Managing Leadership^®

It’s not as easy as it used to be to finish that sentence. The interjection of tangential obligations to various social responsibilities or non-owner stakeholders make it all the more difficult to sort out the already difficult jobs of directors and managers.

Not that these latter two groups haven’t done their best to distort the public impression and de facto expression of their duties in various ways designed to serve their own distinct interests. Managers are especially at fault, here; the passive acquiescence of directors is not so much a separate infraction as an abetment of the primary one, inasmuch as so many of them are actually “inside” directors – that is, senior managers of the company they supervise – or “independent” directors – more accurately, like-minded senior managers of other companies spreading the duplicity around.

The consequences in both the bottom line and widely reported self-aggrandizement of so many of these managers are generating valid questions about these relationships. It is not to be wondered, then, that activists with various ideological axes to grind find stones crumbling from the corporate edifice to sharpen them on.

But it is decidedly not time to attempt to achieve victory by declaring one’s self the leader of the enemy camp. And, yet, that is precisely what many CEOs are doing, and what they are being encouraged to do by professional advisors, commentators, and consultants. A major problem with this sort of thinking, as we have mentioned before, is the presumption that managers have the right to make, and to act on, such decisions.

Some argue that CEOs must, in effect, take the wind out of the sails of those that harry them so by taking the helm of the causes they harry them with, displacing their critics as champions of social consciousness and enlightened corporate citizenship. Indeed, many CEOs, with predictable hubris, identify themselves as particularly responsible for (as corporate citizens), and uniquely capable of (as singularly capable leaders), addressing many of society’s ills.

Both of these situations represent misguided assessments of the font of the problems professional management faces today, and the panicked cobbling together of programs for confronting them – or, more precisely, of trying to make them go away. It begins in our failure to address our relationship – not to society – but to our owners. This is a problem that most managers are barely even able to comprehend, and which they strenuously resist being shackled by. That’s not really a problem – only to be expected – in the presence of a responsible board. But even the best boards have a real difficulty in properly calculating and parsing the complex dynamics at play, here.

In the corporate governance environment in the United States today, managers are hardly the solutions to their own firms’ problems – certainly not to society’s. The arrogant conceit that continues to convince them that they are, and that continues to be foisted on them by a consultant industry just as mixed up in the skulduggery as they, only perpetuates the agony.

We do not need noblesse oblige from our managers. We don’t need patronizing protestations of their gracious readiness to turn their other-worldly attention to addressing society’s ills.

What we need from them is management. And what they need from us is direction and supervision.

That is to say, we all need to get down to business – the business of which, by the way, is business, and which serves no one and nothing by fancying itself to be anything else.