Leaderless Leadership Redux - or - The more things change the more they remain the same!

Leaderless Leadership Redux

Or

The more things change the more they remain the same!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 2005

Redux: returning, to lead back, brought back, used postpositively.

For the past fifteen years, or since publishing Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (1990), I have been bombarding your psyches with the common theme of leaderless leadership. You have responded from your work cells and cages encouraging me to go on. Meanwhile, leaderless leaders in virtually every discipline and field in our culture has been directing us towards where it thought we should go, not where we wanted to go, thus defining the term.

Not to be dismayed. I see encouraging signs on the horizons in postpositive ways. I will share some of them with you now. Later, I will outline some of the absurdities that seem to cling to our leaders, and therefore to us as well holding us back from making any sensible progress in real time.

The irony of this redux is displayed in excessive ceremony in lieu of action. We see this in the death of a pope and the election of a new pope, and the nonevent of the marriage of a prince of Great Britain.

Millions of Roman Catholics have left the church during Pope John Paul II's long pontificate, and tens of millions are likely to leave the church during the expected short reign of Pope Benedict XVI, who for his rigid doctrinaire dogmatism has been nicknamed "God's Rottweiler."

The new pope "does not fear the future" as he plans to take the church where he wants it to go not where the laity in this postmodern world may need it to go to support their fragile spiritual spine.

The aging Prince Charles of England, heir to a throne that has no power, only pomp and circumstance, is largely a product and captive to ancient ritual and tradition.

The Roman Catholic Church and the British Monarchy are mirror images of a feudalism that refuses to go away, refusing to allow the shackles of the past to be cut from the ankles of the future. This would be mere comedy if it weren't taken so seriously.

In this media age, leaderless leadership has been on display since World War Two, and in an increasingly intrusive manner. It is changing because it is wearing thin. We see this as the anointed God like pontiffs of the major television networks are weaning themselves of the God like figures of Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, Ted Koppel, and David Jennings.

These voices of God, as Maureen Dowd puts it, are like old deities just fading away. Walter Cronkite, at the apogee of this televised Godness, was once described as "the most trusted man in America," and yet what did he do? He read the news. These other Godheads became ubiquitous globetrotters to make the news, and of course, we took their histrionics at face value as being as it should be.

In this postpositive climate, we don't read newspapers for information. We read them to see who died, who won (sports), the comics, the crossword, our horoscope, and the latest murders in the community. Rupert Murdoch's USA Today was way ahead of the curve in making the newspaper an entertainment.

Television network news has become background noise while we eat our evening meal. Quiz a score of people after dinner and chances are not one of them will remember what was presented. These electronic God like figures from above no longer matter. They still look pretty, speak pretty, and smile pretty, but that is likely all we remember is their prettiness.

The last to get the postpositive or redux message of leaderless leadership are the places where we work and where we worship.

My focus over the past fifteen years in countless books and articles has been on how ridiculous that pattern has been.

To wit: to imagine that CEOs, and their management teams are actually responsible for a company's success, or that a person in tribal garb has answers to the Almighty that aren't available more directly. Often the success of a company is despite rather than because of its management.

Likewise, spiritual essence is more often realized by finding the God within while not being limited by the people of the cloth without.

As my Beautiful Betty says, I have repeated the same theme ad infinitum and it is wearing thin on her. I accept the charge. Those of you who read me may feel the same way.

I will tell you this as I told her, I will let up when my cry in the wilderness is finally heard, and I think the echo in the wind has picked it up, and maybe that will be soon.

While the media is moving away from God figures, the patriarchal, authoritarian voice of God figures is still apparent in the "captains of industry," and in the church, and even in the government.

It is as if once we elect a pope, elevate a CEO, or elect a president or congressman, our job as followers is no longer to lead, when in fact that is when our leadership commences.

