Jim Stroup (@jimstroup) used to write a blog called Managing Leadership; the blog is gone, but his book of the same name is still available.

Jim understood the myth of leadership.

“…the cult of the superlative individual leader as the cure for our current difficulties,” but Jim also pointed out that those same cult members caused many of the problems.

“We will take the position here at the outset, then, that the family of definitions of leadership that we are discussing is that which incorporates the idea of ineffably sensed forward motion – profound vision, unfathomable wisdom or judgment, courageous decisiveness, a charismatic ability to attract followers, and the like.

After all, it is this type of leadership that we are being told we must place our faith in, so that its exemplars can grasp the reins firmly in their hands, and with reassuring sure-footedness steer we poor, benighted masses out of our barely perceived and dimly comprehended peril. Into which, let it be said again, those exalted exemplars’ predecessors led us.”

Wally Bock has often pointed out that leadership, in common with the emperor, has no clothes and that leadership “wisdom” fails dismally to live up to its name.

Today’s post is short, because it is linked to an important article that KG recently sent as a result of our comparing notes on the subject.

It’s important, because it takes a different, more realistic, look at leadership, as opposed to the traditional view as espoused by the leadership industry. (Yes, “leadership” is an entire industry as is accounting and law.)

The article highlights, as did Jim and Wally, the dangers of our obsession with leadership and those who claim its mantle.

Take the time to read it and, more importantly, think about it, share it, and make it a subject for discussion among your friends.

Image credit: Edvin J.

Jim Stroup is one of my favorite leadership commentators; additionally, he writes one of the most erudite blogs in cyberspace. He was kind enough to offer this post to introduce you to his thinking. He is well worth any time you spend with him. I highly recommend a subscription to his blog as well as his book, Managing Leadership, which I reviewed here.

Summarizing the fallacy of individual leadership

I’ve covered a lot of ground over the past several years on Managing Leadership. I’ve talked about everything from free-market capitalism to history – even physics. But at bottom, it all has been about management and leadership; in particular, how the former is a proper and honorable individual undertaking in an organization, and how the latter is, not to put to fine a point on it, neither.

I will be talking more about what leadership in an organization really is, and how to manage it at my blog, but for this post, I’d like to take a moment to summarize the fundamental problems with the current state of things – the intractable contradictions inextricably woven into the concept of individual leadership:

• It is inescapably about the person – not the work. It encourages personal ties which rise to the level of cultishness. It describes these ties as existing between the “leader” and his or her “followers” – not among colleagues and their businesses or organizations.
• It suggests that individual leadership can be developed. There is, however, no proof whatever for this contention.
• It fails to connect leadership (especially inspirational or charismatic) with successful business management.
• It is filled with fallacious proofs consisting of examples that seem to support it, but which ignore the multiples of examples that satisfy the posited parameters while still failing to support it, or that even contradict it.
• Neither its presence nor its potential can be predicted.
• It encourages adults to attempt to develop personality characteristics that may not be natural to them. This has not been demonstrated as possible; it may actually be harmful.
• It further encourages adults to focus on developing these personal characteristics in order to attain a personally aggrandizing persona, rather than to improve their ability to contribute as part of a team to organizational work.
• By seeking a universal individual leadership model it fails to see how individuals in “leadership” positions learn on their own to evaluate what’s working, what isn’t, and how to adapt to keep things going or to improve them.
• It is irretrievably run through with contradictions – the most obvious being those among the widely touted and disparate lists of “essential” leadership traits.
• It (often actively) encourages unaccountability by its recourse to superlative leadership skills and “intuition” beyond the ken of the rest of us.
• As a really rather obvious result, it is irrelevant, distracting, and thus destructive on numerous levels.
• Flowing inevitably from the above, in its lack of system, resistance to definition, and inability to develop practitioners or predict outcomes, it is inherently unprofessional.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Now read Jim’s complimentary post, Exuding something, that looks at the flip side of individual leadership.

Easily among the most disagreeable aspects of the generally disagreeable concept of exceptional individual leadership is the noxious notion of “followership.”

Image credit: Managing Leadership

I have a great idea to make the world a better place.

Everybody who aspires to the cult of all-knowing leader stops.

Everybody who longs for an all-knowing leader embraces the reality that no such thing exists. (Jim Stroup has an excellent discussion on this that started June 8 at Managing Leadership. I highly recommend it.)

