The end of Leadership

In recent years ‘leadership’ has become a boom industry in management circles, resulting in a deluge of programmes, books, seminars and gurus. Everybody aspires to be a leader these days, it seems. Do a google search on ‘leadership’ and it will return 270,000,000 entries. Yes, that's right, a mind-boggling two hundred and seventy million web pages that cater to this demand. By my reckoning, that is one entry per twenty four people on the earth. (Based on a global population of 6,530,000,000 in August 2006).

But what about the followers? Searching ‘followership’ on google gives a mere 210,000 entries. If we use the respective numbers of pages as an indication of the appetite to lead or follow, that results in an equally astonishing one follower for every 1,286 would-be leaders! Surely something’s got to be wrong here? If everybody wants to be a chief, who’s going to be the indians? And that, to my mind, is the really noteworthy thing about this. Not the desire to be in control, respected, directing things. But the collapse of any interest in being led.

We can see this in the whole phenomenon of celebrity. Vast amounts of attention is given by the world's media to various kinds of ‘celebrities’, most of whom, frankly, are non-entities. People are interested in them not because they believe in them, admire them, are prepared to take their stand behind them, but because they want what the celebrities have got. We don’t want our celebrities put on a pedestal, like the heroes of yesteryear (Scott of the Antarctic, Lawrence of Arabia, Florence Nightingale), out of reach of our prosaic aspirations. We wan't them pulled down to our level, or below. Revealed to be rude, lying, coke-snorting love-rats. It's the same, albeit in a blander grey-suited kind of way, with the leadership circus.

So what’s happening with human beings? Actually, something very interesting and extremely positive. We are coming quite rapidly to a point in our cultural evolution where the influence of external sources of authority is collapsing. The idea that who we are is what other people tell us – our ‘elders and betters’ – is running out of steam. Increasingly who we are is who we define ourselves to be. It’s a gesture that comes from the inside out, rather than from the outside in (as has been the case through most of human history).

In fact this process started many centuries ago and has merely been accelerating in recent decades. We can easily trace it as far back as the Protestand Reformation in Europe, where the central issue was the right to define one’s beliefs for oneself, privately and – most importantly – according to one’s own conscience. That word conscience, although it seems a little quaint and old-fashioned today, is the key here. Because what it really means is not a narrowly conditioned moral sense, a feeling of ‘must’ and ‘ought’ and ‘should’ (which are always the internalised voices of external parental figures) but the expression of something beyond this, of who we really are as unique individuals.

The Reformation was only one of the first stirrings of this, though. When we look back, we see the early Protestants as still fixated on authority and conformity – although this is clearly not how they saw themselves. But religious reform quickly led into political reform, witnessed by the three great revolutions of the Western world (where most of these developments have first taken place): the English, the American and the French. These first mooted the ideas of political self-determination, that people were equal and that they had the right to shape their own affairs. Again, though, it has taken years to shake off the hedges and assumptions that originally accompanied these changes: to recognise, for instance, that women had as much right to a place in the national polity as men or that the franchise belonged as much to uneducated labourers as to the property owning classes.

The revolutions of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries extended this idea of the ‘freedom of conscience’ first into the workplace (with the organisation of labour) and eventually into the home (with the women’s movement). But this has often been seen, frequently in Marxist terms, as a purely political development (as the famous feminist slogan ‘the personal is the political’ indicates). The two big changes at the end of the twentieth century, the empowerment of consumers and the freedom of information (particularly through the Internet), are thus not usually recognised as being part of the same evolutionary process.

All of these developments, however, have had the effect of increasingly transferring the locus of power and authority from others to ourselves. Even within the family, we’ve witnessed a huge shift in the relationship between parents and children: within living memory parents have gone from being patriarchs and matriarchs, whose word was law, to a kind of big sister/big brother armed at best with the ability to persuade. Looking ahead, it’s not difficult to forsee a time when the kinds of radical educational experiments carried out by A.S. Neill and Homer Lane, where children take control of the running of their school, become mainstream thinking. We’re not quite ready for that yet, but it may only be a couple of decades away.

It can be hard to recognise quite how much, or how fast, we have changed. But look back to the 1950s and it is clear that then most people’s beliefs, attitudes and expectations depended crucially on those around them: their parents, their teachers, their peers and the society at large. To challenge the environment one grew up in was still a rare – and hugely consequential – act. The forces that kept behaviour in check: disapproval and shame, were still potent. Compare that with the situation now, where we routinely reinvent ourselves and where few people feel any obligation to follow the tastes or beliefs even of their friends, let alone of their parents. These days we challenge our doctors, break the law when we feel it shouldn’t apply to us and laugh at those who assume they can tell us what to do. ‘Do you know who I am!’ ‘Am I bothered?’

And this is the bald fact about ‘Leadership’: there are no followers any more, nobody who wants to be led. Only those of us who, through inertia or low self esteem, don’t feel able to take control of our own lives, of our own destinies. Leadership sells because we all feel able to be in the driving seat, but the only people we are going to be driving are ourselves. And this is where the Leadership industry needs to recognise what is happening and change direction – from teaching some kind of updated Public School vision of the ‘Jolly Good Chap’ to showing people how to lead themselves. Of course, this requires an understanding of which part of us should be leading (which is another subject altogether).

In the world we are rapidly entering, working with others will be a quite different proposition from what it used to be. Some of us have already tasted this and can share our experiences with those who haven’t. Basically, it means understanding how to work together: the lively harmony of jazz musicians jamming, not the formal ‘command and control’ of conductor and orchestra. It means learning to recognise how others’ strengths complement ours, and how we complement them. And how to offset our weaknesses against each other.

Professor Arthur Deikman called this new paradigm ‘the eye level world’ (in his book The Wrong Way Home). At the end of the book he gives this particularly beautiful and poignant description:

‘The eye-level world is the perspective that arises when the parents in the sky disappear and their images superimposed on other people dissolve and vanish. As you look around, no one towers above you, everyone looks back at the same human height. Although the parents are gone, the landscape is not threatening, it spreads out in all directions, inviting exploration. It is open and calm, in contrast to the world of childhood fears.

‘The child fears that the disappearance of parents would release anarchy, hatred, and destruction because in the parents’ world the child knows no power, no control that is not imposed. In the eye-level world freedom is of a different kind, more responsible than ever before because the choices are your own, they are uncoerced and unbribed. “Free will is the experience of being the author of the law you obey.” This world is different from that shaped by the dependency dream.

‘Although we have no parents in the eye-level world, when we face each other we find companions. We share the same need for meaning, the same intimations of transcendence, the certainty of death, the saving joy of love. We can sense a new connection, a linking of equals that makes all of us one family, yet individuals. Only in the eye-level world do we emerge as ourselves, true to our own perceptions and strengths, able to respond realistically to the world that surrounds us.’