OSZone Blog

Tuesday, June 6th, 2006

Open Source leadership

Ted Leung: “I like to think of the two viewpoints this way: If you want to look at leadership as giving someone authority, then there are two kinds of authority. There’s positional authority. That’s where you give someone a title and then people follow the instructions of the person with the title. But there’s another kind of authority, which is much more powerful (at least I think so). Call this relational authority, the authority that stems from the relationship that you have with another person. We all have (I hope) people that we trust enough that we let them ‘tell us what to do’. We’ve given those people a place of ‘authority’ in some sphere of our lives. In the ‘despotic’ projects that I’ve observed up close, in every single one of them, the despot had gained significant relational authority, in addition to whatever their supposed title conferred.”

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