Is Leadership Hopeless?

We can keep asking why we haven't learned yet that leaders and employees applying EQ or emotional sense, identifying and meeting real customer needs, is the key ingredient for success. We can also feel hopeless about getting the message through. A vast number of companies and leaders can't seem to get this. But giving up would guarantee no progress... and we know that many, many individual leaders are capable of establishing an environment and modelling highly effective behavior for their people, creating highly effective business units within any organization and sometimes even throughout complete organizations.

If only we had enough of these magically skilled leaders. Can we create more? How do we identify them? That's the massive "talent" question everyone is asking. It can't happen overnight.

I was startled by an insightful article by a very articulate graduating student in Anthropology and International Development from York University in the ICA magazine "Edges: New Planetary Patterns." ICA is a Canadian-based international training and facilitation agency specializing in helping non-profits around the world become more effective. You can see the magazine information here (http://icacan.ca/Edges.cfm). She describes how her super university education has trained her to think so critically that is had made contributing effectively seem entirely hopeless. With everything "connected to everything else" and all of it open to severe criticism at every turn there is no way to intervene to improve the world, business or social structures. Everything is gloom. She concludes by saying, "...so I'll just do the best I can. Wish me luck" and her bio says "...still trying to figure out how to make a difference.

This is clearly one of our young leaders. This is a person our organizations are dying to hire and figure out how to keep. Now McKinsey's advice to "keep people motivated, provide meaning and purpose and leaders who model and coach" (in the last post) comes into stark perspective. It's a truism in management development that "leaders teach leaders." The problem is how do we get more if we have only a very small number now who know what to do.

The answer has to be a slow, but constant support building a program within every organization of growing leadership skills little by little, knowing all we now do about what that takes. If we don't.... The good news is that people in senior roles don't have to be good leaders themselves (or they may be). What they need to do, though, is ensure that a great development program is put in place. Future generations, both inside and outside their organizations will thank them.

Comments

[Craig Allen]

Hi Dave,

Douglas Rushkoff's book "Get Back in the Box" also talks about the malaise that occurs when every product and organization is seen as just a special case of a more abstract financial or organizational structure. The book's title mocks the phrase "to think outside the box."

In Rushkoff's view, to think outside the box discounts the magic of the creative process, and casts creativity as merely deduction from settled principles. The end result is demoralized teams and mediocre, predictable products.

Some commentators have suggested that Rushkoff is really criticizing the co-opting of the term "outside the box" by those who are, in fact, very much operating in a conceptual box.

[Dave Crisp]

Good comment, Craig. I've seen a number of things suggesting correctly, as Rushkoff does, that "the box" sometimes is the stimulus to creativity. When we're hemmed in, that's the time to push for new ideas within the constraints we face. I hope to show that in some of my follow-up posts.