Leadership Manifesto: A Typology of Leaderless Leadership

Leadership Manifesto

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 2002

Part One:

A Typology of Leaderless Leadership

Abstract

This is the first of a four-part series on leadership mainly in outline form. This work makes no attempt to be scientific or definitive in content or context. It is the intuitive reflections of the author’s lifelong involvement in organization at all levels of work and management from laborer to senior manager, from professor to consultant, from domestic to international executive.
The first part is a typology of leaderless leadership, which the author claims exceeds even In Praise of Folly (1511) by Erasmus. Folly’s subject is society and she quickly becomes a many-sided symbol, which stands for all that is natural in man, and for all man’s misdirected efforts to get the wrong things out of life. In that sense this typology has much in common with this early 16th century book.
The second part of the leadership series is to focus on the new leaders and where they are likely to reside, and how today they are being misapplied and misused.
The third part looks at leadership and its relationship to the changing nature of the structure and function of work, and why and how culture resists organizational change even in the face of its increasing peril.
The fourth part presents off-the-wall possible models of leadership that may breakthrough the last vestiges of anachronistic hierarchical structures and atavistic functions as the world of work breaks free of its 2,000-year imprisonment.

* * * * *
“The wise man has his follies no less than the fool;
but herein lies the difference – the follies of the fool
are known to the world, but are hidden from himself;
the follies of the wise man are known to himself, but
hidden from the world.”

Caleb C. Colton (1780 – 1832), English clergyman


Leadership is in a state of retreat bordering on confusion. Not only is leadership out-of-date but out-of-touch with men. For centuries, leadership cues were taken from how the church, military, state, commerce and industry conducted their businesses. All these models are now in jeopardy because they were designed for another time.

Institutions today go from crisis to crisis, scandal to scandal, outrage to outrage. Normalcy is waiting for the other shoe to drop. We have become the United States of Anxiety.

The scandals in the Roman Catholic Church are so pervasive as to no longer shock. Criminal sexual misconduct of priests and bishops has resulted in more than a $billion in payoffs to victims in an attempt to cover-up this shameful behavior. Meanwhile, church coffers are diminishing due to internal pilfering from administrative fraud to embezzlement to misappropriation of funds. Scandal is not, however, limited to the church.

Congressmen, mayors and governors have come in conflict with the law, some of them finding themselves behind bars for malfeasance. By the same token, corporate cooking of company books finds once powerful conglomerates going belly up for creating fictitious bottom lines, while their creative perpetrators are hauled off to jail in Armani suits and handcuffs.

Wordsmiths label these outrages with phrases such as the “arrogance of power,” “greed on steroids,” “corporate mafia,” and “supermarket of crime,” suggesting this is a morality play when it is simply a tragic comedy. It represents a society adrift in a maelstrom without a rudder. All kinds of people are at the helm. We call them “leaders.” But they are leaderless leaders without a rudder. That’s the dilemma of leadership today. Wherever leadership finds itself it expects the rest of us to believe that that is where it intended to go. I find that quite absurd.

People are necessary partners to leadership. They control the rudder. Yet, no fault of their own, most are passive, obedient, obsequious, polite, conforming, dependent and submissive or rudderless as well as clueless. They are of no service to themselves, their leadership, or indeed the organization. Corporate society has conditioned them to behave thusly. This translates behaviorally into learned helplessness and nonresponsibility, the incidental products of leadership gone wrong.

People behave the way they are programmed to behave. The way they are programmed is founded in the leadership culture. Society gets the leadership it deserves. Crisis, scandal and outrage do not occur in a vacuum. They are part of the corporate design, and when the design is wrong, the seven deadly sins work their havoc. There is no profit in finger pointing. No one is innocent. Everyone is guilty. Neither king nor prince, pope nor priest, aristocrat nor workingman escapes the pull of his culture. Greed is the god of our culture and Folly is her leader.

The Holy Father in Central America canonized to sainthood a 17th century Spanish missionary, Brother Pedro, who preached and did good works in Guatemala, and Juan Diego, a native Mexican Indian and the first indigenous American saint. The only problem is that Juan Diego may never have actually lived. There is no proof that he ever existed. To add insult to injury images of Juan Diego more resemble the light skinned conquering Spanish Conquistadors than the dark skinned indigenous people he is meant to celebrate.

Juan Bautista and Jacinto de los Angeles were also beatified during this visit, placing them a step from sainthood. The problem with this beatification is that these two three centuries ago were informers for the Spanish Inquisition. This led to the cruel torture and murder of scores of Indians who risked their lives to worship in the ancient ways of their indigenous culture.

Catholic church membership is fast eroding in Central America. These papal pronouncements are obviously expedient measures to stop this erosion, a common practice of leaderless leadership.

The same type of leadership is on display when an American president bombs a pharmaceutical plant in Africa with the nebulous claim it is producing chemical and biological weapons in the hopes of redirecting media heat from his personal peccadilloes; when congress constructs buildings that are never occupied, or commissions roads to be built with governor support that go nowhere; or when CEOs flee their disintegrating corporations with duffel bags full of tens of millions of dollars while the company stock tanks. In the meantime, employees of such companies find themselves without jobs and with 401(K) accounts reduced to confetti.

Ralph Nader, the scold of corporate America, finds this plunge into amorality beyond cynicism. Why, he asks, didn’t we know sooner about these corporate scoundrels? The same could be asked of the church, state, military, commerce and industry when deeds turn ugly and rise to the surface. Why indeed.

Corporate egos are so insulated from reality with their own conceit that deception can be totally transparent for anyone bothering to look. Of course nobody does proving the executive attitude, “You can’t touch me!” pervasive. Those who knew and could have been whistle blowers extends from the board of directors to corporate insiders to accounting firms to lawyers working for these corporations to credit-rating agencies to corporate director to corporate managers to personnel and department heads to all levels in the system. When filthy lucre flows freely, everyone is blinded by its brilliance.

Change the names of corpocracy to the church and the same whistle blowers might be found in the Roman Curia to the College of Cardinals to the archbishops to the bishops to the parish priests to the laity with knowledge of the same kettle of worms. All hierarchical structured institutions are vulnerable to this malaise, as the same rules apply equally to the president, congress, Supreme Court, governors, and so on down the line to the shock of indifference in communities across the nation. All are engaged in leaderless leadership in one form or another with little apparent interest in wondering why.

