Why Do My Questions About Leadership Keep Getting Deeper?
I began with a simple question 25 years ago: “What is a leader?” The more I studied leadership, the less simple that question became.
“What is a leader?”
I first began asking myself this question seriously about 25 years ago.
At the time, I was not a researcher.
I was working in a company, doing my job within an organization, trying to influence people, and sometimes being influenced by others. Leadership was something I experienced every day.
But I did not understand it.
Is a leader someone who delivers results?
Someone who pulls people forward?
Someone who holds a formal position?
Or is leadership something else entirely?
“What is a leader?”
I think I wanted an answer.
## If I understood emotions, could I understand leadership?
Later, I studied for an MBA.
There, I became interested in the relationship between emotions and leadership.
People do not act on logic alone.
The same words may resonate with one person and fail to reach another.
Under the same leader, one person may become more motivated while another begins to distance themselves.
Emotions are always present.
There are my emotions, your emotions, and the emotions that emerge between us.
I came to believe that we could not understand leadership without paying attention to them.
So, in my MBA research, I explored emotions and leadership.
That was in 2005.
Looking back, I think this was one attempt to answer the question I had been carrying with me:
“What is a leader?”
But after completing my MBA, I did not immediately move on to the next research project.
Quite the opposite.
I remember thinking:
“I never want to go through something this difficult again.”
My path toward becoming a researcher was anything but straightforward.
## The question remained
I continued working, but I also continued thinking about leadership.
I read.
I practiced.
I talked with people.
I observed organizations.
Gradually, something changed in the question itself.
“Who is a good leader?”
That question alone no longer seemed sufficient to explain what I was seeing.
Sometimes, one outstanding individual appears to move everyone around them.
But organizations are more complicated than that.
Someone begins to speak.
Another person responds.
Someone who had remained silent begins to act.
One person’s action prompts someone else to take responsibility.
So I began to wonder:
Does leadership really exist inside one individual?
Or does it emerge between people?
The location of my question was gradually shifting from the individual to the relationship.
## From “Who is the leader?” to “How does leadership emerge?”
Eventually, I began studying Shared Leadership.
Shared Leadership does not restrict leadership to one formal leader. It allows us to see leadership as something that can be carried by multiple members of a team.
But I was not interested only in whether such a state existed.
I wanted to know how it emerged.
Why do people who once depended on a single leader begin to think for themselves, influence one another, and take responsibility?
How does that change happen?
I entered an organizational transformation team and followed what happened there over time.
That research eventually became my doctoral dissertation in 2022:
“A Qualitative Study of the Mechanism by Which Shared Leadership Emerges: An Ethnography of the Organizational Transformation Team ‘Challengers’ Association.’”
It would make a neat story if I could say that earning my doctorate finally gave me the answer to the question I had carried for so long.
But that is not what happened.
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## Even my doctoral research did not end the question
In my doctoral research, I followed the process through which Shared Leadership emerged.
I believe the study suggested one possibility for understanding that emergence.
But that does not mean I completely explained how Shared Leadership emerges.
Instead, another problem became visible after the research was finished.
If I wanted to show clearly that leadership had emerged, perhaps I first needed to understand more precisely what a state of non-emergence looked like.
The question reversed itself.
Not only:
“How does leadership emerge?”
But also:
“Why does it fail to emerge?”
Studying emergence made me interested in non-emergence.
## People gather and talk. Yet leadership still does not emerge.
Today, my question has changed again.
People gather.
They hold meetings.
They talk.
They even recognize that their organization has problems.
And yet, why does Relational Leadership sometimes fail to emerge?
My current Research Question is:
> Why does relational leadership fail to emerge even when organizational members meet, talk, and recognize shared problems?
I am not simply interested in organizations where people do not communicate enough.
In fact, people may be talking.
They may be discussing problems.
And yet something may still not be happening in the relationships between them.
At the moment, I am trying to capture this observation in the following words:
> “Problems are discussed, but relationships are not.”
To think more deeply about this kind of relationship, I am currently exploring a perspective I call “Monologic Relationship.”
This is not a completed theory or an established research finding.
It is research that is still taking shape.
So I do not yet have the answer.
## I thought I was looking for answers
About 25 years ago, what I wanted to know was simply:
“What is a leader?”
That question led me to emotions and leadership.
Then it became:
“Does leadership reside in one individual?”
Through my research on Shared Leadership, it changed again:
“How does leadership emerge in relationships between people?”
And today, I am asking:
“Why can leadership fail to emerge even when people gather, talk, and recognize a shared problem?”
I began researching leadership because I wanted answers.
But instead of converging on one answer, the question itself kept changing.
Perhaps “deepening” is a better word.
I once wanted to understand the true nature of leadership.
Today, I am trying to understand both the moments when leadership emerges between people and the relationships in which it does not.
## I am still somewhere inside the question I asked 25 years ago
Perhaps I once believed that if I continued researching long enough, I would eventually arrive at an answer.
I see it differently now.
When we pursue one question seriously, another question appears behind it — one that we could not see before.
The place where we thought we had found an answer becomes the entrance to the next question.
My MBA did not end the question.
My doctoral dissertation did not end it.
And my current research probably will not end it either.
Still, I continue asking questions about leadership.
Why?
Perhaps because the question that emerged 25 years ago —
“What is a leader?”
— has never really ended for me.
I began researching leadership to find answers.
Instead, the more I researched, the deeper the question became.
And I am still somewhere inside the question I began asking 25 years ago.
Originally published in Japanese on INNERSHIFT:
https://innershift.jp/research-journal/why-leadership-questions-deepen/
