Leadership for the Disillusioned: Moving Beyond Myths and Heroes to Leading That Liberates
240
Leadership for the Disillusioned: Moving Beyond Myths and Heroes to Leading That Liberates
240eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781741761184 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin Pty., Limited |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2008 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 961 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Leadership for the Disillusioned
Moving Beyond Myths and Heroes to Leading That Liberates
By Amanda Sinclair
Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2007 Amanda SinclairAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74176-118-4
CHAPTER 1
The seduction of leadership
Leadership is a serious sign of social pathology ... that induces massive learned helplessness among members of a social system
Gary Gemmill and Judith Oakley (1992)
In early 2006, Jeff Skilling and the late Ken Lay, the leaders of the giant corporation Enron, stood trial in what promised to be one of the most keenly watched cases of corporate leadership failure. In a few years, they had gone from being hailed in Fortune magazine as 'one of the deepest and most innovative management teams in the world' to being disgraced as corporate leaders. Both found guilty of fraud and deception, they were facing combined jail terms in the hundreds of years. A few months later, Lay died suddenly of a heart attack.
In the late 1990s, Enron was regarded as the model company of the future. It was an energy company that was supremely profitable, despite not owning much in the way of power stations or gas plants. How it actually made profits was a bit of a mystery, but few felt confident to question its financial practices or novel accounting techniques. Investors loved it, and the largest and most powerful American financial institutions — including regulators and accounting firms — were gullible to its charms, fawning in their admiration.
The Enron leaders were treated like prophets. Ken Lay, the chairman, and Jeff Skilling, the CEO, featured on the front covers of business magazines, attracting widespread admiration for their audacity in refusing to be bound by old ways of thinking in the energy industry. They were portrayed as crashing through to change the rules of the energy game forever, as the young Elvis in his gold lamé suit had done in the music industry.
Lay and Skilling held court at prestigious American business schools, honing leadership performances that seduced their audiences and themselves. They gathered around them groups of followers, including politicians, analysts, bankers and regulators — all dazzled by the conjuring up of massive profits without the nuisance of maintaining much in the way of energy infrastructure. Videos of meetings addressed by the two leaders show captivated audiences. Articles in the business press praised them as 'audacious' and 'brilliant', while esteemed academics such as Christopher Bartlett at Harvard wrote case studies about what could be learned from Enron's leadership and the way the firm went about its business.
The more the press salivated, the more Skilling and Lay basked and colluded in this spiral of adulation: they were 'the smartest guys in the room', leading the sleepy energy industry into the future. Their accountants, Arthur Andersen, lawyers and regulators were all collusive in approving practices that were subsequently shown to be highly deceptive, if not fraudulent. Alan Greenspan, then Chairman of the Federal Reserve, received an Enron award at a gala ceremony. With a few exceptions, brokers and analysts did not probe the lack of transparent balance sheets, and those who did promptly found themselves out of a job. Critics were scorned, dismissed as having 'Enron envy'.
It was not until several years of Enron's spectacular success had passed that a couple of individuals started asking questions. A relatively new employee of Enron, Sherron Watkins, began expressing concerns about methods of accounting. Bethany McLean, a young journalist with Fortune magazine, undertook some basic analysis of Enron's balance sheets and simply could not make sense of them. When she and her editor met with Skilling and other Enron executives, their concerns were not appeased. McLean went ahead and wrote her article, suggesting that Enron stock might be overpriced. It was not incidental that these two early whistleblowers were women and newcomers, outside the cult of adoration that had developed around Enron. While others feared to ask questions that challenged powerful opinion-shapers, neither of these women had quite as much to lose. Meanwhile, many of the smartest, most senior and most influential members of America's political, corporate and financial elites had been seduced.
I argue throughout this book that leadership is often accomplished through this sort of collusive seduction, which can become so powerful as to forestall any criticism. This chapter explores how and why seduction happens, drawing on further examples to show the aesthetic, political and psychodynamic reasons why we surrender to leaders and how they come to believe their own mystique. Recognition of these mechanisms and dynamics is the first step in understanding how it is that bad leadership can prevail — how leaders self-inflate as followers surrender. We need to address these dynamics squarely in order to begin to release ourselves from them. As Peter Gronn has warned, 'the exploitation of heroic leader prototypes impedes meaningful public engagement with the complexities of political and social reality'.
HOW LEADERSHIP SEDUCES
The Enron story, along with many others that I could have selected as examples, shows a common pattern in leadership. This pattern has been likened to falling in love. Here, I describe it as seduction.
What do I mean by seduction? To seduce is to lead astray. The words 'seduction' and 'leadership' have common origins. The Latin root of seduction is se ducere, and ducere means leadership. Mussolini was known as Il Duce. In the fifteenth century, 'to seduce' meant to divert from allegiance or service. By the sixteenth century, the usage was more specifically gendered, meaning to induce a woman to surrender her chastity. While seduction was initially a word denoting a process whereby men seduced other men from their earlier loyalty, later women became the objects of seduction, persuaded to yield their chastity. In modern usage, it is women who are more likely to be described as seductive — as alluring and enticing — and, in contemporary use, men are rarely portrayed as seducible by other men.
