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.

As it happens, if you can dismiss the ludicrous promises made for many of these, what is left may still be useful to peruse, even thought-provoking and helpful.

Unfortunately, though, the intensity of our angst over how we each individually relate to the pseudo-vital subject of leadership can make it difficult to distinguish between the product and its packaging.

This is particularly so in the MLM – with its devastatingly misplaced focus on the uniquely special attributes of the individual. Leadership is what you are, they pontificate. What you are – if you are the right things – is leadership, they add with trivializing profundity.

An exceptionally unnerving quality can become embroiled in this unstable mixture when the advocates of a particular insight-based approach come to uncritically accept their own hype. They can then become dogmatic about it, almost fanatical. Even not-so-subtly intimidating.

A manager recently wrote me about just such a leadership sect, if you will. The group is a well-known leadership consultancy of international reach, and the beneficiary of explosive growth built on the back of a run-away best-selling book by the founder. This book presented the well-worn idea – but with spectacularly well-tuned spin in the telling – that there is an inseparable link between success and wisdom in one’s person and private life, and one’s business position and career.

This group had been hired by my correspondent’s organization to present its leadership training program to the outfit’s managers. It seems, though, that some disquiet was caused by the presenters’ almost glassy-eyed praise of the founding principles of the program philosophy. Evidently, it was even described to the attendees as something that would – indeed, that must – have a “spiritual” impact on them.

The last straw for my correspondent was when there appeared to develop real, personal pressure on the attendees to demonstrate their willingness to drink the Kool-Aid. It seems as though an inordinate amount of time was spent ensuring that each attendee had genuinely internalized – rather than merely stipulated to for the sake of the argument – the philosophical underpinnings of the program. Those that resisted drew unsettlingly focused attention, and it seemed as though the program would not progress until they capitulated.

At this point, the alarm bells sounding in this manager’s head succeeded in drowning out the liturgical droning of the acolytes. He left the multi-day workshop, which had been a requirement, and explained to his seniors why.

When you hear alarm bells yourself during any sort of presentation – especially a workshop like this one – always heed them. Try to determine what they might mean. And never let yourself be intimidated by those who want to rush you along into group-thinking lock-step with their positions without allowing you time for calm, clear deliberation. Get out of the hot-house and evaluate the comprehensiveness and consistency of the case presented yourself. Make your own decisions, and draw your own conclusions.

Certainly, don’t turn into a mindless “follower” of a “leadership” of this ilk. If you’re alert to the phenomenon, you’ll be surprised to find how much of this kind of “training” so dangerously fits this mold.

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Technorati Tags: leadership, insight, manager, training, follower

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.

It is that you can and must abandon who you’ve been, and change your personality into the “leadership” persona.

Think you can do that?

You are, after all, the sum of the immensely complex and interacting admixture of your upbringing, experiences, relationships, and multi-faceted contemplations, not to mention the never-ending self-assessments arising from all of these.

Do you really believe that you can simply read a book or attend a seminar, and suddenly realize you’ve missed the point all these years? Never mind that, as we have seen, there is no such thing as a (non-pathological, or inherently constructive) leadership personality, nor a magical leadership ingredient, or character trait, that will transform you willy-nilly into such an unfortunate creature. For our purposes here, suspend that inconvenient truth for just a moment.

Do you really think all you need to do is to find your inner child, think outside the box, or even enter into a brand-new journey of self-discovery? Now? After all these years?

Can you really wrench yourself out of the path (not the rut) that leads to the “you” you are today? Should you?

You realize that this path isn’t static. With each step you trod along it, you established perspectives, insights, experiences on the bases of which you developed habits and decision-making patterns.

Consequently, the junction where you find yourself today isn’t a simple intersection, divorced in time and space from your past or your future. It is not a place where you abandon one and enter, essentially reborn, into another. You cannot simply turn left or right entirely independently of what has gone before, or of where it is propelling you.

For you do not stop and contemplate the panorama of choices before you here; you add and modify, grow and mature. become better or worse, step by step, adding definition and meaning to not merely the path that brought you here, but to the very momentum that bears you along it, which momentum is also the “you” presently pondering the diversity and realism of these alternatives even as they rush by.