Replacing these, everybody would

• learn leadership skills;

• apply them constantly to themselves; and

• occasionally in the outside world as circumstances dictated;

• take responsibility for their own actions and decisions; and

• partner with others as equals, whether one was in front or behind at any given time.

Not that I think there’s a chance in hell that this will happen, but it’s a nice thought on a beautiful summer Friday.

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In a new series Jim Stroup is exploring what drives our need for “the cult of the superlative individual leader as the cure for our current difficulties” in spite, as Jim points out, of those same cult members having caused many of the current problems.

“We will take the position here at the outset, then, that the family of definitions of leadership that we are discussing is that which incorporates the idea of ineffably sensed forward motion – profound vision, unfathomable wisdom or judgment, courageous decisiveness, a charismatic ability to attract followers, and the like.

After all, it is this type of leadership that we are being told we must place our faith in, so that its exemplars can grasp the reins firmly in their hands, and with reassuring sure-footedness steer we poor, benighted masses out of our barely perceived and dimly comprehended peril. Into which, let it be said again, those exalted exemplars’ predecessors led us.”

Please click over and read this brilliant, irreverent discussion of what leadership has come to be and why it destroys instead of sustains. (Be sure to subscribe to follow it.)

Then check out Wally Bock’s comments regarding the continued idiocy of the leader vs. manager concept.

And  my series on the same topic is worth reading if you haven’t already.

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The ability to influence is not the sign of a leader; nor are visions, forceful opinions, board seats, titles or popularity. After all, if a high media profile was a sign of leadership then Britney Spears and Paris Hilton are leaders.

Millions of people are influenced and even inspired by writers and actors, but does that make them leaders? Angelina Jolie is considered a leader for her tireless charitable efforts as opposed to her screen credits; Rush Limbaugh may influence thousands, but I’ve never heard him called a leader.

It is the singular accomplishments; the unique actions that deserve the term, not the position you hold or just doing your job.

I knew a manager who thought his major accomplishment was managing his 100 person organization, but that wasn’t an accomplishment—that was his job. The accomplishment, and what qualified him as a leader, was doing it for four years with 3% turnover and every project finished on time and in budget.

Jim Stroup over at Managing Leadership wrote, “There is a strong and general instinct to ascribe positive values to what we have determined to be examples of leadership. In a world that so often confuses forcefulness with leadership, this can be – and frequently is, in fact, revealed to be – an exceedingly dangerous habit… There is a particularly frustrating – and increasing – tendency to characterize any practice or trait deemed “good” as “leadership.” When an executive exhibits behavior that is highly valued – or even expresses a perfectly ordinary one especially well – he or she is declared to be a “leader,” or to have demonstrated “leadership.”

Dozens of corporate chieftains who were held up for years as exemplifying visionary leadership now stand in line for bailout money—or dinner in jail.

There is no way to stop the word being used and abused, but you have the option to hear it for what it really is—a word with no baggage, no assumed meaning.

A word on which you focus your critical thinking instead of accepting it blindly, assuming that all its traits are positive or rejecting it based on nothing more than ideology.

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Although I read a lot of article and blogs, I’m very particular about what I pass on to you. I often link to a particular post, but have a much more limited list to share when people write and ask what to read daily when they have very limited time.

I find the topics relevant, but there are a multitude of similar topics every day, so what sets the ones I choose apart? Synergistic MAP and the writing.

I admit that I’m a writing snob. Quantity doesn’t equal quality; reading through dense prose bores me, so the ones I like are clearly and concisely written. This doesn’t mean other don’t have merit, it just means that they don’t do it for me.

The point being that you need to find sources that resonate and work for you, not for whoever recommends it.

That said, here are my four favorites.

Jim Stroup is responsible for Managing Leadership. Jim is who you read when you want to stimulate your brain and dig into the philosophical, strategic and tactical ramifications of business and politics. He’s also one of the most charismatic, brilliant writers I’ve found.

Steve Roesler writes All Things Workplace. Steve draws his topics from the situations he deals with every day in his work. His advice is practical, down-to-earth, common sense-based and, most importantly, immediately useable.

Phil Gerbyshak over at Slacker Manager is the guy for whom everyone wants to work. He provides great input, especially for less experienced managers—although I know a lot of executives who could benefit by following it.

Mark Jabo at Biz Levity fills my laugh bucket and helps me keep my perspective. His posts are my way of remembering that in the great scheme of things none of this really matters—except to the archeologists when they dig though our digital trash.

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Jeffrey Krames, author of Inside Drucker’s Brain, wrote a great piece detailing why the imperial CEO is dead—or should be. (Hat tip to ManagingLeadership for the link to this post.)

