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Australian Financial Review, August 9,
2002 We yearn for leaders, but refuse to acknowledge they are driven, sometimes to madness, by power and lust. The dream is far easier to handle WHEN I first started to research leadership, I was an optimist but also a fool. I thought there was an answer, a secret that I would discover, and that would be that. Increasingly, I feel in danger of being crushed by a thousand leadership banalities. There were 668 books on leadership when I recently searched the Melbourne Business School library catalogue - more than 300 published in the past three or four years. They are not modest in what they promise: inclusive, portable, transformational, charismatic, principled, servant, authentic, high-velocity and results-based leadership. There was something for everyone but particularly for those with an interest in warfare - Patton on Leadership, Corporate Warriors - and those with an interest in gurus and a high tolerance for grandiosity: Jack Welch Speaks: Wisdom from the world's greatest business leader and I'd Like the World to Buy a Coke: The life and leadership of Roberto Goizueta. Other leadership books compete to be the final word on the subject: Leadership A to Z, The Leader's Change Handbook, The Encyclopedia of Leadership. They imply and sometimes brazenly declare: if you read no other, read this book. What does this vast collection of leadership wisdom say? Same old thing. Leaders need to listen, need to be team players, need to be emotionally intelligent, to trust; they need to be inspirational and put their people first, to have values and principles which they live by. But too often the content is vapid and vacuous and far from our lived experience of leadership. We undertake studies, we comb business pages, we survey, refine and interview, thinking that this will deliver us the holy grail of leadership - the essential traits, the ultimate capabilities or skill sets that finally distinguish the genuine leader from the rest. Studies confirm the qualities of "transformational leaders" but - surprise, surprise - they are rarely found in the people who occupy leadership roles in organisations. There is a chasm between what the research urges and predicts, and what actually happens in organisations. Most people find it difficult to nominate one or two great leaders for whom they have worked. Instead, other terms often come to mind: fickle, narcissistic, pragmatic, without vision, flawed, weak. There is a dreadful confronting gap between the ideal and the reality of leadership. But instead of seeking to fully understand the phenomenon of leadership, we continue to look in the wrong places for the wrong thing. Globalisation (of course) is the first wrong place where we have looked for leadership. By this I mean that the vast majority of the business articles and books on leadership come from the US. Americans think they are the world's natural leaders; they certainly have enough marketing power and publishing savvy to ensure that our understanding of leadership is saturated with home-spun American wisdom. Much of this writing on leadership has a quasi-religious tone and unrelenting earnestness. There is rarely reflection about self (even though reflectiveness is often in the suggested leader's tool kit). Seemingly designed to convince us that leading is a pure selfless activity, this writing seeks to infuse leadership with high moral tone and a righteousness that is in denial. In so doing, these writers hide from the frailty and the flesh of leadership. Despite their religious pretensions, some of these books are deeply cynical. Many are compendiums of often recycled articles. Promising to offer the most up-to-date and final word on the leadership subject, they shamelessly recycle well-worn articles in the same format, with the same language. Books professing to offer us the last word in the leadership of change and innovation advise us pretty much what these commentators have been advocating on the pages of Harvard Business Review and the conference circuit for the past two decades. Why are we scared to go deeper in understanding the impulses to leadership? An obvious reason is that it is consistent with the dominant managerial doctrine to act as if all our efforts and initiatives are subject to rational determination. Much early theory on strategy made the same mistake - it failed to take into account how history, family and culture circumscribe strategic decision-making. Allowing for these deeper and more tangled impulses takes us into territory that is more frightening because it is less predictable - but is also closer to reality. To start to understand the flaws of grandiosity and greed, the terrible errors of judgment that were "normal business practice" - as evident at HIH, One.Tel, Enron and WorldCom - we need to pursue a more complex picture of leadership. We can't write off the leaders of these organisations as "a few bad apples". And we can't offer useful leadership commentary until we confront the desire to be led with simple answers from one-dimensional heroes. But this bleaker set of leadership insights will be resisted. When I try to engage students and executives on the underbelly of leadership - the raw and seamy sides of how someone moves us - they don't like it. They are sullen and unco-operative. Leadership is an ideal and they don't want someone like me saying rude things about it. So what is going on? One theory is that we are looking for someone to save us. In leadership we are often reactivating a primitive dependency from childhood - the search for the perfect parent, the one who recognises our own specialness. In the search for leadership we are also engaged in projection - looking for someone else to mirror our ideal self. Yet the kind of pious leadership claptrap that we are currently fed sells us short. It makes me hunger for Shakespeare - for the betrayal and seduction, the catastrophe and lust. Shakespeare knew that the territory leaders inhabit has huge stakes, terrible tragedies and full-blown emotion. Contemporary writers put emotion in the box of emotional intelligence when they talk about leadership and they take out the sex and passion. Yet when we look at the numerous examples of corporate collapses that have occurred in the past months - the words that are necessary but not spoken are betrayal, madness, hysteria, greed and envy. In leadership research there is rarely mention of sexualities or masculinities. How can people seriously research leadership without looking at desire and seduction? Leadership is romance and mystique, physical and visceral. Watch leaders and note the stance, the voice, the implied intimacy and confidences. We've forgotten what Alistair Mant and others advised us years ago: that leaders by definition have a distorted view of their own power and importance. They are less bothered by fears of their own mediocrity. This inflated ego is both leadership's strength and downfall. To understand leaders, one needs to see how these egos were shaped to include the past in the contemporary leadership picture. Leaders, like the rest of us, spend lives and careers seeking to satisfy outstanding needs, compensate for losses, reduce anxieties and inadequacies. In a forthcoming book, Valerie Wilson and I argue that personal backgrounds are the great omission from the leadership story. The best books on leadership face up to the irrationalities and deviance, and see that the same people who have charisma are also those who are unpredictable. A rare recent example is a new book by Manfred Kets de Vries, Struggling with the Demon (2001, Psychosocial Press). I remember my huge relief in finding his earlier books, The Neurotic Organisation (1984, Jossey-Bass) and The Irrational Executive (1984, International Universities Press), in which he openly recognised that CEOs came in paranoid, compulsive, schizoid, depressive and dramatic styles. The liberating part of this analysis was the recognition that the frailty and flaws aren't the dysfunctional exception in managerial ranks - they are everywhere, an integral part of the entrepreneurial and managerial persona. The task of leadership scholars becomes one of seeking to surface and analyse the pressures on leaders, including how the infatuations and delusions of followers feed and collude with a leader's grandiose or needy impulses. Few contemporary leadership books help with this. So why, you might ask, do I continue to research and, indeed, write my own books on leadership? Much of what passes as learning about leadership is looking for a way of living, a way of being that has meaning. At the moment some are looking to philosophers for meaning - perhaps the guardians of Plato and other philosophers who have stood the test of time will have answers. But my view is that to come up with better stories and narratives on leadership we need to talk about it and research it in a more daring and fearless way. And we need to ask questions of, and watch, different people. For example, some of Australia's Aboriginal leaders provide remarkable insights on leadership. They have new things to tell us about leadership practice. Most Aboriginal leaders have learned how to maintain remarkable dignity in the face of institutionalised racism - a dignity many white leaders could only dream about. Almost always they speak from the heart, they say it as it is, but have not lost a capacity for humour and perspective. There is a lot we can learn about leadership but we will only find it if we change the way, and where, we look.
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Copyright © 2002 Macquarie Institute, Australia
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