Power games
Send In The Clowns
I wanted to talk about Leadership this week and it seems impossible to ignore the spite-fest that passes for the Conservative leadership election in the UK.
To call the line-up of candidates underwhelming is to really overstate their qualities. As has been remarked, there is less to them than meets the eye. If this was a recruitment search, you’d sack the consultants and start again. Every candidate has question marks against them and none have a track record that suggest they have the capacity, let alone the abilities, to lead the party, much less the country.
What we have is a beauty contest based around character and personality traits and actual physical appearance. Once again, it is Tomas Chammurro-Premusic’s deadly triad of Confidence, Charisma and Narcissism that is the yardstick, one that has served us so poorly in the past.
Much has been made about the diversity of the 13 person line-up, 6 of whom have ethnic minority backgrounds and 4 who are women. However, almost all have had private education and/or went to Oxbridge and several are millionaires. There is also a remarkable lack of breadth in their political views, as they uniformly support Brexit, tax cuts, small government and ‘Thatcherite’ economics. Diversity, it seems, is in the eye of the beholder.
The narrowness of the debate is also astonishing. They are only addressing issues that appeal to the extreme right wing of MPs in the ERG and the party’s tiny membership, which is predominantly pale, male, stale and reactionary. There’s a complete mismatch between this debate and the issues that the electorate are concerned about right now. If it was a Venn diagram, there would be no overlap.
Personally, I think it is an embarrassment that an advanced and sophisticated democracy is going about choosing its next leader in this way and I’d like to say it is not a reflection of how we do things in this country.
However, the more I think about it, the more I see parallels with how many organisations are run. An out-of-touch leadership team, drawn from a narrow set of experiential and attitudinal backgrounds, focusing on issues that appeal to a very small but powerful group of supporters/investors, trying to outdo each other with increasingly extreme and fantastic proposals. All so obsessed with promoting themselves to the top that they have no time to address the very real and critical issues that everyone in the organisation is concerned about.
It’s starting to look a lot like a mirror.
Reflections
A couple of posts talking about self-awareness this week have got me reflecting on it.
As Dr. Richard Claydon (who you really should be following, if you’re not already) noted, it’s a part of ‘Authentic Leadership’, whilst Dave Cairns (A CRE pirate you should also follow) commented on its lack amongst leaders today.
I think self-awareness is really valuable and important but is it essential?
You see, I was a good boss and an effective leader (I’m not blowing smoke up my own fundament here, people told me so) yet I wasn’t very self-aware. In fact, it was that lack of self-awareness that led me into all sorts of problems both in my corporate career and, even more so, after I had left.
It was the lack of self-awareness that left me so confused and lost. I literally didn’t know who I was anymore, I had lost touch with my essence. Developing that self-awareness has been my biggest learning since I left corporate and I still have a lot to do (do we ever really know ourselves?). Learning the concepts and language to be able to describe it and develop my sense of self has been the major work of the past decade or more.
So I don’t think it’s essential to be a good leader but I do think it’s essential to becoming a better leader.
Here’s my response to Dave’s post
“Think of it like a natural ability at a sport, say, tennis. Someone can get to a good level on that natural skill, which they can't really articulate or explain. However, to become a better player, they have to 'understand their game', deconstruct what they have and learn how to describe it so that they can modify the parts that don't work well and add to their repertoire of shots to cope with a greater range of situations.”
Why
What I think is important about leadership and leaders is intent.
It’s closely related to values, personality and purpose, which are talked about endlessly it seems, but it doesn’t seem to get much attention in its own right.
Yet, when we assess leaders, certainly those we directly interact with, we naturally assess their intent. We sense it, even if it’s subconscious (and we often ignore those senses, to our own cost). We ‘know’ if someone’s a wrong ‘un, if their intent is malign. Maybe this is something that we evolved back in the mists of time so we could identify which strangers were a threat and which were potential friends - it makes sense but I’m just speculating. However, I do know that we do it today, all the time, without thinking (and not just about leaders but about everyone).
We trust people that we sense have good intent. We are ready to co-operate with them, cut them some slack when they get things wrong and we will give them a bit of discretionary effort. We allow ourselves to be enlisted to their goals, to their projects, to their mission.
Whereas if we sense they have bad intent, we get defensive, guarded, cautious. We may even decide to act against them, or distance ourselves from them in some way.
I think I was able to lead because I had good intent and I demonstrated that consistently through my actions. The fact that I wasn’t really aware that I was doing it wasn’t a problem - until I was pressured to act against my values and intent. Then I got conflicted and confused, which I could only resolve by withdrawing or refusing and accepting the (inevitably adverse) consequences of that.
If you are sceptical about our ability to sense intent, I can tell you that I have met two people who triggered my ‘spidey senses’ in a very evident and visceral way. One was Boris Johnson and the other was Milo Yiannopoulos. These happened quite close together and woke me up to my intuition once again, which I had been ignoring for many years. Maybe you’ve been ignoring yours. It’s time to tune-in and pay attention to it.
Jerusalem
We lead because we want to exercise power. Whether that’s exercising positional power or simply our own power, it is an action rooted in power. The power to change the world around us.
Intent, then, is the purpose to which we want to put that power. Richard Claydon (him again) recently wrote about three types of power - Power Over, Power To and Power With.
Power Over is what we are familiar with from the command and control structures that have dominated organisations for decades. Power With is what Mary Parker Follett advocated a century ago, a coactive approach that engages everyone in finding solutions.
Power To, however, was not something I had thought about before. This is the acquisition of power (typically positional power) in order to get something done.
That brings us back to intent, doesn’t it? What’s the change you want to make? What’s the world you want to create?
Jeffrey Pfeffer, who I wrote about last week, suggests we must understand how power works and use that knowledge to acquire it so that that we can then use it to make the changes we want. Power To. However, that process is potentially corrupting, it may change your intent for the worse. You might become more self-centred, less altruistic. Power corrupts and all that.
That’s why I’ve always struggled with positional power. Too often, it is acquired for self-serving reasons, with bad intent. Too often it is exercised in a coercive way, as Power Over.
Hence my attraction to the Be More Pirate way. Tap into your own power, collaborate with others to scale up, create the world you want to see. By using the creation of a new reality as the means, not as the objective in itself, you draw power to yourself and your reality.
That’s why I don’t like Pfeffer’s approach. He suggests you have to play by the old rules and then change them, as if it is easy to commit to the game and then step away. But once you’ve got good at it, why would you? Better to play a different game completely. Play the Pirate game.
As Buckminster Fuller put it “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”