Krames quotes Sungard’s CEO, Chris Conde, “The CEO is like a conductor—he conducts and orchestrates a system. It is very arrogant to think you can make better decisions than the thousands of people below you. The role of the boss is to make a handful of decisions that cannot be made by anyone else and to maintain the collaboration systems. I really think the rise of these collaborative systems is redefining organizational structures and the role of the CEO; they are the last nail in the coffin of the imperial CEO.” and goes on to detail the advantages of collaboration.

All of which I heartily agree with.

The problem is that the imperial ego isn’t dead, it’s not only alive and well, it’s still kicking butt instead of having its butt kicked.

As I said Tuesday, we’re a long way from ending the sense of entitlement felt by so many executives and worse, executives-to-be.

It’s a NIMBY kind of problem. People understand logically that doing to the new generation that which was done to them isn’t really payback and that it should stop, but feel that it should stop after them.

Survival-forced collaboration may diminish the imperial CEO power, but I doubt it will go far in changing either their MAP or their sense of entitlement.

There will still (always?) be a percentage that believes they deserve giant compensation packages and that they could make a better decision/choice if they just had time. They won’t rush to empower their people and will be dragged kicking and screaming in to the collaborative future.

And just because the guy four levels down is making profitable decisions for the company doesn’t mean he’ll get a ride on the imperial jet any time soon.

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On a post over at Managing Leadership, Wally Bock left a great comment that’s germane to my recent posts and to the notion that the idea of ‘leadership’ has been corrupted by the leadership business and the media.

“…people prefer magical thinking to accountability.”

They sure do. That magical thinking is just great for all those who don’t want the responsibility of making their own decisions. It’s wonderful to have a ‘leader’ tell you what to think and how to act. That way, when things get screwed up, it isn’t your fault; it’s the leader’s fault. You get to say, ‘S/he told me to…’ and poof—instant absolution with no strings attached.

“There’s a joke about a professor who says that a certain idea is “fine in practice but may not work in theory. We didn’t have a problem identifying who was the leader before we had leadership theory. Nobody worried about whether that Caesar fellow was a true or real or authentic leader. They just followed him.”

Caesar didn’t worry about it, either. He just did [whatever] and assumed that everyone would follow along. And follow they did, at least until he decided to make his leadership official. At that point their response was direct and very final.

We followers need to do something similar to the leadership movement; not necessarily as final, because it does have its uses.

We need to reform its thinking; recognize that leadership skills are for everyone—not just a select few—and stop it from appointing/anointing those selective few as ‘leaders’.

So, new mantra—everybody is a leader; lead yourself first and don’t worry abut the rest.

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Jim Stroup writes an amazing blog. He reads widely, thinks deeply and writes superbly—of course, it doesn’t hurt that we hold similar views on the subject of ‘leaders’.

Last Thursday Jim wrote Clarifying leadership and supplied me with my quotes for today.

The first is from Peter Drucker, who said,

“Leadership is all hype. We’ve had three great leaders in this century – Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.”

Jim considers this the most sensible thing Drucker ever said about leadership and I agree. Jim goes on to say,

“He was right. Those guys had it all: vision, oratorical ability, relationship building skills, charisma, relentless focus, outside the box thinking, follower-attracting magnetism…Moreover they had the unconstrained maneuver room to give their leadership the untrammeled free rein that the modern movement’s gurus also insist is vital.”

Hmmm, free rein. Isn’t that what deregulation gave our fearless ‘leaders’ on Wall Street and in corporate America?

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I’ve never been a big believer in the cult of individual leadership, a subject brilliantly discussed at Managing Leadership.The current economic meltdown is brought to you by the same folks who have been lauded for years for their extraordinary leadership.

Nor do I believe that leadership is positional; true leadership is found at all levels—it comes forward and makes itself felt when need arises.

Of course, that rarely happens, since most organizations subscribe to the tenets of individual and positional leadership.

CEOs are praised for their brilliant leadership during good times and condemned for not producing the same results in economic downturns.

Worse, their results are compared to predecessor’s performance during heady economic expansion—an environment in which it takes far less skill to produce profits.

It’s said that leadership requires vision and all these leaders had visions—unfortunately. They had visions of being the biggest, baddest, richest corporation in their field—and they were lauded for that vision.

It will be interesting to watch leadership gurus roll out the disclaimers and disavow the same folks who they’ve held up as examples of how to lead.

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