Think you can wrench yourself out of that into some superficial, wide-eyed, “you can do it!” personality prescription written by the latest “researcher” or “scientist” who rolls into town, promising to cure whatever ails you as a leader? The idea that you can taps in to a long and distinctly American sense of self-sovereignty and control. It is powerful and seductive, and it continuously lures millions of us into its ambit.

Unfortunately, the foundation for this one (as for many others) is false. But even if it were real, to attempt to re-write the whole script of your life, your meaning, your core self, would be at best ill-advised, and possibly quite wrenching indeed into the bargain.

And we will point out just one example of why and how in our next installment. Thank you for staying with us!

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Technorati Tags: individual leadership, leadership, researcher, scientist, leader, American

Some years ago a game was used to identify the presence and dynamism of leaders. Groups were randomly organized, then each was tasked with building a tower out of Tinkertoys. The towers had to be both sturdy and tall, and time was sufficiently restricted to make either accomplishment difficult. Roles within the groups were not pre-assigned, but were left to the members to sort out.

There were two run-throughs, one allowing speech followed by one allowing only gestures. Each group identified its leader based on the roles that members took or acceded to during the exercise. Then the groups voted on the virtues of all the towers – height and stability – thus supposedly identifying the quality of the leadership expressed by each group leader.

This, like many such experiments, confuses leadership – particularly as described by the modern leadership movement (MLM) – with command. Taking charge of a situation – especially one like that posited in the exercise which shares characteristics with a crisis – is fundamentally different than expressing the visionary, charismatic, empowering, lofty sorts of leadership celebrated and promised by the MLM and obligingly sought by the rest of us.

In its defense, though, this exercise was at once a good deal more fun yet no more juvenile than any of the more “sophisticated” measures that promise to identify the presence of or potential for leadership. Moreover, it was probably every bit as effective, even though it didn’t really identify leadership at all.

And that’s probably one of the most dispiritingly fascinating problems with the ever-peculiar notion of individual leadership in modern organizations. For all the blather whipped up about the topic 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, as we have seen repeatedly, we really don’t even know what it is.

Consider the issue from the other direction: if it were true that we knew what leadership is and how to identify it (or its potential for development), then there surely would be plenty of evidence for the presence of that ability. But where is it? Where are those leaders? And where are the inspired, fulfilled, empowered, happy “followers” that clamor merrily after them?

Are they in our businesses? In our non-profits or governments? In the U.S. or elsewhere in the world? Is that what you see?

Of course it’s not. So why do we keep kidding ourselves about this?

And we do keep kidding ourselves – to our own detriment, as well as to that of our organizations. We’ll pick up the current discussion with that issue, next. See you then!

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Today’s tips: Speaking of identifying what leadership is – not to mention where in our organizations it’s located, please ponder this excellent post on culture by Miki Saxon.

And speaking of not kidding ourselves, please see this list of recommended business books from Authentic Leadership. Everything about it, from its individual components to its general shared characteristics, is likely vastly better than what you’ve been encouraged to read lately.

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Technorati Tags: leader, leadership, crisis, vision, charisma, empower, organization, inspire, follower, business, government, Miki Saxon, Authentic Leadership

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’s not always fair to blame the companies per se – perhaps new managers had proven inept or had strayed from a decent methodology, or more fundamentally negative influences had washed over the outfits from the markets or government.

But for all that, 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?

It’s a fair question – and not just of management fads in general, but of arguably the most specious one of all: the notion of individual leadership in modern organizations, which continues to be propounded with unflagging enthusiasm by every corner of the modern leadership movement (MLM).

Countless books have been and are published on this topic. And each one is also typically garnished with numerous champions intended to illustrate one or another tenet of the particular “philosophy” on display.

Whatever trait, characteristic, style, personality type, or the like is being promoted, a particular individual will be presented as an illustration, and his or her accomplishments will be rehearsed and cast as expressions of the topic at hand. But just as with the more general management model books, there are at least two problems with this approach.

First, the subsequent review can be quite instructive. Ask yourself: where are all these leaders, or their reputations, today? What has happened to, or has been learned about, those who had been deemed such superlative specimens of individual leadership as to be showcased as special models of it? Inevitably, many of them have stumbled from their pedestals, sometimes spectacularly – some have even been convicted of criminal activity.

Their use in such books is an inescapable device for attempting to prove a point. That so many of them have subsequently turned out to have feet of clay is actually a more trenchant indictment of the idea of individual leadership in organizations which they were used to exemplify than that of the fallen companies is of the various management theories they were associated with.