Our culture abhors a snitch, stoolie, tattletale, rumormonger, gossipmonger, scandalmonger, nosy parker, big mouth. What’s more, we are mainly a passive people. We don’t “make waves” or “challenge authority.” We react to it. We celebrate our individualism while allowing ourselves to be externally organized rather than self-organized. Our nature is to be compliant rather than cooperative. It is all in the programming. When we think, we are confined to the box, or what we already know, rather than to risk thinking outside it. Consequently, we tend to be clever rather than wise, humble rather than self-confidence, imitators rather than the genuine article. No matter how successful we are someone else is more successful, so we have no peace.

It has been in observing people in organization for nearly four decades that I have come to develop this typology. I’m sure the reader will find him or herself in one or more of these classifications. I do. How could it be otherwise? This is our education.

1. The Manipulator

The manipulator-as-manager believes everyone has his or her price, and that price is as devious as his own. He believes the system is designed for exploitation, and the more able the exploiter the faster his rise to managerial consequence.

Character flaw in this manager comes to the fore when asked his relationship to his people. It is clear that he mistrusts people who have no hidden agenda, naked ambition similar to his own, or in contrast to this appear to be what they seem, straight arrows. Such people he sees as hypocrites – everyone’s bent! -- and driven by weakness.

Whatever his self-indulgence, he expects it to be reflected in his people. If he is a drinker, to name one possible dalliance, he expects his people to have an occasional drink with him after work. A nondrinker is suspect from the start and to be watched. He justifies spending time with his people off duty as a way to get to know them, and to learn what makes them tick. He never admits the need of a social partner to justify his indulgence. Moreover, the manipulator’s penchant is compounded in his people, as he is attracted to those who display similar inclinations.

The weapons of the manipulator are fear and intimidation. During a consulting assignment, I once accompanied a manager to the company gym to play basketball with his people. Another group due to a schedule mix-up occupied the court. This was upsetting to my group who were all psyched up to play basketball.

My host approached the black custodian who had broken the news to the players. In no way dismayed, the manipulator manager cajoled the custodian to demonstrate some flexibility. Then he turned his attention to the manager of the group playing. “Be a sport and play half court. Once we get the rust out of our legs, we can scrimmage your guys in a full court game.”
This manager, clearly intimidated by my host, acceded to his will and the problem was solved. It was accomplished with great facility and no interruption in the harmony of the game. I was impressed. Fifteen minutes later we were playing full court.

A half hour into the scrimmage players of the other team started to leave due to other commitments. This resulted in my group having access to the entire gym until the custodian announced that he was locking up. My host ignored this notice asking me if I wanted to take a shower. Sensing this would get the custodian’s backside up, I said, “No I’m all right,” when in fact I was drenched with sweat and would very much welcome a shower.

Looking toward the custodian, my host said, “You don’t mind if my guys take a shower, do you?”

The black custodian replied, “Yes I do mind. I’m closing up now.”

Undismayed, my host puts his face inches a way from the custodian’s and said with a sly smile, “Who do you work for?” The custodian told him. “You don’t want a letter in your file that you didn’t cooperate with a department head, now do you?” My host wasn’t a department head, far from it, but the custodian didn’t challenge him. We took our showers. He called the custodian’s bluff.

The climate is always ripe for the manipulator where fear is pervasive. The manipulator ultimately becomes manipulated with his own self-deception because he comes to believe he is untouchable. He operates at the expense of people and gets work done “by” them, not with or through them. When his type is dominant in an organization, people bring their bodies to work and leave their minds safely at home.

2. The Frustrated Participant

This manager wants to believe in the system. He sees himself as dedicated, loyal and ambitious, and although frustrated is reluctant to express his complaints. Inconsistency in company policy, flagrant violation of fairness issues, and blatant displays of managerial duplicity, he absorbs without protest feeling it is his role to protect the company’s image.

When he is given the assignment to have company divisions nominate a “manager of the year,” he forms a committee with due diligence to evaluate these contributions to determine the ultimate winner. The consensus candidate is presented to the board, only to have the nominee rejected as “too light weight.” Senior management then hastily nominates its preferred candidate, who was not previously selected in the competition, naming this nominee the new “manager of the year.”

The frustrated manager shares his exasperation and disbelief with this consultant in a flood of words. It is clear that while criticizing such action as being reprehensible he cannot muster the will to be critical of his superiors. It is as if this action had no body.
When I remind him of this, he is suspicious. “Are you a pipeline to senior management?” I assure him that I am not.

“If you want a pipeline to senior management,” I suggest, “ask your senior management to explain its rationale for dumping your nominee.”

The thought of such directness was clearly disheveling. Confrontation never entered the frustrated manager’s mind. “I couldn’t do that. They’d think I wasn’t a team player.”

“So what do you plan to do?”

“What I always do. Suck it up and move forward.”

The frustrated manager would continue to make every effort to anticipate his management’s needs, and to deliver its will whether appropriate or not. If its moral authority was in conflict with his, it was safer to act as an enlisted man in officer country then to challenge that authority.

The frustrated manager represents the good, the bad and the ugly of many organizations. He is able and ready, but somewhat traumatized when made to shelf his ethics for pragmatic considerations. On the one hand he believes in the ethical policies of the company, and on the other considers operating practices, and wonders why they seem so seldom connected. It never occurs to him to take hold at his level. It would not be fair to see the frustrated manager always a corporal for he is often an officer of the company who goes along to get along. Where they are similar is that they both are more rank conscious than task driven, while still wanting to make a meaningful contribution. The frustrated manager defies rational description and is everywhere.

3. The Inside Outsider

The inside-outside manager is a growing presence in organization. Like a boy locked in a candy store, he experiences his most cherished dream of inclusion, but to his chagrin not as a player. Ever the outsider, he is a staff specialist with skills needed but never with line authority.

His skills can be in planning, personnel, organization, research, budget, computer technology, or a host of other specialties, which pale in significance to the power exercised by generalists. He is the equivalent of a civilian among soldiers, and although he may have professional credentials to rank with or exceed the officers, he is never considered one of them.

The inside-outsider manager pays his dues, becomes initiated into the established culture of the elite, but is never identified by it as “one of us.” Much as he might strive to enhance his status his unique skills only exaggerate rather than lessen the difference. Being judged for his specialization, should he show a flare for a generalist’s attributes, this tends only to eclipse rather than enhance his perceived effectiveness, proving he can’t win for losing.

The inside-outsider manager experiences the paradox of being needed but not necessarily wanted, producing a certain amount of internal organizational strain. To the old guard he is a cowboy with little couth and too much hubris. He is however the wave of the future with his numbers growing exponentially.

The inside-outsider manager must come to grips with this reality and accept his inside outsider role as the organization drags its feet to catch up with him. If he can handle this, he will be tolerated and his situation tolerable. If not, he will become a problem, first losing his influence and then his station. No effort on his part will change the way things are, only time will.

