Why are Executives So Allergic to Psychology?

This competence–psychological competence–is arguably the very last thing a great many executives I come upon expect to have to develop. This competence comes from one of three areas of knowledge, and again, here I go being bold, wisdom least likely to be tapped in search for solutions to the chronic problems organizations face: Theology, philosophy, and psychology.

So allergic to psychology are many executives that predictable jokes half-consciously tumble out of their minds and mouths. “This won’t be a Kumbaya session will it? Should we hug or shake hands? Okay, now let’s all group hug.” I wish I had a pound or dollar for every time I heard those nervous refrains. Psychology belongs in a dimly lit room with two opposing chairs, with a safe zone between, therapist and client sitting opposite one another. Any mention of psychology makes executives think of that therapy “session” Frasier or Tony Soprano-style. It’s inevitable, since our concept of what happens in our organization’s buildings, and for that matter our minds, should be only ever focused on achieving goals and results. But, believing what should be despite what is makes us miss important dimensions of what is actually fueling and informing what we see going on. Once again, boldly I go: many of the chronic problems managers and executives–you–face at work would be fantastically improved, very possibly eliminated if only they–you–were to look where you have never (okay, very rarely) looked…to psychology.

A Call for Psychological Competence

I’m calling for executives to reconceptualize their role to include attending to the psychological needs of their employees. Wouldn’t it be useful to know why people go to work? (Be careful not to project your own reasons onto your employees.) Yes, it is true paid employees go with the expectation that we will receive financial compensation in exchange for our work. But, usually we are much lazier in our explanation. We say they work for money, or “because they have two kids to put through college.” Plenty of reputable, valid, and reliable scientific evidence from laboratories and field research challenge those habitual assertions. It turns out people work for a great any more reasons than money. That means that several reasons for working have more meaning for us than money has. What does meaning have to do with productivity, goals, success?

Did you know that there is strong evidence that monetary rewards actually undermine intrinsic motivation? That means money as a primary “motivator” actually  works against you. It turns out, in many cases common to everyday organizational life, using money to motivate is bad business. Surprised? How about motivation, more generally? Is it possible for a woman to motivate herself? Should her quarterly goals be inherently motivating? Regardless of whether they should be, are they? Usually we say yes. Usually we hope to high heaven she can motivate herself because we don’t have any real idea of how to do it beyond telling her how important her goals are for the team, project, company, and maybe her career. But, have you ever thought that that kind of motivation might not be good for her productivity and satisfaction in the long run? How does her motivation type link into her decision to stay or go to work for a competitor two years from now?

Psychology can give us important answers to these questions. Many HR exectuves know this, but even HR is hampered by the underlying psychology phobia in American (and global) business. And, many HR executives perpetuate our stale notions of business is business; it’s not personal. Nonsense. It is often deeply personal. I have noticed in my international engagemnets that the situation is similar. International executives like to talk about how different their cultures are from the US business culture, and there are important differences. But, there are remarkable similarities in their allergy to using psychology as a new basis for their everyday interactions, or even the structure of their systems. (They could start by reading the literature on annual review/appraisal and reward systems.) In this sense, business leaders around the globe are in one boat.

Would You Like Fresh Insights on Chronic Problems?

I’ll leave this subject for now. It may be a lot to take in. You may not even think that I’ve made a point worth making. If that’s true, please consider these final questions before finalizing your conclusion:

• Why do we try so hard to limit the amount and kinds of emotion expressed at work? It seems to me we have gone too far. We don’t actually want low-emotion workplaces; we want no emotion workplaces. Why do we need that so much? Maybe because we are too psychologically incompetent (I have intentionally gone beyond emotional intelligence with this idea.)
• How does verbal praise affect the receiver’s motivation? What about criticism? What specifically does it change in their thinking? It would be helpful to know this before you praise or criticize. If you believe in management by walking around, is it possible that you are perceived as controlling, or distrustful, and not interested and supportive?
• If we are so desperate to invent new products and services, and creative thinking is at the heart of the innovation process, why are our organizations decorated with the most bland kind of corporate art you could find in a doctor’s office? What possibilities are you missing here?
• If our company’s values are so central to everything we do, why don’t we see the words and symbols of their meaning on the walls of our offices, in the corridors, and in other places we sit, talk, and think together? See question above.
• If collaboration is so central to our success, if idea velocity (necessary and appropriate speed and direction) is so crucial to hitting our targets, why are our conference rooms so utterly boring? Why are our office spaces set up with row after banal row of rectilinear cubicles if it is interaction we desperately need?
• Do your personal values have anything to do with the decisions you make? How can your personal values affect your motivation? Do you think they have anything to do with the ethical climate at the company? Are there early and subtle signs that would hint that someone is in dubious ethical territory?
• If performance reviews are known to be experienced both by the reviewer and the reviewed as akin to swallowing granola cereal with nasty case of strep throat, why do we still use them in their current form? Why haven’t we conceived a new approach, more psychologically-modern approach?

Psychological competence would help us answer these questions and, more to the point, craft answers that would reduce or eradicate many of our chronic organizational problems. I’m not saying it would be easy. But, think about it. Pleae, push back on the ideas here and share your thoughts. In the overall scheme of life, work is vitally important. How we feel about it, how we perform it, how we make meaning from it are all important to the other facets of our lives - like our family life, our romances, our spirituality. When it comes to how we work, I think being more psychologically competent will help business leaders, me, you, us, do a better job of it. [Copyright David C. Facer, Jr. All Rights Reserved.]

The second link is to the inauguration poem. This often gets far less attention and yet was equally grounded and soaring. I found it soared not in primary colors. More a soaring in the bright, blended, and translucent colors of a rainbow. I hope you enjoy it, too.

Everyday performance demands (yep, I mean that, too) people feel and think they are connected to a big vision. Small actions only roll up into big achievements when they are plugged into something bigger. Plug an appliance into a socket that does not supply enough of the right kind of energy and the appliance does not do what it is capable of doing. So, please, may business managers stop believing and behaving like it is mainly about the numbers, or the small task at hand. When it comes time for each of us to decide if we are going to give more or pull back, go the extra mile or a few more inches, we consciously and subconsciously look for a deeper meaning that inspires us to give ourselves, our skills, our breaths, our life energy to our work. What meaning we can’t find in our work we will seek out elsewhere. This may be good for our other constituents, but it’s bad for our businesses.

One final thought: I hope you will read these when you have some quiet time and space, free from physical, auditory, mental, and visual interruption. To read them is one thing. To let them inhabit your individual and our collective inner space is more what I am hoping for.

Obama Inauguration Speech Text

Obama Inauguration Poem

You have already heard me say I don’t care about New Year’s Resolutions anymore until they are backed up by a true plan of action complete with specific and measurable, motivating, attainable, relevant, and trackable goals (the ubiquitous SMART model.) That remains true. Resolutions without plans are like the wishes a girl makes that she get a pony for her birthday or, a boy wishes his sister would turn into a bug. Nay; for adult dreams to become real they need adult plans of action.

That’s what I intended to write about. But, I would rather offer you a poem of encouragement, and realization about the mystery and magnificence of saying the unsayable, and attempting the BIG hairy outrageous goal you have in mind, so that you persist in your efforts to achieve whatever you dreamed about, resolved, or maturely planned to do, one faithful step at a time.

For all the left-brain thinkers out there, poetry is a great way to open up your creative, non-linear side of both your brain and your spirit. For you right brainers, it may be a gentle reminder to operationalize your creative impulses and insights and stay the course of action even when it appears you are making no progress.

