Posted by Thomas ScarboroughLeadership today is in acute crisis. According to psychologist Harry Levinson in the Harvard Business Review, the signs of trouble began around 1980 in the USA. This coincides with the rise of a theory of leadership called transformational leadership, which is trusted and applied by countless leaders. Does the problem lie in the theory?
Bloomsbury columnist Max Nisen, in Business Insider, describes leadership burnout today as a ‘huge problem’. 96% of senior leaders feel ‘somewhat burned out’, while a third describe the problem as ‘extreme’. Psychologist Kevin Fleming writes: ‘The numbers are absolutely staggering.’ The problem has been
exported, too – at least, there has been a lag before it has reached other shores.
There are costs and collateral damage to match. According to Forbes, businesses in the USA lose nearly $40 billion every year through absenteeism among professionals, executives, and managers – far in excess of any other occupations. Mental stress and fatigue affect not only the leader, but the company.
Several years ago, I submitted a proposal to a major seminary, to investigate the problem in a 150-page postgraduate thesis.
The damage to leaders was approximately known. It was known, too, that most put their trust in
transformational leadership theory. But statistics which might reflect on the causes of the trouble were virtually non-existent. There were not so much as credible definitions of transformational leadership – and without definitions there is nowhere to begin. Existing definitions seemed more like slogans for the movement.
I chose to use a semantic critique – and this proved to be a powerful tool. I applied it to about five-thousand pages of leadership texts. My first task, then, was to identify the core concepts of the texts. From these, I isolated and developed a fresh definition of transformational leadership (which may go by various names, including connective leadership, servant leadership, and ternary leadership).
Then I listed ‘oppositions’ of the core concepts. Oppositions are something like ‘opposites’. They help us, among other things, to find
subtexts. Did the authors' writing cohere, or did their texts reveal subtexts – namely, oppositions which subverted what they said?
It might seem an absurd idea – to look for evidence that authors contradict their own selves. However, it proved to be very fruitful. I was later awarded a distinction for the research, which was a testimony to the power of the method.
Out of five or six core concepts of transformational leadership theory, ‘influence’ is arguably the highest on the list. Leadership consultant John Maxwell epitomises this with the mantra: ‘Leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less.’ This is too simplistic, yet it captures the core of it. Other concepts are
subsidiary to influence, among them character, persuasiveness, and strategy.
The core question was whether there were ‘oppositions’ which showed that influence was rejected, defeated, weakened, and so on. Indeed there were. To sustain one’s leadership influence, one needed (quote) ‘more than sacrifice and suffering’, ‘courage of the highest order’, and a ‘Herculean effort’, among other things. Hercules, needless to say, was a demigod. There were ‘countless discouraged leaders’, and ‘low expectation and hope’. One author wrote, ‘Lord have mercy!’
The leadership authors seemed to have a perverse drive to tell the truth, even if it was only in a single line. Those single lines torpedoed whole chapters of text. The subtext, although one finds it only in snippets, reveals that all told, the core concepts do not work. Every transformational leadership text, without exception, fundamentally subverted itself.
On the surface of it ‘influence’, with its attendant concepts, would seem to be a felicitous approach to leadership. In reality it is not. It can only seem felicitous as long as one admires it in isolation. Oppositions of resistance, discouragement, acquiescence, failure, and many more, lie in wait at every corner, and slowly destroy the leader.
This is not a small finding. One is dealing with the dominant theory of leadership in the West.
But the purpose here is not merely to summarise a situation. It is to drive deeper, philosophically. The very fact that there are oppositions in the leadership texts gives the problem away. We are not thinking holistically today. We are thinking one-sidedly, or dichotomously. We have developed a one-sided leadership metaphysic, while a powerful subtext has been largely expunged from the texts.
It surely has to do with the times. We have been trained to think in partial ways. We no longer think expansively. In physics, wrote the philosophers Wilhelm Kamlah and Paul Lorenzen, we investigate processes ‘by progressively screening things out.’ While one might justifiably think this way in physics, we now find it all over. It reaches all our concepts, including leadership. We are in bondage to dichotomies today, writes psychologist Ellyn Kaschak, in Psychology Today.
Some put the troubles of leadership down to work load, inadequate coping skills, a lack of preventative mechanisms, an increasing rate of change, and so on. Under my own leadership, in an assignment, a Canadian intern Peter Nighswander put it like this: symptomatic treatment of leadership burnout is not without use, yet it seems that we need to be ‘questioning the system that is producing these results ’.
The alternative to a one-sided or dichotomous view is obviously a
holistic one. Many proposed solutions point to the need, not merely for holism, but for deeply holistic thinking.
The scattered solutions, when one surveys them together today, are both broad and complementary. Proposals for a more
participative leadership promise to reconcile the leader with the led. Proposals for more adequate recuperation promise to reconcile the leader-as-leader with the leader-as-person. Calculations of total losses to business promise to reconcile the fate of the company with the fate of its leaders. A reduction of stresses
external to the workplace promise to heal not only the leader but society.
All such proposals may be characterised as the introduction of a more holistic thinking. This is the
philosophy of it. We need to develop a
holistic picture, then apply it. We cannot afford any more to lean on one-sided or dichotomous concepts based on a misplaced trust in the text.
