And I actually think. Yeah, jump in, go. 

Scott Allen: No. Okay. And I'm sorry. So like CCL for instance? 

Toby Newstead: Yep. 

Scott Allen: That, they have the DAC model.

They are in a position to see how the DAC model is interfacing with the world. They're training people on the DAC model, so they have their theory and [00:31:00] they're doing it. So that's a great, that's great. Yes, a hundred percent. 

Toby Newstead: Yeah. I think there's a lot doing it in a. In a cruder way too. Yes.

I've come into contact with more in the practice space, and not to be disparaging, we got together in a room, this is what we think leadership is. 

Toby Newstead: We're gonna put all our, development efforts into whatever it is, like these three aspects or dimensions or elements of our program Yep.

Of our model. And we're gonna, and that's our program. And we're gonna evaluate it by asking people how valuable they found it.

Speaker 4: Was the room temperature? Okay? Yeah, no, a hundred percent. Yeah. The 

Toby Newstead: catering was great. And so I I don't know. And in, in research, we know that leadership development is way under theorized.

Toby Newstead: And so I, and I think, and I liked your, 30,000 feet analogy there, and I think that's exactly it. If we, and. And I think we can get clarity at 30,000 feet. Yeah. I think we can agree that if we are [00:32:00] going to be calling something leadership, at least when you're zoomed right out.

Toby Newstead: These are the, the blotches of activity. There need to be relationships at play, there needs to be some sort of influence being exchanged. Yep. There needs to be some sort of purpose that is shared amongst the group and there needs, people need to be working together. Some sort of collective effort.

Yep. Otherwise, if it's just individuals doing their thing, then it's probably not leadership. So there need to be these. Things, but then how that looks when we zoom in, we might start to get greater clarity around, okay, this specific context, what are the features of this context? And then zooming in again, might get a better view on, on the individuals that are actually, building relationships and exchanging influence and determining and pursuing shared purpose through collective effort.

So I think, but I think that zoomed out thing, that 30,000 feet, I think we can do that, but I don't think we have done that. Yeah. 

Scott Allen: And what would that look like for management as well, and what would that look like? This is probably opening a total can, but how, what does that look [00:33:00] like for followership?

But, so Scott, 

Toby Newstead: you know that I'm like, followership is and we were talking before like it is. Things that are so elegant in theory are often so impossible to clarify and practice. 

Toby Newstead: But one of, one of the reasons we are trying to work on this component space, 30,000 feet Yeah.

View of leadership as involving these things is that none of those things happen without both leadership and followership. 

So followership isn't an afterthought of a components based view. Followership is from the get go. You don't. You don't have any of the components, you don't have any aspect of leadership without both leaders leading and followers following.

Scott Allen: Okay. We're gonna leave listeners there. 

Toby Newstead: You're welcome. You're welcome. Or sorry. 

Scott Allen: I guess Toby I'm switching my final question on you, and take a moment to think if you'd like, but what's the practical wisdom here in all of this conversation? What do you think? What, how do you synthesize what we [00:34:00] just discussed?

Toby Newstead: I think and if we're thinking about people, 'cause all of your listeners. People, right? Yep. We're humans 

Scott Allen: mostly. Some of 

Toby Newstead: us are studying. There's a dog in the corner right now. You got some box listening in. Yeah. No, we are all, and if we're in the academic camp or if we're in the practice camp, if we have a foot in both camps, if we are stepping into our first, year director of oral surgery, major leadership role if we've been doing it for a long time.

I, I think to me, one thing that's important. Is that we keep in mind this, and I don't wanna get us back into the whole definitional clarity, confusion thing, but I think it's really important we continue to learn about what leadership is and how leadership can look where leadership thought has come from to be really critical and really broad ranging in how we choose to learn about.

[00:35:00] Leadership knowing that then for any of that to actually translate. We need to do it. We need to tweak our practice. We need to behave in different ways. We need to ask different questions. We need to do different things. We need to cultivate different habits. We need to seek feedback, and we need to tweak our actual behavior.

But thinking about any sort of ongoing leadership work, if we're researching it, if we're developing others. Teaching others or going about the business of being the best leaders we can be. I think we, we do need to pay attention to doing both. Continuing to learn and then continuing to tweak and refine the doing part of leadership.

Scott Allen: A hundred percent. A hundred percent. I can't agree more. We'll do it again. We'll do it again. Awesome. Thank you so much Toby. Happy 2020, Scott, six to you. And you know what? I just really appreciate you. I appreciate the conversation. It's a fun one. It's an important one. And you know what, thanks for being with me today.

Toby Newstead: Thank you, Scott. I loved it. Be 

Scott Allen: well. 

Toby Newstead: Bye.[00:36:00]