Even with a plan there is no guarantee of success. But, the real deal is to be fully engaged in the process of creating something meaningful - THAT is what life is about. THAT is what business is about (all oversqualked platitudes about results, results, results notwithstanding.) If your plan is something BIG, out of the prevailing view in your circle of friends, family, or coworkers, I hope you appreciate the images in this poem. Enjoy. When I read it, I feel alive and courageous. I hope you enjoy it.

My friend, Bridget Hanley, wrote it. You can read more of her lovely poetry at www.BridgetHanley.com. 

Poet Landing [at New Year]
Now that so much of the world is crumbling
And rumbling with change, many of us
May find ourselves more than surprised
By what we say. We may become like fire
Or water with a mouth, may want to express
A love that will likely be misinterpreted,
May find our words going unnoticed
With no seeming place to land
Even as they seep into open, invisible cracks and hasten
The crumbling, drawn into the unknown,
And give birth to what is new.

I am not the least bit interested in resolutions. I want to see your plans and evidence of what FDR called, direct, vigorous action. Show me your calendar with your goals broken down into daily tasks. Show me your budgets with allocations by month for those tasks that require money to be spent. Show me your hour blocks that dedicate your time to working on those tasks. Show me the calendars, budgets, and time blocks of key colleagues/partners/teammates who are working with you on accomplishing your important goals. Those are the things I want to see!

Show me your education plans, complete with budget, so I can see your commitment to your ongoing learning. Show me your wish-list of knowledge you will buy at Amazon.com. Better yet, show me the order receipts for the ones you already bought. (Might as well take the right off this year, so buy the books, DVDs, CDs now.) Show me your seminar registration and the plane reservation to get there. Show me your new Blackberry or iPhone if you bought an upgrade to be more productive. Show me the subscription receipts for the academic journals you subscribed to, or the weekly/monthly magazines you bought for the coming year. Show me the airline reservations for that visit to far-off lands, great friends, and loved family you say you “will” take. Those things will prove that you are intent. Your intention statements (sorry Wayne Dyer) are as substantive as the clouds outside and as fleeting as Mrs. Tuttle’s cookies (Thanks, Ma Tutt!).

Harsh? Maybe? But, aren’t you tired of the same old silly thinking about annual intentions? I am. I’m bored with my own blabber about intentions. Every year I have a few juicy, cleverly worded intentions, and every year just like most of you (send me a note proving I’m wrong about your 2008 intentions and I will send you a personal apology and a big ol’ Congratulations!) could hardly say in March what I intended in December.

This year my money and time are where my heart really is. So far I have:

A) Bought three books and research on leadership:

• Stogdill & Bass’s updated Encyclopedia of Leadership
• J.M. Burns’ Transformational Leadership book (different than the 1978 book, Leadership)
• Sorrentino & Yamaguchi’s Handbook of Motivation and Cognition Across Cultures
• McClelland’s Human Motivation (Thanks, Michele!) and,

B) Paid for a 3-credit intersession class on Group Dynamics at USD.

Total investment: Approximately $3700.

Am I bragging? I don’t mean to. What I mean is to show that I am putting my resources where my mouth is. So, when I sit with Drea Zigarmi and Susan Fowler (love you both!) soon and we create our vision boards for the 2009, I can truthfully report not only what I want, but what I am doing to create it.

No doubt, some of what will happen in 2009 will be a mystery. As well it should be. But, what I can contribute I will. And(!) this year it will be before I spout off about it.

So, from the depths of my heart to the depths of yours, please do the work now, before your annual New Year’s resolution turns out to be just another clever toast with a fine drink amidst dear friends sent up with a flurry of revelry and chatter into the ether never to be heard from again.

Life is short and can be grand. Act now so when you intend ahead, you actually already have a plan in action.

Happy New Year! May all your plans come true.

But, the fear we feel is met in equal measure with bewilderment. It seems to me business(wo)men and consumers alike have been remarkably irresponsible these past few years. We have been living in a child’s fantasy world, like that Skittles advert where candy rains down from the sky, and there are no consequences for our decisions, and the future is only sunny. When a young friend of mine who has struggled to make more than $50,000 per year bought a $500,000 condo flags went up for me. How on earth could he think he could afford the mortgage (he put nothing down)? More to the point, who on earth would lend him half a million dollars?