But the second problem is no less damning. And that is the internal incoherence of the manner in which these individuals are offered as “proofs” of the nature and importance of individual leadership.

The most relentlessly risible example of this is the tendency to use a different “leader” to illustrate each of a leadership philosophy’s portfolio of traits or styles. I cannot recall ever reading such a book in which it wasn’t painfully obvious that the individual being touted as the very personification of one “vital” leadership trait also happened to be the antithesis of one or more of the others, equally identified as essential ingredients of leadership, in the same book.

Another aspect of this form of presentation of the leadership argument is that the persons selected for display as having the desired characteristic or personality type obviously can also be presented as having been extraordinarily successful. The connection between the alleged expressions of leadership and results is assumed to be causative, or is artfully argued to be so.

However, at least three things are left out of these “analyses.” First, the causative relationship is not proved – merely persuasive asserted. Second, in many of these relationships it can seem quite possible to someone who isn’t under the influence of the Kool-Aid that the causation has been reversed; that the business success achieved for who-knows-what reason has convinced – or, rather, deluded -  the “leader” of his or her individual essentialness and invincibility.

Third, these presentations overlook the vast numbers of perfectly similar people in similar positions in similar organizations who have not seen the results imputed to the “leadership” of those highlighted in these books for our supposed edification.

In this context it is worthwhile to recall Warren Buffet’s admonishment that a good business can survive bad management. The problem is that a really good business can actually fool both bad management and its observers into the erroneous belief that the managers are not merely good, but that they are indeed exemplars of leadership.

Buffet’s corollary that good management cannot rescue a bad business should be borne in mind when we read books ascribing everything to leadership. The truth is that the more inclined we are – or are persuaded by the MLM to believe – that their success is a function of our own exceptional characteristics, the more likely is the management of them to become de-linked from the fundamental realities upon which they truly depend. Or, to borrow another Buffet aphorism, when the tide goes out you’re likely to see the concept of leadership exposed for the disappointment it really is.

But in this, too, hope continues to triumph over experience. Eagerly as ever, we buy the books, attend the seminars, follow the scripts.

Rummage around in this stuff all you like, though. Wade through all the stupendous quantity of material that continues to issue forth on the subject. When all is said and done, you’ll find there’s no pony in there.

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Today’s tip: A site that periodically offers general management advice recently posted a list of blogs published by business professors – an interesting idea. This one is headed most appropriately by Professor Bob Sutton’s Work Matters. Take a look – you’ll surely find much of interest you’ll want to subscribe to.

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Technorati Tags: management, manager, market, government, leadership, trait, characteristic, style, personality type, leader, individual leadership, organization, Warren Buffet, business

Have you ever noticed that when people talk about leadership, the unspoken but overpowering assumption is that it is a positive and constructive force? 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.

It is most important to see that to the extent that there are naturally magnetic leaders – whether self-developed, indentified as latently promising and cultivated, or even somehow just plain taught – there is absolutely no inherent connection between the nature of that leadership in those individuals, and the value placed in your organization’s goals by its owners and its customers. Indeed, it might be argued that the very hypnotic power to cause people to rapturously drink the Kool-Aid is itself highly suggestive of leadership of which you ought to be most skeptical.

As noted here previously, Peter Drucker once said, “Leadership is all hype. We’ve had three great leaders in this century – Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.”

Consider this: when the assorted MLM gurus trot out their exemplars of the various representations they offer of the “essential” leadership characteristics, they tend to use one such ideal for each trait. Ever notice that? The thing is, if you look closer, you will find that many of those celebrated for their expression of one “vital” trait simply don’t have many of the others so described – or even, in truth, are infamous for having the opposite of such another trait.

But Drucker’s alarmingly influential trio and countless other such examples throughout political, military, and business history, ancient and modern, tend to be the complete package – virtual poster-children for MLM depictions of leadership. From passion to vision to humility to, in their own tortuously distorted ways, integrity and honesty. Certainly even today it is disturbingly easy to find such individuals who manifestly have it all.

Does anyone in your organization have them all? Are you sure you want them there? How about the “leaders” you believe you are selecting and developing in your training programs? How wise is it to instill in such as them the inevitable sense of entitlement and expectation of followership, and then to release them back into your units? Similarly, how sure are you that those outside candidates you recruit so confidently because they most completely fit the trait templates for leadership are really safe to set loose on your organizations?

