Seeking an Alternative to the Leader-Follower Relationship: A Brief Interlude

I recently came across an article titled, “Sometimes, the boss really is a pyscho.” It brought to my mind a growing body of research examining some harmful effects of the leader-follower relationship. For instance, work by Timothy Judge at the University of Notre Dame, Adam Galinsky at the Kellogg School of Management, Joris Lammers and Diederik Stapel at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, and Dana Carney at Columbia Buisness School, shows that the inevitable relationship between leaders and followers creates conditions for hypocrisy, deception, cruelty, cheating, and great abuses of authority by the leaders. In my own book, The Myth of Leadership: Creating Leaderless Organizations, I show how the leader-follower relationship sets up an unequal power relationship, where the leader feels entitled to monopolize information, control decision-making, and command obedience from followers, while the followers feel their only options are to obey or leave. Of course, not all leaders behave this way, but in every organization we all know they could act that way if they wanted to, and employees would have to go along.

I am struck by how much potential for creativity is lost, how much talent lies unrealized, how often productivity and profitability are squandered, and how much human flourishing is sacrificed because of the way we currently organize, design, and manage our communities and organizations. I call this the myth of leadership. The myth of leadership is the constellation of beliefs that conditions us to organize our communities around the rank-based conception of authority; to design our communities with relationships of unequal power; and to manage our communities through leader-based hierarchies. The myth of leadership justifies the significance we place on our concept of leadership and the privileges we bestow upon our leaders – frequently to the detriment of others in our organizations. The myth of leadership creates the powerful belief that only a relatively few “superior” individuals can be made leaders and so trusted to make the decisions and do the commanding and controlling of everyone else. It makes false assumptions about both leaders and followers with detrimental consequences for both.

The myth of leadership creates a dichotomy, two categories: one of leaders, a select and privileged few; and the second of followers, the vast majority. So we get the rank-based context that produces secrecy, distrust, overindulgence, and the inevitable sacrifice of those below for the benefit of those above. The myth of leadership creates unequal power relationships that sabotage genuine communication and frequently leads to dishonesty and abuse of power. When we use the words “leader” and “leadership,” we immediately create a ranked division of people in ways that do not serve healthy organizational relationships. We waste too much human potential and do not allow life in our organizations to be as joyful, successful, and meaningful as it could be.

            The deleterious effects of the myth of leadership do not arise because of anyone’s bad intentions or bad character, but are simply due to human nature. Biologically we are hardwired to be status-seeking, reciprocal altruists. This means we are constantly seeking status and cooperating with those who might help us increase our status, retaliating against those who might decrease our status, and simply ignoring those who can neither benefit nor harm our level of status. Given human nature what matters is how we define and recognize status in our communities and organizations. When status is tied to rank-based leadership positions, which it has been for a very long time, then we will get the negative and harmful consequences that have always been present, but which social scientists are just now measuring.

            We need to redefine status as genuine contribution to the success and wellbeing of the organization and to confer status upon those who make such a genuine contribution, without any concern for the person’s rank-based title in the leadership hierarchy. This will require that we implement more of a peer-based management structure of peer councils, rotational stewardship positions, and mentors. We will then be able to assess and recognize contributions more accurately through the peer-based system of open information, participatory decision-making, and shared accountability.

As I tell my classes, when we see status as the meaningful contribution to the wellbeing of the organization, then we realize the janitor is often more important to us than the CEO. After all, whom would you miss more if they were gone for a week – the person who cleans the restrooms in your office, or the president of the company?

A Few Architectural Insights into the Practice of Managment

I am a big fan of a version of analogical learning where you take the ideas and concepts of one discipline and apply them to the issues and problems of another. I have found this sharpens my creative problem solving skills and gives me new insight into the discipline I’m studying. For this reason I believe that our business schools should require MBA students to take courses in the history of art, science, and philosophy alongside the regular management school course work. In my next few posts, I will be looking at some ideas from architecture and applying them to the practice of management. Hopefully it will spark some ideas for you as well.

An architect designs much more than physical space. Through the use of walls, windows, doors and openings, floors, ceilings, and building materials, the architect creates physical space, but also contributes to the symbolic space in which people live and work. The Norwegian architectural critic, Christian Norberg-Schulz, writes in his classic work, The Concept of Dwelling, that the way the architect uses these elements of architecture gathers a world of meaning that gives the people who dwell in them a sense of identity and an orientation in their world. This world of meaning provides them with existential security and also with direction or purpose. Poorly designed buildings produce a sense of existential insecurity and aimlessness in those who must live and work there. Many of us have, no doubt, experienced that! So the artistry and care with which the buildings we live and work in are designed does matter, very much!

Though Norberg-Schulz was using the work of the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, in the Concept of Dwelling, it reminds me of another great architect, the American, Frank Lloyd Wright. Apparently Wright would often tell his students it wasn’t the materials and design that come first, but the space. The type of space, the tonality or feeling, should determine the materials and the design of the building, not the other way around. The space was the thing, and it should emerge organically from both the natural place and the needs of the client! Architects were in the business of creating meaningful spaces, not applying mundane design templates to prefabricated materials to create nothing more than boxes for people to live and work in. If you want to see this distinction, just look up on the Internet some of the homes and buildings designed by Wright, than walk outside your cubicle, or front door, and look around.

So I imagine a great architect is one that sits her or his clients down and asks them first, not what type of design they want, but what kind of space can be created by this building – what type of world do they want gathered there? This would take some courage because I can imagine the client just staring back with an uncomprehending look at such a question. Wright, himself, often felt letdown by the lack of understanding of his own clients.

