The Noise of Leadership Discourse

I have recently been contacted to provide support for two executives in large companies.  Both require support because they are not coping, a formal bullying claim against one raised the alarm bells for one of them and the other clinical depression and alienation sparked the contact.  Both work in excess of 80 hours a week, both work 7 days a week and have been doing so for a year.  Both feel as if the job cannot be completed without them and both have young families.  Both say their life priority is on their partner and family, and it obviously isn’t.  Both struggle with work-life balance and both are trapped and don’t know how to escape.  Both are on a pathway to a breakdown if they don’t do something about it, and that may be the only way they get their break from this destructive cycle.

Now you might say both of these people are stupid but that simply dismisses the real issues and drivers of their situation.  This insane level of working is endemic.  I did some work with a legal firm and all of the partners were clearly alcoholic, none had maintained a relationship, they all worked in excess of 80 hours a week and, all were extremely wealthy.  I was in a business once where the boss slept on the floor of his office, woke up at 4am each day and survived OK on about 5 hours sleep.  He was working in excess of 100 hours a week.
The so called “science” of leadership and the cult-like management movement is a recent phenomena.  It probably started with the work of Fredrick Taylor (1856-1915) and the quest to quantify characteristics of management success and to make them secure and repeatable.  The insitutionalisation of leadership and management theory has developed since the 1960s into its own industry.  The publication of The Effective Executive in 1996 by Peter Drucker probably marks the beginning of the modern movement on management and leadership industry.  This industry has evolved into Departments in Universities, institutes, consultants by the tens of thousands, thousands of books and styles, the evolution of the MBA movement, leadership personality diagnostics and a myriad of theories.  Apart from generating new fads, disseminating information and an income stream for many people, is leadership any better? 

In Australia 42 business schools offer an MBA program.  The Graduate Management Association of Australia (GMAA) was founded in 1993 as an amalgam of a range of state associations and it ranks the quality of MBA programs annually.  One of the most prominent and expensive Executive Schools of Management is out of Melbourne University, Mt Eliza Executive Education.  On average, a 5 day course at Mt Eliza costs $10,000 per individual.  With groups of 12, that’s quite an income stream for 5 days training.  There are many other institutes and organisations which offer some form of executive education.  Does this form of education create better thinkers or does it create follows of a particular school of leadership theory?  I have seen many clones of the MBA cult, and they can’t think creatively or critically.  I have worked with many executives in government who are simply experienced clones of the Public Service System, indeed, that’s how one gets promoted, this is the fundamental of cultural fit.  Many of the cultures of the corporates and government don’t change, because the people it needs to change, leave it or are shuffled out.

I look at conference programs too, and it always seems to be Department heads, professors and CEO’s of large corporations who speak on leadership.  This further perpetuates the myth that big is beautiful, greed is good and leadership is power.  This is the kind of leadership which generated the Global Financial Crisis and triggered the “Occupy” grassroots movement against a leadership without justice, compassion and perspective.  This kind of leadership gives itself a 70% pay rise while denying workers 3%.  This kind of leadership puts profits over people and fails to understand that enough is enough.  Peculiarly, many of this cult of leadership as they approach death and old age begin to do pro bono work, focus on charity and try to reconnect with their lost children.

I just finished reading the story of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, an amazing book and Steve Jobs was an amazing person but clearly psychopathic in behaviour and incredibly dysfunctional.  Yes, he may have changed the world but at what cost?  He abused most people, including close friends.  He neglected relationships, alienated children but when faced with his own death said:
'Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important'. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked.

Jobs said this in 2005 at Stanford University.  Towards the end of his life he worked hard to reconnect with alienated family and build stronger ties with his immediate family.  He lived to see the graduation of his son Reed from High School which Jobs described as one of the happiest days of his life.

I met some small business managers the other day, two women dressed in power suits, talking about ASX 200 companies and fully baptised in the management-leadership industry.  The discourse of success was connected to top tier thinking, not critical thinking.  There was no time to listen nor understand.  The discourse was laced with pragmatism, power and “leadership speak”.  This kind of speak is immersed in spin as truth and jargon as meaningful. 

It doesn’t matter whether its in small business or tier 1 companies, leaders who are not interested in learning don’t lead, they manage.  I meet many executives in large companies and in government, they have no time to read and the material they read often confirms the agenda of the MBA mentalitie - success, pragmatism and power.  Lots of noise in the leadership industry about itself but look for the words that are missing from this discourse - compassion, justice and learning.

Parenting it’s just Common Sense

The sad thing about the notion of common sense is that it is a mechanism for dismissing attention to something.  The process of dismissal is something I investigated in my research into fundamentalism.  People who assume a position of superiority to the fundamentalist often dismiss the logic and sense of the fundamentalist.  Fundamantalism is not a matter of people being stupid or unintelligent indeed, the evidence shows that many young intelligent people are suicide bombers.  The write off that people lack “common sense” is just unhelpful.  The language of common sense is simply not helpful but we need to understand much more the process of sensemaking undertaken by people whose behaviours we don’t understand.  To do this, we need to understand much more about the arational decision making process.  I wrote about this a few entries ago in One Brain Three Minds.



In a previous life I was ACT Manager of Youth, Community and Family Support.  In that role I served on a range of working groups and task forces on parenting, child protection and young people in out of home care.  When I established the Galilee School and worked in youth detention, I saw first hand the results of the most terrible abuse of children.  I saw many people who didn’t know the fundamentals of parenting. But hand on, isn’t effective and good parenting just common sense?
Well, if good parenting was common sense, why is the welfare budget so high?  The welfare budget, the level of child abuse, the neglect of children and the number of welfare institutions should tell you that the very fundamentals and logic one would expect of parents is not held in common.  Indeed, the level of abuse and neglect in our society would tell you that 20% of the population don’t know how to do it.

When you work in welfare you cannot assume that someone knows the fundamentals of care, love, respect, tolerance and selflessness.  Indeed, many third and fourth welfare generation children exhibit all the behaviours they learned from their parents despite strong efforts to educate them otherwise.  Whilst there is some success with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), not everything gets through to Mind No. 1, the rationalist systematic method.  Many ways of thinking are intuitive and learned unconsciously which deny the logic of reason through cognitive dissonance.



The welfare sector is a sector of high risk.  Children who are taken out of homes, who suffer abuse are at high risk of many things: early school leaving, detention, crime, substance abuse etc.  One can learn a great deal about the nature of risk by spending some time with these kids.  Their risk taking behaviour may not make sense to you but its their common sense.  For them, its common sense to fight, steal, live on the streets, abuse others, cheat, take drugs and live in squats.  Their sensemaking doesn’t make sense until you get out of your shoes and live a day in theirs.  But you won’t be able to help anyone with the language of common sense, if they smell any superiority or patronising language in your speech, they will switch off.  Understanding sensemaking by others is the beginning of making sense of risk.