The Leader Can Lead No More

The Leader Can Lead No More

A topic that interests me is the sudden loss of confidence in a leader who had previously been considered outstanding and, perhaps, even heroic.

I remember a conversation with sociologist and collaborator Pat Esborg in the late 1990s. In the conversation she described the phenomenon of, perhaps, revolt, with the heroic leader being pushed off of the cliff by a mob. At the time, I thought she attributed this to Carl Jung, but I have never been able to find such a reference. In subsequent conversations, I have heard it attributed to Claude Lévi-Strauss and Emile Durkheim. Again, I cannot find reference to the hero and their demise, and reading these bodies of work is far beyond me.

The attribution to great minds does not matter – the mob doing in its leader is a phenomenon we know, and it is as old as society.

In my Introduction to Leadership, I wrote that some individuals are the right leader, at the right time, for a certain set of goals. At other times and for other goals, they are not the right leader.  One sees this often when there is a transition from a startup to a publicly traded company. There are different attributes of  leadership  when charged with starting and growing an organization, sustaining an organization, or “changing” an organization.

There are many ways a leader can suffer a collapse of confidence. A common way is with the sudden perception of a fatal flaw or weakness.

In the past few years, we have taken the identification of fatal flaws and the “canceling” of leaders to high form. An important reference in this regard is civil rights lawyer Jeffery Robinson’s discussion of Thomas Jefferson’s contributions to our democracy standing in contradiction with owning slaves. Robinson maintains that a person is “no one thing,” ¹ (ref also the movie, Anatomy of a Murder) and that their negative attributes do not require that we discard their positive contributions. ²The interested reader can search Robinson’s lectures on YouTube. Unfortunately, the primary one I have used has been removed due to copyright disputes.

As for loss of confidence because of weakness, I have seen several instances when the leader losses their ability to lead because of fatigue, loss of interest, physical illness, and more serious loss of cognitive abilities. I have seen many managers or leaders “staying on too long.”

A different mode of weakness is the perception that the leader is not the “right person” to lead the organization in the face of a threat to the organization. There is, perhaps, the perception that the leader is not a “fighter” or willing to place the organization in a position “to fight.” In this case, the organization has experienced a change, and the organization may need to change leaders to address new goals.

As with a conflict of interest, perceived weakness can be just as damaging as factual weakness.

Once the leader has lost the ability to lead, it is difficult to regain that ability. Confidence and trust building take time.

After confidence and trust are lost, there is opportunity for others to carry out their agendas. In the case of the an organization embedded in a larger fragmented organization, it allows the fragmentation to return.

Therefore, a question emerges for the leader and the organization. If the leader were to stay on, then how much effort goes into reestablishing trust in the leader, perhaps a personal desire, rather than actually working for the benefit of the organization? ³(ref to self differentiation in Introduction to Leadership ) It is easy for the leader to conflate their personal desire with their being the only one who can “save” the organization.

With regard to my specific experiences in management and leadership of dysfunctional scientific organizations embedded in fragmented federal agencies, I want to note two specific types of behavior that are repeated.

1) The leader loses or never obtains the confidence and respect of those in their organization

In the case of losing or never gaining the confidence and respect of the organization, this can occur when the organization decides the leader is not adequately credentialed, experienced, or respected as a scientist. I have seen organizations disintegrate in days when they view their leader is, perhaps, beneath them. This case is common when upper management decides to bring in a manager who is viewed as a strong commander and organizer, but who does not have the scientific pedigree demanded by the organization. For this manager to survive and succeed, to lead,  requires extraordinary perseverance, leadership skills, organizational allies, and many years. They will usually not survive the “personality conflict” described below in 2). ⁴This is also a case when sexism or racism directed at the can be in the subtext, if not explicit.

Other instances of losing confidence and trust and the ability to lead follow from more mundane behavior. These include the overtly self-interested leader, the dithering leader, or the inattentive leader. Cultural norms, such as “science should not be managed,” can support managers with these characteristics for many years because it perpetuates the fragmented culture of the organization.⁵ (see fragmentation in Attributes of Entrenched Organizations)

2) The leader losses the confidence or support of their (upper) management

In the case of losing support of upper management, this can, in fact, be the outcome of good organizational leadership. This is, especially, true when working to change an organization that is embedded in a larger organization, an Agency, that itself perpetuates a dysfunctional culture. That is, the organizational leader not only has to lead cultural change within their home organization, but advocate and promote change in the larger  Agency organization. This requires strong allies , who persist within the Agency.

At some point the Agency is sure to “have had enough” and the leader losses their ability to lead. At least three times in my career, I was told I had been “more successful than we ever imagined” and management decided to “go in a different direction.”

The agency reverts to form.

This situation allowed two realizations that I would take into any effort of “trying to manage change” in an organization.

The first is that if an executive or program manager within an agency decides that a performing organization “needs to change,” there is no reason to conclude that this desire is shared by the agency as a whole. Indeed, it is not, because success in changing one organization within an agency has consequences for other related organizations. Therefore, the culture of the agency works against change.

The second is the common reason used to terminate a successful leader, which is a “personality conflict” with upper management. As upper management is imbued with “leadership,” this leads to a simple threat to power.  The stubbornness of an organization’s leader to yield to this dysfunctional power is easily and conveniently dismissed as “personality conflict.”  This allows the truth of the dysfunction to be unspoken.