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Why Fearless Leaders are Something to Dread
LONDON - The painful unraveling over the last year of the public and private lives of one of the UK's most iconic businessmen, Lord Browne, is a sobering example of the pitfalls of the cult of leadership. Raising expectations far beyond the capacity of one human to fulfill them - neither BP's successes nor its more recent failings were ever down to Browne alone - hero leaders often end up destroying themselves and wounding the companies that helped to make them.
The love affair with Leadership - capital L - is deep-rooted and pervasive, as a look at almost any copy of Harvard Business Review or Fortune will confirm. April's HBR establishes both the tone and the assumed relationship with 'What Your Leader Expects From You'. February offers 'Discovering Your Authentic Leadership', while January 2007 - a special issue devoted to 'The Tests of a Leader' - sports a cover picture of a shirt-sleeved executive (male, naturally) pumping press-ups on the boardroom table. 'Leadership is for lone He-Men' is the clear message: leaders are managers on steroids.
Of course, we need leaders to focus, decide, rally and sometimes inspire. From playgrounds to football teams to political parties, human groups do not remain leaderless for long. But the business need for heroic leadership - and its corollary, the lament for the lack of it that kicks off most articles on the subject - is something else again.
Where does the desire for heroes originate? One source is the quest for certainty. This intensifies as the world becomes more uncertain; perversely, by raising expectations it also increases the likelihood that they will be dashed. Another source is the way the leader's job is specified. Theoretically, the need for hierarchy, with a strong leader on top, stems from the idea that employees' and companies' interests differ, so a strong boss is needed to ensure the workforce does what is required for shareholders. The boss must also decide what they should do. Obvious, really: in any case, the alternative - running a company from the bottom up - is surely a recipe for chaos and anarchy?
Except that these notions are dangerous half-truths. In theory and in practice, hierarchy doesn't work, and no one put the reason better then GE's Jack Welch, himself an iconic manager. Hierarchy, he said, defines an organisation in which people have 'their face towards the CEO and their ass towards the customer'. The more charismatic the executive, and the more centralised the power, the more perverse the effect.
Centralised power and decision-making, central planning by another name, is not only bad news for the customer. It leads to a cult of personality that wrecks good management. In Ego Check: Why Executive Hubris is Wrecking Companies and Careers (Kaplan), Mathew Hayward notes that chief executives who become celebrities are a danger both to themselves and their followers. They believe their own press, attribute success to their own brilliance and failure to the incompetence of others, and vastly overestimate their decision-making prowess. Success only supercharges this process, generating feelings of invincibility that make an eventual fall inevitable.
When CEOs become celebrities, their firms' performance starts to decline, Hayward finds. Before their downfalls, Martha Stewart, Enron's Ken Lay, Hank Greenberg at AIG, Sunbeam's Al Dunlap, Dennis Kozlowski at Tyco, and WorldCom's Bernie Ebbers all figured in laudatory cover stories in prominent business magazines. He also discovered that companies with starry CEOs pay more for acquisitions. And consider this: by acting as positive feedback, stellar pay can reinforce executive hubris and its damaging effects. Hayward writes: 'By fostering false confidence, greater compensation can actually diminish our resourcefulness and productivity.'
At bottom, the cult of leadership is based on a false opposition. The opposite of top-down hierarchy is not bottom-up anarchy. It is what John Seddon of Vanguard Consulting calls 'outside-in', or, to reverse Welch's image, turning the company through 180 degrees to face the customer rather than the boss.
Making the organization demand-led instantly changes the role and requirements of the CEO. Of course, courage and judgment are still necessary. But they are no longer arbitrary, the product of supposed omniscience. Nor is the job any longer one of coercion, but rather to support front-line employees in serving customers. In short, the leader sets the context in which the interests of company and employees can, as far as possible, coincide.
As ever, be careful what you wish for. Outside-in, demand-led companies don't need hero leaders, we should beware of creating them, and they should beware celebrity's duplicity. As for investors, when a CEO makes the front cover of Fortune, or appears at the head of a 'most admired' list - sell.
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
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11 Comments so far
Show AllWell here we are again with a "customer-oriented" solution to corporate and consumer greed and the consequential corruption that is the natural result.
Consumer facing, "outside in" management is just another management theory that still does not get to the core of the problem -- business is not life and is not supportive of life. Business is about profit which is about money, which is again anti-life.
How about having the people as a whole owning half of all business interests, especially at the huge corporation level, as E. F. Schumacher suggested in Small Is Beautiful. We don't need another business book or management theory.
