Being Wrong About Leadership
I am often caught up in arguments where the terms leader, leading and leadership are bandied around as if everyone agrees on the precise meanings of those three words.
Mostly it is assumed that to be a leader you must play a significant role in a corporation or nation and have charisma, strength of character, and other personality traits that allow you to stand out from the crowd in abundance. A ruthless streak does not go astray, nor money and friends in high places.
The leadership literature, along with social and mainstream media commentary, doggedly refer to these leaders as discrete individuals who wield authority over others simply by virtue of their standing in a (mostly) male-dominated pecking order.
Governments and political parties unfailingly refer to their Prime Minister as the Leader. And of course we must not omit to mention the leader of the opposition. Public and private companies are fond of discriminating between the leaders of the organisation - in reality a private members club where the obscenely paid exercise their supposedly superior knowledge to laud it over the mere mortals who actually do all the work.
I find it fascinating, for example, that Alan Joyce, the CEO of Qantas, the iconic Australian airline whose customer service rankings have plummeted over the past three years owing to a series of bungles, is paid $8 million a year - the equivalent of 110 nurses or teachers.
At the same time we conveniently ignore two salient factors. First that leadership is not simply a more advanced or erudite form of management - although that would be 'news' to the business schools attached to major universities who insist on giving their students full frontal labotomies to inculcate that is indeed the case. Second, research indicates that at least 20 per cent of people graced with the mantle of leader are actually sociopaths.
Let us, for a moment, put the dominant Western approach to leaders and leadership to the test. Many popular leadership theories harness psychology, quite legitimately I believe, to distinguish between those of us who have a propensity to tell others what to do and those who do not. We commonly sort these into two categories: leaders and followers. Some of the core assumptions underpinning these theories are inconsistent. Others are fatally flawed.
For example, one Western notion of leadership - initiated by social theorist Max Weber over 100 years ago in his theory of 'charismatic leadership' - perpetuates the myth that 'great' leaders use their innate talents and strength of character to dominate followers and give them instructions, the aim being either to enforce compliance with their wishes or to instil in people the impulse for taking a particular course of action they might otherwise dismiss. Another, based on Frederick Fiedler’s work in the 1960s and 1970s, favours the notion of contingency - that for every discrete problem there's an individual best suited to fixing that problem. Contingency theory spawned an entire executive recruitment industry which focuses on discovering a supposed 'perfect match' between a candidate and the context in which he or she will be operating. Both of these theories amount to little more than delusions in such a complex world as ours.
As a consequence of these flawed hypotheses, along with aseveral other models originating from these two primary sources, like Hersey & Blanchard's prescriptive 'Situational Leadership' model, for example, people in positions of authority began to be perceived as exemplary leaders - rather than managers, which is their actual role. This also explains why middle-aged male CEOs, military officers, politicians and heads of state are so often depicted as leadersand why women find it so difficult to be viewed as such: they lack the very qualities that would potentially give them similar credibility; characteristics we incorrectly assume to be vital aspects of leadership.Â
This kind of confusion has led many, otherwise intelligent organisations, down a futile path where explicit qualities like decisiveness, grit, tenacity, and assertiveness, are portrayed and modelled as essential leadership behaviours within an overall 'competency' framework. Worse, these theories, Â models and frameworks all assume that leaders with adequate strength of mind and resolve can prevail over whatever reality they confront. As the world becomes increasingly complex this is an absurd notion. Yet we take these things so seriously!
So what is the truth? How can we begin to define a model of leadership that makes sense given today's conditions and constraints – also considering that the psychology of leadership, a mindset and practice sustained taught in most US and European business schools - is a phenomenon that may become less and less relevant in a world culturally inclined to fewer Western role models.
The major thrust of my own research over a ten-year period, which led to the publication of The Five Literacies of Global Leadership, indicated a new philosophy of leadership, where to lead is framed within a global context and redefined as the impulse and capability to help shape what it is that people want to happen – rather than what they are told they must do.
This led me, quite early on, to affirm my belief that there is no such thing as a discrete leader and that leadership is not a role, a competency, or even a practice, but an emergent phenomenon arising from the collective desires of those within a group or community. Participation in what we apprehend as leadership (particularly in terms of raising the human spirit to new aspirations and endeavours) is not bound by gender, age, nationality or belief - and certainly not by hierarchical status, influence or wealth. On the contrary, participation in leading can engage men, women and children, of any nationality, and any belief system, when they share in devotion to a cause that matters to them. And it's not at all surprising that when we start looking for examples outside of the traditional spotlight in which leadershipis supposed to occur, we find an abundant supply of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, in any number of domains.
