Rethinking Leadership: Tired Myths and New Insights
What you think you know about leadership is probably wrong.
There is a good chance that you and your organization are unwittingly suppressing leadership.
There is no such thing as ‘a leader’.
In 2010, the Harvard Business School held a colloquium on leadership as part of the school’s centennial celebrations. It was attended by a variety of scholars from diverse disciplines, many of whom had submitted papers for discussion at the gathering. Their general conclusion: the essence of leadership is not well-understood or agreed upon, and the institutions that school current and future leaders are not producing research that adequately answers fundamental questions.
In the ensuing ten years, not much has changed. Political scientist James MacGregor Burns’ longstanding observation still holds: “Leadership is one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth.” (Leadership, HarperCollins, 1978)
And a deeper issue is this: much of what we currently think we understand about leadership is faulty and weak. This greatly matters – if we don’t understand what leadership is then we cannot design it to happen and develop strong leaders, nor repair it when it breaks down – we are leaving leadership emergence to serendipity.
What’s the problem with our understanding? There are several issues. We attribute certain personality traits to leaders, (e.g., extraversion), or mysterious characteristics (e.g., charisma), or certain behaviours (e.g., authenticity), as well as many other things, such as character and inspiration, but these are not uniformly displayed by those whom we call leaders, if at all. We attribute leadership to roles (e.g., CEOs, Presidents, and Prime Ministers), yet we know that just because someone occupies a certain role does not necessarily mean that they are displaying whatever it is we call leadership. We conflate leadership with management, yet we intuitively know that there is a difference, albeit unclear. We attribute outcomes to leaders, yet even cursory reflection reveals that outcomes are dependent not only on the individual but on circumstances beyond the individual’s control, such as market, technological and political forces, and it is frequently difficult to distinguish whether success (or failure) is attributable more to the individual or to the situation, or (more likely) to some combination of the two.
While we do know a great deal about managerial effectiveness, we have not understood the essence of leadership – what it is and why we perceive people to emerge as leaders. This again matters – managerial effectiveness is not the leadership essence we seek in many critical situations.
Over a period of several years, in conjunction with my consulting work to CEOs and senior executives, I undertook an in-depth academic research effort in management sciences to better understand the leadership phenomenon. In short, I found that leaders engage, align and mobilize people by meaningfully challenging, or meaningfully resisting challenges to, systems and the status quo, and accumulate and wield non-coercive power in doing so. Through their communication and actions, they induce others to see existing situations in a significantly altered light, compelling them to think and act differently to create a desired new reality. And no particular set of character traits, behavioural styles or other properties is uniquely suited to doing this.
This new perspective has significant ramifications to organizations, leadership development efforts, and leadership research. Deeper analysis reveals that:
organizations are designed to suppress leadership emergence, not to develop and encourage it
leadership emergence is dependent on the situation
no one is universally ‘a leader’
leadership is not inherently good, despite its common connotation as such: “show some leadership!”; leaders can do good or evil, but the phenomenon itself is neither
leadership isn’t always about change – sometimes it’s about resisting and preventing change
‘leader’ has supplanted the word ‘manager’ in organizations, yet most managers are not displaying leadership (nor do organizations pay them to be leaders or want them to lead)
while empirically based and methodologically sound, most academic research on leadership is actually about managerial effectiveness – it does not focus on the key concept of emergence, i.e., why leadership emerges in the first place, and what is the essence of the phenomenon
that minority of research that does focus on emergence is grounded in evolutionary psychology and complexity theory, and does not lend itself to empirical testing
much of the non-academic leadership literature is replete with moralistic fallacies, declaring what the authors think leadership should be based on anecdotal experience rather than exploring and testing how the phenomenon actually shows up in nature, as a scientific approach demands
Boards and corporate executives must ask themselves whether they desire to employ individuals who will meaningfully challenge, or resist challenges to, the system and status quo, and who will acquire and exercise power beyond that institutionally conferred in doing so. And they must further determine which of these is appropriate given the environment the organization is operating in and where they want it to go. If the forces needed for change or stability align of their own accord or through the use of coercive institutional power then there is no need for leadership. But if there is a desire for leadership to emerge – to non-coercively mobilize and sustain collective action to either overcome or stabilize system forces, as circumstances warrant – then organizations must be open to significant challenges to the status quo and to major adjustments to their stabilizing mechanisms, enabling executives, managers and staff to act well beyond adherence to the routine procedures and practices of the organization.
This is not the prevailing understanding of leadership, nor the focus of most current leadership development efforts, nor the kinds of behaviours that corporations and other institutions generally encourage. A rethink is needed.