Leadership Unravelled

The Faulty Thinking Behind Modern Management

Mark Cole, John Higgins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000406849
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Why is it that leaders – in social, political, and (most importantly) organisational contexts – are seemingly unable to address meaningfully the wicked problems and complex challenges that we currently face? There's enormous busyness around reconfiguring departments and adopting 'transformational' operating models, but in general plus ca change, plus la meme chose.

Eyewatering amounts of treasure and time are spent in corporate life on leadership development, with people working hard to try and demonstrate that something useful has happened as a result. An entire pseudo-science has emerged to try and prove its worth, in part to justify the economic dividend that goes to those who make it to the upper levels of positional power. The fetishisation of leadership, especially strong leadership, fills our news outlets holding up carefully distorted images of great men (leadership is still deeply gendered) from across the worlds of politics, business, and sports. This book explores the persistently disappeared and unacknowledged constraints that inhibit leaders in every context. It argues that these constraints – defined in this volume in terms of five organisational paradoxes and six management myths – are found at large in society and are especially impactful in organisational life.

By calling attention to, and exploring in rigorous detail, these paradoxes and myths, this book helps leaders, and the leadership systems they are part of, to wriggle free of the tacit assumptions that lock them into a cul-de-sac of simplistic prescription and heroic individualism. Once these mind-forged manacles are removed, new forms of leadership practice become possible, ones that are fit for purpose in engaging with a world facing systemic crisis and existential risk.

This book is essential reading for leaders and managers at all levels looking for solutions to traditionally simplistic leadership practice and who want to affect systemic change. It will be beneficial to all those in the world of leadership development including business schools and HR departments.

1

An Introduction… in seven uneasy pieces

DOI: 10.4324/9781003035015-1

The worlds of organisations and management are full of cliché and glibness. The mental disciplines that feed considered thinking and action have been rotted by bubble-gum habits of mind, trotted out as if they were the wisdom of the ages, something that looks good in a slide-deck. Meanwhile people’s lives get turned upside down by a frenzy of pop-prescriptions that justify endless upheaval, given big-word titles such as ‘transformation’ and ‘game changing’ and ‘world class’ this or that. Nothing is allowed to be ordinary or human scaled. There is a lot of pain and little gain – except for the snake-oil salespeople and Quack Doctors who peddle the latest nostrums, dealers to corporate junkies too strung out to see who benefits from the exchange. There is a lot to despair at when looking at what has come to pass as good management and leadership, where its citadel of learning ‘[t]he business school… has tended to become somewhere that produces knowledge for management rather that knowledge about management… It is knowledge… that relies on flattering those in power’ (Parker, 2018, pp. 36–37).

In this book we draw on years of working in and studying organisations of all sorts to explore what got us into this state of affairs, so that it becomes possible for something different, something better to emerge in due time – free we hope of the false promises and soft-soap we’ve already staked out as part of our current organisational malaise.

We have written it for everybody who works for a living and has to be part of, or engage with, taken for granted institutional patterns, which leave them bemused as to how such strange behaviours have passed unquestioned, madness hiding in plain sight. For those of a literary bent we would say this is for anyone who has thought that ‘there is something rotten in the state of Denmark’, where Hamlet’s Denmark stands for the common nonsense of accepted practices of organisational life.

In this introduction we’ll sketch out how we came to this downbeat, but realistic, conclusion and outline how our analysis will unfold through the book and how we will cautiously outline what a better way might look like in terms of management and leadership. Its seven uneasy pieces are:

• Uneasy Piece 1 – The common sense we live by
• Uneasy Piece 2 – A superficial connection with reality
• Uneasy Piece 3 – What gets in the way of us stopping and wondering about our world
• Uneasy Piece 4 – The disappearance of collective sense and sense making
• Uneasy Piece 5 – The fragmentation of time, busyness, and the disconnected future
• Uneasy Piece 6 – Paying attention to the headwaters of our thinking
• Uneasy Piece 7 – What happens next

While wary of over-condensed conclusions, we will frame these introductory sections with our take on what might be seen as punctuating conclusions, while suggesting we all stay on our guard against potted knowledge that is easily swallowed and just as easily passed.

1.1 The common sense we live by

Here is a tale of the modern world – and insight perhaps into the way in which so many people experience it, which is crucial to the critique that we advance in this book. In May 2020, a story appeared in the virtual edition of the Daily Mirror newspaper in the UK, headlined ‘Nursery teacher red-faced after discovering why newly purchased candle “disappeared”’ (Cripps, 2020). A woman of 21 gave her 18-year-old sister a scented candle as a gift. When physics took its course and the candle burnt down, the recipient began a charged correspondence with her sister via text.

According to the story, she demanded to know ‘where has the wax in my candle gone’ and claimed it had ‘disappeared’. It was explained that this is what happens with candles, which led the younger sister to complain in a disgruntled fashion that no one had told her that this might happen – and that, when she had seen her generous sibling replacing candles in the past, she had assumed that she had some sort of OCD about it or was some sort of candle expert.

Drawing attention to this story is not meant to denigrate in any sneering way the people in it. Instead, it seems to us to show the way in which so many of us experience our day-to-day lives, as something in which we are not fully invested but which we expect to endlessly meet our daily needs. In this instance, there are several noteworthy themes. Firstly, the report suggests that the first reaction was not to try to make sense of what had happened, but to argue that there was something wrong with the candle.

The lack of inquiry in the world is very apparent; it has been supplanted by emotional reaction. Things make us angry, sad, and happy these days…but very rarely do they make us feel curious. The clumsy and uncommunicative shorthand of social media leads us to push buttons, not sense make…and allows us to go from 0 to 60 in terms of emotional response, without any pause at thinking. When Scorsese’s film The King of Comedy (IMDB, 1982) appeared in the UK in 1983, there's a scene where the entertainer Jerry Langford is approached on the street by an initially gushing and adoring fan, who then turns on a sixpence when Jerry makes his apologies about not speaking to her nephew Morris on the payphone that she’s using. She bellows after him the vicious instruction that he contracts cancer, (YouTube, 2013) a curse that shocked at the time – but is now familiar behaviour on Facebook, Twitter, and the like.

Secondly, there is a failure of agency, with a sense that an infantilised perspective is at work here and across the wider social world. The response that no one said aloud that this might happen seems to allow an individual to abrogate their responsibility for making sense of the world – and instead sets up an insistent demand that the world should constantly be explained by others. We are nudging here towards a view of the world seen merely as a commodity that we are licensed to experience, rather than a place where we have an intrinsic and reflexive presence.

Lastly, there is a pathologisation of others based on one’s own limitations, in terms of understanding a candle. Changing candles is explained away as part of some psychological condition. Interestingly, there is a flip side to this notion, which is to hide away behind ignorance and merely assert that those who have a reasonable grasp of key elements of the world can be dismissed as an ‘expert’ of some sort. In this case, it is to talk of the older sister as some sort of candle expert. One might reasonably suggest that this schema sees illness and expertise as pretty much part of the same ‘weird’ continuum, problems that need to be owned and fixed by another rather than an exposé of a lack of understanding on the part of the person who denigrates the other.

Let’s leave those two sisters in their wax-and-wick based confusion. In the spirit of full disclosure, the following story is very similar and involves Mark. H...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Chapter 1: An Introduction… in seven uneasy pieces
• Chapter 2: The use and abuse of paradoxes in organisational life
• Chapter 3: The six myths of management (thinking)
• Chapter 4: Conclusion…Enrichessez-Vous!
• Index