Manage-Wise

Leadership is a viral: pass it on

Only one in ten! Inspired leadership seems to be rarer than hen’s teeth, as exotic as bottled lightening. It’s the same around the world: the Gallup Organisation’s global research on employee engagement finds that 29 percent of employees are engaged, 55 percent are not engaged, and 16 percent are actively disengaged. This data is based on more than three million employees. Gallup estimates that just the 16 percent actively disengaged in the United States cost $350 billion per annum in lost productivity.

This perception of a widespread absence of inspirational leadership isn’t just bottom-up. It’s top-down, too; in IBM’s 2004 global survey of CEOs, designed to find out what was keeping the top guys awake at night, 60 percent of CEOs of large organisations reported their employees lacked the right expertise or leadership qualities to manage growth. “They told us they had been focussing so hard over recent years on efficiencies and cutting costs that they had neglected the development of a next generation of leaders that would take the organisation forward; at the top of their agenda now is the need for people who can inspire growth,” Abigail Tierney, one of the survey report’s authors, told us.

The best of times, the worst of times

For leaders in business, in particular, this is the best of times and the worst of times. “In terms of power and influence, you can forget the church, forget politics. There is no more powerful institution in society now than business,” says Dame Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop, herself a pioneering business leader. Yet, the reputation of business and business leadership in the opening years of this century is about as low as it can go.

The comedian Steven Wright says he has a friend who is a limbo master; he can limbo so low he limbos under rugs. In the popular mind, particularly of those millions of citizen-investors who felt themselves so betrayed by the market collapse at the end of the last century, and of company employees who find their pension contributions have disappeared into a black hole, that’s about where you had find business leadership’s reputation—with the dust and furballs—so low, its disappeared under the rug.

How business leaders are portrayed in popular culture gives us some clues as to where they rank in the public mind. It’s hardly inspiring. Despite all the Jack Welch-inspired talk of “Bossless leadership”, the corporate leader in popular culture is, inevitably, “the Boss”.

So there’s the overtly dangerous Mr Burns. Then there’s the low-level but destructive cynicism of David Brent—the dysfunctional boss in BBC TV’s The Office—who spouts leadership platitudes while stepping all over his people and failing his way to the top, before ultimately being seen for what he is and thrown out. Ricky Gervais’ grotesque fictional manager and would-be leader touched a nerve on both sides of the Atlantic.

The leader as a bad guy

The movie The Corporation and its accompanying book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, clung onto the coat-tails of the post-Enron mood and projected a generalised picture of psychopathic tendencies in large organisations and those who run them. From Donald Trump’s portrayal of leader-as-sorcerer in the TV ‘documentary’ series The Apprentice to the emergence of the global business leader as the villain in the Bond movies after the fall of the Soviet Union, the examples of not just uninspired but downright malevolent leaders are endless.

This casting of a business leader as bad guy is part of a broader loss of faith in leaders of all kinds as people look to themselves to protect their own interests, rather than expecting their elected representatives or employers to do so. One of our members calls this phenomenon ‘the growth of the self-preservation society. If corporations were people (and, legally, they are people, interestingly: a corporation as a legal entity has the attributes and responsibilities of a person), then the dominant portrayal of big business and its leaders in our popular culture is as people whose behaviour often leads others to be wary of trusting them.

It doesn’t help when psychologists come up with widely-publicised profiles that draw parallels between the character traits of psychopaths and political or business leaders.

Says Robert Hare, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, who claims psychopaths can be found throughout the upper echelons of management and leadership.

Hare’s research suggests faster-moving, change-oriented companies are more exciting places, therefore more attractive to psychopaths.

The leader as psychopath is a sideshow, a marginal problem within the overall failure of leaders to inspire. But, the widespread coverage of such findings suggest they strike a chord; that dysfunctional David Brent-style leadership is closer to the norm most people experience in the workplace than inspired leadership, experienced by just 11 percent. Those who reported that their leaders were not inspired were asked to come up with words that described them. The two most common were ‘ambitious’ and ‘knowledgeable’. Today’s leaders seem more focussed on their own careers than those of their direct reports.

How did we get to this?

Let’s look backwards a little before we go forwards. Since it was founded in 1999, the Inspired Leaders Network has focussed on identifying leaders who are blueprinting how business will be done as this century unfolds, just as Henry Ford, Frederick Winslow Taylor and their peers defined 20th century business.

Economic historians have studied so-called ‘long waves’ of economic growth—Kondratieff cycles and the like. In these 50-60 year waves—the Victorian machine age, the post-World War II boom—powerful new management techniques are diffused across the economy, often pioneered in one sector and then adapted to others, contributing to a huge accumulation of capital.

Historically, as each wave of capital accumulation comes to an end, you tend to find the parks of new technologies, new organisational forms, nestling in the embers. Some of them fail to ignite. Others consume themselves in their own fire—obvious examples from recent history would be the money-burning dotcoms and Enron’s clever financial engineering seeping into fraud.

The rise of management

But, the most robust of the leading-edge changes succeed. As with natural evolution, these successful changes in the organisation of production and distribution tend to become dominant. They replicate across sectors to become the genetic blueprint, the accepted form of business, for a given Age. That is how the last half of the 20th century saw the rise of modern management science from the seeds of Fordism and Taylorism. At worst, the spread of productionist thinking leads to people gaming the system—cheating to survive—as principles from a factory age are applied inappropriately to call centres, banks, hospitals and other workplaces where the unit of production being measured bears little relation to the value being delivered.

“The revolution that happened in factories and offices over a century ago has changed the way we all work,” says Anita Rododick, founder of The Body Shop and a friend of our network.

Excerpt from ‘Seven Secrets of Inspired Leaders’ by Phil Dourado and Dr Phil Blackburn. Published by Wiley India Pvt Ltd