THE END OF LEADERSHIP - Curtis Kelly

Abstract:

Leadership. What is it and how do our pre-conceived notions mislead us? I portend that the concepts and terminology associated with leadership are obsolete, artifacts from a previous age. Once, means of production and technological levels made a linear organization of society efficient – leaders above guided followers below – but we have now entered a new age. The postmodern organization is circular rather that linear, composed of teams. Once organizations were mechanical, but they are now “organic,” with wisdom spread throughout the cells. Once the structure of energy flow was an upright pyramid, but now the pyramid is upside down, with customer contact people directing the board. As a result, as long as we study change agentry through the conceptual biases of modernistic “leadership,” we are restricting our understanding to that of an era that has already passed.

Close your eyes for a second. Think of the word “Leader.” What images pop into your mind. Hold onto those images for a moment.

“Leadership.” In our culture, it is an oft-used and potent word, but there is something about it that bothers me. One winter, I took two doctoral courses on Leadership and everytime I heard the term, I conjured up the same set of negative images: Boy scouts. The “Right Stuff.” Infantry charges. Grimace. Passion. A religious glow in people’s eyes, especially White, Western, male eyes. Accompanying these images was a voice. It whispered unpleasant things in my ear: “There’s no such thing as leadership. It’s an American pipe dream. A fantasy.”

It tried to caste aspersions on the concept of leadership, but I wouldn’t let it. “So what?” I would say. “These images are not right. No one talks about leadership in Napoleonic terms anymore. So, why are you so negative?” Nonetheless, it was hard for me to discount this voice. I had heard it before and I knew it was more profound than I. So I kept listening. Then, after three months, I understood what it was trying to tell me.

Early one morning, the the voice explained itself to me in a dream. I was lying in that Daliesque state of half-asleep when one’s inner, normally silent, voices rouse earlier than the rest. Words from a leadership class were floating in my head: Leadership, Postmodernism, Native American round logs and circle societies, Zeitgeist, an article by Farren & Kaye on the changing workplace. And all of the sudden the voice spoke out. It told me what was wrong with our concept of leadership. The concept is obsolete and thus hinders us. Did I say in a dream? My Navaho friends would understand.

But before the voice spoke, I had already found a major problem with leadership. Despite over 5000 studies on leadership (Yukl, 1998, p. 494) science cannot really tell us what it is. It just isn’t a topic that fits empirical research. It is far too murky for rigor, and hard to define. That doesn’t mean the scientists still don’t try, but they usually come up with research speak like:

“Leadership is ‘the influential increment over and above mechanical compliance with the routine directives of the organization.’ (Katz & Kahn, 1978, p. 528)” (Yukl, p. 2)

Thanks, Katz and Kahn. All these highly respected researchers can tell us is that leading means doing more than you have to. This definition, like most of the others produced through empirical research, is so basic as to be trivial. Maybe Sara Meléndez spoke for all of us when she wrote that she can’t describe leadership, but she knows it when she sees it (Meléndez, 1996).

Since science cannot unravel the secret of leadership, we are left to our whims and impressions, and this brings us to the second problem I discovered in my dream. The general view of leadership contains a monlithic bias.

Lead. Follow. Most writers, including such renowned voices as Hesselbein, Covey, Bardwick, Kouzes & Pozner, Smith, Ulrich characterize leadership as one person leading many (Hesselbein, Goldsmith, & Beckhard, 1996). The direction is singular (follow me), and it is almost always top-down (the corporate helmsman at the wheel – gender specificity intended). But is this really a bias, you ask? After all, when Bill Gates orders his engineers to upgrade Windows in such and such a way by such and such a date and you had better hop to it, then the unidirectional model fits, doesn’t it?

The truth is, though – and this is what came to me in the dream – that today’s leading edge organizations no longer operate in this top-down fashion, and as a result, the traditional concept of leadership is obsolete. Linear, top-down leadership is a thing of the past, from the Modern, not Post-modern age.

