12 - Criteria for the Evaluation of Transformational Leaders

Summary

I have devoted most of this book to analysis of the political strategies of Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Chapters 9 and 11, however, were devoted to the challenge of explaining their choices. There remains an additional exercise of core relevance to the study of leadership: evaluation. How should we evaluate Gorbachev and Yeltsin as leaders? This is by far the most difficult task, for it subsumes the other two. We must determine what those men were trying to do and specify how much latitude they had to pursue those goals before we can evaluate the effectiveness of their leadership. And we must employ counterfactual reasoning (“what might have been”) to ask whether their actions led to outcomes that would not have happened in the absence of their leadership. The exercise is made even more challenging by the normative component of any evaluation. I begin the exercise with a short chapter that specifies criteria for the evaluation of transformational leaders. I then devote the last two chapters of the book to evaluations of Gorbachev and Yeltsin as transformational leaders.

REQUISITES OF EFFECTIVE TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP

Transformational leadership is a process of what Schumpeter called “creative destruction”: dismantling of the old system in a way that simultaneously creates the foundations for a new system. This is a tall order for the most talented of leaders.