Managing Leadership^®

In the course of our current review of the reasons to reject the concept of individual leadership as it is taught by its modern proponents, it is worth addressing the unavoidable fact that there really are some leaders around. In the last two posts, we looked at why a widely advocated leadership type is, at best, essentially irrelevant to organizational purpose and, at the sadly common worst, is actively destructive of it.

But the general theme of our argument here can easily be derailed by the protestation that there are, in indisputable fact, some genuine leaders in our organizations. The problem with this assertion, and the reason we need to address it now, is that it is a particularly pernicious feature of the problem with the elasticity – the slipperiness – of the term “leadership.” So, we will nail these manifestations down, and hopefully leave them behind us as we continue our discussion.

The key to these forms of more or less real leadership is in the sources from which they spring. Unlike as advertised by the modern leadership movement, these sources are not to be found principally within the putative leaders – their sterling characters, their visionary insight, their inevitably self-aggrandizing humility – but rather in the rather more mundane circumstances that give rise to their influence.

And yet, it is worth noting as well, that not all even of these are organizationally relevant. Of those that are, not all are of any particular organizational value. Indeed, rather than fundamentally the singularly extraordinary manifestation of individual leadership, they may turn out to be the unhappily ordinary consequences of dysfunctional or poorly-monitored and managed corporate culture.

There is at least one type among these that is both organizationally relevant and valid. But, as we will see, it really has little to do with all the froth and fuss projected onto the topic by the modern leadership movement.

And yet, as mentioned, it is important, in the broader topics of organizational and individual leadership, to understand these nominative examples of the latter. So we will look at them in the next several posts.

But first, we’re going to do a long-overdue review of an excellent management book – one that is relevant to our current topic. See you soon!

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