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?
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