The answer is a) by way of creative financing that anyone who was writing about innovation five years ago would probably have applauded and, b) bank managers who really did not know enough to be bank managers convinced him, and themselves, he could swing it. But, there is probably an answer C, also: the world consumer culture made it easy, too. Let’s face it, the bust we are now embroiled in is a world event, and the American consumerism mindset so often talked about as a mindset peculiar to America isn’t.

I just returned from Dubai, where the building boom makes the US building boom sound like a squeak. Many of their new buildings, spectacular as they are, are empty, and yet there are dozens more planned. Exciting and sexy does not sound business make. Just as the spectacular housing boom of the past decade in the US did not make for sound business practice.

Will we ever mature beyond our boom and bust mentality? Will we learn to steel ourselves to the Siren call of booming growth when we know from recent history that busted growth often follows right behind it? What will it take for us to appropriately regulate our inclinations to do what we want to do when other, albeit uncomfortable, actions are more likely to yield better long-term results? This question is at the heart of self-regulation…and strong, wise leadership.

Think of the trillion (that is a thousand billion) dollars now allocated to correct the effects of bad thinking and decisions. That money has surely wiped out many of the advantages gained by the use of the policies it now seeks to remedy, no? I don’t mean to be (totally) glib, or Pollyannaish, but was this avoidable? Could company executives have chosen a wiser path forward these past ten years?

I really don’t know the answer to my questions. When a river swells and picks up speed it is very hard to resist its flow. Maybe I am naive to think a Steady Eddy mentality would have kept more companies, their customers, and their employees safe–or the other stakeholders management had little considered, like the distant citizen affected by the ensuing recession. But, I want to think a more rational, and dare I say it, conservative business strategy is also truly wise, that is, more likely to ensure a more positive, stable, and predictable future.

Just because we feel driven to do something does not mean we ought to do it. Just because the prevailing wind (a.k.a. mindset) blows one way does not mean we have to fly our kites in that wind. Take another example: American auto companies. Detroit’s prevailing wind had it ignorant of or naively ignoring the many trends that have nearly eroded its foundations completely. What might have happened had management and labor looked more carefully at what the Germans and Japanese were doing successfully for 30 years and responded in a completely different way than was their convention/norm/habit?

For many lenders the completely different way would have been not to sell my friend a condo, or at least not one as expensive. For my friend, it would have been to keep renting. For home owners, the completely different way might have been to not use their home’s equity to buy that new car, or upgrade the bathrooms and kitchen.

Like many people, I can get caught up in boom-time naivete. And, in some ways I did. But now I want to really look into the thinking that leads to my actions. I am going to contemplate where in my personal and business life I need to invite in unconventional thinking and even get back to Steady Eddy ways. Maybe you know someone who should, too? [I welcome your thoughts and comments. Feel free to enter them below.]

I said, “I could be wrong here. Throw away what I’m about to say if it’s totally useless to you - Aren’t you tired of being frustrated and angry?”

He said, “I’m not angry, He’s angry.”

“Really?” I said.

“You think I’m angry?” he asked.

“Yes,” I replied, to his surprise.

There is something real and useful in the notion that we see in others aspects of ourselves. Sometimes we project onto other people qualities that we possess (like anger) or qualities we think we do not possess (like wisdom, intelligence, beauty–and frustration.)

My client is continually frustrated by a colleague he sees as constantly frustrated. See how it works?

What I might have said to this client (who was talking about the executive vice-president of marketing) is “Oh, give it up already! Get over yourself. You are holding onto your frustration. Holding onto it is like holding onto a convenient, comfortable, and dysfunctional story you tell yourself to keep yourself precisely as you are now. It lets you ignore the responsibility and authority you have to address the situation in more useful and productive ways. So, as long as you stay frustrated you remain right. (Righteous is more like it.) As long as you keep telling yourself you are right, you will remain frustrated. Aren’t you tired?”

