Leadership Dissonance
A few hypotheses about how we teach leadership as compared to what we look for in leaders
I am a veteran consumer of leadership training materials. I’ve read countless books and articles, participated in leadership training seminars, employed an executive coach, and even created and taught a leadership training program aimed at middle school and early high school students. Moreover, from as early as I can remember I have had a voracious appetite for biographies and related materials that might give me insights into the minds and actions of people who are credited with accomplishing great things. One of my standout memories is rushing to the library stacks to find a book entitled Colonel George Washington when I was in the third grade. I couldn’t even properly pronounce “colonel” (I thought it was a perversion of “colony”), but I knew that I wanted to learn about this guy.
All that to say that I am fascinated by leadership. You might say that it is a persistent preoccupation of mine.
The recent election, wherein we chose our national leadership for at least the next four years, has prompted me to think more deeply about what we collectively look for when we talk about leadership. My interest here is not political; it’s stylistic. Regardless of your feelings, either positive or negative, for Donald Trump, you have to admit that he has a particular leadership style that resonates with the majority of voters. How does that leadership style compare to the way we train leaders? If it’s different, why is it different? What are the implications of any differences? These are the questions that have been of particular interest to me over the course of the last few days.
Modern leadership theory tends to embrace concepts like effectively managing emotions, building strong relationships, maintaining team cohesion, mental health and well-being, empathy, self-awareness, inclusion, empowerment, and a servant mentality. This focus has rendered autocratic leadership, charismatic leadership, transactional leadership, and command-and-control leadership passe’ in most organizations. At the very least, we don’t train new leaders to implement these models.
But, when given a choice, people seem to overwhelmingly favor leaders who might score low on EQ and Servant Leadership and who employ many of the command-and-control tactics that I, as a leader, have been told to avoid for the better part of the last 30 years. And this isn’t a distinctly political phenomenon. Political power is won or lost for a variety of complex reasons, and one can’t simply conclude that leadership style is the only - or even the predominant - reason. But, consider the business luminaries that we lionize, the coaches who are idolized, the generals who are memorialized. How many of them are described as “nice guys”? Many, if not most, of these leaders are command-and-control, “eagles” as opposed to “doves,” “my way or the highway” types of executives.
Why? Are the leadership theorists, executive coaches, corporate trainers, and YouTube popularizers wrong?
I don’t know that I think so. But that means that we have to develop some hypotheses to explain the cognitive dissonance - the “leadership dissonance - ” that exists between what we are told are the most effective leadership models and what we all seem to prefer when given the choice.
I present here a few hypotheses. I don’t claim that these are comprehensive. Nor do I claim that we have to choose just one. It’s probably a combination of them all in some way.
The first hypothesis is that there is a proximity component to what we value in a leader. For example, I don’t think many people would enjoy working directly for Trump, Jobs, Bezos, Belichick, or Patton. However, almost none of us have to work directly for these types of guys. So, one possibility is that our expressed preferences (as indicated, for example, by feedback interviews) are reflective of what we value in leadership as experienced up close as opposed to what we expect from leadership at a further remove. In this formulation, we want command-and control leadership so long as we don’t have to interact with it directly.
A second hypothesis is that our preferences are reflective of particular situations. The harder the job appears/the bigger hill there is to climb, the more we trust people who adopt a more “bottom line” oriented approach. For example, I don’t think many field level generals are known for their empathy. They are “command and control,” and that seems to be justified by the activity that they pursue. Likewise, many of the “great” entrepreneurial founders are known to be less than nice people (Jobs, Bezos, etc.), but we give them some leeway because we acknowledge that what they are doing is really, really hard. Moreover, they don’t seem to care in particular about how they are viewed. Their sole motivation is to accomplish whatever they set out to accomplish. Maybe we think that the ends sometimes justify the means.
A third hypothesis is that we expect truly exceptional leaders to be “other” as compared to the rest of us. I’m thinking here of the concepts of immanence and transcendence. We expect leaders to move among us, but we expect them to be qualitatively different from anyone else. They are set apart - they “transcend” normal human experience. So, I don’t want most of the people I interact with to be autocratic, but I don’t expect leaders to act like most people. This “othering” of leaders allows us to distance ourselves from the impacts of the difficult decisions leaders often have to make. Most of us can’t or won’t make tough decisions. We expect our leaders to make tough decisions. . . which don’t always work out. But because they are not like the rest of us we are able to excuse ourselves from the potentially negative outcomes associated with those tough decisions. Allowing our leaders to behave differently absolves us of some of the responsibility associated with following them. In effect, it creates a ready-to-hand scapegoat for when things go wrong.
A fourth hypothesis is that we equate clarity in direction, clarity in communication style, transparency, and honesty - all leadership traits that are universally admired - with a certain amount of abrasiveness. This is the, “He’s just tellin’ it like it is!” sort of explanation that seems to excuse one from socially acceptable niceties. Someone saying the quiet parts out loud comes across as more authentic, and we appreciate authenticity over and above a forced social compliance. In other words, authenticity matters much, much more than we perhaps credit.
A fifth hypothesis is that we are in the midst of a generational evolution with respect to what constitutes effective leadership. Boomers and GenXers may be much more tolerant of certain leadership behaviors than are Millennials and Gen Z. I’ll admit that I’m skeptical about this one. The numbers don’t seem to bear this out and I would argue that the leaders we acknowledge and admire today display similar traits to the leaders who were acknowledged and admired centuries ago. People are people are people, after all. . .
Which brings me to a final hypothesis. The Bible has it right: people are always and ever in search of a king. We think that kings act in certain ways and we look for those cues in choosing our leaders. Kings are about pomp, kings aren’t bound by social norms, kings are impetuous, etc., etc.
As I said before, it may be and probably is all of these things and more. I’m not an academic, but I have to think that someone has studied the “leadership dissonance” effect that I’m describing. If you know of anyone who has, please let me know.
What are the possible implications of “leadership dissonance”? One implication, especially of the first two hypotheses, is that we actually should adjust how we train. Instead of training “leaders” maybe we should focus training on second and third level “managers.” These are the people with closest proximity to the workforce, after all. And a part of that training ought to be how to manage the founder/king/general given that he or she may be abrasive, etc.
A second implication might be that we need to be more precise when we define terms. We have a tendency to conflate “leadership” and “management.” I suspect feedback interviews, for example, are actually about “management” as opposed to about “leadership.” I don’t know why we largely abandon the distinction between effective management practices and effective leadership. Maybe it’s a marketing thing? But I am increasingly convicted that, while the two are related, they aren’t the same thing.