To understand leadership in the Modern Age, think Churchill, Patton, the Washington Whiz Kids, Chaplin’s Modern Times. In the relatively low technology of the Modern Age, changes were slow. Markets only expanded or contracted; they did not appear and disappear. Resources were fixed and they were almost always physical rather than informational. Business then, when markets and resources were fairly static, meant producing the same product for decades and engaging in Darwinian competition. To succeed, goods had to be produced as cheaply and efficiently as possible. Since the system was more or less static and only required fine tuning, top-down management worked. In fact, it was all that worked. Uniformity ruled the day, not diversity, and moving thousands by the commands of one, made an efficient, unidirectional organization.

We are now, however, no longer in the Modern Age. Somewhere in the seventies or eighties, we crossed the Rubicon of paradigms and we landed in the Post-modern Age. On this side of the river (or this side of the Zeitgeist) things are different. We live is a world of circles, not lines. This is the age of individual empowerment, team-building and networks. Whereas once diversity and autonomy represented resistance, they now represent flexibility.

The linear organization of the Modern Age is dying fast and two things are killing it: 1) the speed of technological change and 2) highly fluid markets. The speed of technological change directly related to the advance of computers and telecommunication. According to Farren and Kaye,

“We are witnessing a transformation of the conditions of human labor so pervasive and basic that it can only be compared to the introduction of agriculture or the industrial revolution in its impact. Precision manufacturing that formerly required the efforts of hundreds of skilled workers can now be performed with greater speed and accuracy by automated systems with a few trained operators. The legions of administrators and midlevel functionaries who were once needed to oversee our bureaucracies are being replaced by networked terminals and a handful of floppy disks.” (Farren & Kaye, 1996, p. 176)

Instant communication and rapid technological advance has also made our Modernistic theories of economics obsolete. Traditional concepts like supply and demand, or fixed resources no longer apply. In Unlimited Wealth (1990), Paul J. Pilzer points out that traditional economic theories are based on the limiting concept of “physical” resources, and so, are unable to describe either the present or the future.

“Today, there is a dynamic, exponential relationship between the continuing advance of information-processing technology and the pace at which other technologies develop. The effect is not only an expansion of our supply of resources, but constant change in the definition of what constitutes a resource.” (p. )

Consider one of our greatest resources, the internet. It is neither physical, nor does it have a fixed structure. The millions of computer connections that create it cannot be mapped; nor would anyone want to. According to Cringely, rather than a tree or a grid, the internet is more like a “cloud” (1996, p. 351).

Unparalleled productivity is one the results of rapid technological change , but another is the unparalleled fluidity of markets. The distinction between necessities and luxuries has been lost and companies that succeed are those that create new markets rather than compete for the existing ones. After all, in a world where the product often precedes the need, an existing market is one that is already dying.

So how have these changes in technology and markets changed the Post-modern organization? Again and again, experts like Charles Handy - author of the Age of Unreason, William Bridges - author of Managing Transitions, Sally Helgeson - The Female Advantage: Women’s Ways of Leadership, Gifford Pinchot - The End of Bureaucacy - The Rise of the Intelligent Organization, Peter Senge, Frances Hesselbein, Ken Blanchard have stressed these four characteristics:

1) Organizational structures are becoming circular, not linear. Companies are increasingly becoming networks of independent teams, which are semipermanent task forces, held together by trust. “Organizations are communities of individuals, not arrays of human resources” (Handy, 1996, p.4). As a result, leadership is distributed throughout the network and three new concepts have come into play:

a) Subsidiarity - Higher orders cannot assume responsibilities of lower orders without weakening them.

b) Virtuality - Organizations are dispersed, or “unbundled” rather than integrated, so positional leaders have no direct control over the parts.

c) Earned authority - Influence, not position, represents power.

2) The organization of today manipulates information, not things. As a result, rather than position or rank, the possession of information empowers an individual. The organization of today is moved by those who know, not those who rule.

