On “Leadership”
By: Doug Breitbart & Fabian Szulanski
The assumption of the need for leadership is our inquiry. The prevailing leadership mindset is fundamentally rooted in power, control, and authority over others. The companion drivers utilized to preserve and enforce retention of this power are fear, scarcity, competition, and zero-sum games.
This concept lies at the heart of the way businesses have been operated and grown from the dawn of the industrial revolution. The historical and ancient antecedent roots in fact trace all the way back to tribal leaders in prehistoric times, through to the emergence of dynastic rulers, and ruling classes from the earliest appearance of larger human settlements and societies’ emergence.
Intrinsic to the meme of leadership, in its earliest manifestation, is the idea that the leader embodied the greatest power and physical capacity to triumph over all others in the group or tribe. The evolution of brute force to metaphoric power and control over the subordinated majority comprising organizations has brought us to today’s profit-driven version of human productivity, where employees are commoditized and reduced to units of labor, a class of “resource” applied within the chain of production. What has been sustained is this being rooted in fear.
We note the emergence of many aspirationally, more evolved variations on the “leadership” meme: servant leadership, self-leadership, conscious leadership, values-based leadership, and leaderless structures, etc. purporting to “wash” the more negative and toxic dimensions of the original Tayloresque vision. However, all ultimately remain rooted in the memetic “leadership” center of gravity, which solely exists in service to supporting the core belief that there are others that need to be led.
The concept of “self-leadership” perfectly illustrates the intrinsic irony. Inherently, even in the context of “self” leadership, it requires a projected disaggregation of the individual into two distinct beings: the one who is leading, and the one who then follows.
Why is it not sufficient for this same individual to just be, fully connected, empowered, and in touch with their own agency, voice, self-awareness, capacities, and consciousness; as an entitled and committed contributor to the collective endeavor, without the need for direction by an imposed internal or external “other?”
The fundamental argument for the need for leadership is that the answer to the above question is because those to be led are presumptively incapable. They are not capable of working things out with each other, and they lack the intrinsic capacity to do so when left up to their own devices.
If that is the belief of those in authority, then the leadership is guaranteed to create a reality that affirms that belief, effectively institutionalizing the incapacitation of all in subordinate positions through separation and disaggregation. This becomes a self-fulfilling and self-perpetuating prophecy.
A correlative question in this context is:
What is required to enable those conditioned to oppression and submission, experiencing relentless instability and disempowerment to reawaken and reconnect with their individual power, creativity, and agency; in service to maximizing the realization of their fullest potential generative capacity and contribution?
In order to achieve the above, both those in leadership positions and those comprising the “led” class must each arrive at a place of readiness to enable transformation from a power-over-profit-fear-centered dynamic to a distributed, empowered, human-centered-and-connected living organizational culture.
We see the drivers for this kind of transformation in evidence in many large organizations. These drivers are different as and between the leaders and the led within these organizations.
The drivers for leaders are based upon the magnitude of change and challenge with which they are confronted, requiring tremendous adaptation and alacrity in decision making, required speed of communication, and responsiveness to changing conditions. None of these attributes are possible when stuck within inflexible bureaucratic silos, maladapted to the emergent digitally-driven lightspeed evolving world and markets of today. The C-Suite of today is substantially at a loss for how to meet these challenges, resorting to reflexive revolving C-level doors, endless recurring reorganizations, all amidst escalating deterioration of employee engagement.
Compounding the above is a tendency to resort to “solutions-in-a-box” from the solution providers du jour, without true long-term prioritization and resource allocation. This is accompanied by a complementary pressure to perform, measured in growth-centric agendas, and myopically focused on next quarter results. Upon achievement of this Tayloresque ideal, the operating environment and management of today’s multinational organizations are dehumanized, and antagonistic to any human expression of distress, or acknowledgment of the need to heal the human experiential misery borne by the employees.
For the led, the drivers are found in the fundamental alienation of the embodied emotional and spiritual self from their role, title, and position within the hierarchy. In fact, any expression of feelings, stress, discontent, or personal challenge is explicitly and tacitly declared as inappropriate and unwelcome.
This prohibition is so thoroughly imprinted upon the employee population, such that it is self-enforcing as, by and between employees, with fear of advantage to or attack from others, so as to prevent any and all possibility of sharing or displays of trust of any kind. Evidence of the level of disengagement abounds and is reflected in the decreased employee retention and the emergence of websites where employees post negative employer reviews. Most of these reviews portray significant dysfunction and fundamental failures of effective leadership and institutional awareness of employee discontent.