Some seem to be finding this function in this leaderless leadership redux, and not a moment too soon. I see this in people who take charge of their lives, base their judgment on experience, show a tolerance for others, filter the propaganda of their company, community, church, and country, and stand on their own two feet, come what may.

We once treated our family doctor as a God figure and notice how that image has faded. We once looked up to our parents as God like figures. Even in my youth, we looked up to older guys to teach us the ropes because we believed in them, trusted them, respected them, and admired them. There was a God like quality to this as well. That, too, has faded.

There was a time when a man's word was as good as his bond. No longer. We are a litigious society in which few of us trust ourselves much less each other. There is a Godless emptiness to this as well.

Just when I feel a modest reassurance that we are on our way to maturity, a book comes out that resonates with leaderless leadership and not with its redux. I am speaking of a book by resident scholars at the American Enterprise Institute. The book is One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture is Eroding Self-Reliance (2005) by Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel.

Those of you that read me know that I deplore self-help books, and that I am a devotee of Ralph Waldo Emerson's definition of self-reliance: "the best lightning-rod for your protection is your own spine."

These authors indicate how our therapeutic culture expands our spinelessness by psychobabble terminology: a receptionist is now a "director of first impressions"; a secretary is "an administrative assistant"; a school bus driver is a "transporter of learners"; and so on.

We now have self-esteem educators, grief counselors, traumatologists, sensitivity trainers; and feeling experts. Games have been invented for children in which nobody wins or loses. Children are programmed to vent their feelings at all cost because anxiety, stress, or discomfort is now considered harmful to their delicate psyches. Teachers, coaches, and counselors are programmed to emphasize what children are doing right, and to ignore what they are doing wrong because criticism may prove distressing.


Self-esteem psychology is the rage being based on the premise if you tell a child enough times that it is wonderful, talented, bright and able, it will eventually follow that these attributes will be manifested. There is absolutely no evidence this is true, but quite the reverse. Esteem comes from accomplishment, not accomplishment from being esteemed. Self-image psychology notwithstanding, esteem comes from practice, practice, practice of whatever.

There is even an effort to engage in sensitivity screening of textbooks, no-fault history books, reinforcing case studies, and masking natural phenomena so that children are not spooked with reality.

Early this past week, I attended a third grade class presentation of Spanish historical events. My granddaughter, Rachel, was Queen Isabella of Spain, the queen who financed the voyage of Christopher Columbus and his three ships to America in 1492.

Rachel prepared well, her mother purchased an authentic costume of the times for her daughter, but being only a third grader, she was quite nervous, and it showed. When her performance was completed, her teacher asked for positive feedback, not comments, but positive comments. A little girl said, "Rachel kept looking down at her cue cards as she talked, and this distracted me. I couldn't always hear what she was saying."

The teacher immediately reminded the class, "I said positive feedback. That is not a positive comment." For several moments, no one said a thing. Finally, someone did, pointing out the interesting information, and the organization of the material. I wondered what might have been if the teacher had not interjected herself in the discussion.

Later, I asked Rachel about this. She said she didn't like the criticism. "I don't like to be criticized at all," she admitted. Then I asked her if she thought the criticism was appropriate. "Yes," she confessed, "but I still didn't like it." I said no more. It was inconceivable to imagine myself as a third grader making any presentation, much less a comprehensive one like Rachel's.

In the vacuum of leaderless leadership, we have had an army of grief gurus, behavior and self-centered apologists, stress free life stylists, and all kinds of pseudo-religionists to move us away from the basic moorings of our society: self-direction, self-management, self-acceptance, self-reliance, stoicism, and courage.

At the same time, the pusillanimity of God like leadership is apparent. Cynicism is rising with the feint glimmer of hope that we are moving through this care giving mania to taking hold by taking charge. We are not yet there. The cafeteria menu of leadership is still in place. It is a fast food menu, and is losing its appeal as it has little spiritual nutritional value. An army may run on its stomach as Napoleon insisted, but society runs on its soul.

The Peripatetic Philosopher
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.