Whenever you discuss the notion of individual leadership in organizations – especially in your organizations – be sure to address as well the question of what it is, to challenge the demonstrably untenable assumption that it is somehow an inherently constructive force in your midst. Do not engage in discussion of leadership on its terms. Insist on doing so on the basis of your own carefully determined and delineated requirements. You may be surprised what you actually begin to see.

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Today’s tip: But don’t just take my word for it. See this sensible dispersion of much of the hype surrounding leadership in this essay by Mark Henricks at BNET.

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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? After all, the MLM has been pontificating for decades now (with surprising cacophony, given the uniformly stentorian voice) that they know what it is, why you need it, and how you can employ their expertise to get it yourself – either personally or in your organization.

But how many such leadership systems – whether executed in educational institutions such as universities, or by training programs within endeavors of various types and sizes – are actually developing leaders? Do you know of any? How many reliably emit “leaders” – according to one or another system certified by the “studies” of this or that guru – who fit the MLM mold? Do they suddenly start having awe-inspiring visions, generate creativity-enhancingly large goals (I hesitate using the at once crass and utterly inane – quite literally stupefying – phrases used by MLM gurus to describe these), or do they begin on cue to develop fundamentally profound understanding of and connections with their “followers?”

And speaking of that, do “followers” suddenly start gravitating toward these newly-minted “leaders”  as soon as they are ejected from the starry-eyed end of this mysteriously storied leadership development system? Here they are, reentering the organization, thoughtfully stroking their chins over the gravity of the issues they now heroically perceive and confront, gazing wistfully upward lost in their visions of the future, bestowing empowering and affirming smiles of understanding and appreciation on those around them, or – most distressingly of all – doing all of these at once.

Are you (or anyone) satisfied with that? Is it what you wanted? Is it leadership? Is it remotely like what you thought you were getting, what you were promised?

Of course not. And it can hardly be surprising that this should be so. There is no such thing as a leadership development program, however well-intentioned as most are, that develops individual leaders with personal – that is, work-unrelated or context-free – skills and abilities that result in their being characterizable individually as leaders in any fashion at all; certainly not as prescribed by the various advocates of the MLM.

Why not? For one thing, for all the brook-no-doubts certainty of the many mutually inconsistent depictions of what it is, no one really knows what it is. Nor, actually, can anyone really prove that it (as a distinct, reliably describable and replicable personality type) even exists.

Moreover, even if you stipulate to one or another of the noisily competing theories about it, no one has proven that the exemplars specified by any of these can be trained or developed. And even if you acknowledge that much, it remains necessary to note that neither has anyone shown that they can be identified, culled from the crowed, and groomed.

There is no proof, no evidence – none – that “leaders” of the superlative ilk promoted by the MLM can be developed. So what of the many leadership development programs – particularly those in-house to the benefiting organizations – that are widely respected and have evolved consistent and reliable methodology for producing graduates that are highly regarded and demonstrably beneficial to their outfits? How are they to be explained?

Easy: they don’t produce leaders. Whatever terminology they prefer to employ, they are producing managers. Thoughtful, goal-oriented, integrative managers. It would be best for all concerned if they acknowledged that, and removed the last vestiges of self-deluding dross that unproductively burden their programs and the self-perceptions of their graduates.

We’ll discuss this in more detail in the coming weeks. Looking forward to your visits and observations as we do.

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Today’s tips: “Often the ability of followers to succeed in spite of leadership inanities is a more fascinating process question” – any essay with a phrase like that is worth reading. Stop by to see Fred Schlegel‘s post at the Frog Blog.

As always, if it’s not about the work, it is going to be a problem. Please see Steve Roesler at All Things Workplace for yet another example of how and why.

Please see this WSJ article and observe the curious attitude and “What, me worry?” comments of the CEO of the highlighted company. What is the secret of success here: the management, the nature of the business, or perhaps the quality of the workforce?

There is no better advice for how to work your way out of a stumbling block than that offered by Cultural Offering – note his attribution at the end.

