Leadership, not Leaders
Overemphasis on 'leaders' at the expense of 'leadership' holds organisations back in our increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” - Lord Acton
Back in 1999, my former colleague Dr Peter Senge defined leadership as “the capacity of a human community to shape its future”. 1
Few organisations ever get close to their full capacity to shape their future because of the way leadership has traditionally been interpreted, well captured in this 1996 definition by Harvard Business School Professor John Kotter: 2
“Leadership defines what the future should look like, aligns people with that vision, and inspires them to make it happen”.
In this traditional and still dominant perspective, leadership is all about defining, aligning, and inspiring - done by an elite few, to everyone else.
But what happens if someone in the body of the organisation sees the way to the future when top management don’t?
Like Alan Kay at Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center who saw how to make computers easy to use by everyone, including children, and pioneered developing the technology required. 3
If Xerox had exploited his insight, they could now own the combined markets of Apple and Microsoft. 4
Or like Vic Mills at Procter & Gamble whose ‘silly idea’ of disposable diapers led senior executives to threaten him with termination three times before P&G eventually launched Pampers and created a new multibillion dollar market. 5
Maybe people in your organisation right now already have insights into the big breakthrough that will transform your market?
We live in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world, a world of significant opportunities and threats, mostly noticed first by people in the body, rather than at the top, of organisations.
Bottom line: the traditional practice of segregating people into ‘those who do leadership’ and ‘those who have it done to them’ is no longer fit for purpose.
Instead of continuing to constrain the organisation’s capacity to shape its future, senior executives must maximise it by ensuring that sense making, decision making & action taking become ever more tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded and widely distributed throughout the organisation.
Kotter eventually acknowledged this failing in his book’s 2012 update, noting that “more agility and change-friendly organisations” and “more leadership from more people, and not just top management” are increasingly vital. 6
I’ve described in previous posts how senior executives can go about creating conditions that enable and encourage more agility, change-friendliness and more leadership from more people to emerge in their organisations. 7
But there’s another crucial benefit of moving away from seeing leadership as the exclusive preserve of a presumed gifted few.
Lord Acton’s famous observation that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” was part of his objection to people at the top of social hierarchies being granted a ‘free pass’ on their private actions. 8
When he wrote it in the 1880’s, popes, kings and queens were widely understood to have been appointed by God. 9
And whilst few of us today consider senior executives to have been divinely enthroned, their positions are still widely interpreted as granting them inalienable ‘decision rights’.
From 2010-2017 I was a co-founder and Advisory Board member of the Daedalus Trust with former UK Foreign Secretary Lord David Owen, Arie de Geus, Sir Bob Reid and others, exploring the prevention and mitigation of negative personality changes associated with the exercise of power. 10
We explicitly established the Trust to explore Hubris Syndrome - a term used by Lord Owen and psychiatrist Jonathan Davidson to describe individuals intoxicated with power who exhibit several of the following symptoms:
Seeking self-glorification;
Acting to enhance personal standing;
Excessively conscious of their own image;
Displaying messianic tendencies;
Believing “I am the organisation”;
Using the royal “we”;
Excessive confidence in their own judgements and contemptuous of others’ opinions;
Displaying exaggerated self-belief;
Feeling they’re accountable only to history;
Believing unshakably that they will be vindicated;
Out of touch, isolated;
Restless, reckless, impulsive;
Impractical – overlooking detail and possible unwanted outcomes;
Incompetent at implementation by failing to attend to details through excessive self-confidence.
Senior executives who place too much faith in their own perspectives and too little in the perspectives of others, risk derailing not only their own careers - and lives - but also the future of their organisations.
When, however, they escape the trap of mistaking their narrow, biased, and inevitably incomplete perspective for the whole picture, this shift in mindset rapidly leads to significant positive changes to their attitudes and behaviour. 11
By cultivating a genuine interest in understanding the perspectives of others, senior executives begin unlocking the full leadership capacity of their organisations.
When influential individuals embrace this shift, it has a systemic knock-on effect - first on the people around them, and then rippling through the organisation via the existing cultural pathways that previously constrained leadership capacity.
A couple of years ago, I produced a series of short videos describing how organisations can make focused, low risk, high leverage interventions to identify and exploit these cultural pathways.
One of these videos (7 mins) describes how, having previously worked in digital innovation, I joined one of the world's leading open innovation labs in 1983.
A few years later, when one of our clients asked if I could help “their people to behave more like our people” it launched the unique career path I've been on ever since.
My big breakthrough was discovering that creating a future-fit culture with high leverage and low risk is a lot easier than it first seems, once you see where to focus to achieve this systemic leverage.
You can watch the video here.
Peter and I served together on the Global Leadership Team of the Society for Organisational Learning from 2009-2015. This definition of leadership is in his 1999 book ‘The Dance of Change’ (p 16).
Kotter’s Leading Change was seen as the definitive book on leadership when first published in 1996.
Alan Kay’s insights were commercialised by Apple and, according to Steve Jobs, copied by Microsoft.
Xerox is currently worth $3.5Bn compared to Apple and Microsoft’s combined market cap of $4,500Bn
P&G ultimately created the Vic Mills Society for its most successful innovators.
Kotter’s Leading Change revised edition 2012, preface page ‘ix’.
See, for example, these posts on seeing culture, enabling emergence, and overcoming the habits that cripple future-fit cultures of innovation and agility.
John Emerich Edward Dalberg (1834-1902) - aka Lord Acton - wrote his most quoted phrase in a 5 April 1887 letter to Archbishop Mandell Creighton, challenging the latter’s view that Popes, Kings, etc. should be judged on their public, not private, actions.
UK coinage still carrier the designation “DG REG FD” after the Queen's name, in Latin ‘Dei Gratia Regina Fidei Defensatrix’ - meaning “By the Grace of God, Queen, Defender of the Faith”.
The Daedalus Trust website contains a wealth of material related to hubris.
Find out more about this 2D3D mindset in this six minute video.