Whatever you’re holding onto in order to be right and righteous, give it up. There is a lot more to achieve, and being stuck in your single version of what’s happening around you (and to you) is sure to keep you exactly where you are.

(Remember what I said about seeing in others some projected aspect of ourselves? Well, I wrote this blog for my benefit, too. I’m right there with you.)

Here’s the thing, if your career followed the common path (not that you’re not extraordinary, mind you!) you began early on with some academic knowledge about your field of study, took a job that allowed you to apply that knowledge in “the real world,” had that knowledge severely tested by every day challenges and problems, and managed through hard work and good old Puritan work ethic to develop a growing expertise at it. Then you were promoted based on that expertise into a role with  more responsibility and authority. You did so well you were promoted into management. That’s when things got crazy.

The instant you began managing other people you entered a vortex of psychological, sociological, and emotional dynamics that little of your previous success prepared you for. You were a great “team player” before, but you noticed that being a team “lead” or manager is totally different. People have very different expectations and biases about you now that didn’t exist before you became a manager or team lead. And, in fairness, you began to look at the team members differently now that you are “responsible for them and their results.”

You’re not crazy if you feel things got a lot more complex; they did. I will tell you that you are crazy if you think more focus on technical outcomes (usually put in term of “goals”) is still your primary focus. Crazy is not actively investing in learning how to wisely and proactively manage the psychology and socialization of your organization. Crazy is not, with your time and money, investing in your own personal development and leadership skills.

When executives ask how to deal with the complexity they now face, I advise them to invest a minimum of 5% of their time in self- and leadership-development. For a 50-hour work week, that’s 2.5 hours per week, or 10 hours a month. That means books, workshops, retreats, coaching (yeah, you knew I’d throw that in there), management and leadership skills training, and awareness development. Imagine having invested at that level. After one year you would be so much more knowledgeable and capable. Your management life would be a lot easier and a lot less crazy.

Things don’t have to be as crazy as they seem. If you actively invest in your own development, you will notice something interesting…other people will seem a lot less crazy. You will finally (!) understand what they are trying to do. And, if you approach things well, you can strike the right balance of helping them meet their needs while achieving the organization’s key goals. How about that approach for a little sanity (and winning results)?

Webster’s online dictionary calls perception “the act or faculty of apprehending by means of the senses or of the mind; cognition; understanding. 2. immediate or intuitive recognition or appreciation as, of moral, psychological, or aesthetic qualities; insight; intuition, discernment. 4. a single unified awareness derived from sensory processes while a stimulus is present. But, is such a shared and agreed awareness even possible? Minimally, generating one can be challenging.

The little girl is not expected to have astute physical senses and yet she sees something down the hall. Her adult caretakers take for granted that much of what she sees is not really there—except to her, of course. Her stuffed animals do not really talk to her, except that they do. There is no single unified awareness there. For the little girl those things are real, though, just like for the father the movie was just a movie about a capricious kid, and for the uncle the hallway was just a little-considered, functional pathway through a house. The fact is that these contradictory perceptions simultaneously sit beside one another, as do their perceivers each night at dinner.

Who Is Right?

The son watched the movie and perceived the young man’s journey as metaphorical, as connoting something bigger. The roads the son visually watched the protagonist take from Georgia to Alaska were not important per se. The story was about a young man’s search for the meaning of life, and testing himself in way similar to how ascetics test their bodies to achieve spiritual transcendence. His father initially described the movie as “a good movie.” His perception was not the same as his son’s, clearly, although they watched the same filmed images. In conversation, the father also saw of the protagonist as naïve, which was an interpretation, a conclusion, a drawn meaning, a perception that emerged by seeing into the movie’s possible meaning and not only looking at the moving images. The father’s latter summation was just as much a representation, just as much a mind-leap from watching to seeing into what was watched, just as much the result of a meaning-generative process, just as much an interpretation of what was actually viewed with the eyes pointed at the movie screen as was his son’s assessment of the protagonist’s actions as metaphorical of the life journey of all human beings. So, the father had two views, two perceptions of the same movie, and his son gained another perception of the protagonist as naïve. I wonder how many more perceptions there are.

