Zombie leadership: Dead ideas that still walk among us

A really interesting read about ‘zombie leadership’ ideas.

Not a full summary, so check out the paper.

Zombie ideas are a “residual commitment to an older set of ideas which have been repeatedly debunked but which nevertheless resolutely refuse to die”, taken from zombie economics. They apply this to leadership.

They say that zombie ideas are “particularly prevalent in this field precisely because the stakes are so high” and “if you control the narrative of leadership you control one of the principal engines through which power and privilege are understood and reproduced”.

Leadership ideas that are “hard to kill” are those that simplify “knotty social process”, while legitimising privileges of social elites. E.g., per their words “a complex of self-aggrandizing personal coaching, expensive development programs, and glossy business magazines”

?Before moving onto the zombie leadership axioms, they discuss three mechanisms – what they call the “Hollywood narrative of leadership:

·???????? The narrative assumes that masses of people are incapable of looking after themselves without a leader at the top of a hierarchy

·???????? It implies that “leaders deserve their exalted position because they are special individuals who have distinctive qualities that set them apart from the masses”

·???????? It attributes success of a group to the actions of the leader and “marginalizing other group members”

Zombie leadership is said to constitute “a powerful cocktail of ideas that removes the masses from the running of society, legitimates the prevailing social hierarchy, and provides those in positions of power with a justification for their sense of superiority that is at the same time both comfortable and comforting”.

They cover some foundational points of leadership. One is that leadership at the most basic level is not a solo process, but by necessity grounded in relationships and connections. E.g. You must have followers in order to lead.

They say the “ultimate proof of leadership is not what leaders are like or do but what their followers do”. Likewise, there is no leadership without followership.

Because leadership is a social process, it’s more about getting people to “want to do things than about making them do them”.

They also discuss the role of power, noting that leadership is less about power over followers and more about power through them.

Because followership requires some acceptance of the leader’s definition of reality, it is ultimately a group process and about collectives, not just individuals.

Problematically, “Zombie leadership contrives to get all these things wrong. In the first instance, it does so by reducing leadership to the leader alone”. Zombie leadership also paints leaders as “solitary heroes who single-handedly drive history-making group success”.

In doing so, it “reduces group members to mere groupies who idolize the leader for doing what they cannot do for themselves”.

The axioms are presented in the image below – I’m only going to pick out a few points from the paper in this summary.

AXIOMS

People are often more attuned to and affected by the leadership of their immediate supervisors than they are to distant but more senior ‘leaders’, or as they say, ‘the leaders’.

One study found across sports athletes that when asked who was doing the leadership in their teams, they generally indicated leadership activities less by formal leaders and more by “rank-and-file team members who had taken on informal leadership roles”.

They say that these findings contrast zombie leadership fads that “routinely singles out high-profile leaders for attention and valorization”.

Moreover, and again quoting the paper, there is a “tendency to lionize and fetishize leaders”, creating a hubris syndrome. Leaders can be caught up in this syndrome and “leadership trap”, where group success is overly credited to leaders rather than to the followers. This can feed “the ego and narcissism of leaders but dishearten followers and thereby undermine group success”.

Another axiom relates to the principle that leaders are born, not made; or similarly, leaders have qualities that non-leaders don’t. On this they observe “there is probably no positive ability or quality that has not been linked to effective leadership at some point or another”.

They also point out research on the social characteristics of leadership, and how it can often lay more in the perceptions of followers than as specific qualities of the leader. They say that “the fact that being assassinated — or simply being dead (Steffens et al., 2017; Van Dick et al., 2019) — is a powerful predictor of a leader’s charisma and perceived greatness alerts us to the fact that what leaders ‘are like’ will sometimes not matter at all”.

Another axiom relates to charging into large change programs, leading the pack. Instead they say leadership is as much as stable phenomena as it is about change – like resolving conflicts, bolstering morale, reproducing culture, ethics and more.

They say that the aura of a champion of change also frequently ignores failure.

In any case, they argue that it “remains impossible to reduce leadership success to a simple ‘to do’ list because group context is critical”. Hence, there is a risk of focusing too much on the leader—who they are, what they do—and failing to recognise the significant impact of the followers.

They also challenge an idea that even if leadership isn’t always grand, then surely it’s always good? (Outside of instances of toxic or psychotic leaders etc). They disagree – leadership, as in discrete heroic hierarchical leaders isn’t always necessary and won’t always lead to better outcomes.

Moreover, they say a “voluminous literature” highlights that different forms of collective and distributed leadership, where the leader role is shared, can also lead to high performance.

They provide some ways to defeat zombie leadership:

I’ve skipped heaps, so recommend checking out the full paper. It’s a top read.

Haslam, S. A., Alvesson, M., & Reicher, S. D. (2024). Zombie leadership: Dead ideas that still walk among us. The Leadership Quarterly, 101770.