Motivational earmarks of Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Y job seekers are no longer centered on finding a 1950s-style permanent professional home, with 20-year retirement goals, and progressive bonus, vesting, and vacation benefits.
These generations are centrally interested in finding their work to be of value, in service to a higher purpose, bringing good things to the world, being fairly compensated and treated; with working conditions that enable the individual realization of maximum generative potential, unconstrained by time clocks, in-office presence, and other industrial era conventions. For these generations, the employer must prove worthy of their time and continued service every day, or risk their moving on to greener pastures.
The question is, what fundamental changes in mindset on the part of those currently in leadership positions would be required to take power and control out of the co-creative collaborative equation within large organizations? How might we provide the safety, and peace of mind for leadership to let go of their need for control as the essential active ingredient required, in order to “manage?”
The question for the employed is, what operational changes must be made to enable the regaining of trust, self-empowerment, engagement, and agency, in service to reawakening, enabling, and realizing the currently untapped generative potential being left on the table.
Abruptly withdrawing the prevailing power and control-driven form of leadership from the equation; without adequate parallel preparation of and socialization to the new self-empowered circumstance of the employees to new individual internal authority is a formula for disaster. However, if there is an institutional commitment to let go of the reins of power, and welcome employee contribution, a truly transformed power-free organization can emerge.
What are the implications and consequences of such a leadership-less organizational transformation?
Whence goes power, so goes the perception of “control” over future outcomes. It is central to the old industrial paradigm that, by exercising power and control, outcomes can similarly be predicted. Unfortunately, this correlation is not reflected in reality. As with any abstract simplification to a limited set of variables, the true complexity of human nature, collaboration, and attendant frailties have successfully defeated the best-laid plans and projections of management teams and experts for decades.
Leaders must recognize that individual power and control, exercised from the top down, in multinational corporations comprised of silos and divisions dependent upon centralized unilateral top-down decision propagation architectures are not capable of receiving, processing, analyzing, and responding to incoming needs and demands fast enough to meet today’s accelerating rate of market and global disruptive changes.
Only through thoroughly decentralized and distributed authority, sensemaking, and distributed response authority is it possible for the organization, as a living organism, to react to emergent changes and threats in real-time.
What are the implications and intrinsic opportunities that such a shift means to those who are led in the prevailing structures; and the potential benefits that may be realized by the organization?
After years and years of imposition of new programs, development agendas, transformation initiatives, and course changes, each comprised of tools, platforms, methodologies, theories, principles, practices, training, and the ubiquitous required meetings, most employees are both numbed by and inure to this endless parade of change and salvation offerings imposed top-down by C-Suite-inspired decision-making.
The result is a tremendous amount of skepticism, distrust, and materially diminished engagement and enthusiasm in the rank and file. The perception is that time and attention thus diverted is akin to adding insult to injury, leaving the beleaguered employee with less time to meet ever-increasing performance demands, in fulfillment of disassociated performance goals.
Rehabilitation of individual agency, empowerment, enthusiasm, and authority to step up, step in, and contribute; on a self-motivated and vested generative basis requires a fully supported organizational commitment, empathy, an operating value system, and authentic recognition of individual and collective generative potential and contribution of value. This would require a true commitment of organizational resources, priority, support, and nurturance of each employee’s healing process, transitioning from being an objectified unit of production to an important, valued; and a material contributor to and co-creator of the organization to which they belong and that they serve.
If the tip of the organizational hierarchy is not prepared to acknowledge the need for help, and the employees are not given the means to feel truly empowered and in control of their own co-creative process and contribution, then the old paradigm of fear and chaos used to perpetuate the need for leadership will rear its head; and, the reinstatement of old-style power, control and authority over will return, along with all of the attendant dysfunction and employee despair.
No matter how many ways the leadership lily is gilded, at the end of the day, it intrinsically evokes, and as a term is contaminated by the connotative association with the exercise of the power of one over others. It is so fundamentally and culturally imprinted on everyone in the developed world, that even gentler less charged titles, such as facilitator, moderator, consultant, host, or coach have enough emotional “leadership” DNA, by association, so as to trigger an autonomic reconfiguration of the employee to a submissive and almost robotic follower, awaiting instructions.
In the next chapter of this series, we will seek to unpack the dimensional benefits both for the employed, and the employer of an individual — awakened, and acknowledged as a fully capable, empowered, resourceful, valued contributor to the best future manifestation of their organization, in the world.