We need to see the basic violence of business and the mentality it nutures -- subservience and master worship, when we need community and sharing and self-celebration at every level of income. There is some real no-nonsense down to earth business sense.
We tried the Japanese automakers way of mixing managers and assembly workers during lunch to learn from each other. I posted that [here], and the next post was "Then we started building SUVs". !!!
Yes CEOs are lavished because they are there to please stockholders!
Just when you think you are smart-your not!
When your ego gets in the way, your only there for yourself!
In government we look for a leader so we can be lazy. We all are leaders and need to be informed so that the burden does not fall on the boss!
leaders take people to good places. an example is bush after 9/11. he had the chance to change the world for the better. he took the easy way which was war. a leader leads with his heart. his heart telling him things like it is wrong to kill or torture. the leader is in front. leadereship has nothing to do with business, though that is what we are told. the only good leaders are business men. a successful leader is one who makes money. start leading with the heart. dump all the current 'models' of leadership. look at george lakoff's model of the nurtarant parent to see what real leadership is. one of his three books is 'thinking points'.
"Leadership: Theoretically, the need for hierarchy, with a strong leader on top, stems from the idea that employees' and companies' interests differ, so a strong boss is needed to ensure the workforce does what is required for shareholders."
Yeah, the leader demands that workers forfeit health benefits and take a decrease in pay. On the other hand, the leader ends up with multi-million dollar benefit packages and their greed-driven sharholders are happy.
Trickle-down economics is a myth!
Who needs "dear leader"?
For me, just about the scariest and most insidious part of corporo-fascist delusion is the replacement of the word 'manager' or 'owner' with the word 'leader'.
At the corporation for which I work, 'leadership' is something generic and teachable. The capable 'leader' of a bakery department is considered equipped to go run the seafood department. If she does well at that, she might 'lead' a store.
So now America buys this line of hooey and considers the entrepreneurs and CEOs to be 'leadership material' and lets them run our government. We the People have become 'externalities', and have been removed from all consideration unless we can contribute to the 'leader's bottom line. We've gotten what we should've known we'd get.
Jesus, Muhammed (bbuh), Hildegard of Bingen, Sojourner Truth, Ghandi, MLKjr, Bill Moyers, Dennis Kucinich. These are a few people I consider true leaders. At work, I use the word 'manager' to avoid cheapening what a leader actually is and does.
They are the seed crystals that fall into a supersaturated social solution and create a solid substance.
peach,
You touch upon something very important.
I am half asleep, so I won't perform, but this is my favorite topic.
I think the trend started earlier, probably with the Harvard Business school, and the creation of the concept of a "free
floating manager" instead of a competent administrator.
I always compare this country with the former Soviet Union where a good apparatchik (i.e. a person with exceptional abilities to inflict pain) would become one day a minister of culture, and another minister of agriculture.
OK, I am going to bed, but tomorrow I'll read the article.
Actually, it's today.
The issue of leadership has been taken in relation to Canada by Françoise Morissette and Amil Heinen Made in Canada Leadership: Wisdom from the Nation's Best and Brightest on the Art and Practice of Leadership where they talked with +200 leaders to see what could be replicated. They also found that co-operatives produced better leaders than capitalistic companies.
"I always get more accomplished when I let people think its their idea."
This sign sat on Ronald Reagan's desk, and though I disagree with Trickle Down Economics, surrounding himself with Viet-Nam hawks, kicking the mentally unstable people back into society and killing full time employment for seasonal emergency employees who want to pass their knowledge on season after season.(leaving dedicated people with no retirement)
He was the "Great Communicator" with a greedy message!
I am back. I've scanned the article, and I am disappointed. I think he is not familiar with /not interested in American reality.
I like two posts most – by Awaken and Peach.
There many aspects of the cult of leadership
- it's a cult of personality in a totalitarian environment – American workplace.
- "free-floating", empty, content deprived nature of American corporate leadership is impossible without denigration of knowledge and expertise. We worship and obey the ignorant CEOs, but we have contempt for true experts, who in this environment are disposable. It's not difficult to predict the consequences of such situation
- a myth that a manager, who is trained to use and manipulate people only, can be successful everywhere and the denigration of knowledge have lead to dismissal of countless highly educated experts and the destruction of countless institutions
- Washington of the last years is an extension of the absurdity of American workplace. Brownies are everywhere not only in New Orleans. They are however surrounded by silence.
etc.