Who Is Seeing Clearly?

When we observe carefully, we notice that in everyday life, in every domain, be it work, school, family, or platonic endeavors, we fill a great deal of our awake time, use much of our conversation, and employ a lot of our solo thinking in trying to figure out how much is really happening in a situation, whose “seeing” and points of view are most valuable, how much we see, what dynamics are illusions, how much more might be seeable, what we are missing, what our obligation is to see more, and, very often, how much of what we see we can filter out—all in an effort to decide how much information, if any, we must consider or act upon. These inquiries are at the heart of the challenge of perception.

The simplest aspect of perception is to take in, to register, to receive a stimulus with one’s senses. This is important and fundamental to optimal human functioning, for sure. But there is more potential in perception than in mere observation and stimulus receipt. Perception is not simply to register with eyes, for example. Seeing (or smelling, for that matter) may be a merely physical and unintended phenomenon. Perception is also a thing of interpretation. I see a flower I interpret as colored magenta. The color magenta is not innate to my mind. I did not have preconscious knowledge of it. It is learned as is your perception of, say, red. I might settle firmly on the experience of a magenta flower, and you might be equally firm on it being red. Who is right? Moreover, how do we reconcile the two views? Herein flashes the problematic nature of perception.

Looking At is Different from Seeing Into

In the case of the movie, I perceived a story as something else, a metaphor. What I watched was akin to something else. This interpretive level of perception is valuable. One is generally and complimentarily said to be perceptive for either seeing something physical others missed, or seeing something non-physical that others missed and agree could possibly exist. In both cases perception and perceptiveness is culturally valued. That value is hinted at in the way people refer to another’s perception. They often say, “That’s very perceptive of you,” with the tone of regard. And, the opposite, scoffing tone also implies a value of perception in our culture when someone says to another who pointed out the obvious, “How perceptive of you, Sherlock.”

In Sherlock Holmes lingo, perceiving is a combination of sensibly receiving and then drawing deductive and inductive connections between evidence and observations and something that may or must, by extended thinking, be as real as what is physically true. So, it is reasonable that we initially define perception as a recognition of something using a physical sense. That is a good start. What can that recognition do for us?

20 students watch a video in which 6 students, three in white t-shirts bounce a ball, and are told to count the number of bounces. Half the students see a black gorilla walk across the screen, half do not. Half perceived the gorilla, half did not. So what? The answer comes in what meaning, from sweet to sour, any or all of the students make of the gorilla’s perception by half the students, and the fact that half of them still did not have the image of the gorilla in their minds 10 minutes later because they did not actually see it. What might the gorilla’s simultaneous absence and presence mean? Ask ten students and you get many answers which show what is true of perception beyond merely seeing: it is variable. It is not easily fixed in a single interpretation. To perceive is not merely to physically validate. It is also to look into. So, perception includes both the physical scientist’s observation and the non-physical practitioner’s in-sight about the observation. What the perception of the gorilla or lack of it meant to everyone is a more important and challenging contemplation than whether the gorilla was physically present or not. Unless we go to this extra level of thinking we are only working to extend the use of our physical senses. But once we do go further, we are in the land of imprecise, multiple simultaneous meanings, and, hence, tricky interpersonal, scientific, and philosophical terrain.

40 eyes watched the video. 40 images of gorilla’s were received through 40 pupils and built on 40 retinas and only 20 actually “saw” the gorilla. A father and son watched a popular movie with two sets of eyes and came away with several different perceptions, several different meanings. A little girl is convinced of a spooky forest down the hall, and her uncle sees four doors.