When I have talked about the seduction of leadership with audiences — particularly male-dominated ones — there is an uneasy moving in seats. The idea of men being seduced, and moreover men being seduced by other men, is confronting at a number of levels: it can offend a prized sense of autonomy and judgment, among other things. However, the same audiences recognise the features of seductive leadership described above. A common response is to protest: 'Yes, but seduction isn't necessarily a bad thing.' Seduction can, of course, be an enjoyable process. But I suggest here that, just as we now recognise the 'groupthink' mentality which can create illusions of invincibility and undermine good decision-making, by looking in more depth at the seductive potential in leadership, we are able to make finer judgments about when seduction is harmless and when it is dangerous. At what point and under what circumstances, for example, do followers suspend critical faculties or abdicate responsibility?
The seductive process commences when leadership is located in one person, who is seen by audiences and followers as 'above other men'. It is not surprising that this happens in Western societies, which tend to be individualistic, and where CEOs are encouraged by big pay packets to think that they are responsible for an organisation's fortunes. Despite little empirical evidence to support the formula that leaders determine organisational success, the cult of the CEO is rarely questioned.
That leader then starts to enjoy the benefits of being seen as super human. An inflated persona is constructed, with legends and myths developing around it. These leaders are celebrated in the business press, and their views and presence are sought to grace all sorts of occasions. Some are asked to sit on government and advisory panels, and thus accumulate significant political power. Myths of physical virility and invincibility develop around some leaders, and have been shamelessly cultivated by the likes of Mussolini and more recently former Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi.
Under these circumstances, such leaders start to believe themselves to be so great that they are outside the constraints applicable to 'ordinary' people. This leader starts to believe that his 'visions' are unquestionably deserving, and therefore can legitimately come to serve for others as well as himself. A range of narcissistic, ego-inflated, sometimes neurotic and psychopathic behaviours can develop. LaBier, for example, notes how irrationality and psychopathology can be highly adaptive in the workplace — for example, in financial institutions where reputations depend on big financial deals, there are in-built incentives to inflate and deceive when stating amounts transacted. Similarly, in the United States, corporate leader 'Chainsaw' Al Dunlap was celebrated in the 1990s for his sadistic capacities to 'execute' (the word is important) radical downsizing in the corporations he headed. His management style was welcomed as bringing a necessary discipline; meanwhile, he adopted humiliating tactics of escorting people from workplaces without notice. Dunlap met an ignominious demise when it was found that he added little to the value of companies, but not before he had been feted for his toughness — including by the late Australian media boss Kerry Packer.
In understanding how such leaders are swept along on a tide of narcissism and self-aggrandisement, personal backgrounds are often significant. Look carefully into the early years of some and you find difficult childhoods, producing a consuming determination to remake themselves, to rewrite their own history, and so forge a new and more successful identity. Many political leaders, including Tony Blair and John Howard, endured difficult early years — often characterised by rejection. As I explore in Chapter 4 on the importance of personal biography, the earlier self is often being denied as the leader reconstructs a more potent and irresistible self-identity.
For male leaders, the remaking of identity often becomes bound up with the establishment of a heroic, death-defying masculinity. Enron's Jeff Skilling, for example, organised adventurous treks of dirt-bike riding for himself and his senior colleagues. These feats are recorded on video, and the mythology around them permeated Enron, installing these leaders as physical heroes as well as intellectual ones. Themes of conquest and manly appetites are often implicated in the reconstructed persona of the leader.
For their part, followers often fall prey to the conviction, charisma or promise that the leader holds out. Under the spell of this mystique, followers — including managers, employees and even senior stakeholders such as directors and regulators — suspend their critical faculties and become compliant to the leader's wishes and the dictates of the culture. This pattern of behaviour has been widely documented in cases of ethical contravention and moral failure in companies. Examples range from the indictment for obstructing justice of giant accounting and consulting firm Arthur Andersen, for shredding evidence about its advice to Enron, to the case of Shell in Nigeria, where the assurances of leaders and organisational reputation silenced — at least for a time — evidence of environmental damage and political corruption. It is not uncommon to find otherwise smart and well-educated people surrendering their doubts to the certainty of leaders. Highly regarded individuals sat on the Enron board. Caught up in leadership's aura of success, perhaps they felt like they too could do no wrong.