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Technorati Tags: leadership, organization, leader, individual leadership, workplace, expertise, education, training, follower, vision, leadership development, manager, Fred Schlegel, Steve Roesler, management, business, workforce, Cultural Offering

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: These teams perform extraordinarily precise maneuvers at stupendously high-speed; there is no room for miscommunication or even collaboration. There is one leader, and three followers. Screaming above the desert floor at hundreds of miles an hour with perhaps only inches separating their wingtips, each follower focuses intently on maintaining constant speed and direction, with his single reference point being his relative position to a particular physical point located on the lead aircraft; he focuses on maintaining that exactly as specified, to the exclusion of all other facts roaring by.

As for the leader, his job is to follow the choreographed route, executing the exactly specified directions and speeds for the precisely specified durations. He has no time to check to make sure his followers are in position behind and around him; he relies on their focus on him for that, and they rely on his focus on the itinerary to execute the drill.

In the course of this, the leader will use features on the ground or the surrounding mountains toward which he may be momentarily heading to help him maintain direction. When the prescribed time for the current leg expires, he will shift to the next maneuver, and the next landmark.

This all requires a degree of focus that is so intense as to exclude all else. No peripheral considerations, no stray thinking allowed. The leader intent on his object, the followers on the leader.

In the case of this accident, the general impression of other fighter pilots is that the lead pilot may have became lost in the intensity of his concentration on the desert floor landmark he had selected for that leg of the drill, which then resolved into a hypnotic fixation. Losing even the limited perspective that his function restricted him to, he drove his aircraft straight into his focal point on the ground. His followers, intent as ever only on doing their jobs while wholly dependent on him doing his, drove straight in after him, maintaining perfect formation to the end.

Precision drill teams like this do great good for the military and the country, acting as grand ambassadors for the Armed Forces, exhibiting the great pride and honor inherent in uniformed service, as well as demonstrating the inspiring discipline, spectacular skill, and quietly relentless courage that such service both requires and elicits from those who answer its call. There is sometimes a great cost paid in providing this good, and this accident is an especially devastating example of that.

But we want to note here that the things these teams work so hard to display so stupendously is what we have just noted above: pride, honor, discipline, skill, team spirit, dedication. Not leadership.

The form of leadership/followership that can nominally be drawn from the interaction of the drill team members offers a dramatically visual depiction of much of what the modern leadership movement (MLM) teaches about individual leadership and the roles of those who are expected to submit to and partake in it. Indeed, while metaphors typically can’t bear all of the burden placed on them, this one doesn’t carry enough to faithfully describe the expectations made of the sort of leader the movement promotes. It is pretty good, however, at depicting the complete and rootless dependence the MLM expects followers to invest in that leader.

An interesting difference, though, is that the faith placed by the drill team “followers” in their leader is justified (extraordinarily rare accidents like the above notwithstanding) precisely because he is not the sort of leader promoted by the MLM. His “leadership” is tightly choreographed and scripted. His expression of it is tightly circumscribed and detailed. He is not a visionary the consequences of whose actions and decisions we are supposed to simply accept on faith to be constructive. They have been pre-planned, calibrated, tested. Everyone – whatever their position in the formation – has contributed, studied, and internalized them before taking to the air to perform the drill.

So these drills are not a display of leadership at all. Certainly not of the sort that is practiced in the mission-oriented, highly decentralized, and dynamically shifting operating structures of the modern US military.

Nor should they be the pattern you impose on or submit to in your own organizations. You want to limit your perspective or your freedom of action neither to the inviolable constraints of an inflexible script, nor to an inflexible and ill-advised faith in a leader whose qualities you don’t understand and whose “leadership” you don’t collaborate with.

No individual, and no organization, can bear the great rush of disorienting dynamics unleashed by such a relationship. The unscripted and unconstrained individual leadership promoted by the MLM, combined with the tightly scripted and willfully constrained followership expected to multiply its power, is virtually assured to produce the cataclysmic results that are the exception in the military approach. The MLM prescriptions for individual leadership ultimately and inescapably generate a closed, self-referential system which careens who knows where with who knows what results around it in the real world.

One day such a leader will become dangerously disoriented by the unnatural and unsustainable relationship you have established with him or her, and lead the entire organization to an unexpectedly sudden doom, everyone all the while completely content and entirely unaware that there has been the slightest cause for concern. The leaders and the followers, mutually misled and hypnotically unhitched from reality, will head together, fatally enmeshed in their increasingly unrealistic relationship, right over the cliff.

