Managing Leadership^®

Attending to one’s image or appearance is reasonable enough, particularly when your position blends your image – from the perspective of outsiders or insiders – with that of your organization’s. Most of us understand that, or come to in time, and strive to deport ourselves in a way that eases our work and reflects well on our affiliations.

It’s when the blurring of our image with that of the organization occurs from our own perspective – by us – that we begin to have a problem. Even perfectly ordinary, self-possessed beings can begin a slide into the unpredictably chaotic state of vanity. When this happens we often have slipped the bonds of ordinary sanity and floated into a sort of self-referential hysteria. We abandon our anchor-points, clinging only to ourselves. This, indeed, is madness.

But the curious thing is that this hysteria sweeps up so many others with it. “Leaders” become obsessed with seeing themselves in whatever light the modern leadership movement currently wishes to bathe them. And the rest of us, so desperate to catch a glimpse of these transformational beings, to believe in them, or to imagine ourselves to be on the path to ordination ourselves, convince ourselves that there really is something special there. We, squinting, peer into the dazzling fuss made over these poor creatures, and we, poor we, see what we wish to see.

Visionary, compassionate, immovable, agile, heroic, empowering, ladder-setting agents of change or chauffeured edge-walkers – dress this “leader” up as you will, with whatever accessories go with the current fad. But when the lights go down, the sound effects are cut, and the curtain is pulled aside, you will see no wizard, no royally-clad being, but just a regular joe or jane like the rest of us; and one, moreover, who has been diminished by the whole affair, as have we for encouraging and participating in it.

Emperors, wizards, leaders – they’re all the same: their time is gone. Let them go as well. There are no grand costumes, no booming incantations, and no rare personal qualities that can bring them back. Perhaps there never were, really.

But the effort to adorn one’s self with such exclusive distinctions simply, in the unforgiving and levelling world we live in today, makes those who try look, sooner or later, ridiculous. Unfortunately, for every time that ridicule is poured on its deluded victims, the joke is really on us.

Ordinary people like you and me, who possess the customary combination of personal ambition and self-doubt can, if we just will, manage our own affairs, and those of our organizations. And we can do it without suffering the baleful influence of such sad spectres desperately harking to relive ages irretrievably gone.

So, it’s on us, after all. To work then.

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