It is time we faced facts. In spite of the many millions of dollars spent by companies and governments around the world each year, the strategies we're using to develop so-called 'leaders' in order to embed 'leadership' have failed. Occasionally these huge investments impart the illusion of progress. But in reality they don't work.
If we were making real progress we would instantly be able to identify extraordinary 'leaders' in most of our institutions. They would stand out for their distinctiveness, their passion and their presence. Instead we get grey faces in grey suits thinking grey thoughts; clones armed with lookalike MBAs from one of the many lookalike business schools. And executive training and development that invariably misses the mark.
Yet we continue to throw big bucks this way. Who are we kidding? Real leaders, authentic leaders, seem to be a rare if not virtually extinct species. Why is this? Why do so few people in public life inspire us by their vision of how things might be? Is leadership such a rare talent that it is out of reach for most of us? Or are we simply looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Part of the problem, I am convinced, lies in our stories of leadership. Seduced by nostalgia for a glorious past, Hollywood heroes, and psychopaths who will do anything to be noticed, they entangle us in improbable fictions. Stemming from the playground games boys enjoyed at school (which they then choose to maintain in later life) these myths speak almost exclusively of intrepid deeds by an exclusively older male fraternity.
A perfect combination of gerontocracy and patriarchy, you won't find many women's tales in this stereotypical male domain unless they are Joan-D'Arc or Boadicea types, prepared to don the mantle of masculinity to seek advancement in an exclusive men's club. Nor do the more spiritual or compassionate aspects of our humanity get much of a look in. This is a real man's world where actions invariably speak louder than words and where expressing one's feelings or showing kindness are best avoided lest they are interpreted as a sign of weakness.
And so we are taught from an early age that leaders possess the kinds of courage, wealth, power and status that mere mortals can only dream about. This then generates the view that we are all players in an overarching narrative being directed by the rich and powerful. What arid, dangerous nonsense!
Another misguided fable concerns the relationship between leaders and managers, or leading and managing. As management science sought legitimacy during the latter half of the 20th century, an adolescent consulting industry extended its influence and earnings potential by declaring leadership a management competency. This, of course, is absurd - but a stroke of sheer genius from a financial perspective. The inherent difference between managers (who channel resources at hand to achieve measurable results efficiently and as seamlessly as possible) and leaders (who harness their entire being in the pursuit of disruptive dreams) will forever remain in creative tension. Confusing the two degrades management and thwarts genuine leadership.
A third possibility concerning the contemporary confusion over leadership is that the nature of leadership itself has morphed. Perhaps the charismatic style of leadership we have come to expect, and for which some of us still yearn, is no longer sufficient for our needs. In that case, perhaps leadership is self-organizing into something less evident (but more pervasive) than previously? It doesn't mean that leadership has disappeared. Rather, it has adopted a new guise. After all, the world is always changing, with old certainties continually being swept away.
Through the ages, as we often joke, death and taxes were the only certainties. Today even this is in doubt. Astonishing breakthroughs in knowledge through the use of artificial general intelligence and the machine learning used in large language models like GPTChat, are undermining almost everything we once held true. New smart apps are disrupting long-established patterns of human activity, banishing the familiar and eroding certainty in our minds. Traditional value systems are mutating. Some of our most venerable institutions are threatened as, through the rapid fusion of ideas, fakes, technologies, institutions, markets, and cultures, entire belief systems collide and ricochet - indifferent to established boundaries.
At the same time, digital gadgets and social networking websites plug us into the clamour of the global village. What it means to be 'human' - its ideals, anguish, joys and horrors - is thrust in our faces non-stop. Twenty four hours a day. Seven days a week. This intrusion of the mass media into our daily lives ensures there can be no escape. Alas we are trapped in prisons of our own invention.
The mental pressures and physical stress on business leaders, and politicians too, appear overwhelming. The latest technologies are continuously changing what we do, how we do it - and even how long we can keep on doing it before we need to do something else.
Governments react timidly to the slightest shift in geopolitical conditions. Clinging to the coattails of American or Chinese archetypal militancy (depending upon one's political persuasions) their moral authority, once indomitably resilient, is evaporating along with a slow decline in national self-determination. Eventually - or so it seems - the Westphalian model, which has been the backbone of political governance over several centuries, will collapse under the weight of an impossible mission.