When people set off looking for more leadership — individuals, groups, organisations and nations — what is going on? History and public policy research suggest that calls for leadership are heard most often when anxiety and apprehensiveness about the future are pervasive, and when the problems facing a group require a radical shift in approach. People in such situations are seeking a leader who can relieve a group from its stresses. At some level, they may be looking for a 'father figure', a god or saviour to lift them out of their suffering or insecurity. This yearning for leadership is all the more powerful because it is usually unconscious or repressed. Leaders and followers collude in the imagining of leadership as heroic feats that will fix problems and usher in a new era. These practices are seductive because they release individuals from the work of leading themselves, from taking responsibility for thinking through difficult problems and for critical decision-making. Heifetz and Laurie describe the dilemma in the following terms:
We call for someone with answers, decision, strength, and a map of the future: someone who knows where we ought to be going — in short someone who can make hard problems simple. Instead of looking for saviours we should be looking for leadership that summons us to face the problems for which there are no simple, painless solutions — the challenges that require us to work in new ways.
STEVE VIZARD AND DOUBLE SEDUCTION
In 2005, on the other side of the world from Enron, another story of leadership seduction was being played out. Steve Vizard, a young Australian lawyer turned media entrepreneur, was fashioning an identity for himself as a new breed of corporate entrepreneur. He was funny, winning, and quickly earning public roles as diverse as a director of Telstra (the largest Australian phone company) and chairman of the Art Gallery of Victoria. Vizard was adored by ordinary Australians because, as a highly successful television comedian, he had himself poked fun at establishment figures. He was the perfect leader for an Australian culture wary of 'tall poppies'. Tall, extroverted and widely regarded as charismatic, he was a lovable larrikin of a man who had also managed to become a multi-millionaire through his media and entertainment interests.
He accrued prodigious personal wealth, but was also seen as a philanthropist, committed to giving something back to local Melbourne and Australian communities. With his interests in diverse business activities, including creating and selling his own television and film productions, he was also a devoted family man, winning the award for Australian Father of the Year in 2002.
Vizard rapidly accumulated a lot of political, business and public support. Politicians begged him to lend his profile to good causes, major events and fundraising initiatives. This spiral of social and professional influence was supplemented by family connections, especially in judicial and media circles. Vizard was described by David Elias in an article in The Age as 'the man who knew everyone'. A former associate told Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) regulators that Vizard seemed a born leader: 'his sheer physical appearance ... you can't help but see him ... he stands out ... has a terrific ability as a comedian, a commanding presence and an endearing personality'.
Yet, during 2005, Vizard became embroiled in a scandal that saw him publicly humiliated, provoking his resignation from many of his board and leadership positions, and an absence from Australia of several months. Some thought his crimes deserved jail. This inglorious unravelling of Vizard's leadership began in December 2000 when he had a dispute with his former bookkeeper, Roy Hilliard, and pursued a search warrant to freeze Hilliard's assets. Hilliard had charged that his former employer, Vizard, had asked him to do 'unlawful things', and had engaged in tax evasion and insider trading. What began as a trial against Hilliard became a searching examination of Vizard, his business and his character.
Among many things that emerged from the case was that Vizard had been given leeway and the benefit of the doubt by his bankers, Westpac, and by Victoria Police. Authorisations had not been checked. On allegations of tax evasion and insider trading, investigating police officers had said they accepted the celebrity's version of events as a 'reasonable assertion'. Vizard was in danger of having criminal proceedings brought against him, but his accountant refused to sign a witness statement and that case collapsed. Vizard had denied under oath that he was involved in insider trading and tax evasion, opening the possibility of perjury charges.
In the end, Steve Vizard escaped major proceedings. He apologised for one case of insider trading, was fined $390 000 and banned for ten years from acting as a director. Subsequent proceedings against Hilliard in which Vizard was called to testify redeemed none of the players in this corporate drama: Hilliard briefly went missing and Vizard stonewalled, claiming poor recollection. But the lessons, for our purposes, are less about the extent of Vizard's culpability and more about how this story of a fallen hero shows seduction at a number of levels — how members of the establishment, the media and even the police were so beguiled by his image and charisma that they failed to notice flaws or follow up on normal checks. His networks 'protected' Vizard from the normal surveillance and inspection that would apply to less-applauded individuals, processes that perhaps would have been in his own interests as a check to his tendency to grandiosity. The case proved to some that, as one commentator put it, 'having money, mates and power puts you above justice and decency'.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Leadership for the Disillusioned by Amanda Sinclair. Copyright © 2007 Amanda Sinclair. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Table, figure and images,Acknowledgments,
Introduction: Leadership for liberation,
PART I WHAT'S WRONG WITH LEADERSHIP?,
1 The seduction of leadership,
2 What's wrong with ideas about leadership?,
3 Teaching and learning about leadership,
PART II PRACTICES OF LIBERATING LEADERSHIP,
4 Going back,
5 Working with power,
6 Bringing bodies into leadership,
7 Breath and mindfulness,
PART III GOING DEEPER,
8 The identity work of leadership,
9 Leading with spirit,
10 Less-ego leadership,
Epilogue,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,