Managing Leadership^®

If the concept of individual leadership advanced by modern gurus is more meritocratic than its lineage would suggest, it has not escaped its aristocratic heritage altogether. For example, it remains described as a rare capability, demanding that its possessor be accorded special rights and powers in an organization. And it is in this that some of its less pleasant traditional predispositions resurface in the modern face of individual leadership as promoted by the modern leadership movement.

There are two aspects to this. One comes from the unavoidable requirement that such leaders’ abilities demand that they be given free rein to reach expression, in order to be able to visit upon our organizations their special promise. That means power – not just with, as Mary Parker Follett advocated, but over, which she feared would persist as the ordinary means of controlling an organization. And those fears legitimately apply also to what must follow from popularly marketed models of leading an organization.

Many behind the movement will protest that power over is diametrically opposed to the forms of leadership they support. The problem is that, as we mentioned previously, they either aren’t really talking about leadership at all, but rather management (which is fine – they would do us all a favor if they just acceded to that fact), or they are meticulously dismissing the inevitable consequences of the surpassing attributes they ascribe to their leaders.

There is no escaping those consequences. If you invest a rarified few with superlative and vital powers in such a manner that sets them apart from others, then you set those powers apart from others as well; you make them personally inaccessible by the majority. As a result, you are required, in order to be consistent with your views of leadership, to award these great leaders great rights within the organization not available to all others, and free them from burdensome constraints that continue to hobble everyone else.

If you do not do this, you fail to afford the freedom of movement and expression necessary to give the extraordinary leadership capabilities you describe sufficient rein to work their magic.

And if you do do this, then you have – perhaps unwittingly, but nevertheless irreversibly – consigned the rest of us to the role of followers. This is the flip side of the projection of traditional singular leadership into the modern world of organizations. The majority is left to uncomprehendingly – because that is what the leaders’ capabilities are to non-leaders – hew wood and haul water.

And that’s the other aspect to the problem, here: on the one hand you have extraordinary and vital abilities in a small number of leaders, who must then be given power over followers; and on the other these ineffable intellectual talents and traits of moral character are very seldom attainable by any but a few.

That is to say, leaders and followers must know who they are, and they must reconcile themselves to occupying their appropriate places relative to each other. They must not be allowed to suffer confusion about their proper station in life. In the world of the modern individual leader, there are clearly defined classes of workers, and there is little if any upward mobility in the very nature of that world.

Note, please, that no modern leadership guru would state the matter in such stark terms. But recall as well, if you will, that we are attempting to prepare the way for the presentation of our own position. So, we must first work backward from their arguments to the premise on which those must be based, and which the gurus – unsurprisingly, as it turns out – do not seem to offer on their own.

But for all that, they still attract great attention and innumerable advocates and aspirants to their examples. How is that possible with such a model so evidently out of step with the modern world?

We’ll look briefly at that tomorrow. See you then!

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Today’s tip: Speaking of alarming discoveries when reconstructing the unstated premises underlying peculiar arguments, please see this report, from the WSJ, of a scientific specialist’s analysis of last month’s controversial report about the putative consequences of climate change. Whatever your position on the subject, you will likely want to see this.

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