Here a leader, there a leader, everywhere a leader-leader

Managers seem to have become an endangered species.  Everywhere I look, leaders are ascendant – or so I’m told.  And yet my many years of practice and research tell me something different.

This is not just an academic issue, a tempest in a teapot.  Rampant “leader language“ has significant practical ramifications.  Words and language matter.  We create our social reality through language, and this in turn shapes our thoughts, behaviours and actions.  For example, “fake news” isn’t a benign phrase – its constant use has had profound societal impact. As George Orwell commented in his essay Politics and the English Language, “This invasion of one’s mind by readymade phrases … can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.” (1945/2013: 16).

And so with “leadership”.

I conducted extensive empirical research, both experimental and qualitative, on the leadership phenomenon as the focus of my PhD in Management Sciences.  It surprisingly became evident to me that most work and writing on leadership, both scholarly and popular, is actually about managerial effectiveness, and not about leadership or, in particular, about understanding leadership emergence, i.e., why someone shows up as a leader in the first place.

What my research confirmed is that leaders engage, align and mobilize people by meaningfully challenging, or meaningfully resisting challenges to, the status quo, and accumulate and wield non-coercive power in the process.  This non-coercive power is conferred on leaders by those who follow (“from below”). 

In contrast, managers have coercive power conferred on them institutionally (“from above”), and are not paid to overthrow the status quo nor to tamper with the system stabilizers that maintain organizational equilibrium.  They are accountable for continuous improvement but, as organizational scientist Elliott Jaques brilliantly articulated, managerial work (and all work, for that matter) is “the exercise of judgment and discretion to arrive at decisions to execute tasks, within parameters” (emphasis added).  In fact, organizations are designed with powerful automatic stabilizers to suppress tampering too much with the system or status quo, i.e., they’re designed to suppress leadership emergence.

In Jaques’ view, “The managerial role has three critical features. First, and most critical, every manager must be held accountable not only for the work of subordinates but also for adding value to their work. Second, every manager must be held accountable for sustaining a team of subordinates capable of doing this work. Third, every manager must be held accountable for setting direction and getting subordinates to follow willingly, indeed enthusiastically.” (Jaques, 1990, 1996, emphasis added)

The reason good managers may be perceived to be leading is because they acquire personal authority (beyond the positional authority institutionally conferred on them) by demonstrating technical and behavioral competence in their work over time; so they acquire one dimension that characterizes the leadership phenomenon – staff follow willingly.  And to staff in a properly stratified managerial structure who are not operating at their manager’s level of complexity, it will appear that the manager is able to restore and stabilize the status quo when moderately disturbed or incrementally adjust it as needed.  But from the perspective of the manager’s manager, and from my perspective as a consultant, the manager is just effectively performing their managerial work, executing in concert with the established system with the anointed authority to do so. It’s not leadership.

Managerial effectiveness is certainly important: if managers are effective in their roles, their staff may respond well and perform as desired without the need to use much coercive positional power, thereby tending to diminish the oversight load on a manager as well as increasing staff commitment and engagement. 

But  managerial effectiveness is not the leadership essence that individuals seem to more fundamentally seek and respond to in many situations.  People perceive the difference between managers and leaders.  My research confirms this.  Managers can also be leaders but, to repeat, organizational systems militate against leadership emergence.

So there’s a big difference between the nature of managerial and leadership relationships.  Organizations can declare who is a manager, confer authority on them,  and declare who reports to whom.  But they can’t declare who is a leader – it’s presumptuous at best, and demeaning at worst to those who are then deemed followers. 

Since leaders engage, align and mobilize others through meaningful challenge or resistance, and in so doing earn non-coercive power, perception of leadership is often laden with values and connotations. It’s deemed good, desirable, virtuous, deserving of respect and loyalty, even heroic, and implicitly is followed voluntarily.  Managers, by contrast, with their coercive power to hire and fire, assign, monitor and adjust tasks, assess staff performance, and so on, operate within a somewhat less attractive social relationship characterized by formal authority with associated consequences to staff for violations of directions, and without the accolades afforded leaders.

No doubt use of the term leader in organizations is largely well-intentioned. People are motivated by titles and descriptors; being labeled a leader or declaring others to be is likely an organization’s attempt to energize individuals in their work by elevating their status and importance.  But it also creates a desirable aura about those in charge, suppressing the coercive dimension and implying a gentler relationship with staff.  We have a tendency as well to attribute desirable outcomes to leaders, rather than understanding that outcomes are a function of individual effort in conjunction with the situation and system within which that individual is operating.  Success in organizational work is not generally due to singular effort (nor is failure) – it’s more complex than that.  For these reasons, there is no justification in propagating misleading language that mischaracterizes managerial relationships and power dynamics and is thus misleading to staff (and managers).

If there’s a mismatch between who staff are being told are leaders and actual leadership, then staff will experience dissonance and executive credibility and trust will be undermined. And it’s actually unfair as well to managers capably doing their managerial work to ascribe the moniker “leader” when that’s generally not what they are, thereby setting them up for failed expectations in the eyes of their staff. While some managers might feel good about the description, others might actually feel uncomfortable. This isn’t a recipe for individual motivation and commitment, and associated organizational high performance and effectiveness. It’s okay to be a manager and to be called a manager – in fact, much more than okay. The managerial role should be highly valued. The manager-direct report relationship is the linchpin relationship in an organization.

It follows that organizations might want to reflect on declaring their executive groups to be “leadership” teams.  The right to confer that title is the purview of those who report to them, if they perceive it to be warranted.  In declaring themselves or others to be leaders, executives are attempting to construct a social reality that they want others to subscribe to, intentionally or not.  But that may not be what is perceived and, regardless, is not theirs to declare. It’s akin to George Orwell’s “newspeak” in his novel 1984: declaring “War is Peace”, “Freedom is Slavery”, “Ignorance is Strength” doesn’t necessarily make it so, despite the intent. Nor does “executives are leaders” or “management is leadership”.  Again, staff don’t choose their managers, but they do decide who is a leader.

Leadership is not attributable to a role or to a person; it emerges depending on the situation and the individual(s).  Leaders disrupt systems and the status quo, or sometimes preserve them through disruptions, and show up in myriad fields of endeavour.  And usually they aren’t managers - think Nelson Mandela in prison, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Tom Brady, Winston Churchill at the outset of WW2, and others.  We sometimes need managers to be leaders, depending on the situation, but this is not routinely required.

But we definitely need managers in organizations.  Management is critically important - management matters - and the managerial role should not be diminished and subsumed by all this “leader lingo”.  

I would suggest that we have a paucity of good management and a surfeit of ostensible leadership.  Instead, management should be returned to its deserved status and be up to snuff in practice in organizations.  Leader lingo should be diminished and leadership should be invoked as needed, which is likely much less frequently than it’s currently being summoned in organizational settings.

So cool the leadership lingo and elevate management back to where it justly belongs.  To paraphrase US 5-star general and later President Dwight Eisenhower, beware and resist the “leadership-industrial complex” perpetuating the damaging fiction conflating management with leadership.