LEADERSHIP REDUX -- JULY 2007

LEADERSHIP REDUX -- JULY 2007

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© July 2007

“Where is a leader when you want one?”

“He is at your mind’s door waiting to be invited in.”


I was eating my lunch today and tuned into PBS's Charlie Rose show. He was interviewing some young man who is an "expert" on leadership. I didn't get his name because I didn't stay with the program long.

Rose asked him what constituted a great executive and he spieled off something about a CEO that walked through his shop with a pad and pencil taking down observations and comments.

I lived through that phase. I also lived through the phase where the CEO would have a worldwide television hookup, and "talk to the troops" in the manner of a pontiff with well rehearsed remarks and many smiles.

I lived through off sights and training seminars where "experts" and HR professionals would take a group through this or that fad-of-the-moment. One of the longest such engagements was Quality Control Circles, which was a good idea, but for the wrong audience and the wrong time with very mixed results.

If it were the 1945-1955 period, it would have been a colossal idea, but it was launched in the 1980s when the workforce had changed the color of its color from blue to white, and 80 to 90 percent of a company’s employees were in the process of getting a higher education degree or already degreed, often in technical fields.

This, mind you, was before the computer took over and the personal became even more impersonal.

It isn't only people like Dan Brown who have successfully chased myths and made bundles for the trouble. Brown is famous for the de Vinci Code, but Tom Peters is equally famous for "a search for excellence" fame. Most of the companies he profiled, however, have crashed and burned or have been absorbed by hedge funds, split up and sold for huge profits. No leadership in this equation.

Leadership cannot be found in what a CEO did or didn't do, nor can excellence be searched for like a pony in a haystack.

Leadership has always been about people, not persons; and excellence is something you create, not something you search for.

You only have to look at the mess the federal government has made in attempting to manage the unmanageable with the broad umbrella of "Homeland Security," or the military trying to solve ancient political and tribal problems with military might, alone. Indeed, when you think things can't get worse, they do.

So, what is the answer?

The answer has been staring us in the face forever.

People are the key, not markets, not global economies, but people.

People are the leaders of what they do. They need the training, support, trust, consistency in policy and fairness in promotion and discipline to make them feel in charge of their work and therefore in charge of and responsible for the results.

Well, you’ve heard all that before so tell me something new?

The new is that people are the key, and this is simply an introduction to what lies behind that door. But before we turn the lock, we need to examine some detritus.

It all went haywire when children were all awarded is school and play equally for unequal performance. Fairness is a brutal concept.

When I was a freshman in college, there were about 3,000 of us. A little more than a third of those that started with me graduated with me. Many flunked out. In those days, students couldn't take the course over to change their grade. They had to live with their failure, and move on.

Today hardly anyone fails at anything and therefore few actually succeed in a real sense. They cope. They hang in there to retirement, or they become hardened and bitter and recalcitrant.

I'm not just talking about working stiffs on the line and in administration. I'm talking about CEOs that fail again and again, but never suffer for their failure, because, you see, there is this old boys' club that doesn't want to strangle the golden goose.

While people are writing books on leadership, and always thinking of it in terms of persons in the singular and not people in the plural, a false economy moves higher and higher on imported cheap goods and tighter and tighter bottom lines that only impact the people in the plural, not persons in the singular, not the CEOs, not the so-called "leaders."

We don't have leaders. We have pontiffs. And pontiffs are always attempting to solidify their power, confident that tradition will support them, while accepting collateral damage such as redundancy, merging, streamlining, and whatever new nomenclature is invented to cover their failure as the price of doing business.

I am heading for Europe, which is a microcosm of the US in about every way, and is apparently caving in to the same detritus. Take the Roman Catholic Church of Rome.

We don't have enough trouble with Islam, but Pope Benedict XVI has taken this moment to claim the primacy of Catholicism. He now is driving a wedge between Catholics and Protestants and Jews that Pope John XXIII attempted to repair with the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s.

Pope Benedict is even going further by bringing back the Latin Mass to the enthusiastic approval of such conservatives as Patrick Buchanan, who incidentally once ran for president of the US.

In the more than seven decades of my life, leaders of the church and state and business have played quick and dirty with my conscience and loyalty, and I am not alone. Science has done the same by saying "we should do this" and then later say "we shouldn't," as they float in the same surreal world of their collective hubris.

People in the plural are caught in this quagmire.

There is a syndicated voice, a man named David Brooks, who seems to sees this with engaging clarity. He writes a syndicated column from his New York Times desk, and can be seen weekly on the "News Hour with Jim Leherer" on PBS television.

Today's column wasn't about leaders, but people in the plural, specifically young women and their music. He mentioned three songs and how these songs depict modern women in terms of dissonance and disconnection. He writes:

“This character is hard-boiled, foul-mouthed, fed-up, emotionally self-sufficient and unforgiving. She’s like one of those battle-hardened combat vets, who’s had the sentimentality beaten out of her and who no longer has time for romance or etiquette.

“This character is obviously a product of the cold-eyed age of divorce and hookups. It’s also a product of the free-floating anger that’s part of the climate of the decade.”

He continues, “Once, young people came a-calling as part of courtship. Then they had dating and going steady. But the rules of courtship have dissolved. They’ve been replaced by ambiguity and uncertainty. Cell phones, Facebook and text messages give people access to hundreds of ‘friends.’ That only increases the fluidity, drama and anxiety.”

I mention this column and these remarks in this context because these young people are the litmus test of our society. It has gravitated to this, and it won’t change by declaring the primacy of a faith, or bringing back a Latin Mass. Nor will it change by celebrating the achievements of a few who have led businesses to profitabilty, often under suspect clouds.

Society, and the people that make up society are being punished by their leaders for not behaving instead of the leaders attempting to understand how things have gotten out of hand.

People need intimacy, need to belong, need to feel they are part of something bigger than themselves. They need to love in order to be loving. They need to trust themselves and often the reason they distrust themselves so badly is because of misplaced trust in their leadership.

If it sounds as if I have a harangue against the Roman Catholic Church, I would be misread. My soul has been cauterized by this faith, and I have come to accept that its programming, discipline, and continuity are as much apart of my writing as my spirit. I mention this only to gauge the context of this content. It is because of my church that I’ve always been fascinated with leadership.

Leadership, I have found, does not know itself because it projects the ideal of being rational, cognitive, disciplined and temperate, when all the transitions from stuckness to unstuckness have come when the temperate spirit was let loose into a fire in the mind. Martin Luther comes to mind in that sense. He would not be happy with Pope Benedict.

____________

Dr. Fisher’s latest book is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007). Check with the publisher for more information: http://www.authorhouse.com/