Managing Leadership^®

The tradition from which come today’s presumptive intellectuals suggests that there are people who inherently know better, and people who inherently do not. To claim membership of the former group requires that one believe in the existence and humble condition of the latter. Moreover, it demands that they interact with each other in a contemporary reflection of their historic relationship.

The result is the modern progressive movement. This is composed largely of genuinely well-intended thinkers who believe that we must follow their prescriptions in order to move forward and rise above the poverty, ignorance, and violence of the past. They see themselves as the intellectual and moral vanguard of this advance, discovering and interpreting to the masses, who obediently and gratefully follow them, the secrets to a more virtuous future.

Sometimes it takes the rather more gloomy aspect of our obligation to do what they say by rote, without real understanding, in order to enjoy the consequent benefits, also, unfortunately, with at best incomplete comprehension. But at least they feel comforted by it, and know that we are better off, even if we remain only dimly aware of it ourselves.

That is more or less the form this movement initially took a century ago in the then emerging world of organizations. Bosses ordered, and we, if we really did know what was best for us, obeyed; paid, as we were, to do and not to think.

But since the unexpected revelations of the Hawthorne experiments, a previously shrouded sentience inherent in the working class began to penetrate the arrogance of the management class of the time. This eventually led to a progressive movement there, as well. In its heyday, it expressed itself in approaches to the working masses such as the transformational theory of leadership, in which enlightened leadership generates elevated levels of awareness, productivity, and even morality (which, presumably, would have otherwise been unattainable without that leadership intervention).

The inescapably elitist cast of the movement causes it to portray the progressive management class as the source of insight and creativity - although it may, at times, discern instances of a sort of primitive, native wisdom among the workers which it then elaborates into theory and exploits. This class then acts on, or on behalf of, the working class, often out of purely benevolent regard for the latter’s own good.

While the working and management environments have dramatically changed over the subsequent decades, it must be said that our instincts have not kept pace with that change. There remains a strong paternalistic trend in both the theory and practice of management even today, and even a strong attraction to that attitude by the rest of us.

The classic example of this is the still thriving modern leadership movement, with its characteristic emphasis on the exclusiveness of the club, not to mention the presumption of its natural superiority over mere management, which latter calling has come, in the modern age of organizations, to be dominated by commoners, however well-trained. And that impulse to hierarchically distinguish the two functions is the clue to the ongoing presence of the traditional discrimination between those few who believe they inherently can, and the accompanying conviction that the rest of us are the sadly benighted masses whose greatest privilege is to have these luminous exemplars among us.

In the real world, though, the Cinderella fantasies these movements inspire are just that: fantasies. There is nothing inherently elite, exclusive, or rarefied among the capabilities or characteristics of managers or “leaders” at any level that sets them apart inevitably or naturally from any of the rest us.

The ubiquity (and mobility) of talent - and, indeed, of leadership, for that matter - is a fact increasingly evident in the workings of the modern meritocratic world of organizations. And the shortcomings of our attachment to the fairy tale depictions of the inscrutable and infallible priesthood of leaders at its summit is continuously evident in the news.

But the progressives, in all domains of modern life, continue their fight for survival and, in particular, dominance. We will look at that tomorrow. On Friday, we will wrap up the lessons inherent in this for us as working managers. Please do join in.

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This post is a part of a series. You can learn about and link to the other articles here: Intellectuals

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Today’s tip: For a somewhat contrasting view of all those scandals and business failures in the news and their meaning with respect to leadership, please see this post by Carmine Coyote, author of Slow Leadership.

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If you look at the contents section on the sidebar of the main page of this site, you will see a listing of the article series that have been published here. You can click through to view summaries of the pieces, and then read the full series or selections that are of most interest to you. Enjoy!

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