Beware the (In)visible Gorilla

Perception is important, and problematic, not because it has only to do with physically missing or noticing a physical or immaterial object or phenomenon. Perception is problematic and rich with potential because what is perceived is then used to make sense. From that meaning action springs, be it conscious or unconscious. Indeed, even future involuntary action can be influenced by past perception just as past meaning influences future conceptualizations. For everyone who perceives something, that something exists, if only briefly. What is perceived leads to an ongoing relationship between meaning, affect, thought, and action.

Perception is no mere physical sensory ability or cultivated skill. It is one of the special attributes of the human mind. It is a primary gateway to the vast human experience. But, try to align multiple perceptions within one single mind, and try to align any, many, or all of them into a unified and shared awareness in many minds and the collective human experience gets very exciting indeed.

—> http://www.ccl.org/leadership/pdf/research/EverydayLeadership.pdf

You might “find” yourself in one of the data summaries.

Enjoy. If you want to discuss it, look me up on Twitter (@activ8potential), AIM (ActivatePotential), or email (ActivatePotential{at}Gmail.com)

Bye for now.
David

Most of the people talking about leadership in the sites I visited fall into three categories: executives who claim success in “leading” an organization; people like me who claim to have had some success in some field of work and now consult to people who have organizational problems or needs they want to address; and professors in universities or PhD-holders in a related field working in some form of education in some kind of organization, either for- or not-for-profit.

Was It Really Leadership?
The most interesting thing about all of this, though, is how infrequently the businesspeople (and consultants) reference anything the least bit academic on the subject. They rarely discuss leadership in any particular context, or juxtapose their belief that leaders must possess “10 key leadership traits” with the current (or even historical) research about traits or anything else that might contribute to the sustained performance of effective leadership. More often than not, and almost certainly the bolder they are, they fall into the trap of the “fundamental attribution error” (Ross, 1969).

In the interest of fairness, even on this site, my past blog entries and articles were written from my point of view, as if my point of view and experience (and whatever meager insights I offered you) would perfectly fit the situation you are facing. And even worse, it wasassumed that success was a result of leadership, and in particular, the leadership of the person writing. That “my size fits all” approach is naive. It may even be arrogant. But, I assume everyone is trying to help someone else out, so I’ll stick with naive.

Rigorous Analysis or Anecdote?
The advantage of tapping into the research on the subject of leadership is that it can act as a kind of sounding board and acid test for the expertise claimed by executives. For example, a successful executive may or may not have executed leadership at all if you use James MacGregor Burns’ definition of leadership. That executive may actually have been a very, very successful manager. A strong balance sheet does not a leader make. The analysis shifts again if you consider Joe Rost’s definition. Likewise, those claiming the real-world benefits of servant leadership probably under-analyze the strong management systems that naturally underpin a successful implementation of servant leadership philosophy.

Organizational success can be achieved without much leadership at all. Or, it may be achieved with a combination of leadership and strong management, no matter whose definition we use. But, those selling leadership services and ideas pretend leadership alone created success. It surely was important, and but one element in a complex situation over time.

Anecdotes and Academics
What we really need is a combination of valid first-person experiential learning and the deep analysis that comes out of good academic work, including research. Why? Because the success stories usually underestimate the factors that fostered success, and so often even downplay the amount of work that went into their success. The story-tellers would actually be more impressive is they accounted for more of the dynamics that they (and everyone else involved) successfully addressed. A more academic analysis would help them.

Positively influencing others–the very heart of leadership (Burns, 1978)–or any attempt to affect another person’s thinking and behavior is inherently psychological, sociological, relational, and philosophical. Most stories about business success miss a great deal that went into it, even when told by the proud executive who “led” the charge.

So, when you read what’s online about leadership, look awry at it, as Simon Western says (2007). There is more, and often less, there than meets the eye.