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Today’s tips: Speaking of delinking focus from perspective, please see this piece from The Presurfer, describing what happens when squads of foraging ants are separated from the main colony.

And speaking of the military, please see this piece from The Economist about a stunningly innovative new communications antenna – here when you need it, gone when you don’t.

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Technorati Tags: US Air Force, military, collaboration, leader, follower, discipline, skill, courage, leadership, individual leadership, visionary, mission, decentralized, organization, perspective, followership, Presurfer, Economist, innovative, communication

Before returning to the main topics in our current discussion of the problems with the prescriptions of the modern leadership movement (MLM), we’re going to take a brief look at two more types of what are generally regarded as genuine examples of “leadership” in organizations.

Today, we will explain why one of these examples actually is not leadership at all as it is understood by the MLM, and why it is more accurately seen as a symptom of an unwell organization. This is the sort of leadership we see in the person who steps up and “takes charge.”

Ordinarily, we don’t refer to someone as taking charge unless that person is filling a vacuum that has been exhausting the organization’s resources and energy. After all, if the organization’s positions of authority were properly distributed throughout, and their occupants routinely discharged their duties effectively, it wouldn’t occur to anyone to comment on the matter.

Moreover, if some of those position holders turned out to be inadequate to their tasks while others were doing fine, it still wouldn’t occur to any one working under the management of either of these groups to say that the latter one’s members were “taking charge.”

It is generally only when someone steps in to resolve a situation normally beyond his or her formal range of authority to save the day, to fill a void that is paralyzing the organization or one of its departments, do we say that someone has appeared on the scene to “take charge” of the situation. This doesn’t happen when you are effectively managing your assigned duties. It happens when you step in to the chaos created by the mismanagement of someone else’s responsibilities to establish order there.

This commonly occurs when a co-worker or operational manager observes the problem, and in order to resolve it, assumes an authority not normally his or hers. “What do you say we fix this?” he or she says, or “I think I see a way out of this.” Instantly, heretofore enervated fellow employees become energized and focused. “Lead,” they say, “we’ll follow.” Somebody do something. Anyone. Anything. Let’s just start getting this thing underway again and see if we can see the way forward better as we get going.

This is a valid form of leadership, but it should be noted that it is not organizationally designed. It doesn’t arise from the intent or planning of the senior leadership. Rather, it surfaces on its own as a result of the sclerotic incompetence descending from there into the organization. That’s a key feature of this: it occurs where it is needed due to organizational ineptitude; not where it is intended by organizational design. It is situation-dependent, not personality-derived.

Even the “followership” is more or less genuine in instances like these. But it is no more institutionally valid than the unconventional risk-taking form of individual leadership which generates it. Indeed, it is often just as risky for the followers to follow as it is for the “leader(s)” to take charge where those formally responsible have proven incapable (a fact painfully highlighted by the appearance of unofficial and unauthorized “take charge” leaders attracting equally unofficial and unauthorized “followership” at various points around the facility).

What’s more, such intermittent eruptions of leadership/followership are more expressions of relief than the sort of relationship with an individual leader that is described and promoted by the MLM. They are organizational reflections of the developing situation, rather than inevitable responses to particular persons due to their possession of specified leadership traits.

When the problem situation resolves, ordinarily the leadership/followership phenomena fades away with it. That is, it is an organizational response to a situation, not to a person.

In fact, it is not really individual leadership at all – it is a manifestation of what I refer to in these pages as organizational leadership. In the case postulated here, it arises from managerial incompetence, and is often suppressed and even punished by that management once the latter regains its bearings and, wholly mis-appreciating the import of what has happened, reasserts control.

This suggests, of course, the importance of managers who acknowledge and manage the leadership naturally existent in their organizations, rather than attempting vainly and dangerously to arrogate it all to themselves. That is to say that the best managers don’t assume they are themselves the sole font of the organization’s leadership – they “take charge” of it, though, by managing the organizational leadership inherently there so it can produce “take charge” leaders where and when they are needed – not to resolve crises or incompetence, but to head them off with authorized innovations, and to seize opportunities to grow and improve.

Which brings us to our next topic: we’ll look at why the type of preeminent individual leadership most enthusiastically promoted by the MLM as what ought to be designed into an organizations is usually – in truth, perhaps  inevitably – actually so destructive of them. We will also look at why it so commonly takes a terribly long time to realize that, as we willfully persist in misattributing its baleful effects.