4. The Winning Side Saddler

The winning side saddler manager appears with increasing frequency as you move up the organizational chart. He is a pyramid climber with a knack for making his presence felt. A pleaser, anticipator and executer, he dispatches issues before they become problems, endearing him to his bosses. The focus is never on what is needed but what is expected. He is a chameleon with the capacity to change camouflage on a moment’s notice. There is no point in asking him for a coherent point of view because he has never developed one. His nature is that of the hunch player who knows every verse, page and chapter of the “cover your ass” book. A fence rider extraordinary, he tells you what you want and expect to hear. The more uptight and defensive the organization the prominent is his role. A palm tree yielding to the prevailing winds, the winning side saddler manager provides a buffer to the ugly edges of reality. Should a power shift be eminent, the winning side saddler has already saddled the winning horse and is waiting to put his new boss into the stirrups.

Senior management never has a chance. It thinks it judges staff on the basis of qualification and competence, but the winning side saddler knows better. Management settles for comfort level, “am I comfortable with this person?” If comfort is assured, competence and qualification are ordained as givens. This sustains organizational lethargy with senior management’s unconscious design.

To the winning side saddler anything goes that fuels his career. Loyalty is blind. Obedience is an amoral pursuit. Fear is prevalent in his personality if not in his vocabulary. He has an eye for weakness and a gift for exploiting it. His will is to react to the needs of those in charge with the devotion of the sycophant.

The winning side saddler manager is of some value because of his willingness to serve. This is can be an adverse virtue if he withholds vital information because of its negative implications.

It would be folly to discount how important being liked as opposed to being competent has on the organization. CEO Lee Iacocca, after having a record year at Ford Motor Company, was fired by chairman of the board Henry Ford, III. When he asked why, Ford said, “Well, sometimes you just don’t like somebody.”

5. The Nostalgic Elitist

The nostalgic elitist manager is fortunately disappearing. He is a vestige of past restricted glory and an unwilling participant in a more open egalitarian present. He lives in a black and white world of workers and managers, thinkers and doers, the educated and the ignorant, while the world has become predominantly gray. Disturbing to him is that nothing seems as it once was. He takes cynical delight in the vocabulary of “social change,” as he sees it changing nothing, merely manipulating fads and slogans with smoke and mirrors.

Schooled in the belief that abrupt change is infrequent, he is having trouble with this being called one of those exceptional periods. Yet, much as he would prefer it to be otherwise, he cannot ignore that institutions are disintegrating and being resurrected into God knows what.

This non-structured period causes him great pain. His preference is for fixed structures and closed systems. He cannot fathom why his authority is challenged, why the less gifted are to be treated as equals, why his superiority is not self-evident, or whatever this business of a “bill of rights” for workers is all about? He will not accept that the old way is not working any more, choosing instead to see it being abandoned without cause, not out of necessity.

A new mentality is emerging which he cannot comprehend and therefore opposes. He sees a more permissive society with everybody doing their own thing, and he shutters at the decadence, ignoring the fact that creative expression is inversely related to the level of formal control. A more open permissive society spawns creativity, while a more closed and structured one kills it.

The nostalgic elitist manager believes in the idea that there are good and bad attitudes, whereas in reality there are only differing attitudes. This manager holds that there is only one truth, his truth, when each individual experiences a measure of his own truth. You cannot make him see that good people do bad things for good reasons. This defies logic and he is a student of logic.

All this conflicting data irritates the nostalgic elitist manager. He cries for simpler times and more blunt instruments to control behavior. He longs for termination without reason, and the use of stick and carry games to motivate.

He seldom comes to grips with his own weakness, and is often of a sadistic temperament. To him toughness and strength are synonymous. This attitude frustrates subordinates and agonizes superiors, as it underlines his weakness. His prominence is evident the slightest shift in a new direction.

6. The Waiter in the Wings

The waiter in the wings is a pragmatist. He has a healthy appreciation of both his potential and obstacles to success. While others are aggravating about change he is husbanding his resources, planning his tactics and developing his strategy. This separates him from the winning side saddler. He is as strong and resolute as his opposition.

His penchant is to make a periodic assessment of his progress to date versus his long-range objective, assessing this against the progress of his organization. He has no plans to tie his future to a sinking ship, or bide his time with rationalizations. His motivation is kept close to his chest, feeling no need to campaign with bluster.

Operationally, he makes himself indispensable. Yet he confounds subordinates and superiors alike. Success is essentially a game to him. This can be misconstrued as his being cold as well as cool. He cares but doesn’t make an issue of it. Lacking the appearance of emotional baggage, he is often misunderstood and frequently envied.

What confounds his critics is his ability to balance stealth with openness, insouciance with results, choosing never to telegraph his hand. He is waiting to make his move and that is all that matters to him. Both because he doesn’t need and trust one, the waiter in the wings seldom has a confidante, but allows himself to be one.

His MBA patina is obvious as he applies the science of his business school education with the precision of a case study. Yet he gets no rush from being a student as the application of his tools is his only interests.

Balance describes him. He is an excellent writer and effective communicator with a well-developed sense of proportion. In a word he is not easily ruffled. Perspective defines him, which makes him especially engaging as a calming influence in crisis. Inadvertently, this makes him a threat to those who mistrusts his velvet glove approach. He is waiting in the wings and has no doubt that center stage awaits him.

His edge is belief in himself without preamble. He never meets a stranger and is as confident addressing a ghetto audience as a board meeting. As relaxed as he seems, he is actually wound as tight as piano wire. Given this, he can only wait so long before he has to move on, always to a more challenging role.

Long before his present position he was filling all the appropriate boxes in his curriculum vitae to make him a prime candidate much like a first round draft choice in the NFL must spend hard year’s honing his talent for such selection. Organizations recruit him with the same diligence.

In any organization 15 percent of the work force are foot draggers, another 70 percent obsequious followers, and yet another 15 percent hard chargers. The waiter in the wings manager is a hard charger and usually gets little developmental attention, as he will succeed whether the organization does or not. The natural inclination is therefore to spend a disproportionate amount of time with losers and followers, which often results in this superior performer moving on.

7. Happily in Harness

The happily in harness manager accepts his role because he loves what he does. Never wanting to be anything else, he is satisfied. Each promotion is a genuine surprise. By nature, he is appreciative and generous, easy to work with or for, competent without being righteous, confident without being arrogant.

He creates a climate for subordinate growth even if he himself is not inclined to be a good coach or counselor. His most effective teaching method is by example. He is trusted and fair, consistent and honest. He would never think of countermanding an executive order, or bad mouthing a superior. It would never occur to him to do so.

