The truth about leadership
It isn't what it used to be
“The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next” — Helen Keller 1
If you’re active on LinkedIn, you probably see more posts about leadership than just about anything else.
Except perhaps culture — which is not about “shared values” by the way. But that’s a topic for another time. 2
Unfortunately, most of what’s written about leadership perpetuates a now dangerously outdated orthodoxy.
The vast majority of thinking on leadership still adopts the viewpoint expressed in this statement from Harvard Professor John Kotter:
“Leadership defines what the future should look like, aligns people with that vision, and inspires them to make it happen”. 3
In this legacy perspective, an elite cadre of people “define a future vision” and “align” and “inspire” others to “make it happen”.
This defining/aligning/inspiring is done by this elite — the “leaders” — and done to everyone else — the “followers”.
Shortly after Kotter’s book appeared, my former colleague Dr Peter Senge proposed a definition of leadership much more appropriate to our increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world:
“Leadership is the capacity of a human community to shape its future”. 4
This future-fit perspective doesn’t segregate people into those who do leadership and those who have it done to them.
Instead of creating followers, this approach encourages the development of many more leaders — or to be more precise, it unblocks, unlocks, and unleashes much greater organisational leadership.
Kotter did eventually acknowledge this failing himself, noting in the preface of his book’s 2012 reprint: “more agility and change-friendly organisations” and “more leadership from more people, and not just top management” are increasingly vital.5
If you want to cultivate a future-fit, entrepreneurial organisation with a culture of innovation, agility and adaptiveness, the old orthodoxy of leader-follower relationships must progressively give way to leader-leader relationships.
In the words of a frustrated former senior executive client, exasperated with his peers stuck in the leader-follower mindset: “Why would anyone think that they’re smarter than everyone?”.
But senior executives have traditionally been encouraged to think that way — except in high-tech firms where innovation and agility are part of the DNA, and diverse people engage in collaborative sense making, decision making, and action taking to achieve continuous, entrepreneurial, new value creation. 6
As the world becomes ever more uncertain and unpredictable, organisations that fail to escape the old leader-follower mindset will not achieve the levels of entrepreneurial innovation, agility, and adaptiveness required to survive - and thrive.
The organisation’s whole future is at stake, but recognising, accepting and acting on this understanding can prove very challenging for those who’ve made it to the top based on the old orthodoxy, and see their role as making the decisions that shape the organisation’s future.
That’s why it’s often people who haven’t yet reached the top of the organisation who see most clearly the shift that now needs to take place.
The traditional orthodox leader-follower mindset has multiple negative effects:
Discourages wider engagement that would improve sense making, decision making, and action taking
Encourages groupthink, sacrificing the richness of diverse perspectives
Drives disagreements and dissenting voices underground
Increases decision making bottlenecks and associated senior executive stress
Perpetuates the all-seeing, all-knowing leader myth
Impoverishes organisational leadership capacity
Stifles entrepreneurial innovation, agility, and adaptiveness
The low risk, high leverage way to unlock future-fit organisational leadership capacity is to get the key influencers whose mindsets, attitudes and behaviours systemically affect everyone and everything operating from a leader-leader mindset. 7
This means that leadership development is so closely tied to the attitudes and behaviours of key influencers that it cannot be outsourced to HR, business schools, or other training providers.
One of the biggest “aha” moments for senior executives who want to build a future-fit entrepreneurial organisation is when they see that their organisation’s future success critically depends not just on the decisions they make but on how effectively they and other key influencers role model this shift to leader-leader mindsets and encourage it in others. 8
Many senior executives worry — even if they only admit it privately — that leadership mindsets rooted in the old orthodoxy may be too deeply embedded in their organisation to successfully pull off the required shift.
Few contexts have a more deeply ingrained legacy of leader-follower mindsets than the US Navy.
However, under Captain David Marquet, the nuclear-powered submarine USS Santa Fe went from being the worst performing to best performing ship in the fleet.
The key to this unprecedented turnaround is in the subtitle of Marquet’s 2015 book: Turn the Ship Around: A true story of turning followers into leaders. 9
Here’s Marquet describing the key to shifting from leader-follower to leader-leader mindsets: “We had no need of leadership development programs; the way we ran the ship was the leadership development program”. 10
The bottom line is that organisations and individuals both lose out under the old orthodoxy that leadership creates followers.
The organisation loses out by failing to develop the entrepreneurial leadership capacity to survive and thrive in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable future.
People within the organisation lose out individually by failing to experience the intrinsic motivation that comes from playing a real part in shaping the future of the organisation and it’s ability to create real value in the world.
That’s why the truth about future-fit leadership is that it’s not about leaders — it’s about unblocking, unlocking and unleashing the capacity of the entire organisational community to shape its future.
Questions for reflection
Does your organisation still attempt to enact leadership based on the orthodox legacy Kotter perspective, or does it enact a future-fit Senge-like approach?
To what degree do you enact a leader-leader mindset - so you role model and encourage others to adopt and operate from that mindset too?
What will you do in future to enable, encourage, and embed the necessary shift away from the legacy leadership orthodoxy?
Or if that’s a topic you’d like to explore now, here’s a previous piece on how the toxic myth of shared values was plucked out of thin air by McKinsey and went on to became an axiomatic article of faith within the organisational discourse.
From Kotter’s bestselling book Leading Change (1996, revised 2012).
Peter was President of the Society for Organisational Learning when I served on its Global Leadership Team from 2009-2015. This definition appears in the third book in The Fifth Discipline series, The Dance of Change (Senge et al 1999) p16.
Ibid (Kotter 2012, preface page ‘ix’).
I first experienced this future-fit approach to leadership myself when, having worked in engineering at two traditional organisations — British Aerospace and the BBC, I moved to the open innovation lab Cambridge Consultants in 1983.
See this previous article on how the mindsets, attitudes, and behaviours of key influencers systemically dictate the emergence and evolution of organisational culture.
See this previous article on the seven channels of culture, in particular Channel 3 — Role Modelling, and Channel 4 — Expectancy.
In Turn the Ship Around, Marquet describes how they had to adopt a future-fit leader-leader mindset on the Santa Fe because his lack of technical knowledge of that particular class of submarine meant he couldn’t continue to operate from the traditional top-down command and control leader-follower mindset.
Ibid — Marquet p84.