Rethinking Leadership

A Critique of Contemporary Theories

Annabel Beerel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000402544
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

This book provides a detailed review of the key leadership theories and skills required during times of crises and radical uncertainty, how these can be developed, and how they can be applied in practice.

Written over the course of the 2020 pandemic, the book highlights the immense lack of leadership competencies required for effective leadership in times of radical uncertainty and provides in-depth insights into the capacities and skills that should be part of all leadership development. The latest leadership theories, as well as existing key styles, including mindful leadership, the neuroscience of leadership, and transpersonal and adaptive leadership, are discussed and critiqued along with their potential contribution to developing effective leaders. Each chapter concludes with a convenient executive summary and questions that can be used for teaching purposes and class discussion.

This is a comprehensive book about the interdisciplinary and multifaceted requirements of leadership and how to attain those capacities to develop effective leaders. It will be valuable for advanced undergraduate as well as postgraduate courses as a foundational resource on leadership theory and its application in practice.

1 The world in which we need leadership

• Introduction
• Future shock
• A new understanding of reality
• A world full of systemic challenges
• Future thinking and cognitive complexity
• Business leaders as stewards of the planet
• Global capitalism
• World leaders unite
  • American CEO roundtable
• Leadership skills
• The failure of leadership
• Executive summary
• Questions
• References

Introduction

As I write this chapter, the world is still reeling under the enormous impact of the coronavirus pandemic. Every continent on the planet, excepting Antarctica, has been contaminated by what is labeled as COVID-19 – a severe strain of the flu that spreads rampantly and can be deadly.

Leaders at every level are challenged to handle the crisis. The initial response to the virus, which first began in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, was complacency. Many defined it as a China problem. Some thought that after a month’s lockdown of the Wuhan area, all would right itself almost immediately, and things would return to normal. Unfortunately, this complacency has cost the world dearly. Regrettably too, at this point, even with several vaccines in sight, there is minimal global cooperation. Finger pointing abounds, and most countries are selecting their own strategies for coping. Public life across the planet has been severely curtailed.

As the crisis continues to mount, no one can accurately predict the outcome. What is observable, however, is the ineffectiveness of leaders in their handling of the crisis.

Leading in a time of crisis – something we discuss in Chapter 7 – requires, among other things, an ability to deal with the unexpected; to handle uncertainty; the courage to speak to reality; communication skills, empathy, and sensitive timing.

The first leadership tasks during these times include being visible, being informed, being concerned but not panicked, communicating clearly and regularly, and creating an atmosphere of reassuring calm. As much physical safety as is realistic should be provided immediately, followed by psychological reassurance. Few leaders, at either the political or corporate level, performed any of these tasks adequately, if at all. Most of the strategies were delayed, ad hoc, confused, and subsequently reactive. Worst of all, at the highest level, some leaders became blamers and showed little or no empathy for people’s justified emotions of fear amid the media-created chaos.

The previous most devastating pandemic of the 20th century was the 1918–1919 Spanish flu. According to the World Health Organization, more than 40% of the world population was infected, and more than 50 million people died. This is astoundingly more than the reported 17 million people who died in World War I, which ended in 1918 shortly before the pandemic broke out. It is said that the virus that caused the 1918 influenza pandemic probably sprang from North American domestic and wild birds.¹

How would one describe the state of the world in which the COVID-19 pandemic appeared?

If we take a systemic approach – which we must – the world is in disarray just as it was after the devastation of WWI. As we discuss in this chapter, this disarray is dominated by multiple systemic problems. Technology has gotten ahead of us. It is accelerating change at a pace the environment, which includes us, cannot sustain. Global capitalism and the rampant power of corporations have exacerbated this rate of change at the price of not only our own health but that of the environment.

Physics in the 20th century has presented us with a new paradigm of reality in which we now understand everything to be a web of interconnected relations. Everything is interdependent and coincidental. Through this lens, we see that the coronavirus pandemic is not a one-off, isolated event to be conquered. It is a symptomatic manifestation of a system that is out of order.

To lead in this complex world, with its runaway innovations and mounting systemic challenges, requires different leadership capacities not just new and different skills. Leadership training and development have not kept up with real-world needs, and we are seeing the result of this failure.

Future shock

In 1970, Alvin Toffler (1928–2016) penned a runaway bestseller titled Future Shock. Future shock refers to the state of extreme stress and disorientation individuals experience when they are subjected to too much change in too short a time. The biggest challenge, Toffler claimed, is the rate of change we are being faced with rather than its direction.

Back in 1970, Toffler anticipated that future shock would prove to be an imminent danger to society and stated how “appalled” he was at how little is known about adaptivity. He criticized both intellectuals and educators, saying that they in no way prepare people for the future. His 1970 book provides an intense documentation of how 20th-century life had become one of roaring change that was so powerful that it would shatter societies, overturn institutions, radically shift our values, and shake us to our roots.

