A different way to understand leadership and management

Yesterday I read Chris Rodgers’ latest post on ‘10 much-needed shifts in the way we think and talk about leadership’.

This, in my opinion, is a great post, one that deserves to become a classic, an exceptional part of the process of changing the way we commonly think and talk about leadership.

I was lucky enough to hear Chris run through his arguments at a meeting at the Centre for Progressive Leadership hosted by LMU on Wednesday last week. It was a stand-out part of the evening for me, and led to a stimulating conversation amongst the participants.

The ubiquitous but flawed ‘well-ordered, fully aligned view of organization and management practice, with its unfailingly positive results’ is, of course, a way we ‘frame’ our understanding of leadership.

Framing, as I am sure everyone knows, is about the sometimes unconscious, sometimes conscious, assumptions we make about a subject.

Chris points to several negative results of this kind of framing. And how, dangerously, this framing reinforces itself:

"it inevitably distorts the ways in which they [leaders] account formally for their actions. The resulting reports then serve to reinforce the assumptions of scientific rationality, predictability, and control on which the popular rhetoric – if not the reality - of organizational management and leadership practice is based. And so the fantasy continues."

I think this framing of leader as rational hero is really unhelpful. But what does it mean for the world beyond ‘leadership thought’? For the public at large, for society?

It means we continue to fail to properly address the significant, ‘wicked’ problems of our time. We live in a fantasy in which many of us believe (to reverse Einstein’s position) that we can solve our problems - environmental destruction, poverty, war etc - with the same thinking we used when we created them.

Many of us believe the same kind of leadership that got us into our current situation will get us out.

And, if we don’t believe that, then we become cynical, and give up, framing it all as ‘impossible’. Nothing can be done, nor should it be.

To counter both positions, Chris does a brilliant job, in his ten propositions, of outlining these assumptions and how we might re-frame our thinking. For example, in a reframing:

“It would be recognized that managers (like everyone else) act into a continuously emerging and unknowable future, in which they don’t have all of the answers. Sometimes they don’t have any. The search for, and expectancy of, certainty and predictability would have been replaced by the valuing and practice of curiosity. That is, there would be a preference for leading through questions, and acceptance of the inevitability of ‘not knowing’.”

This is something very close to my heart. Curiosity, questioning, and enquiry, for me, offer a different way of acting and being in the world, a way that can give us strength in the face of uncertainty and complexity.

Chris Argyris and Donald Schon in their Model I, Model II theory point to the importance (in Model I) of suppressing emotion, and appearing rational. They suggest that many people will avoid not knowing and the uncertainty it produces at all costs. For me, enquiry offers a way to face that uncertainty.

But I recommend you read the piece carefully and consider each re-framing separately. There is much wisdom to consider in each.

Ending the piece, Chris invites us to form a coalition of support around these themes. That’s a coalition I’d very much like to join. What about you?