In our organizations we are architects, not of physical spaces, but of psychological, interpersonal, and social spaces. Our use of the elements of organizations – titles, positions, tasks, relationships, pathways of communication and decision-making, etc. – creates a tone and feeling that creates the spaces between our people; that gathers a meaning world in which we dwell together with one another. This organizational space should provide our people with both a secure center and a purposeful direction. It should be a space where we are skillfully enabled to perform our tasks in such a way that we cultivate confidence in ourselves, kindness in our relationships, and joy in our work.

Unfortunately, when we ask people how they would describe that world, the organizational space of their workplace, too often the words and phrases we hear are: low trust, burnout, turf wars, cynicism, apathy, one-way communication, stifled creativity, dissatisfaction, etc. Few words are spoken that suggest a secure identity, purposeful orientation, and joy. I’m certain no owner or manager sets out intentionally to create this type of space – to gather this type of world. Yet, it is often the space and world we unintentionally create in our organizations by how we intentionally design, organize, and manage the elements of organizational space. What might we learn from Wright and Norberg-Schulz?

Perhaps the place to start is to realize that in designing and managing work we are doing more than merely determining the span of control or division of labor, but we are creating psychological space. We are gathering a world of meaning to dwell in with our people. We should become much more intentional about the kind of world we want to create and then design and manage to that end. Like a great architect, we should sit down with our people and converse about possibilities and the type of meaning world we want gathered by how we arrange the elements of organizations – titles, positions, tasks, relationships, and most importantly pathways of communication and decision-making. I imagine the kind of space we will want to create is described by words and phrases such as: mutual trust, participation, cooperation, dignity, contribution, shared prosperity, and joy. Lets envision the organizational space together and then design and manage to bring into existence a shared world of beautiful and meaningful work.

Nothing truly great or noble happens in the world without love motivating it and beauty inspiring it

 

In my inaugural post, I want to offer some preliminary definitions of the words and phrases that, I believe, are key to the business of business, to life in our communities, and to a flourishing life in general:

Care – to cultivate, nurture, and develop the full measure of talent, ability, and strength that lies potentially in ourselves, in our relationships to others, in our communities and business organizations, and in our world.

Love – the strongest power in the universe to motivate faith and action even in the face of doubt, fear, and insurmountable odds. Love is what keeps us moving forward even when we feel like stopping.

Beauty–what awakens us from sleepwalking through life; beauty arouses us from the idleness of apathy, cynicism, and passive acquiescence to the status quo. 

The Practice of Management–the artful midwifery of authentic human relationships that brings into existence a shared world of beautiful and meaningful work.  

The Art of Working Together–skillfully performing our work tasks and assignments in such a way that we cultivate confidence in ourselves, kindness in our relationships to one another, joy in our organizations, and sustainability in our world.  

These terms and phrases still need much unpacking, and their key to success in our communities and business organizations needs to be made clearer. That is my goal in this blog, to share insights and conversations with others who, along with myself, believe that care, love, and beauty are of the essence in the life of our communities and central to how we conduct business in a way that enhances life. And, dear reader, please share with me your thoughts on care, love, and beauty as well!

Nothing truly great or noble happens in the world without love motivating it and beauty inspiring it. It is no different in work and our work organizations. We each need the experience of love and beauty in our lives, and since we spend so much time at work, it is very important to discover love and beauty there. Without love our work will be unsatisfying and deadening to our character. Without beauty our work will lead us to apathy and cynicism. I know this from my own experience in jobs where I was neither motivated by love nor inspired by beauty, and in observing people in companies I have known, where love and beauty were not valued.

I don’t mean to say a job must be glamorous or high profile for something great and noble to be accomplished. No, I believe that any job can be a great and noble work when done with love and where the person creates beauty, either by what they produce, or in the manner they produce it. I recall an older man who for many years was the custodian at my children’s elementary school. Whenever I visited the school, I would always see him, broom at his side and wearing his trademark denim overalls, supervising the kids in the halls or in the lunchroom with a friendly smile on his face. It was obvious he found joy and meaning in his work, as well he should. After all the importance of having a clean and sanitary environment for our children is incredibly important for their overall wellbeing, not to mention their learning while at school.

I could tell, watching the way the children interacted with him, that the affection and love he had for the children were returned manifold by the children themselves. And there was beauty in the skill and ease with which he performed his labor. It may seem odd to say, but there is something beautiful in the movements of a person performing any task with great care and love. Perhaps there are no menial tasks, only menial ways of doing them, perhaps. But, I often noticed this beauty, and it reminded me of the great, realist paintings by the nineteenth century French painter Gustave Courbet, whose artistic depictions of the work of farmers in the fields or day-labors and the non-elites revealed the beauty of ordinary labor, when performed with love. Certainly the work of my children’s school janitor was great and noble and, in its way, as significant as the work done by the school principal. Observing this man at work, one might say, not that he was the school custodian, but rather, he was the steward of care, love, and beauty at my children’s school.    

So, like Ariadne’s thread led Theseus safely through the minotaur’s labyrinth; care, love, and beauty will lead us securely through the complexities of management and the difficulties of working together. Yet in the practice of management, we cannot give people a love for their work or make them find beauty in doing their work well, but we can act as a midwife. Just as a midwife doesn’t have the baby, but only assists the mother in the delivery, so in authentic management we cannot force care, love, and beauty upon our people, but we can set the conditions for them to develop confidence in themselves, kindness in the their relationships, and joy in the workplace by how we create and manage the space where we work together. That is to say, the authentic practice of management makes possible the experience of love and beauty in our communities and in work places.

That idea – how to create and manage the space where we work and live, so care, love, and beauty can emerge – we will begin to explore in my next post.