Managing Leadership^®

In ordinary daily life, we are encouraged to resist excess, to maintain well-rounded, healthy lifestyles physically, mentally, and emotionally. We go to experts when we find ourselves careening to one or another extreme of a vital characteristic, losing our equilibrium, our perspective, our effectiveness across many aspects of our lives. Those experts then prescribe medicine or therapy to help restore us to health.

But what if one of your doctors suddenly started encouraging you to cultivate certain of your abilities to extreme degrees – or even to develop extreme traits not previously associated with you? What if they even suggested that you should come to understand your life, yourself, on the basis of this or that peculiarity targeted for extra-normal growth? Would that make sense to you? You would probably avoid this expert like the plague.

You don’t, though. You read all the latest leadership books, attend the seminars, buy the CDs. You listen, enthralled, to one, and then the next, peddler to roll through town, claiming inside knowledge based on the latest “scientific research.” Then you buy their prescriptions for making you a 10-foot tall, iron-jawed, charismatic, visionary. You believe in their promises to make you so extraordinary that everyone else in the room will suddenly wheel around, regard you with new respect, and transform into your followers.

But maybe they’re actually regarding you with concern – alarm, even. Perhaps they’re following you around not to study your example, but just to see what you’ll be up to next. And that spontaneously generated communication system to inform everyone as to your thinking and activities – it could be that it isn’t a fan club, or a means of expanding the reach of your leadership, but an early-warning system; I’ve seen that happen more than once.

Think back to some of the recommendations made in even the best-selling leadership books of recent years – even now. The thing is that the descriptions they provide of what a leader is – and of what they encourage you to be – are not far removed from those that can be found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It’s worth noting that many of the experts who commend those descriptions to you are trained psychiatrists and psychologists, whose key reference – scientific research – is that very manual. That’s worth a thought, isn’t it?

Does the brand of superlative individual leadership promoted by the modern leadership movement merely amount to a peculiar sort of personality disorder? Or, might its self-referential, inwardly-directed focus on the lop-sided development of exaggerated personality traits lead inevitably to accompanying dysfunctional afflictions?

Tomorrow, we’ll look at the flip side of this question. The plan, then, is to return next week to complete the previous series on the implications of all of this. Then, we will move on to look for evidence of immunity to these afflictions – and how to develop those. Looking forward to your visits!

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Today’s tip: You’ve always suspected this sort of thing about many of the putative leaders you have to endure, haven’t you? Well, you’re not alone. Please see this item about sheeple, at Chris Blattman’s always worthwhile blog.

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