As the modern leadership movement’s (MLM) many and various advocates compete for attention, we inevitably find ourselves being bombarded with simplistic insights, each one, its “discoverer” will argue, the very cornerstone of a brave new world that can be built only on its foundation. . .
The purpose of this current discussion is to identify the key and fundamental problems with the notion of individual leadership in modern organizations as it is professed and propounded by the modern leadership movement (MLM); to outline the case against this misguided concept. Many of these have been addressed to one extent or another, as well, in other discussions on these pages. But today’s subject is one that belongs firmly in our current topic. It is easily among the most astoundingly ill-conceived, and even dangerous, of the many bafflingly preposterous claims made by the MLM.
For all the blather whipped up about the topic of individual leadership over the past few decades, we can still predict neither the presence of leaders for assignment nor its potential in individuals for development. But, really, why should we be able to do that? After all, we really don’t even know what it is.
It was once popular, some years after a best-selling management book highlighted specific companies as exemplars of this or that fad, to reassess those businesses and to delight perversely in how far the putatively mighty had fallen. . . it can be instructive to run down the rolls of champions touted as winners for their expression of this or that management philosophy, and to see to what dire straits – or even oblivion – so many of them have tumbled. What does that say about the management models those companies were used as the poster children for?
Have you ever noticed that when people talk about leadership, the unspoken but overweening assumption is that it is positive and constructive? Have you ever questioned that presumed relationship? If you have, what sort of reaction did you get? The falsity of this putatively inviolable connection is among the most grave of the many very serious problems with the modern leadership movement’s (MLM) concept of individual leadership in organizations. . .
We have seen, since the opening of the current series on the problems with the notion of individual leadership in organizations, that the most fundamental of them is that such leadership is inescapably not about those organizations – it is about the purportedly peerless and vital qualities of those putative leaders. Whatever after-thoughts or carefully contrived qualifications are thrown at the topic, there is no avoiding the truth about individual leadership as “discovered” and promoted by the modern leadership movement (MLM): it is about relationships with individuals who exhibit the described leadership – it is only peripherally, if at all, about the work at hand, from which, in any event, it most decidedly does not arise.
We have also looked at some examples of what appear to be actual instances of individual leadership in the workplace, only to see that they are either not really examples of leadership or are clearly not results of the teachings or other activities of the MLM.
That’s a peculiar puzzle, isn’t it? . . .
Some years ago there was a horrific crash during training maneuvers by a US Air Force precision flying team. All four aircraft in the group failed to pull up from a steep dive, and piled directly into the desert floor. The official statement blamed a mechanical malfunction in the lead aircraft, but the general view among military pilots seemed to revolve around a sort of human error peculiar to this special type of formation flying. A fighter pilot explained it this way . . .
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