What's gone wrong with leadership?

Who thinks leadership is great right now?

Not employees – less than a quarter are fully engaged at work, number one desired improvement is leadership. Not investors – global productivity continues to stagnate, and the Bank of England’s Chief Economist Andy Haldane has pointed out how poor leadership and management has created a long tail of business underperformance. Not leaders themselves – fewer than 1 in 7 think they have mastered the crucial elements of effective leadership, and overall confidence in leadership is at its lowest level since the financial crash. As for trust in leadership at the political level, well…

A lot of considerations of leadership effectiveness have focused on structural, contextual and behavioural explanations for what has gone wrong since the 1990s. But as I reflect not just on the research, but on my experience working with leaders (and sometimes being a leader) over that period, I find myself noticing something else entirely: the way leaders think about leadership in their hearts – which I think is what others mean by leadership mindsets.

Let's take a 5-minute look at these different ideas, to find out why leadership has lost its way in the 21st century:

Theory 1: If Only Business Took Leadership Seriously!

I get that leadership development is too rare – only 1 in 5 leaders get any – and often less than effective – meta-analyses have found much if not most development programmes achieve zero to negative impact in terms of leadership effectiveness. I also get that leaders are often rated based on irrelevant criteria (confidence is usually rated the #1 leadership attribute despite having zero correlation with results) or outright discrimination (women leaders are systemically under-rated, even when compared to clearly lower-performing men).

But I also notice that throughout the period where leadership and productivity have slumped, there has been much more attention paid to leadership in and around businesses. Most leaders when I started work in the 1990s would have looked at me blankly if I had asked them about emotional intelligence, servant leadership, adaptive planning, psychological safety, systemic change, or anything really that was not couched in heavily military terminology. Leadership evaluation was mostly of the I-know-it-when-I-see-it variety. Today’s leaders have their behaviours rated and ranked, they are awash with leadership theories and styles…

…and yet they preside over organisations where productivity has stagnated and their employees are overwhelmingly disgruntled and unmotivated.

Something else is going on: could it be context?

Theory 2: Leadership Today Is So Hard!

This explanation I am sure a lot of leaders can relate to. We have just been through a once-in-a-century pandemic, younger workers are more demanding and more diverse in their needs than previous cohorts, remote and hybrid working have created distance between leaders and their organisations and require new leadership & management approaches, social media means every mis-speak and mis-take is publicly and rapidly circulated by emotionally-manipulative algorithms, and jobs have become more complex and higher-skilled, requiring more complex and higher-skilled leadership. Oh, and all that talk about leadership excellence has raised the bar in terms of expectations – Gallup depressingly suggest that only 1 in 10 of us has even the baseline capabilities to be an effective leader. No wonder leaders are underperforming – they have been set an impossible task.

I admit, this isn’t the easiest time to be in charge. Organisations today operate in rapidly changing and increasingly unpredictable and challenging circumstances, and that insecurity makes people up their demands of leaders. But it is also true that the impact of this demanding leadership context is far from universal –global productivity has stagnated not because every organisation is failing to become more efficient but because the gap between the few top productive and the long tail of unproductive organisations has widened, dragging down the average. Some leaders are causing their organisations to thrive, even in these challenging circumstances, but most are not.

What are the effective leaders doing that the ineffective leaders are not?

Theory 3: Leaders Are Doing Leadership Wrong!

A lot of the leadership development I criticised in a previous article is predicated on the belief that leaders don’t know what effective leadership looks like. To remedy this, leaders are offered new behavioural models, accompanied by plans focused on specific leadership competencies: thinking strategically, prioritising effectively, inspiring and motivating people, taking timely decisions and overseeing efficient operations and so on. So long as the behaviours are based on those that effective leaders consistently demonstrate, and the models align with the replicable parts of I/O psychology, leadership effectiveness should result.

Only problem is: this does not work.

Somewhere between the coaching room and the workplace, things get complicated. The techniques don’t quite come together. People respond in unexpected ways. Leaders are left confused, exhausted and frustrated. It feels like they are performing rather than doing, and nobody is buying tickets.

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Theory 4: Leaders Have Adopted Unhelpful Mindsets

It’s easy to be cynical about mindsets: you can’t immediately see them on the surface, you can’t apply KPIs or put them in a development plan. But we all recognise how someone’s perspective and assumptions about the world influence what they think, say and do. And when someone’s mindset shifts, we acknowledge the results in far more than just their behaviours – we feel differently when we deal with them.

Like most things about people, there is no hard ranking of leadership mindsets. But there are mindsets that in general hamper leadership effectiveness. Here are three I have had the misfortune to encounter, and which have consistently led to poor personal and organisational results:

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The Heroic Mindset

Too many leaders think of leadership as a hero’s journey – a story that is all about them as an individual confronting challenges, learning, taking grand actions and getting rewarded - leadership as a blockbuster movie.

In real life, leaders get their results through catalysing other people’s efforts and achievements – what matters is their journey, not yours. Leaders stuck in the individual hero mindset often fail to take the time to understand and appreciate colleagues and their insights, micro-manage when they should delegate, withdraw effort when they feel personally slighted, and exhaust themselves with misdirected overwork and under-collaboration.

They can also come over as pompous and more than a bit annoying.

Kryptonite for the heroic mindset?? Encouraging that leader to get curious about and engaged with how the team and organisation around her work – what are others’ aspirations, triumphs, challenges, learnings – in the hope that she will realise her leadership is something much bigger than her, and will expand her focus and with that increase her effectiveness.

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The Technical Mindset

Another set of underperforming leaders see leadership as a mechanical puzzle – with jobs collapsing into tasks, people into productive units of skills and time, organisational systems into process flows and cost/profit centres.

The problem with this delusion is that it is inevitably punctured by human behaviour: employees who resist being treated as a fungible resource, customers who divert from the planned user journeys, colleagues who withhold their discretionary contributions and complain of a lack of emotional intelligence in and connection with their leader.

A debugging of the technical mindset? Encouraging an interest in psychology, social as well as individual – evidence of how much more powerful perceptions are than any tangible facts, analysis of how these human factors can be measured and supported, exploration of what matters to people, and how they work best together – so she can discover herself in others and others in herself, and grow into a real, not a paint-by-numbers, leader.

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The Harmony Mindset

Then there are leaders who think their job is to reduce friction. They claim that they are prioritising psychological safety, minimising dissent and dissatisfaction, accommodating diversity, focusing on strengths, increasing collaboration and commitment.

In reality, they are crushing innovation and kneecapping quality, driving debate underground and replacing engagement with performative farce. Often these leaders find conflict very challenging personally, and react to threats by avoidance and displacement. Like all the delusional mindset holders, they often feel terribly isolated.

A change of key for the harmony mindset? Exploring psychological safety – the science of creating a context for rich and productive debate and innovation. Examples, deliberate and frequent practice, the support of colleagues in maintaining the courage and warmth to have the conversations that matter, until one day the leader wakes up to how challenge and security best go together, not as opposites.

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The good news

Mindsets can be changed, and the work of changing them is no different to the kind of real purpose and values work I talked about here . Increasingly, I think the hardest thing about changing them is committing to seeing the work through. If leaders only lift their heads above the cacophony of the short term and do that work, they and the organisations they lead will thrive.