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Today’s Tips: Speaking of managerial incompetence, if worse comes to worst, you may want to check out these fascinating products of the power and insight of market forces to help you mitigate them: CareerExcuse.com and Alibi Services. I haven’t used these, by the way; they were discovered in the course of reading an illuminating book called Liespotting, by Pamela Meyer.

And speaking of the wonders wrought by the marketplace of needs and ideas, please see this terrific Economist piece on an adaptation of vacuum tube delivery systems you all have seen in hospitals and similar institutions – this one is for delivering your online purchases . . . all the way to your home.

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Technorati Tags: leadership, organization, authority, management, mismanagement, worker, manager, employee, intent, planning, incompetence, design, followership, individual leadership, leadership trait, innovation, Pamela Meyer, Economist

As we’ve seen, the form of more-or-less genuine individual leadership most likely to be identified at the top of an organization is to be discovered in the founder/owner. As we’ve also seen, this does nothing to support the wholly misplaced lessons of the modern leadership movement, since these “leaders” are not products of external education, but of internal instincts. As for leadership and entrepreneurship, it doesn’t support their conflation either because the ones who succeed to the point of attracting notice are a miniscule proportion of those who make the effort, and those who display what is interpreted as leadership are a smaller subset still.

The co-incidence of what we recognize as individual leadership with success in such instances is just that: coincidence. And, more than that, as influential as that leadership may be to the culture and operation of such organizations, there is no real evidence that it actually is the fundamental source of their success. After all, the much vaster pool of failed organizations is driven by similar expressions of leadership, which by themselves regularly prove to be distinctly insufficient. So, leadership by founder/owners in failed organizations is insufficient, and the same sort in successful ones is irrelevant, or perhaps only marginally and insufficiently relevant, to their success.

But there is another form of what is widely recognized as individual leadership in organizations. Anna Smith refers to an excellent example of this in a recent post on her site, a wonderful resource for managers, What Do You Want From Them. This is the individual leader who appears from within. This typically occurs in larger, more mature organizations, since the form of leadership expressed by founder/owners tends to overwhelm the expression of it by, or even the presence of it in, others.

Anna describes an individual who holds a position that carries little or no real formal authority over others, but who nevertheless exhibits a strong and constructive influence over not only members of the organization of all ranks and departments, but even among outside vendors – indeed, even among customers.

We’ve all seen such individuals appear at various times among us. We all recognize the genuine leadership they naturally express, and we all feel the satisfying instinct to follow it. Moreover, it clearly conforms with much of how the modern leadership movement defines it.

Except that it is not a product of that movement. It is the fortuitous incidence of an alert, positive, engaging personality among us in an environment that happens, for one reason or another and for indeterminate periods of time, to be congenial to the organizationally constructive expression of these traits.

It is not taught, and it is not replicable (at least not by leaders from above striving to imprint their own leadership on the organization). It is wholly fortuitous. As such, even it must be seen as at most supportive of a successful organization’s success, rather than fundamentally responsible for it.

It seems that while leadership can occur in organizations, it may not have much to do with, or even to say about, them. We’ll look at that when we pick this topic up next. See you soon!

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Today’s tips: For an especially excruciating example of writing on leadership from the modern leadership movement, please see this about “creating leaders” (thanks to Miki Saxon for the tip).

Speaking of entrepreneurship, please see this WSJ piece about striking examples of it in Europe. Note how many of these the UK seems to be producing.

And speaking of macro-leadership in innovation, please see this excellent Bret Stephens essay on why this century is likely to remain American rather than Chinese for some time; see why “you cannot plagiarize your way to pre-eminence.”

Finally, here’s a real holiday gift for you – Wally Bock offering a typically gripping description, and a brilliant summary of the meaning, of his encounter with Peter Drucker.

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Note: Managing Leadership was recently included in a list of resources for students at Online Schools. Many thanks to them and best wishes for their efforts to contribute to the continued professionalization of this educational avenue of the future.

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And speaking of subscriptions, ours here are always free! Why not subscribe by email or RSS reader now?

