#041 Leadership BS 💩
Hello,
Welcome to The Future Of Leadership, an approximately monthly newsletter packed full of leadership wisdom for CEOs and senior technology executives.
My virtual bookshelf was the most clicked link in last month's newsletter. Here I keep a record of all the books I've read, categorised into six buckets of practical worldly wisdom: numeracy, human nature, history, natural science, business and second-level thinking.
What I'm reading
A recurring theme in coaching conversations is clients lamenting the fact that, despite reading so many of the popular leadership books and following the gurus advice, they don't feel like they're becoming better leaders, just more confused ones. After exploring why they think this is, I share my own take:
Firstly, these gurus and their books can be helpful in the earlier stages of our leadership journey. They help us to develop our explicit knowledge of leadership, and provide us with inspiration and foundational themes.
However, we reach a certain point in our journey when the complexities of leading go beyond any single genre of book genre and their big ideas. At this point, it's up to us to weave together our own more intricate leadership style and approach. The answer is not out there, it's inside us and we must find it (a coach can help).
But there is a second, more pernicous problem with many of the popular leadership gurus, which is the wild disconnect between the approaches to leadership that they prescribe and reality on the ground.
According to Stanford Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, too much of the thinking on leadership has become a sort of morality tale, based on an idealised notion of what these self-styled experts would like leadership to be and, I'd suggest in some cases, based on what they know we would like leadership to be and are willing to pay to read about in order to have our hopes confirmed. Just give us the cosy narratives and platitudes that we're wired to want to hear!
Inspired by another conversation with a client on this topic last week, and a LinkedIn post that I shared which got a lot of traffic, I picked up Pfeffer's book Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces & Careers One Truth at a Time again. It is one of my favourite leadership books!
"To be sure, these days there are many fabulously fantastic people with exceptional credentials and ethics working mightily to improve organizational workplaces and leaders' careers. But the leadership industry also has its share of quacks and sham artists who sell promises and stories, some true, some not, but all of them inspirational and comfortable, with not much follow-up to see what really does work and what doesn't... The way leadership gurus try to demonstrate their legitimacy is not through their scientific knowledge or accomplishments but rather by achieving public notoriety - be it the requisite TED talks, blog posts, Twitter followers, or books filled with leadership advice that might or might not be valid and useful".
What I shared with clients this month
Are you feeling let down by the leadership gurus? Getting beyond the BS of Leadership Literature - "This consuming interest in leadership and how to make it better has spawned a plethora of books, blogs, TED talks, and commentary. Unfortunately, these materials are often wonderfully disconnected from organisational reality and, as a consequence, useless for sparking improvement... Part of this discrepancy - between the prescriptions of the vast leadership industry and the data on what actually produces career success - stems from the oft-unacknowledged tendency to confuse what people believe ought to be true with what actually is. And underlying that is an associated confirmation bias: the tendency to see, and remember, what you’re motivated to believe".
The Signs of a Good CEO - "Of course, most readers aren’t CEOs because only an infinitesimal percentage of businesspeople are CEOs. But everyone should aspire personally to be more like a good CEO. Plus, if you are considering investing your time and/or your cash behind a CEO, I recommend you evaluate the CEO against these five easily observable characteristics - and invest, or not, accordingly".
If you're struggling with busyness, then pair with my own popular article 8 Executive Time Management Techniques (based on real CEO coaching conversations).
A final (apolitical) thought
The gurus will have us believe that leaders must have the ability to inspire trust, be authentic, tell the truth, serve others, be humble, modest and self-effacing, show empathy and emotional intelligence, amongst other seemingly sensible nostrums.
In 8 days time the votes will have been cast in the US Presidential election. Whatever the outcome, it will be an interesting reflection on the state of leadership at the highest level. Are all those characteristics listed above truly leadership prerequisites? Or, is reality far less idealistic? How does power, money, hierarchy, perception (and deception) come into play? I'm not taking a position, nor am I suggesting we shouldn't strive for a better system. But I do wonder whether we need to be more pragmatic in how we think about balancing leadership effectiveness and moral virtues? It's certainly something I give a lot thought to when working with senior executives.
Until next month,