Contentment is a word that describes him. He entered the work force with this attitude and remains true to it as a veteran. He takes pride in his experience and ability to do his job, but uncharacteristically, he registers a surprising tolerance for those less inclined to follow suit. If there is envy or jealousy in him, it fails to show. He celebrates the achievement of others and encourages those more able than him to strive to go beyond his station. He has an equal amount of patience for those who stumble but try as for those who fail to try for fear of stumbling. Although laziness is foreign to his make up, he remains philosophical about lazy people. “This is not their patch. Trust me, when they find it they’ll be a different person.”

The happily in harness manager is the backbone of most successful organizations. His poster board appearance however can be deceiving. He is unlikely to note progressive internal stress and strain building up from dysfunctional practices, or to be inclined to calibrate accelerating external demands on the organization. One thing is certain. A whistle blower he is not.

8. The Quiet Soldier

The quiet soldier manager is not to be confused with the happily in harness. He differs in some striking ways. For example, he is more comfortable in the role of follower rather than leader and identifies with the aspirations and frustrations of his subordinates. He is not necessarily happy. He is just reticent about it. By inclination, he is a doer rather than a thinker, an implementer rather than an innovator. Risk is not in his vocabulary.

The upshot of this is that he is a constant frustration to those in charge. They see him having the talent but not the resolve to do more. Moody and taciturn, he is apt to accept untenable situations rather than to do something about them. “Not my job,” echoes in his silence. Simply put, he is a passive passenger on his own ship with more confidence in someone else doing the navigating.

Hard to believe, he is the manager everyone likes even when he lets his charges down. Is it because he is stoic; has presence; because of his sublime dignity; or is it merely because what you see is what you get? The conundrum is part of his appeal.

Clearly, he needs to be prodded into action. Since he is unlikely to be interested in promotion, the stick and carrot routine doesn’t work. Either he fails to understand his role or chooses to let others worry about it. He needs constant stroking to achieve only adequate performance. Curiously, he is seldom considered incompetent. Perhaps it is because he never makes waves.

In another time the quiet soldier manager was paternalistic management’s perfect son. Today he is the logjam in the soul of the machine always waiting for orders from headquarters. This predilection can derail projects, cause deadlines to be missed, or blow critical networks.

The quiet soldier manager is present on every managerial team as his lack of ego is considered an instinct for teaming. He is the flotsam of yesterday and the jetsam of a new tomorrow and he is present everywhere, a holdover from a system preferring cosmetic to real structural change. And he is unlikely to soon disappear.

9. The Victim

The victim manager has a well-developed martyr complex. Nothing can be taken at face value. He expects to be trusted without being trustworthy, given cherished assignments without being dependable, and taken at his word without being credible. Call it tunnel vision, myopia or hindsight, he has it. He delights in the failures of others, but finds no humor when others delight in his. When others fail, it is because they’re incompetent; when he fails, it’s because others let him down.

He has the mysterious ability to put well-meaning people on the defensive, poisoning their minds with the idea that they don’t like him because of his race, religion, ethnicity, parochialism, socioeconomic status, accent or the neighborhood from which he comes. If that doesn’t work, it is his college or university degree lacks the prestige of certain other institutions. And if that still fails, there are always the staple discriminators: he is too fat, too thin, too short, too tall, too bald, too hairy, too old, too young, too quiet, too loud, too common, too rare, too late.

“Late” has a whole new set of disclaimers for the victim manager. As Marlon Brando says in the film, On the Waterfront (1954), “I could have been a contender,” meaning he could have vied for the World Middleweight Boxing Championship, “if I had had the breaks.” For the victim manager, it is too late (for him) to go back to school, learn new skills, change jobs, change careers, leave the company, start a business, start a family, leave everything and start a new life.

Holding him back is another set of the victim manager’s favorite foibles. He couldn’t do any of these things because he had to take care of his parents, his wife wouldn’t let him, they (company, family, friends, acquaintances, relatives) didn’t approve, he couldn’t find the money, he couldn’t take the stress, and it would interfere with his (bowling, soft ball, club, family, church) obligations.

Mention is never made that he might be afraid of failure, of embarrassing himself, or might not have the stick-to-it-ness necessary to complete the task much less succeed. The victim manager is looking for justification for his unhappiness and he wants it put on everything and everybody, just as long as it doesn’t stick to him. He has never come to terms with the fact that where he is is exactly where he expects to be.

He holds a few other cards meant to put the heat on others, such as he hasn’t been given enough training, coaching, mentoring, or opportunity to prove himself. Yet when he manages, he invariably manages up, fantasizing were he in charge he’d run a tighter running smoother ship.

Asked how he thinks his people see him, he replies, “They like working for me; know where they stand. I treat them the way I’d like to be treated, not the way I’m treated.” Notice an “us” positive always has to be coated with a “them” negative.

Little surprise, when his direct reports are asked what it is like working for him, they echo the same unenthusiastic sentiments he alludes to regarding his bosses. In other words they’re not happy campers either. They see him as a whiner, complainer and often lazy as well. Most of his energy is spent criticizing the system rather than constructing better ways to utilize it. The content of his personality is immersed in “can’t,” not can.

The victim manager has a tendency to form an alliance with the nostalgic elitist manager, complementing the masochist with the sadist. A shroud of gloom surrounds them both and corrupts the air their subordinates breathe. Their most telling power is to turn colleagues such as the quiet soldier and frustrated manager into martyrs working on the victim complex.

The victim manager makes no secret of his discontent. He wears a permanent wounded hound dog expression encased in the armor of passivity. This is so thick that it is impossible to reach him short of termination.

10. The Unbending Idealist

The unbending idealist manager idealizes life and lives in a dream world. He is a product of film and television and prefers to see the world as it should be, not as it is. In contrast to the victim manager he sees himself as a savior of lost causes and even more lost souls, explaining away failures and suspect conduct, failing to place it on the responsible people. Consequences are suspended, forgiven, or ignored. F. S. didn’t mean to steal the laptop. He just forgot to bring it back. G. D. took off early and failed to meet the deadline because her car pool left early. P. M. has a lot on his plate, which caused him to lose it in front of the customer. Such people suck the energy from everything around them while the unbending idealist provides the rationale.

It never occurs to this manager that life is a series of choices. Some people make good ones and others rotten ones. The unbending idealist suffers incurably from the naiveté of the good heart; failing to see this tendency for what it is, compassionate condescension. This manager considers advocates of self-reliance, self-discipline, self-management and survival of the fittest soulless as well as heartless. Failure to put pressure on people to make suitable choices might then find the unbending idealist as headless. Obviously, it is not an either/or proposition, but Folly might insist it being so.

