Managing Leadership^®

This is a place we all regard with awe and wonder – a place we would like to be someday, one of the select few privy to the private consultations which generate the decisions about strategic planning, operational policy, and daily practice to which the rest of us are bound. It is a grave, mystical place, with access to information and knowledge beyond our grasp, occupied by denizens possessed of wisdom beyond our ken.

Or, that’s how it seems from the outside. It is useful, perhaps, to recall that the phrase originally referred to the secluded chamber of ancient temples, accessible only by the priests of the local religion. There, the elders were said to perform sacred rites and commune with the gods. They would then issue forth into the temple proper, and announce the results to the rest of us, grateful to have our ignorance excused, and our faithfulness rewarded with divine instructions.

But, of course, we know that those old religions were shams. Since we also know, then, that the priests weren’t really talking with the gods, and certainly not relaying the conversations to us, they must have been doing something else. What might that have been?

As we massed in fear and trembling outside this inner sanctum, it’s entirely possible that they huddled inside, quaking with anxiety and alarm themselves. They had to keep up the charade, convince us that their vision of the cosmological order was right, that their own vital and privileged roles as interpreters and mediators were effective, and that the impounding of the public’s wealth and restriction of its rights was worth the ongoing cost.

So with each new imposition, they had to produce greater images and edifices with which to cow the people and keep them in submission. As it turns out, it was relatively easy to do, as they so eagerly sought this sort of yoke, trusting that the priests understood how to resolve a world so filled with cognitive dissonance, and how to guide us safely through it.

It’s worth pointing out that imagery such as this is often used to depict the actions of extraordinary individual leaders and their coteries of interpreters and mediators on the one hand, and we cowering and necessarily ignorant and impotent followers on the other – however enthused we may be at being empowered to comply with the instructions we receive.

Is it not possible that all of the mystical formulations spun by the modern leadership movement are a sham as well? Should we not reevaluate the caliber and content of the deliberations going on in this peculiar institution’s inner sanctum, as well as the competence and commitment of those of us – employee, customer, partner, shareholder – waiting in heretofore passive inaction outside?

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Today’s tips: Speaking of misapprehending what is really happening in the minds of people regarding each other across group boundaries, please see this excellent piece about non-verbal communication by Steve Roesler.

And speaking of questioning habitual arrangements, please see this post by Fred H. Schiegel, author of the Frog Blog, where he offers eye-opening insight about marketing and much more.

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