A Concept Difficult to Define
Leadership is a concept that is difficult to
define. Rightly so, because there is no one leadership, as insinuated by the simplistic
tales that we are told.
Leadership can mean different things to
different people, based on their values, aspirations, culture, and what have
you. Additionally, different situations may require different types of leaders.
Leaders sometimes may do horrific things to accomplish a goal while their goals
can be ethical, non-ethical, against the law, or a combination of all. Their
mission may not always be as black and white as insinuated by the tales we are
told. Leadership opportunities can also be time-limited. The emergence of a
leader can be as critical as the step down of that leader when his/her work is
done.
Leadership by Appointment?
Exceptional leaders often emerge from certain
circumstances. The most profiled leaders in history emerged in connection with
a cause, a vision, some kind of a passion. The driving force for exceptional
leaders isn’t usually a paycheck or merely getting appointed to lead others.
The circumstances from which exceptional
leaders emerge generally don’t apply to organizations, except for when they were
initially created. Organizations are often created with (genuine) intentions, e.g., to accomplish a vision, to
serve, or to fulfill someone's purpose in life. However, over time, their “purpose”
tends to shift. Over time, individuals running the organizations, their self-interest,
greed, immaturity, and other human shortcomings start to define the direction. Subsequently,
the mere existence of organizations and the self-interest of the persons
running them becomes more important than the purpose for which they were
initially created. There are countless examples of this. Political parties and
other idealistic organizations are some of the most illustrative ones.
Put on a Pedestal or Villainized
Some of the most exceptional leaders in
history are people ranging from Mahatma Gandhi to Adolf Hitler. The fact that
Gandhi and Hitler can belong to any same (artificial) category should make us wary.
At the very least, it should make us question sanitized leadership narratives
because even though these examples seem to be two extreme cases, it doesn’t
even take two separate individuals for the extremes to occur. The extremes can
occur even within one “leader;” for example, in the form of a champion of human
rights in one arena who has no problem violating human rights in another arena.
Through sanitized leadership narratives, however,
leaders are often either put on a pedestal or villainized. The black and white
stories are easier to tell and digest than having to admit to complex aspects
of human psychology and examine social conditioning. The latter is crucial in
all truth-finding. That is why most of the narratives we are told have little
to do with the truth. The truth requires going within, examining one's own
life. However, who wants to examine one’s own life when one can “get out there
and ‘develop leaders’”?
Being a Leader Versus Occupying a
Leadership Position
According to leadership narratives, anyone in
an organization can allegedly be a leader even though individuals at the higher
levels of organizational hierarchies are generally referred to as leaders,
regardless of whether they are “leading” or not.
It is correct to assume that anyone can be a
leader. However, just not for the reasons the leadership narratives give us. Being
a leader generally requires independent thinking and the courage to be a change
agent. Within organizations, unless one is in a leadership position,
opportunities to lead tend to be limited. The limitation is closely tied to the
hierarchies. Individuals in superior positions can feel threatened by the
leadership of a subordinate. The level of threat the superiors perceive by a
subordinate and her/his capabilities will determine how much room the
subordinate will be given to lead. This, in turn, can encourage or discourage
the subordinate, depending on what his/her capabilities or potentials are.
Organizational Hierarchies Encourage
Conformity, Discourage Leadership
Organizations, where work is performed, are hierarchical
entities—no matter how non-hierarchical they claim to be—that encourage
conformity and discourage leadership.
Hierarchies nurture the ego and trigger the
need to control others. In hierarchical organizations, there is a tendency to
keep up the status-quo and pressure to conform. Even within organizations that are
identified by change, innovation, research, and development, change is usually
closely controlled and tied to a particular status-quo, to one or more
individual’s self-interests. The more hierarchical an organization, the truer
this generally is. However, the leaders that organizations are allegedly
desiring to develop are change agents. Desiring (independent) change agents and
wanting to exert control are, in essence, contradictory concepts. Meaning, the
two realities clash.
There is a time,
however, when true leadership in structured organizations are a realistic
option—when things are falling apart. The reason for this is human psychology.
When things get very bad, human beings become more willing to give up control.
They are willing to open up and do things that they would usually not (be
willing to) do. The worse the situation, the more they are willing to give up
control and allow change to happen.