There is a heroic sweep to the role he sees for himself, as if an actor on stage spinning an idyllic part recalled from memory. He equates charisma with competence, and presence with performance. Dress, diction, and the dramatic are tools of his trade for he is the product of a romantic education. Every effort is made to attend the “best” schools and get the most desirable degrees to make his rise to prominence swift and without glitches. Education is not a means, but an end in itself, the ticket to the good life.

Another aspect of this manager is self-consciousness. When he enters a room, he expects heads to turn. When he speaks, he expects necks to crane not to miss a word. He practices in front of a mirror to manage his expressions to best equate them with the intended impact.

Self-image is everything. This proves necessary to create and then live an impossible fiction. With every failure he reinvents himself, never seeming to register the folly of his ways. He is a perfectionist without understanding the blessing of human frailty; that people are flawed but perfectible. He is a dreamer who is looking for fulfillment “out there” when he is tripping over it.

The unbending idealist sees himself different than others with the same training and he is inclined to bridge the difference by waxing sincere. When this fails, he mirrors those bypassing him to increasing power, convinced once he reaches the rarefied air of top management his idealism will finally find a home. What a shock it is to his system when he arrives only to discover the duplicity, chicanery, pettiness, coarseness and trivializing conduct here is not unlike that previously experienced. Small wonder his idealism is in danger of dropping like a stone into cynicism once brutal reality meets unbending idealism.

He now encounters real people where before they were symbols of power. Here he expected camaraderie, not competition, collegial good will, not the maliciousness experienced in his climb. If this reality is not assimilated, a good and possibly great manager could be lost. People are people everywhere, good and bad, ethical and immoral. There are no pristine pockets of them anywhere.
11. The Adventurer

The adventurer manager is different than the unbending idealist manager. The difference is that this manager is totally consumed with the adventure. He has no room for idealism. He is out to push the envelope, which necessitates playing CYA and SYA games. Pushing it where is never clearly defined for the game is the thing.

Experience has taught him that the adventurer best have a “cover your ass” explanation for everything, while the best defense is a “shows your ass” offense to keep troublemakers at bay. When cornered, he comes out swinging with a “red pencil,” a caustic remark, exception to the rule, or an incomprehensible explanation. He can lie with a straight face looking his accuser in the eye, or pass a polygraph test without flinching. His singular sense of adventure has no sense of consequences, as it never occurs to him that he might be caught, humiliated, and terminated.

He is a type “T” personality, a high-risk taker, and thrill seeker, rule breaker with a creative abandon persona. Primarily left-brain oriented, the adventurer manager can easily gravitate to the bizarre. Paranoia, busily fermenting in his brain, provides him with protective sensors, escaping one close call after another. The rush makes him even bolder.

What is confounding is that he is often brilliant and could succeed brilliantly without all the artful dodging. Take one adventurer manager who created a complex matrix of performance indices, which confirmed staggering results. It was so convincing that several chief engineers signed off on it. This led to a huge promotion, only to discover months later that the matrix was entirely bogus. Invariably, the deceiver is caught but often not before he wreaks havoc on the system. The adventurer manager craves attention and feels he has to act precipitously to get it.

Usually, this attitude is not justified as he is often the darling of the organization, the daredevil and nonconformist that is envied for his monstrous accomplishments that often seem to exceed the believable, and for reason – he cuts corners and cheats. Yet he is the glamour boy who seems the perfect manager, a team player who sets the bar higher than anyone else dares. While appearing a solid manager, he is apt to bring shocking embarrassment to the organization because he is never what he seems.

Were his work to be scrutinized instead of his sizzle, his poor management skills would surface because this role is not exciting enough. He has little interest in mundane practices showing a preference for big-ticket items. Constantly challenging himself to be more sensational he cuts corners, fakes results, doctors the books, invents fictitious accomplishments, and worse of all, musters the support of legitimate doers to be tainted with his mythic accomplishments by guile, vanity and flattery.

What may surprise is that the adventurer manager is actually a passive defensive personality. He wants to belong but not to the herd. So he enters the wilderness of despair out of which there is no escape. It is an improbable place that an increasing number of highly talented people are rushing to enter, and we must ask ourselves, why?

12. The Spin Doctor

The spin-doctor manager is the public relations conduit between the community at large and the community within. He is the eyes and ears and voice of authority. His greatest concern is to put a good face on a bad situation requiring him to be a good liar, and herein lays the danger. He has a tendency to reduce everything to public relation speak with cavalier flamboyance, when this is far from the facts of the situation.

He sees his role as the little person on the shoulder of the giant giving directions. This has some merit. The problem is that the spin-doctor manager can come to believe in his own rhetoric, ultimately leading to credibility issues.

Assessing explosive or exploding issues, and putting a positive slant on them, is no small achievement. Wariness is his by word, as unstated implications of a situation can destroy momentum. So, he must be quick to interpret and translate events into believable terms. It is the skill of the illusionist who changes the complexion of the problematic with sleight of hand cunning, giving the chaotic situation an orderly context, a down surge in business an uplifting forecasts, a crisis situation the umbrella of calm.

The danger is to proffer short-term solutions that bypass long-term implications. He is apt to be quick-witted, congenial, decisive, and less a public than a backstage performer. Vital as he is he cannot afford to become manic. As Eric Goffman puts it in Relations in Public (1971),

The manic is someone who does not refrain from intruding where he is not wanted or where he will be accepted but at a loss to what we see as his value and status. He does not contain himself in the spheres and territories allotted to him. He overreaches. He does not keep his place.

Overstepping his role can be a disease most deadly for his every word is trademark to his purpose.
13. The Reluctant Soldier

The reluctant soldier manager is neither fish nor fowl, neither leader nor follower. He is seldom there. He simply is. Everyone knows him. Everyone tolerates him. No one expects anything from him, and therefore nobody does anything about him. He is in the same job and at the same level that he has been for years. He exists. During that time, he has received increased compensation and improved entitlements for doing less and less. He is retired on the job and sees little reason to act otherwise.

The reluctant soldier is the benefactor of a spoils system where favoritism resides. To call him lazy is an oversimplification. A greater stretch would be to see him a “rebel.” He is neither, but a person who has wandered into a job and found a home.
He is often crafty with survival his sharpest tool. This he plays to perfection. Once he was painfully unhappy, but that was so long ago that his memory is inured to it. When first employed, he was considered a “safe hire,” then promoted and forgotten. Statistically, he is a member of the 15 percent “foot draggers,” which plague most organizations.