In one sense leadership exists independently of performance. Yet the qualities exhibited by those whose natural inclination is to step into the shared phenomenon of leading are well accustomed to achieving extraordinary things in situations that would defeat most others. Quite distinct from the more popularly assumed qualities of an effective leader, the most vital attributes are:
Constituent Cooperation - the ability to gain integrity rapidly by locating oneself within the group rather than above it or separate from it
Ecological Sensitivity – the knack of fitting in with the group such that the group’s identity is shaped in ways that makes one's agenda an expression of that identit
Ecority - The capacity to take responsibility for the reality we create, while caring for all living things, and shaping futures that better balance technology with humanity.
In essence, by appreciating the values and beliefs of those with whom we interact, and all those others who are merely witness to those interactions, we avoid any tendency to assume absolute authority, engaging in a collegial dialogue instead about what we stand for, what really matters, and how we should act, and in ways that constantly generate new possibilities and nurture trust.
It is abundantly clear that no fixed set of personality traits or behaviours can ever assure effective leadership, because the most desirable qualities invariably depend upon the nature of the group itself as well as the context within which they find themselves.
In other words the underlying premise of leadership is not based on individual makeup, talent or personality, but on the inherent psychology of the group with which those inspired to lead most strongly identify.
Whereas 'charismatic' models of leadership insist upon strength of character coupled with a rare set of personal attributes to determine leadership effectiveness, and 'contingency' theories imply the secret of good leadership boils down to finding the perfect match between the individual and the challenge at hand - both of these responsible for a multitude of best-selling business books as well as the fortunes charged by corporate head hunters - the fundamental assumption on which contemporary leadership is based concerns the phenomenon of social identity.
This concept of allows us to avoid the wearisome flip-flop between those who assert that a great leader can surmount any situation, and those who rejoin that it is the circumstances which define the leader. It also helps to resolve the dilemma that immoral people like Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot cannot possibly have been true leaders because of the evil they perpetrated. They were tyrants who were able to create the conditions for mass psychosis in the population of which they were a part. And tyrants, along with psychopaths, can certainly engage in leadership as defined here. The fact they used brutality and coercion is neither here not there given that leadership as I define it can occur on a spectrum ranging from pure evil to sacred ecority.
Coined in the 1970s by Henri Jajfel and John Turner at the University of Bristol in England, the term 'social identity' refers to that part of an individual’s awareness of self that is both derived and defined by being a member of a group or community – be it family, gang, sect or nation. In this context, leadership arises from the symbiotic relationships between people within the group. Essentially, social identity enables group behaviour. It allows us to identify with a group of like minds, reach agreement on what matters to us most, and coordinate our actions in striving towards shared goals. In other words, social identity enables coherent collective action.
The emergence of social identity helps to elucidate the transformation we see in the strategies used by rulers associated with the genesis of modern nation states in the 19th century. Before national identities emerged European monarchs could only rule as autocrats, using power to control their citizens. But once people identified with the state, effective monarchs were able to rule as patriots, leading their people by virtue of the shared national identity they embodied. Monarchs like Louis XVI of France who grossly underestimated or misunderstood this shift literally lost their heads!
More recently, social identity has become especially germane owing to the growing numbers of people around the world, enabled by new information and communications technologies such as the Internet, who engage in social networking activities. This, together with related phenomena yet to emerge from even more astonishing technologies such as artificial intelligence, will only increase the need for new approaches to leadership.
When a shared social identity exists, those who best represent that identity will invariably have the most influence over other members in the group: their authenticity, as culturally prototypical of the group, is palpable. This is why they become the most visible symbol of leadership. Not only do they exemplify what makes the group distinct from (and even superior to) other comparable groups, they're able to do this from a position of belonging - almost instinctively.
The wash up of all of this is four elementary lessons. Firstly, in spite of all the products in the human resource marketplace suggesting otherwise, legitimate, effective and authentic leadership in today’s global environment does not require a pre-determined set of personality traits, talents, skills or behaviours. Nor does it mean applying universal rules of behaviour. Likewise, competency frameworks cannot deliver. In fact the most desirable leadership qualities are emergent: they must align with the culture of the group experiencing leadership and this will inevitably vary from one group to another and from time to time.
Secondly, anything that distances a leader from the group or sets them apart (including financial compensation) will ultimately compromise their effectiveness, undermining their credibility and ability to influence particular outcomes.
Thirdly, authentic leading is more than merely reflecting and conforming to current norms and protocols. Indeed the most effective leaders will constantly contribute to shaping their group’s social identity (through key principles underlying their words and deeds) to fit with their vision of how things should or could be, enabling them to position these as expressions of what their constituents already believe (or know) to be in their best interests.
Finally it must be remembered that identity must harmonise with reality. Even some of the most oft-touted conventional leadership skills, such as intelligence, personal charm and assertiveness, for example, can be out-of-kilter in some situations today. The wise leader is not simply attuned to making the group’s social identity 'real' but also helps the community experience that identity as a reality. In order to do that, the only sensible approach is to constantly scan the environment and design or adopt traits that fit with changing circumstances. This is why leadership as defined here will be increasingly vital in the future.