Two Basic Types of Leadership
There are two basic types of leadership: idea
leadership and leading others. The two types can overlap, coexist, or be in
opposition to each other. One of the most critical bases for idea
leadership—coming up with new ideas and having the courage to implement them—is
critical thinking and questioning the status quo. Based on that, we know that
we are not "developing" too many leaders because otherwise, at the
very least, the leadership narratives that have little to do with reality would
have no way of spreading as much as they do.
On the other hand, the lack of critical
thinking should not come as a surprise because while critical thinking skills
are the basis for idea leadership, the opposite is generally true when it comes
to leading others.
For leaders to lead, they must have followers.
Effective following often requires a lack of critical thinking or questioning,
or at least, scaling down and not acting on them. It must be noted that there
are legitimate times when toning down of “critical thinking” and questioning can
benefit the overall good. However, lack of questioning and critical thinking is
a problem when it becomes a permanent state, as often observed within
organizations when they are scaled down due to fear of losing one’s job, trying
to fit in, receiving validation, moving up the ladder, or other similar
factors.
True Leadership Is Based on Voluntary
Following
True leadership is based on voluntary
following where followers gravitate to, and in essence, define the leader. True
leaders have followers who have a desire to be led by the individual due to
his/her merit, not because followers are instructed to follow an appointed
“leader.” Career leadership where followers have no say in who gets to lead
them has little to do with leadership. That is why hierarchies become essential.
Hierarchies create the necessary power imbalances which ensure that career
leaders have followers, regardless of their skills and the quality of their
actions. It goes without saying that appointed leaders can also be true leaders
whom the followers follow willingly due to the quality of their actions. However,
such leaders are too few and in between. This is understandable, because organizational
hierarchies encourage allegiance to one’s superiors, instead of allegiance to
the mission. After all, the mission doesn’t hire or fire a “leader,” but the superiors
do.
Insecurities, Fear, and Other Factors in
Workplace Interactions
Within
the arbitrarily created hierarchies in organizations, individuals with different
levels of (childhood) trauma, insecurities, fear, aspirations, motivation,
values, courage (and the long list goes on), coexist. In many ways, workplaces
are not too different from a children’s playground. Both in the
playground, as well as in the workplace, individuals are looking for similar
things—recognition, validation, and above it all, love, and connection with
others no matter how unlikely this may sound. However, the conditioned society
that fiercely discourages authenticity leads to the creation of a reality where
individuals, among others, pretend to be someone they are not, or give up on
the truth altogether. Subsequently, highly destructive behavior patterns start
to develop.
For example, in the workplace, statements that
even defy the principles of science can easily be made. Highly educated and
established subordinates may be listening to the statements and may pretend to
not notice the lack of coherency in the statements made, or choose not to say
anything. After a while, accepting such lies and delusions becomes normalized.
Employees start to consider the lying, looking away, and not speaking up as an
integral part of the professional workplace. Euphemisms such as “professionalism”
or “diplomacy” are used to cover up the lies because rarely does anyone have
the courage to speak up out of fear of losing their jobs or retaliation.
One of the most taxing and challenging tasks
in workplaces is generally not the duties of a given job but rather navigating
through the children’s playground aspect of workplaces, a concept referred to
as “workplace politics.” Workplace politics is not more and not less than working
with the childhood trauma of adults in an environment based on the unequal
distribution of individual power.
Most
Important Aspect of Leadership Is Courage
The most challenging
aspect of (idea-)leadership is not coming up with new ideas to lead, but rather,
having the courage to put the ideas into action.
Exceptional
leadership takes courage because true leadership often comes at a high price.
Let us go back in history and look at what happened to some of the most
exceptional leaders—Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, JFK, Julius Caesar:
they were killed.
Besides the most
extreme form of punishment—death—being a leader can mean being isolated, looked
down upon, ridiculed, excluded, and even persecuted. Let us think about some
exceptional authors or painters in history who developed new ways of doing
things, introduced new ideas, new forms, and what happened to them. Many of
them died before their work was ever appreciated, while during their lifetime,
they were ridiculed, looked down upon, and excluded. At the very least, they
experienced long periods of isolation.
True leadership can
be an extremely lonely and painful place. It takes substantial courage to be a true
leader. Hierarchical organizations are hardly a place that nurtures such exceptional
courage…
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