14. The Unforgivable Prodigal Son

The unforgivable prodigal son manager once stumbled badly. This caused embarrassment to him and the organization. His faux pas was of such magnitude to embarrass the company but not sufficient to warrant dismissal. It would have been better for all concerned that it had been. Once he was punished for this indiscretion with a suspension without pay and his rate frozen for two years, his personnel jacket was expunged of his crime.

Unfortunately, it didn’t end there. The prodigal son manager returned to his job but without forgiving grace. He became a pariah with his guilt whispered behind his back with his every act. There was nothing he could say or do to change the climate. He was stigmatized, and might as well have worn a scarlet letter on his forehead.

New people arrive, and are told to stay clear of the unforgivable prodigal son manager. “He is poison,” they advise without being more specific. He doesn’t make matters any easier for himself jumping the gun telling new people of his crime before they ask.

It matters little that he becomes an efficient manager, the guilty whispers still continue. What behavior could be so reprehensible? In this case, and this is one of a pattern I’ve observed, the prodigal son manager “betrayed” the company and his colleagues. He leaked a story to the media about unsavory company practices. An investigation followed, the company was sanctioned, several customers terminated contracts, and people lost their jobs.

The company was careful not to punish him as a whistle blower, but for breaching company policy, which called for reporting such findings in writing to one’s superior. He didn’t, arguing if he had the company wouldn’t have done anything anyway. So he injudiciously took matters into his own hands. His assessment may have been correct but not right under the circumstances.

Still, if the perception exists that an organization is a closed system, a person is likely to ignore the chain-of-command when exasperation reaches its limits and indeed go over management’s head. This would be tantamount to insubordination, a crime in an uptight operation. Such a culture labels a whistle blower a “snitch” with the unspoken but pervasive word if you want to win promotion and be accepted by your peers, keep your mouth shut! The person fares much better being simply incompetent.

Puritanical justice is actually a double-edged problem. The accused and the accuser are wrapped in the same cloth and painted with the same brush. Trust is destroyed and silence rolls through the organization like thunder. No one is confident to say anything for fear of reprisals. The ultimate loser is the organization. Sincerity is the first casualty. Much talent and energy is wasted in posturing. It is assumed more important to make an impression than a difference, to wax mellow as a personality than to cut to the chase as a performer, more prudent to play it safe than to gamble on venturing outside the box.

As for the unforgivable prodigal son manager, unlike the example above, he is apt to become increasingly irresponsible for what difference does it make? If he is particularly malicious, he is inclined to spread disinformation with a desire for vengeance. He thinks, ‘what have I got to lose, so why not stir things up a bit?’ As his personality becomes increasingly warped, his venom spills out in sarcasm questioning the leadership and its fairness to the troops. Whatever happens, he twists it to reveal an ugly side. Gossip and innuendo are his weapons of mass emotional destruction.

This is precisely what happened to a police captain put on permanent nights for an indiscretion. In this medium sized metropolitan area this meant that he was exposed to all patrol officers as they rotated shifts. In time he riled them up so much the 350 sworn officers went on strike in a state that does not allow public employees to strike. Bedlam followed. Experts of all description were brought in. I was one of them fortuitously stumbling on this cause. Once uncovered, the officers quietly returned to work, embarrassed that somebody they trusted had duped them.

The unforgivable prodigal son manager often shares many of the attributes of the victim manager. What is regrettable is that he is frequently able with passionate drive. This drive has been turned inside out with hate triumphing over love, maliciousness over kindness.

That said, it is dangerous to place him in a position where he could poison the minds and hearts of those reporting to him. The best bet is to isolate him from people until reason wins out. If this seems extreme, this consultant has seen organizations ruined once this Iago is allowed to rant.

15. The Over Achiever

The over achiever manager is inclined to educate himself beyond his intelligence, pushing his ambition to the brink, or beyond his capacity, exposing him to situations past his comprehension. He epitomizes the leaderless leader because action is his call and shooting from the hip is his modus operandi.

He has a surface acumen that is engaging and catches the eye of his superiors. His intensity is contagious. He is likeable and agreeable and seems never to sleep. His attractiveness extends beyond what he does to what he is, a human dynamo. He has lived so long with his limitations, which he hides in a swirl of activity, that they have become assets.

Others assess his performance in his long hours in pursuit of a goal, never pausing to wonder if he might be a more effective reflecting more, and acting less. “Ready, fire, aim” is his inclination. So long is he of this persuasion that he could not fathom it any other way. Nothing is done with ease. This finds him attempting to cover everything rather than focusing on the critical 10 percent causing the problem.

The over achiever manager is not actually an achiever. He is a drone who micromanages to a fault and finds it difficult to delegate. People who accomplish assignments with ease are suspect, as he equates accomplishment with time and intensity. Because of the tornado that he is everyone thinks him competent. They see the whirlwind process and not the marginal product.

He needs help. A career development plan may redirect this tortured manager into a repetitive function he can perform with satisfaction, for example, data collection. Where he has broad discretionary power, such as commanding people, his ineptitude is likely to surface. He is better suited to manage things than people. What is appalling is that working hard is likely to get more attention than working smart. This coats the skids for the over achiever manager.



16. The Messianic Manager

The messianic manager sees himself as a savior. Where he differs with the unbending idealist is that he has a conceptual approach to modify reality. The unbending idealist only has the rationale to explain reality away.

The change masters of the 20th century might never consider themselves sponsors of the messianic manager, but they are. They have worked around the problem of a changing working society with the false assumption that there is a “Holy Grail” core. There isn’t. A brief explanation is warranted.

Douglas McGregor’s (Human Side of Enterprise 1960) “Y” style of manager, Robert Blake and Jane Mouton’s (The Managerial Grid 1964) “team manager,” Carl Rogers’s (On Becoming a Person 1961) “employee center manager,” George C. Homans’s (The Human Group 1950) “informal work behavior,” Chris Argyris’s (Personality and Organization 1957) “humanistic value system,” Frederick Herzberg’s (Work and the Nature of Man 1966) “motivation-hygiene theory,” and Elton Mayo’s (The Human Problem of an Industrial Civilization 1933) “humanistic management,” to name only a few interpreters of leadership and worker motivation, set themselves the noble but impossible task to identify what pushes both leaders and workers off the dime and on the same page, and they have all failed.
With regard to leadership, they have not departed from the 2,000 year-old model of somebody in charge calling the shots and somebody else responding. With regard to motivation, they have assumed motivation can be defined when it is as slippery as an eel in the hand. Put simply, it’s the culture, stupid. The culture dictates behavior, and the culture is driven by the structure and function of work, which is dynamic and ever changing.

