That’s so effective a way to put the issue – in the real world of work bosses are managers appointed by the board and other bosses, not “leaders” gathered around by “followers” or voted into position by their acclaim.

Your connection of the fact of a manager’s power to reward or punish with his or her perhaps inordinate influence on corporate culture strikes at the heart of the matter, it seems to me. Managers must have that power – there is no good reason to happy-face it away – it is essential to focus and progress.

However, it can, and often does, become a problem when managers misread the meaning of that influence, or misplace its source as inherent in themselves rather than in their positions or the logic of the organizational structure. One of my concerns is that the common means of viewing individual leadership almost inevitably – indeed, by design – leads to this error.

Your comments always restate my posts more concisely and effectively – I can’t even respond as succinctly! Thanks as always for such thought-provoking insight!

It is perplexing, isn’t it? Sometimes it seems as though there’s an “already bought in” dynamic at play – one way to look at it is that we don’t readily change opinions in which we’ve invested so much – we’ve chosen our story and we’re sticking to it; another is that the investment causes us to interpret evidence only in the context of the intellectual framework to which we’ve committed – we simply are no longer able to see things from another perspective.

Another difficulty here may be that no one’s ideas are wholly erroneous – individuals do exhibit leadership – my question is where that leadership originates: should we be cultivating it in individuals or in the organizations that, I argue, actually are its source?

Your observations about the difficulty of finding a common thread woven through disparate examples of successfully managed organizations certainly adds to the puzzle, doesn’t it? The example of the clownishly charismatic leader who is effective despite him- or herself is instructive of the complexity of the matter.

That may be further evidence that management is hard, and the dynamics it has to understand and sort out are complex and shifting. But I think that that evidence points to our need to do more work trying to understand it – not to the presumption that we already do, which is suggested (rather too stridently, it sometimes seems to me) by current approaches to individual leadership.

Thanks for your visit and your always thought-provoking observations. It is far more important to raise questions while they are there to be raised, than to rush to answers which work only to conceal the continuing presence of those questions. Thanks!

In most of today’s workplaces, bosses are not chosen by the people who will work for them. Instead, they’re appointed by other bosses who will be above them. And, in most of today’s workplaces, the boss has the institutional power to reward and punish. We have very few effective models of anything else.

But a consequence of that is that the boss has an inordinate influence on the culture of a work group because of his or her power to reward and punish.

It’s probably says something about the way my mind works, but I keep asking myself, what keeps that from happening? It’s a way of operating that promises to be more efficient, more effective, and far less expensive than other approaches.
Who doesn’t want that to happen? The Board? The shareholders? The employees? Forbes, Fortune, the Journal, CNBC, and the rest of the business press?

“Singular individual leadership” does have a constituency, and my bet is most of them are not drooling idiots. And not evil, either.

How does a bad idea prevail despite its obvious shortcomings?

Because I’ve consulted to blue and pink collar workplaces absolutely ravaged by the effects of poor leadership, I’m extremely pleased whenever I find one that’s well managed. So far, I see no coherent thread whatsoever.

Many “leaders,” (many of whom got promoted from within) are relaxed, not narcissistic, pretty healthy folks. Some of them convey that, and are very effective. Some get chewed up and spit out.

Some “charismatic” leaders are laughably vain, and far from perfect in their business judgment. Everyone sees it as the performance it is – to the point that there’s snickering just offstage – but that leader somehow finds a way to be effective despite it all. And when they move on, it’s experienced as a loss by the organization. Somehow they filled the bill.
It’s a puzzlement.