This past weekend, I happened upon a blog entry by Ron Pereira on his LSS Academy site, entitled Level 5 Leadership. The Level 5 reference is from a bestselling business book called “Good to Great“, by Jim Collins. Ron posed the following question:
“So, it seems the two primary characteristics of the Level 5 Leader are straight forward – be humble while holding fast to the path you feel is best for the organization no matter how difficult it may be. I’d like to turn it over to you, are in 100% agreement with this leadership style? Do you think Level 5 Leadership is essential for a company to succeed?”
Since Ron posed the question, I answered, if somewhat tactlessly, ”Complete nonsense! Such claptrap is worse than useless, it is harmful.”
(Read Ron’s original post and my comments here.)
Those who know me say that I have have a real knack for subtlety — NOT! When its comes to discussions of leadership, I am fed up with the disastrous nonsense that is routinely peddled as authoritative science in business literature. “Good to Great” is just another example of this sort of nonsense.
The distinctly American cult of personality has produced a nation in which great leadership and great followership have all but disappeared amdist an anarchy of petty, self-interested, rabble With pseudo-science of this sort, it is no surprise that the U.S., supposedly the master of innovation and enterprise, is fast degenerating into a third rate economic power that is systematically substituting money churning con-artistry for the hard work of creating great products and services that help to make peoples’ lives better.
Pick up any business book on leadership and flip through the pages. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred you will find yourself reading a passage about how the personality traits of some boss-man or woman made them a “successful leader”, whatever that means. Words like vision, determination, strength, humility, boldness, common sense, and plain old grit, pop off the page. What the heck do those words and their like mean when it comes to doing?
Precisely this — NOTHING! Vision can create blindness. Strength becomes weakness to an observant adversary. In humility there is arrogance. Fools tread in boldness. In common sense, there is folly. The platitudes of personality and style provide no basis for action and no basis for improvement.
There is most certainly a great deal of art in leadership. Every leader invests in his or her activities as leader, their unique qualities as individuals. But, as with all art, there is an underlying discipline founded in science and methods, that enables the artist to express his or her individuality. Without knowledge, skill, and methods, there can be no music, sculpture , poetry, etc. The discipline of leadership is no different in this regard. The art of leadership must be anchored in theory and method.
Why most business books on the subject of leadership are worse than useless.
Most leadership literature purports to identify organizations led by individuals who are deemed “successful” or “effective” leaders. The authors of these books then proceed to reason backward, by looking for the qualities of those individuals that appear to be correlated with the leader’s “success”. The assumption made be the authors of these books is that the character, personality, and style of the individuals they have identified are the primary causes of the organization’s success.
Fallacy 1: By what measure can we identify “success”? In the popular literature, the identification of members of the class of people called “effective leaders” is at best, arbitrary and at worst, loaded by the authors. For example, the CEO of a company with a rising stock price is said to be an effective leader. Is stock price or profit a valid measure of a successful company? In comparison to what? What about the problems of flash-in-the-pan volatility and promises that cannot be fulfilled? What about longevity, sustainability, customer and worker loyalty, quality of product and service, and contribution to the community? Might these be meaningful measures of success as well? Does the company’s stock price correlate with leadership? Maybe creative accounting would provide a better explanation of a company’s stock price. How could anyone know?
Fallacy 2: How can we determine the causal role of a leader? The assumption that the success of an organization, by any measure, is caused by its leader is problematic. The fortunes of an enterprise are determined by an incredibly complex constellation of causes. Leadership has its role to play, as do the organizational followers, the competition, fads and fashions, the weather, and blind luck. How could anyone know? Simply put, assigning the person acting in the role of leader as the primary cause of an organization’s “success” by any measure, is impossible. it is the system as a whole that produces any outcome observed at any given point in time.
Fallacy 3: What time frame can be used to define the success of a leader? Results, by any measure, are not predictive. Today’s market share or stock price does not predict tomorrow’s results. Only theory can predict what will happen in the future. The corpses of dead enterprises, once deemed successful, litter the landscape of history — Rome, Businessland, Acme Buggy Whips, and soon enough, General Motors, are all moldering in their graves. Were their leaders successful, or did they sow the seeds of failure? How could anyone know?
Fallacy 4: Even if we could determine that a leader should be classified as “successful”, how could we decide which of their traits are are meaningfully correlated with that success? It is common to proclaim that the correlates of success include things like decisiveness, openness to new ideas, visionary insights, boldness and willfulness. Even if we could agree to a measuring stick by which to assess these characteristics, why should we think that they are determinates of a leaders success? We might just a well say that their style of clothing, choice of entertainment, color of hair, and food preferences, are the causes of their success. How anyone possibly know?
There is no science in such silly methodology. No quantity of in-depth interviews, surveys, data, three color pie charts, and trend plots, can compensate for the fundamentally fallacious reasoning used by the authors of these entertainingly anecdotal fairy tales about leadership. On the whole, there can be no answers nor gain from the nonsense they peddle. What is worse, they have only managed to further mystify the job of leadership that is so crucial to the success of all of our enterprises.
By reasoning backward, the authors of these “authoritative” books guide us the WONG WAY!
How to start moving forward in the study and improvement of leadership
So what does it take to turn around and begin moving forward in trying to understand and improve leadership?
As I have explained, the literature of leadership has been mystified by a focus on the individual qualities of people deemed “successful leaders” — character, personality, and style. As is so often the case, the obstacles to understanding begin with the questions we ask. The question, “What are the characteristics of good leaders?” is fundamentally mistaken. The more useful questions are “What is leadership, why does it always arise when two or more people set out to do something, and how does it work?”
By reframing our questions about leadership in this way, our attention switches from studying the internal characteristics of individuals to an inquiry into what goes on between people who are trying to get something done! This is the leader-follower SYSTEM that operates as a whole to produce effective collaborative action.
In future posts, I will attempt to address some of the questions that flow from this theoretical shift in the study of leadership.
1. What is leadership and why does it always arise in every human enterprise?
2. How does the leader-follower system work?
3. Why and how do leaders emerge in the context of any enterprise involving two or more people?
4. What are the responsibilities, tasks, and tools of leadership?
5. How can leaders constantly improve in the understanding and performance of their jobs?
6. What are the built-in moral and ethical conundrums of leadership?
I invite readers to contribute their answers to these interesting and important questions!
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