Create the culture that supports the interests of the organization and fulfills the needs of the worker and, voila! Leaders and workers get off the dime, move on to the same page and work gets done, the work that moves everyone to where they want to go, not to where they usually end up.

An idealistic concept has driven management in the direction of the messianic manager called “humanism.” Human Resources has been the interpreter of this humanism, selling the leadership on the idea that giving workers everything but the kitchen sink will cause them to applaud their leadership with conscientious, efficient high-level performance. This hasn’t happened. Not only has this failed to materialize into an interdependent leadership-worker partnership in a “culture of contribution,” but it has stumbled instead too frequently into a permissive “culture of complacency,” where nobody is seemingly in charge and workers waffle suspended in terminal adolescence.1 The messianic manager is one of humanism’s most persistent creations.

He is like the missionary that goes into a culture of 4,000 years with the idea he is going to save that culture from itself by changing it into his. Albert Schweitzer (Reverence for Life 1969) comes to mind as a messianic manager, as he brought Western culture to West Africa, setting up a hospital and clinic. Noble undertaking? For me, this is troubling. It has the hubristic feel of Western culture hegemony with “progress society’s most important product” looking down from its mountaintop at this primitive society, and saying, “Don’t worry, we’ll fix you.”

This is characteristic of the messianic manager. He believes he has answers and understands the workings of the minds of those that he plans to save. He has cause and they are his beneficent effect. Schweitzer has admitted in his writings that his motivation was atonement for the excesses of his culture. But in that atonement he assumed the arrogance of saving another culture through the sacrifice and saving of himself. A faulty premise.

It is as if there is a right way and a wrong way of doing everything, and he knows the right way. He takes pride in his humanity, but is it not benign paternalism, and isn’t paternalism what is anachronistic? Moreover, he sees himself as considerate and compassionate, which he tends to be, as long as people respond to his largesse. His group is a family with him as its head. Rather than deal with his people individually, allowing them to assess their individual strengths and weaknesses and to design a system that they can own, they must fit in his. For those who fit, it is like milk and honey; for those who don’t, it is vinegar and acid.

The messianic manager gets rid of the bad apples by converting them into good ones. If this fails to work, bad apples are ignored until they dry up and fade away. Fairness is a weapon and his scepter.

A complex individual, often an able one, he has a passion to contribute but only on his terms. So blinding is this ambition that he will sacrifice people “for their own good,” working them beyond reason as described in Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of the Machine (1981) for a cause bigger than everyone. It is on these grounds that he requires special attention or he may go haywire.

17. The Pained Participant

The pained participant manager could be easily confused with the victim manager and the reluctant soldier manager. He has a separate place in this typology because early in his life, he discovered two things: one that he was able, and two that the world was organized against him. A tragic figure, he is like a Dante who has lost the keys to his own inferno, permanently caged in the pain of self-pity, seeing his situation as unique and his dilemma untenable. He wrestles with his confusion in dialectic all too common, which he will gladly share with you. This dialectic was the same when he was twenty as it is now when he is fifty. Life has been stacked against him because he didn’t have the right parents, the proper educational opportunities, and the breaks that everybody else seems to have. Then too, he is too old now to do anything about it, as he was too young before when he was twenty for the same reason. He is in a cage of his making with an invisible ceiling enclosed in invisible walls.

Somehow he got into management and treats his subordinates as buddies sharing with them his personal woes, which they dutifully listen to at their profit. Life, the system, the company, circumstances have all wronged him, and much as he would like, Kafkaesque, he cannot forgive them for what they do.

Remarkably, the organization is strangely tolerant of the pained participant manager’s obsessive-compulsive inclination. It chooses to ignore his masochism with a blind eye, and always at its peril for he is apt to promote passive behavior among the ranks. This may destroy the organization’s infrastructure as inconspicuously as if social termites invaded its sinews.

No matter how much the organization attempts to mitigate the pained participant manager’s anguish, this only raises the bar of his self-pity. Incredibly, the organization forgives him his transgressions but he never forgives it theirs. His anxieties plague operations. With no cure in sight, the best therapy is to allow this manager to go elsewhere to appease his long suffering soul, but no longer here.


18. The Missionary

The missionary manager, like the messianic manager, has a mission. The difference is that his mission is not that of his own making but that of the organization’s. He has made it his business to spread the gospel according to the corporate fathers to the ignorant. He does this without question or reflection. He is an acolyte and they are his knowing masters. When this mission is consistent with what is needed, everything works smoothly and he is recognized. When the mission is in conflict with what is needed, derailing momentum and causing increasing organizational tension, unlike the victim manager, he takes personal responsibility for this failing like a willing martyr and thus lets his corporate fathers off the hook. He is a believer!

A missionary manager works from the premise that human nature is fundamentally good, that people are therefore basically good but are capable of doing bad things. He sees that goodness drives his masters and this goodness will ultimately triumph. They are the light and the way and beyond the pettiness and greed of common men.

On a personal level, no one is more crushed than him when he discovers his masters have feet of clay, and do bad things such as cook the books, acquire unpaid loans, fail to report income from stock options, and so on. Remarkably, he deals with this by sticking to his principles -- that is, disembodying goodness to the greater cause -- turning a blind eye to whatever does not fit or is not consistent with these principles.

A missionary manager often has a peculiar tick. He can be driven up the wall by swearing, smoking, kidding, wearing facial hair, dressing differently, always having a cup of coffee in hand, keeping office door shut, cracking knuckles, bending company policy, whistling, doodling, disappearing for hours, or any number of other irritating behaviors, but experience little problem with the corporate greed of his masters.

His righteousness may extend to race, religion, ethnicity, politics, or ideas. He has decided what is appropriate to work and what is not. That said, some guys like to talk about sports of a morning to get their blood flowing. If the missionary manager is not into sport, this too may grind against his decorum. Chances are he has a code for everything, adopted from his masters, which has little to do with the job at hand, and much more to do with his comfort level. He is on a mission to help people help themselves to be in sync with corporate policy when they may in fact feel no such need. A holy war may evolve as the missionary manager thinks with his heart and rules with his head.

He is present in every organization with a zeal, which may or may not be appropriate. If the mission is consistent with legitimate concerns, it might best be tested at that manager’s level with his people. Success here will be its own conduit to a larger stage. On the other hand, if the mission is conflicting, it may fuel discontent and disrupt productive work.
This manager is likely to have a strong character but a narrow point of view. The mission is everything. Inconvenience, costs or possible negative impact do not matter. It is what his masters want. He is not interested in obstacles or what can’t be done. He is a man of consequence and puts a tiger in the organization’s tank. Providing that is what is needed, he is someone to reckon with.