Technorati Tags: individual leadership, organization, owner, leadership, entrepreneurship, culture, Anna Smith, authority, influence, WSJ, innovation, Bret Stephens, American, Chinese, Wally Bock, Peter Drucker

In the most recent post in this current series on the fallacy of individual leadership, we noted that, among the types of leadership we seem to genuinely see in organizations, there is at least one that is, more or less in fact, both organizationally relevant and valid. Valid, because this type has the legal and moral right to give expression to personal leadership in the organization with no concern for violation of fiduciary duty (this is a real and fundamental problem with the modern concept of individual leadership, which we will discuss later in this series). Organizationally relevant, because it does indeed serve as the basis for the formation and operation of the organization.

This type is the founding owner. Many such business owners have come to be seen as virtually synonymous with the word “leadership,” and the putative lessons derived from their experiences are routinely assembled and marketed to the rest of us for our own application at work.

However, the rest of us generally are not the founding owners where we work, and the lessons from such sources recommended to us will thus serve us poorly there indeed. Moreover, there are several other vital points to bear in mind about these examplars, apparently genuine leaders though they may be, that should give us pause before setting out to emulate them.

First, they are the few survivors of an incalculably large cohort of entrepreneurs of similar character, drive, ambition, vision, and inspiration who simply didn’t make it, and about whom we hear not a word. So, it would be unwise of us to conclude that these few achieved their success due to so-called leadership personality traits shared by legions of others who did not succeed. Rather, perhaps, their success was due to the luck of the draw, fortuitous timing, more fundamental management skills, or some other thing or combination of things entirely. “Studies” of this miniscule group of exceptions should not be mistaken by the rest of us as establishing the rules.

Second, for all that their putative leadership traits might not be the source of their success, they do make up the shape and momentum of their leadership style at the helm of their businesses, which have succeeded. As such, they do – as long as these founding owners remain at the helm – legitimately serve as the themes around which the rest of the workforce can and should assemble and guide its actions. As followers. The notional leadership behavior under discussion here only applies to the founding owners while in that role. As a department manager, you would be ill-advised to try mimicking what you presume to be the leadership characteristics of the founding owner of your business. You likely would find that you neither serve – nor amuse – him or her overmuch.

Third, just as it is unclear what, if any, relationship there is between the founding owner’s supposed leadership style and his or her business success, it surely is far from established that this or that leadership character exhibited by the founding owner of this or that business is portable. That is saying more than that the leadership style may not be effective in a different company, industry, or culture. It means that the leadership presumably exhibited by an individual who founded a successful business may merely be an incidental environmental factor tolerated by a company that is successful for wholly unrelated reasons. In a different setting, whether exhibited by that same person or emulated by another, the same leadership style may not be so easily tolerated (or ignored); it, in fact, should not be surprising to discover it to be distracting or even destructive.

So, founding owners can be viewed validly as “real” leaders of their organizations. They are welcome, if they must, to ascribe their success to this characterization, and their employees can even freely and genuinely respond to them as such. What’s more, whatever may actually be responsible for the emergence of their businesses as thriving enterprises, a founding owner’s putative expression of personal leadership can continue to legitimately and distinctively shape the operational characteristics and culture of the company.

But, does that mean that there’s a lesson in all of this for the rest of us? If so, are we sure we know what it might be?

Before moving on to those questions, we will take a brief look next at another example of genuine leadership sometimes perceived in more mature organizations. See you soon.

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Today’s tips: Speaking of not getting too full of ourselves, please see this WSJ essay by Peggy Noonan, undoubtedly inspired by a Simpson’s episode, on why the President’s Cabinet might need a new Office of Keeping it Real.

And speaking of founding owners who are widely viewed as modern individual leaders, please see this revealing review, also from the WSJ, by Bill Gates contesting some of the main themes of Matt Ridley’s recent book, “The Rational Optimist.”

Finally, please take a look at this fascinating piece from The Economist essentially asking why we need leadership – or, even, centralized command and control – at all.

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Note: This blog was recently acknowledged as a Top 50 Leadership Blog for 2010 – many thanks to Evan Carmichael at The Entrepreneur Blog.

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Technorati Tags: leadership, organization, individual leadership, owner, business, work, entrepreneur, character, ambition, vision, inspiration, trait, management, workforce, follower, manager, company, industry, culture, WSJ, Peggy Noonan, WSJ, Bill Gates, Matt Ridley, Economist, command, control, Evan Carmichael