One of the biggest challenges of future shock is the confrontation to our psyches. Toffler explained what happens to us when we reach the upper levels of our adaptive range. He says we become fatigued and apathetic, suffer from emotional exhaustion, feel overwhelmed, and succumb to decision stress. With decision stress, we default to habitual, mechanical behavior. We make bad decisions, or we readily hand our decisions over to someone else.

Resistance to change, of course, shows itself in denial, frustration, anger, and violence. Toffler wrote about how anger and violence were on the rise and were sure to escalate further.

In attempts to deal with radical change, he said, many people revert obsessively to previously adaptive routines that have become inappropriate. Other people look for a “super-simplifier”, someone who will resolve everything with a single, neat equation.

Toffler referred to the US as a society that is out of control. He mentioned it exhibiting qualities of an individual going through a nervous breakdown. He suggested that creative strategies are needed for shaping, deflecting, accelerating, and decelerating change. He proposed that it is a time for people to work together to be imaginative and insightful. He expressed his concern about future shock attaining a grand scale, the consequences of which would radiate instantaneously around the world. He predicted that the effects of the technological revolution will be deeper than any social change we have experienced before. Unless steps are taken, he insisted, human beings will find themselves increasingly disoriented and progressively incompetent to deal rationally with their environment. This will lead to mass malaise and neurosis, irrational behaviors, mental health problems, and a growth in free-floating violence – all behaviors that were already evident in the 1970s and cast a shadow forward to the distress and disorientation that has marked the 21st century (suicides, opioids, and mass killings, to name a few.)

To survive, wrote Toffler, individuals must become infinitely more adaptable and capable than before. They must find ways to anchor themselves and to establish what he named a stability zone. Education must take a more helpful role in helping people adapt to change. Technology must be tamed, as it is the accelerative force behind everything. Corporations and government must work together to envision a future that balances the change in the environment and individuals’ adaptive capacities. People need to work together to create visions, dreams, and prophesies – images of potential tomorrows (Toffler, 1971).

A new understanding of reality

The philosopher Rene Descartes’ (1596–1650) division between the self and the world, led to the belief that the world could be observed and described objectively, whereas Isaac Newton (1643–1727) saw nature as a machine governed by exact mathematical laws. The Newtonian world was one in which material particles consisting of small, solid indestructible objects out of which all objects were made moved in absolute space and absolute time. The motion of particles was caused by the force of gravity. Everything was the subject of rigorous determinism in a world that operated like a giant machine (Capra and Luisi, 2014).

Modern physics (1920s) has shattered the principal concepts of both the Cartesian and Newtonian worldviews. Modern physics, which refers to the findings related to relativity and quantum physics, ushered in a whole new paradigm of reality. In one swift move, it obliterated the principles of determinism, reductionism, objectivity, dualism, and mechanism. From here on, the cosmos is seen as one inseparable whole, forever in motion, alive, and organic. Motion and change are the intrinsic properties of matter and arise from inner force fields rather than due to the action of external forces.

Matter itself is now understood as a field of energy not a mass of solid particles. The constituent parts of atoms, being subatomic particles, have been found to be dynamic patterns that do not exist as isolated entities but as integral parts of a separate network of interactions (Capra, 1997, p. 225).

The more scientists penetrate the submicroscopic world, the more they find it to be a system of inseparable, interacting, and evermoving components. There is no absolute space and time; there are no elementary particles; and one cannot objectively study the causal nature of physical phenomena or devise an ideal description of nature. Nature does not comprise isolated building blocks that can be disassembled and put together again. The natural world has infinite varieties and complexities. It does not comprise straight lines or regular shapes, and things do not happen in sequence but all together. Linear cause and effect are illusive, as is relying on the sequencing of events or the sequential structure of abstract concepts and symbols.

Interconnections occur as probabilities rather than as certainties, and relationships cannot be defined in a predictable or precise way. Nature has now been discovered to be a highly communicated web of relations between various parts of the whole, where the observer is always included. Nonlocality exists where communication occurs at a distance without observable or measurable links. One cannot partition the observer and the observed, as the observer participates in and affects what is being observed.

As physicist Fritjof Capra describes in The Tao of Physics (2010) and The Web of Life (1997), the environment is engaged in a gigantic cosmic dance, animated by cascades of energy which both creates and destroys in rhythmic pulses (Capra, 1997, p. 11). In this world, there are no isolated incidents and no one-off events. Everything is interdependent and coincidental. Nothing can be analyzed on its own but only as part of the whole. This means that all change and all challenges are systemic in nature.

Dana Zohar, in her book, Rewiring the Corporate Brain (1997), explains how modern physics is challenging us to rethink our basic categories of perceiving the world. She describes the need for a shift from atomistic thinking toward holism and a focus on isolated events to an emphasis on seeing relationships. She claims we must move away from trying to understand parts through fragmentation to seeing parts in integration. We ...