Kellerman - The end of leadership

The
END
of
LEADERSHIP

BARBARA KELLERMAN

For Kenneth Dana Greenwald and Thomas Dana Greenwald.

Circling back, full circle, center of the circle.

Change or die.

Claudian

Change is inevitableexcept from a vending machine.

Robert C. Gallagher

Contents

I make my living in leadership. I have written and edited more than a dozen books on the subject. I have taught leadership at the graduate and undergraduate levels for over thirty years. And I have led or been part of various leadership centers, institutes, and associations. Why then write a book that bites the hand that feeds me? Why take on a profession in which I myself am deeply entrenched? Why pick a fight with many if not most of my colleaguesothers who, like me, till this soil, some of whom are good friends and acquaintances?

The reason is that Im uneasy, increasingly so, about leadership in the twenty-first century and the gap between the teaching of leadership and the practice of leadership. Moreover, Im downright queasy about what I call the leadership industrymy catchall term for the now countless leadership centers, institutes, programs, courses, seminars, workshops, experiences, trainers, books, blogs, articles, websites, webinars, videos, conferences, consultants, and coaches claiming to teach peopleusually for moneyhow to lead.

Being a leader has become a mantra. It is a presumed path to money and power; a medium for achievement, both individual and institutional; and a mechanism for creating change sometimesthough hardly alwaysfor the common good.

But there are other, parallel truths: that leaders of every sort are in disrepute; that the tireless teaching of leadership has brought us no closer to leadership nirvana than we were previously; that we dont have much better an idea of how to grow good leaders, or of how to stop or at least slow bad leaders, than we did a hundred or even a thousand years ago; that the context is changing in ways leaders seem unwilling or unable fully to grasp; that followers are becoming on the one hand disappointed and disillusioned, and on the other entitled, emboldened, and empowered; and, lastly, that notwithstanding the enormous sums of money and time that have been poured into trying to teach people how to lead, over its roughly forty-year history the leadership industry has not in any major, meaningful, measurable way improved the human condition.

I wish I could say that these truths are a matter of only minor importanceof interest only to those of us who make a living from leadership, or to those who pay to learn how to lead. But they are not. I am describing a bigger problema gnawing, growing, chronic problem that threatens the fabric of life in the twenty-first century, that undermines whatever the arrangements have been between leaders and followers, and that imposes disorder on a world requiring a modicum of order. Put directly, the leadership industry is much less than meets the eye. For whatever the industrys small, generally narrow successes, humankind writ large is suffering from a crisis of confidence in those who are charged with leading wisely and well, and from a surfeit of mostly well-intentioned but finally false promises made by those supposed to make things better.

None of this is to say that the leadership industry is without merit altogether. Nor is it to say that everyone who purports to teach how to lead is somehow flawed, or that everyone who purports to have learned how to lead is somehow misguided. Rather it is to insist there is a problemone that is impossible to address without acknowledging it even exists.

Bottom line: while the leadership industry has been thrivinggrowing and prospering beyond anyones early imaginingsleaders by and large are performing poorly, worse in many ways than before, miserably disappointing in any case to those among us who once believed the experts held the keys to the kingdom.

Change

Everything is vulnerable to the vicissitudes of changea general rule to which leadership is no exception. The institution of marriage, of all things, provides an interesting comparison. In mid-eighteenth-century England, a womans property and children belonged to her husband. Divorce was impossible and, if a wife dared leave home and hearth, she had to leave her children in the process. Moreover, marital rape was perfectly legal and probably frequentthough in 1782 a law finally was passed that forbade a husband to beat his wife with a stick wider than his thumb.

A hundred years later, marriage was different, but only slightly. In 1848, at the Seneca Falls Convention, Elizabeth Cady Stanton charged that marital abuse still remained the norm. She claimed the history of mankind was a history of repeated injuries... on the part of man toward woman.... He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.... She is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master.

By the mid-twentieth century, marriage had changed yet again, particularly in the United States. By then Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique , the so-called bible of the modern womens movement, was able to address a different sort of problem altogether. In fact, her genius was to reveal a truth hiding in plain sight: that though there was nothing obvious for them to be unhappy about, many married women were, nevertheless, deeply unhappy, feeling stifled rather than liberated.

Now, of course, another fifty years on, the institution of marriage has changed yet again. There are further permutations, such as gay marriage, and in its traditional form wives are relatively stronger and husbands relatively weaker. Roughly half of all American marriages end in divorce, and children are more likely to stay with their mothers, not their fathers. Moreover, given that more than 40 percent of children are born to single mothers, and that some 70 percent of mothers now earn their own money, the institution of marriage is considered by many to be more elective than mandatory. In other words, in the last 150 years or so, American marriage has evolved from an arrangement in which wives were subservient to one in which they are nearly, mostly, the equal of their husbands.

Between husbands and wives, and leaders and followers, there is a single striking similarity: patterns of dominance and difference are radically different now from what they were even one hundred years ago, at least in the West. Humankind has always been organized on the assumption that some are weaker while others are stronger. Between men and women, it was presumed until only recently that husbands would, and should, dominate, while wives would, and should, defer. But as historian Stephanie Coontz points out, marriage now is different. It is expected to be free of the coercion, violence, and gender inequities that in the past were commonplace. Along similar lines, between leaders and followers it was presumed until only recently that leaders should dominate and followers defer. Leaders were generally expected to tell followers what to do, and followers were generally expected to do as they were told. No longer. Now followers, like wives, are far sturdier than they used to be, stronger and more independent. Moreover, now, ideally anyway, leaders are supposed to suggest or recommend that their followers follow, not order them to do so.

Lets go back to the late eighteenth century, to that time of upheaval when the ideas of the Enlightenment were beginning to be realized. Patterns of dominance and deference were changing in marriage and, simultaneously, they were changing in the body politic. The two most obvious examples are the American Revolution and the French Revolution. Both were transformational events in which followers came to the fore, while leaders came under attack. In Europe and America, lifepolitical, economic, and socialwas never again the same.