3) The organization has become organic rather than mechanical. Wisdom is distributed throughout the cells; fish in a school swerve as one; geese take turns in the V. In the words of Bridges, the organization has become “dejobbed” (1996, p. 12). As Peter Drucker writes: “Every organization has to build the management of change into its very structure (Harvard Business Review, Sept.-Oct., 1992, p.97)” (cited in Bridges, p. 14).

4) Organizational pyramids used to be right side up, but now they are upside down. In an upright pyramid, information and energy flows away from the customer at the bottom. That may have worked in the Modern Age, but it is fatal in the fluidity of Postmodernistic markets (Blanchard, 1996). Most of today’s markets are so volatile that an organization not in constant touch with its customers is doomed. And so, much of the planning in today’s organization comes from the bottom of the pyramid, the customer contact people, or to be more exact, the customers. The bottom is at the top.

Consumers shape producers and producers shape consumers. People at the bottom instruct those above. As a result, organization charts twinkle teams into and out of existence in a Margaret Wheatley world of circles. Communities of interdependent cells exchange influence and information. Commands from the top must be used sparingly, for they interfere with the basic metabolism of such cells. So, if “telling” someone what to do no longer works in today’s organic organizations, then what is the role of the leader? Who are the Pattons and Churchills of the Postmodern age?

They no longer exist, except in our biases. In the Postmodern age, we have moved away from militaristic paternal leadership, even in the military. Bill Gates does not really run Microsoft from the top, as aluded to earlier, leadership is spread throughout, which is one of the reasons employees rank it as the best company in America to work for. Of course, this doesn’t mean that Gates didn’t try to run it from the top. According to insider Cringley (), he almost wrecked the company by trying to control it from his office. ?????It wasn’t until S came and suggested a looser structure based on his doictoral

Leadership has changed and so has our value system. Authors attribute these changes to a number of factors – the feminization of society, yuppie anti-establishmentarianism, or the populism of the nineties – but a more fundamental factor is the real cause, changes in our means of production.

“Old (and yes, patriarchal) Karl Marx was right and we don’t have to accept his political theory to recognize the power of his insight: that the manner in which society gets its work done shapes most of the other things the society does and believes” (Bridges, 1996, p. 12).

In conclusion, we have undergone a great change, but our biases in regard to leadership are still tied to an age that has passed. What images of a “leader” did you conjure up at the start of this article? Did you envision a powerful company president or did you envision a minor salesperson with a high degree of awareness? Probably the former. But, my friends, we have crossed the Rubicon into a land where no one leads and no one follows, everyone leads and everyone follows, and often simultaneously. Such is the nature of the circle. In the zeitgeist of the Postmodernistic Age, the King is dead. Long live each one of us.

References

Blanchard, K. (1996). Turning the organizational pyramid upside down. In F. Hesselbein, M. Goldsmith, & R. Beckhard (Eds.), Leader of the future (pp. 81-88). New York: Jossey-Bass.

Bridges, W. (1996). Leading the de-jobbed organization. In F. Hesselbein, M. Goldsmith, & R. Beckhard (Eds.), Leader of the future (pp. 11-18). New York: Jossey-Bass.

Cringely, R. (1996). Accidental empires. (2nd ed.). New York: Harper Business.

Farren, C., & Kaye, B. (1996). New skills for new leadership roles. In F. Hesselbein, M. Goldsmith, & R. Beckhard (Eds.), Leader of the future (pp. 175-187). New York: Jossey-Bass.

Handy, C. (1996). The new language of organizing and its implications for leaders. In F. Hesselbein, M. Goldsmith, & R. Beckhard (Eds.), Leader of the future (pp. 3-11). New York: Jossey-Bass.

Hesselbein, F., Goldsmith, M., & Beckhard, R. (Eds.). (1996). The Leader of the future. New York: Jossey-Bass.

Meléndez, S. (1996). An "outsiders" view of leadership. In F. Hesselbein, M. Goldsmith, & R. Beckhard (Eds.), Leader of the future (pp. 293-302). New York: Jossey-Bass.

Pilzer, P. Z. (1990). Unlimited wealth: The theory and practice of economic alchemy. New York: Crown Publishers.