Leadership as a topic in business became popular in the 1980s. It was not enough, however. James Burns distinguishes transformational leadership from the mere transactional leadership in his book, Leadership. Servant leadership raised the ethical bar by applying the ethical model of Jesus in the Gospels to leadership in business. Leadership vision quickly became a buzz word, as was charismatic leadership. All of these renderings can be interpreted as business trying to escape its mundane terms for a loftier enterprise in which ideals are more salient or applicable. As valuable as efficiency is, it is difficult to get excited about it. The problem is that many (or some) leadership consultants on social media have gotten too caught up on their utopian platitudes that leadership becomes a mere subterfuge. Certainly the utopian ideologies do not define leadership or are attributes of it, and yet the "coaches" claim that platitudes are necessary to leadership. In other words, I contend that leadership gurus, or "coaches" (a mis-applied analogy that wrongly dismisses the word "consultant" as too boring), had by 2023 taken to social media to project whatever utopian ideology they value onto leadership. The term has become too vague as a consequence. In fact, the concept of leadership became a near synonym for goodness in human relations and excellence in terms of virtue ethics. As a result, the concept approaches being a tautology whose actual meaning has been rendered vacuous from the a projection of so many subjective, utopian ideologies. Relative to such lofty remakes of leadership, management has become almost a dirty word—certainly not as flashy as visionary leadership. In actuality, the "coaches" are evangelical ideologues.
I contend that what a CEO says in representing one’s organization to the wider society and characterizing what the business stands for to the employees as a whole is distinct functionally from what a department manager does in coordinating worker schedules, ordering new product and supplies, and “doing the numbers” for accounting purposes. Vision does not apply to both levels; neither does charisma.
In his book, Charismatic Leadership: The Skills You Can Learn to Motivate High Performance in Others, Kevin Murray dismisses the definition of charisma with disdain. In the book's description paragraphs on Amazon, he writes that charisma is not "widely-applauded magnetism or shallow charm." Apparently, leaders such as Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy, Gandhi and admittedly even Hitler did not have charisma. Murray presumes furthermore to redefine charisma, which literally means gifts of the spirit, as a skill applicable to mundane supervision. Never mind that Ronald Reagan, who had loads of charisma, was terrible in supervising subordinates in the White House; he trusted too much in delegation. From sacred origins, charisma has in Murray's book fallen to a banal skill in business. Spirit and skill represent the sacred and the profane; they are antipodal, as in the spirit of the law versus skill in observing the law.
Transformational and visionary leadership go with charismatic leadership; charisma has no place in the transactional language of management. One need only consult Max Weber's theory of bureaucracy to understand that charisma and administration are like oil and water.
Indeed, leadership as a phenomenon is distinct from
management. To sketch the latter as the former is intellectually dishonest,
even if done to motivate managers. In 1893, the University of Chicago’s law
school renamed the undergraduate, for first, law degree, which at the time was
the LLB (Bachelors in the Letters of Law), as the Juris Doctor even though a
first degree (3 or 4 years) in a field of knowledge does not a doctorate make. Similarly,
preaching that a department head in a Target retail store is a visionary leader
does nothing to change the manager’s job description and actual tasks. Vision
does not apply to coordinating worker schedules and keeping inventory. Nor does
charisma. Rather, politeness should apply, as the mundane daily tasks of
managing and working in a business characterized by specialization of labor can
get boring. Hence the appeal of a leadership guru on the sidelines, who
preaches—and it is preaching—that leadership is never giving up, being all one
can be, overcoming adversity, looking at solutions rather than problems (yeah,
right), being positive (as if negatives are not a part of human existence), and,
of course, “success!”
