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What's behind the leadership crisis?
23 August 2009:
According to a recently- released 2008 survey carried out by the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University's Kennedy School, an astonishing 80 per cent of the American people believe the country has a leadership crisis.
Business leaders are among the least trusted, with only 45 per cent of respondents saying they had confidence in them, Only Congress and then president George W. Bush were less trusted.
And it is not only ordinary people who are losing trust in their leaders; senior managers are losing trust in their corporate leaders. A survey published earlier this year and carried out by Booz & Company of 828 senior managers across the globe found that 40 per cent of senior managers had no confidence in their top executives' ability to address the economic crisis.
Part of the problem is the concept of leadership itself and the $250 billion (Dh919.5 billion) industry it has spawned.
To start with, the concept of leadership has never really been adequately defined by those who use it interchangeably to mean power or a set of personal traits. For example, a headline in The New York Times on August 10 read: 'Rival Claims Leave Taliban Leadership Uncertain'. Leadership here is used as a neutral term denoting those in power, the occupants of the highest office.
Now consider from the same paper the following example on August 15: Referring to US President Barack Obama, one reader wrote: "And how refreshing it is to have dignity, intelligence, and leadership in a president after eight years of ... other things". Here the term leadership connotes and is associated with lofty attributes such as a grand vision, dignity, courage and moral rectitude.
These attributes traditionally described extraordinary people who confronted extraordinary challenges, profoundly affected the course of events and shaped history. Lincoln, Gandhi, Attaturk, Mandela, Al Sadat and Gorbachev come to mind. There are others who accomplished extraordinary things but went unnoticed by the recorders of official history.
American academics and organisation culture specialists decided that the term leadership need not be exclusively reserved for extraordinary figures. They contended that the attributes of these extraordinary figures could be studied and emulated; in short they argued that leadership can be learned.
Thus, leadership emerged as a field of study to illuminate organisational culture and to give corporate managers a competitive edge.
Theories of leadership abounded: would-be leaders were urged to learn and emulate the attributes of great leaders; to understand leaders' behaviours, and to pay attention to the context because different situations required different skills. Recently we were urged to expect less of leaders and more of teams.
What all this theorising had in common was a desire to bring leadership down to earth, turn it into a glorified version of management training, fuel the explosion of leadership development and executive education and, in the process, make some institutions and a few entrepreneurs a great deal of money.
But vision cannot be taught and personal values and courage are intensely deep-seated and uniquely personal qualities.
Management, however glorified, is not leadership, however humbled. Warren Bennis elegantly distinguished between the two concepts by saying that managers do things right (by the book) and leaders do the right thing (what is fair and just).
But the right thing may be profoundly radical if it requires managers to ignore the rules and listen to one's sense of compassion and fairness. That is why real leaders are fundamentally revolutionary people willing to challenge the status quo.
There was no danger of this happening with the dominant model of management. Inspired by globalisation and uncritically applied around the globe, it was fundamentally driven by results defined as ever-increasing profits; even if this meant exploitative labour practices, irreversible damage to the environment and a growing concentration of wealth in the hands of the richest one per cent of the world's population while more than one billion people struggled to live on $2 a day.
What is more remarkable and indeed astounding is that this dominant model of management masquerading as leadership has failed time and again in its own culture. Yet, phoenix-like, it emerges unchanged from the ashes of one crisis after another. The Harvard survey mentioned above listed the failed financial institutions and stated: "These failures were not caused by complex financial instruments. They result from failures in leadership."
The crisis of confidence in leaders and especially business leaders suggests that people are no longer willing to accept the concept of leadership as glorified management, or as a neutral descriptive notion.
People are yearning for leadership that is associated with grand vision, integrity, courage and basic human decency.
What is ironic is that one does not need to be a larger than life, extraordinary figure to possess these attributes; there are all sorts of people from all walks of life providing this kind of leadership quietly and unnoticed by the glamorous management industry.
I call this value leadership; leadership that connotes the right values and that adds value to human development in whatever field.
Source: Gulf News