Companies resort to obsolete business models (because that is all they know to do) apparently unconcerned by the risks they face in remaining the same. Spin-doctors talk up growth while glossing over ubiquitous look-alike plans they know will stifle innovation and strip value out of the enterprise.
The landscape has become littered with mindless, short-term, survival tactics. And, just to add a further frisson of uncertainty, a rising tide of corporate accounting scandals is shaking world markets as Ukraine and Russia pummel each other using new generation intelligence tactics, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu resorts to eschatological utterances to justify the massacre of Palestinians, organized religion staggers from one crisis to another, conspiracy theories refuse to subside, and racial prejudice and discrimination grows stronger even as global heating threatens our very existence! No wonder the business world is in such a state of bewilderment.
As these dynamics acquire a seemingly unstoppable intensity they are giving rise to an increasingly unstable environment in which the rules (and much of the knowledge) of the past 400 years are increasingly irrelevant. How can we possibly know what matters any more? What should a 'leader' do in times such as these? So confusing and uncertain is today's world that it seems almost impossible to achieve anything much. And yet almost anything is actually possible.
The essence of being human is not just about having a single vision focusing upon unending material growth, or the accumulation of more and more wealth. Nor is it instituting controls for its realization, fighting others to achieve it, or endlessly trying to persuade others of its benefits. That is how we got ourselves into this mess in the first place.
On the contrary, understanding what it really means to be human demands humility and compassion; transformation, starting with us; embracing emergent realities; and accepting that the world is a far richer and more complex place than any one of us can possibly comprehend. Over the coming decades we will be called upon to reimagine the entire material basis of our civilization. In that context the true challenge of leadership demands that we challenge current dogma, let go of our old self-serving scripts, and create new stories and admitting new realities that allow our authentic selves to emerge whole once again.
From tribes and cults through empires to today's monstrous bureaucracies and multinational corporations the story that has dominated Western society for well over two centuries has been one of servitude and efficiency. It fuelled an age of prosperity where self-interest was tied to the notion of material gain. This story has led to impoverished views of the self and an ethos of dependency within society. It is no longer adequate to maintain even a modest sense of truthful universal well-being. It never was.
Furthermore, because it fails to remind us of our dependence on the biosphere (often seen merely as a means of production) we have recklessly extracted earth's resources, polluting as we go, and losing our sense of connection to the planet that sustains us.
The new story, slowly emerging, felt by some but not yet clearly understood, is about integration and regeneration. At some point, we have to know, accept, and express who we really are, not be content with being what others want us to be. When we can tap into our passions, engage authentically with the world, discover a more virtuous and meaningful story, and take responsibility as a sentient species for stewarding all life, we will change ourselves. And when we change ourselves, we change the world.
That is the rationale and the world in which we all have the potential to be leaders - a world in which there is no room for apathetic or compliant followers, a world where leadership is a state of cooperative collegiality (an altered state of being rather than some alchemical process aimed at converting management clones into inspirational architects of innovation), and where effectiveness means acquiring the ability to deal with novelty while embracing the extraordinary.
Actually this model of leadership is not rare, though it often goes unheralded, and because it's not labelled leadership it’s mostly held in low esteem. For it starts in grassroots communities and spreads like a bushfire, requiring no individual agent for its combustion, or to fuel its progress, nor to keep it blazing.
Which is, of course, what authentic leadership is really about. The stark realities of the human condition require a profound transcendence of the ego in those of us who aspire to 'lead' and a willingness to create experiences fuelled by love, empathy and compassion, rather than the rampant materialism that was responsible for industrial economism. That is now the only way to become a force for good in this world - particularly if we're serious about the preservation of our species.
Leadership is an emergent experience, a work of art, a phenomenon intrinsic to our collective status. It is not the prerogative of a few old white men in suits who happen to call themselves ‘leaders’ because of fictions perpetuated by business schools, and organizations too lethargic to invent their own lexicon of new meanings.
Very well put and argued RDH. In the past I’ve also liked your references to “ silent leadership”. Simply put; perhaps the best leadership passes unnoticed. It’s a bit like selling and changing minds: a subtle process to persuade ( people) to think or undertake actions which they had not considered previously…..Best, O