Opening up leadership

Recipients, empowered, often turn out to desire very different things from what governments and public services had anticipated.

Peter Shergold

My recent reading of Amanda Sinclair’s Leadership for the Disillusioned has really pushed me to think more deeply about what we use the words “leadership”, “leading” and “leaders” to describe. In the book Sinclair argues that many people, herself included, have become “disillusioned” by their encounters with what is usually named as leadership and with those people who are called leaders referring particularly to “… heroic performances, impoverished theories and oversimplified templates.”

Under the influence or “seduction” of current conceptions of leadership she suggests that “… people call for leadership because they feel unable to do the diffcult and challenging work of thinking about how to move forward together.”

This should be of great concern to us, she argues, because as society becomes increasingly complex and ungovernable by traditional methods of regulation and control the notion of leadership acquires a “… powerful new relevance as a potential custodian of, and advocate for, values such as public good, community welfare, well-being and sustainable development.”

In Part 1 of the book she explores what she sees as the limitations of the current constructions of

leadership including the how its practiced, the theory and ideas about it and how it is taught and suggests that:

• Leadership can be dangerously seductive for both leaders and followers.
• Much of the way in which we select, train and develop leaders reinforces an individualistic and heroic view of leadership.
• Leadership is often taken to be synonymous with occupying a position within the hierarchy of an organisation.
• Business leaders, and private sector conceptions of leadership in particular, have come to “represent the standard” for leadership.

My reading so far has triggered a number of questions:

1. What is it about our current conception of leadership that enables it to “seduce” both leaders and followers into mindless (as opposed to mindful) action?
2. In my context (or yours) what is leadership for? What do I expect those people I “see” as leaders to do?
3. How did leaders come to be stereotyped as individualistic, heroic and largely male, saviours?
4. What do we know about the differences between public or community leadership and business leadership?
5. What do we do (what do I do), in the way we teach, develop and consult to leaders, that both models and sustains an heroic view of leaders and leading?
6. In my context (and in yours) whose interests are served by maintaining the current view about what leaders do and how they should act?
7. Are there differences between leading and exercising authority? If so, do they matter?

These questions were reinforced for me by an opinion piece by Peter Shergold, former head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, in The Australian on the weekend. In it he explores how public servants and governments think about themselves and, by implication at least, suggests that they have, in the past, been “seduced” into believing in themselves as the bringers of “solutions”. In the final paragraphs he proposes that:

Public servants should become facilitators and intermediaries, providing the means by which people are enabled to do things for themselves. Power needs to move from the centre to the edge, with frontline, street-level public servants and community advocates given greater authority.

Food for thought!