Well, Hitler never gave up. He
nearly wiped out European Jewry in being all that he could be. He overcame the
adversity of the Communists by exterminating them. He turned his attention to
the final solution rather than stayed fixated on problems. He was positive
about the future of the Aryan “race,” and thus of a Jew-free and Communist-free
Germany. He was successful in getting Germany out of the Great Depression by
rearming the country, and freeing it of the shackles of the humiliating treaty
that ended World War I. He had charisma; even his enemies admitted that. He had
a vision of a blood-pure and economically prosperous Germany. The self-labeled “leadership coaches” that
began springing up on the sidelines of the American business world since the
1980s are too ideologically-bent to admit that their utopian notions of leadership
can include Hitler if his value-set of ideals is assumed.
Furthermore, efforts to define
leadership ideologically as a virtue or utopian world that goes beyond
leadership cannot define the term. For example, to say that leadership is
success ignores or leaves out instances of success that do not involve leading
an organization (or other people). Leadership is therefore not success per se.
Similarly, a person can be tenacious in overcoming adversity without being a
leader. A person can be a leader without necessarily overcoming every obstacle,
or always being positive rather than negative.
In fact, President Reagan campaigned
in 1980 against the stagflation (i.e., inflation and low economic growth) and
the federal government, which he labeled as part of the problem rather than the
solution. He led with that vision, and enough of the American people followed
that he won in a landslide. Hitler, too, included negatives in his vision as he
campaigned for his party in 1933. Germany was in an economic quagmire, and so
too was its democracy. Hitler did not minimize scapegoats: the Jews and
Communists. It is not uncommon for a leader to go negative on the problems that
justify the positives in a vision, whether for an organization or a country. To
claim that leadership is always being positive is simply incorrect, as is the
conflation of leadership with management.
Leadership has been practiced by
good and bad people. Of course, just who are the good ones and the bad is to
some extent debatable among reasonable people. This is another problem with insisting
that a given ideological value is necessary for leadership to be
leadership. For example, to claim that leaders appreciate diversity ignores
Japan and China, whose populations are more homogenous than those in the U.S.,
where diversity itself has become an ideological weapon as well as an ideal. Subjecting
leadership to a particular definition of the good is overly constraining, and
dogmatic in the sense of being arbitrary. To define leadership in terms of the content
of an organizational or societal vision conveniently excludes many
instances of leadership. Leadership involves convincing people to accept a
vision, which we can treat as a black box.
The self-proclaimed leadership “coaches”
go even beyond human utopias on social media in telling us about leadership
qualities. This is often done by showing videos of other species. In one instance,
a large herd animal is racing across a river as an alligator is in pursuit. Just
as the predator pounces, the prey reaches the banks and leaps out of the water
just in time. Leaders don’t give up. Well, actually, human leaders are not at
all like prey running for their lives so not to be killed and eaten. The anthropomorphism
here is out of control. Even CEOs in competitive industries, in the proverbial “jungle,”
are hardly in anything even remotely like a real jungle. The CEO of a company
that buys another company at a great price does not make a killing in
any sense like an allegator does in a river. The military language often used
in the business world is also far-fetched.
In actuality, leadership “coaches”—and business is not a (blood) sport either—preach their personal ideologies in the hope that even managers who do not actually practice leadership will accept and value the respective ideological utopian ideals. These gurus that preach under the veneer of business leadership are like the business ethicists who use thou shalt not to get managers to behave as the ethicists want. It is a power-grab of a Nietzschean sort wherein those on the sidelines are driven by an instinctual urge to have power over the “players on the field,” whose uses of strength are not necessarily appreciated and may even be resented.[1] The “coaches’” will to power is evinced in using the concept of leadership as a subterfuge by which to tacitly impose an ideological value or ideal concerning human nature and relations on society by beguiling powerful opinion-leaders in the business world. It does not concern these new birds of prey that the concept of leadership is warped, distended, obfuscated, or rendered vacuous as a utopian tautology in the process. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” the Wizard says as Toto pulls the it back to reveal an old man manipulating Dorothy and her friends by fire and brimstone in the film classic, The Wizard of Oz (1939). People are not always what they lead on.
[1]
Skip Worden, “A Genealogy
of Business Ethics: A Nietzschean Perspective,” Journal of Business
Ethics 84 (2008): 427-56.