19. The Professional

The professional manager is an oxymoron. The professional is seldom a manager albeit carrying the title. This title designation is often used to justify his entry-level pay grade and benefit package. Nor is the manager of professionals necessarily schooled in the discipline of his charges. There exists the belief in management that a professional manager, thanks to Harold Geneen of ITT (Managing 1984), can manage anything whatever the business or discipline, as management is a science. I have seen such arrogance create colossal chaos.

Take the case of the manager who downgraded a systems analyst of a high tech defense contractor because he observed he was “dogging it.”

“The guy doesn’t do a damn thing,” he complained. “Sits there at his desk mumbling all day, tapping his pencil.”

Systems analysts threatened to bolt. They demanded he be restored to full status, and even given a raise. Brouhaha followed, which revealed the offending systems analyst was actually the best problem solver in the group, and revered by his colleagues. The manager didn’t have a clue. How could he? He didn’t know what they were doing. This is not an isolated example.

The professional manager is more often than not educated in a discipline, which has little to do with managing, motivating, and mobilizing a cadre of folks in a given function. Even business school grads are more skilled in managing things than in managing people. In this increasingly technological climate chances are the professional manager picks up what skills he has in leading and developing people on the job in a one-dimensional company management-training program. Moreover, the majority of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies have technical degrees supported by MBAs, which offers little insight into this mood-driven-demanding-self-centered-mercenary system called a person.

Three things are essential to managing people: know them as individuals, treat them as individuals, and develop them as individuals.

Once the professional manager generalizes, he moves into the deep yogurt of no man’s land. To know-treat-develop people as individuals, he must understand their work. In a broader sense, this extends to the business.
Lee Iacocca was a great automobile executive because he knew and loved cars and the people that made them. He had the wisdom not to be pulled into a business he didn’t know. He is the exception.

The professional manager today spends an inordinate amount of time in a factory called a university. He comes out of this institution with a certain slant on how the world works, especially the business world, and feels that he is ordained on that basis to position power, perks and concomitant authority still with a wet nose. No entry-level salary or job for him! He feels he has spent his time in the minor leagues of industry and commerce in academia, and now is entitled. He has this romantic notion of being instantly gratified with affluence, prestige, privilege and trust without the necessity of earning any of it because he has a piece of paper that states he is qualified. Qualified for what?

Actually, for nothing, but that’s not the point. He’s made a six-figure investment in education, has delayed gratification four-to-six-to-eight years, has paid his dues, and now it is time for society to fess up!

Somewhere lost in this scenario is the importance of experience, the benefit of failure in the learning process, and how life and career are a journey, not an end. People fresh out of these academic factories come into the system to demand salaries and benefits that eclipse what people in the system spent ten, twelve or twenty years to accumulate. Small wonder there is dissension.

For many, acquiring professional credentials was a way to avoid struggle. Struggle has gone out of work, pain has taken leave, and the motivation to work has become confused. The professional manager wants a position, not a job; desires authority without concomitant accountability; and expects to be measured in terms of time spent doing rather than results. It is hard to measure work, in any case, when mainly spectator to it, or indeed worth when results are not in the equation.

Of all the monsters we have created the professional manager is the largest. In an age when much work requires basically self-management, when maturity is essential to deal with ever changing and conflicting circumstances, the professional manager epitomizes the spoiled brat generation that feeds on itself and the system. If this seems harsh, consider this when it comes to promotions: having presence is more effective than purpose; making an impression more defining than making a difference; having a winning personality more the focus than performance.

This is how the professional manager has been programmed and this is how he is apt to behave. Campaigning for the next position is a full-time job. There is no point in blaming him. We have programmed this multi-faceted and potentially capable person in learned helplessness and nonresponsibility. Many as I write are marching into middle age suspended in terminal adolescence waiting for their golden parachute.


Summary and Conclusion

My typology is not definitive or all-inclusive. It is not even, dare I admit it, scientific. So, you may discount it entirely, of course, I believe at your peril. What I have seen in nearly four decades of working at all levels of organization, here and abroad, as a working drone, executive, consultant and graduate school educator are all grist for my mill, and I sense within the bounds of many of your own experiences.

You may take issue with many of my ideal type descriptions, but my bet is that you have had more than a passing acquaintance with most of them.

Our institutions are failing across the globe, and such failures are always human if also circumstantial. The fact that scandals and failures grow grosser is evidence only that we have a problem. Nothing else. It is not a morality issue. It is a contextual problem. Obviously, people are failing and this is the reason for the typology.

A typology has the ability to describe perhaps better than any other way the humanness of this failure. If you see more failure than successful ideal types here, it is because I have encountered more.

I must confess that I have struggled for clarity in seven books and scores of articles to describe these crumbling walls within workplaces without defining an architectural scheme to eradicate the problem. I am confident that more gifted carpenters of the mind will put their craft to work on such a new design. I don’t apologize for this deficiency, but simply state it, as I cannot divine what will replace CEOs or presidents or pontiffs, but believe they will be modified if not committed to history in due course. Why? Because leaders of extant institutions no longer know how to lead and have never learned how to follow. Their eyes are guided by history, not vision, by what they know, not what they can find out, by what has worked before, not what is failing now, by a sense of power, not a sense of people.

Circumstances, mainly brought on by the technological explosion, are forcing a reevaluation of “leadership.” I suggested more than a decade ago that work could be conducted much better without managers (Work Without Managers 1990); that performance appraisal was a sham, a costly time consuming ritual without substantive results, and that the total quality movement was an expediency driven by a crisis management. Time has not changed my mind.

Little real change is realized when you superimpose a methodology, exquisite as it may be, on a faulty foundation. The Malcolm Baldridge Award for Quality, for example, does not change institutional behavior any more than quality control circles have changed individual motivation. The fat still comes back in both cases.

Leadership discussions assume everyone is talking about the same thing. I don’t think they are. Leadership is often personified in a charismatic leader (President Kennedy), a central figure (Pope John Paul II), or a person that sits at the top of the organization (CEO). It can be called “service leadership” or “competent leadership,” or whatever but leadership invariably is reduced to an individual at the helm. I find this too narrow a perspective. For one, I don’t think charisma is relevant, if it ever was. Nor do I think leadership is personified in a central figure. I believe leadership is far more universal, pervasive, organic and encompassing. Put another way, everyone is a leader or no one is!
* * * * *
Dr. Fisher’s books and ideas are on other places on the Internet, including his website: www.peripateticphilosopher.com