Leading with Questions, but make it good; Bad Leadership Tropes and why we need to retire them
‘Leadership’ is not doing well right now. The old ways don’t work anymore but the new ways are often still just guesses and wishes. Like tectonic plates, ‘empowerment and discourse’ is pushing up against ‘command and control’. There is an obvious disconnect between top managers and their teams. Just look at the most visible dispute that does not want to die down: the hybrid work discourse.
Employees want things. Managers want something else. Other stakeholders again something else. With everyone being able to put their points of view online there is a lot of confusion out there, which inevitably leads to people running away with cliches.
The fact that pretty cliches get you more likes and reposts doesn’t help the discourse. But I get it. People want order in the chaos.
As someone who has led many people, and few people, and different types of businesses, I have been feeling more and more, annoyed is the wrong word but rather bemused by some leadership cliches that proliferated the discourse. Too many of these axioms sound like imagined utopia, wishes from people who aren’t themselves in positions of leadership, and ideas that should make people feel better. These can be interesting But there are too few examples of them producing results IRL.
I often just want to say: that’s not how it works in real life; I would like to do things this way but everything depends on context, culture, and circumstances. It is not that simple. Otherwise, we would already be living in a utopia. But people are… complicated. So are their relationships with each other.
This paper on Zombie Leadership, link below, is genuinely the best thing I’ve read in a long time on the topic.
We need provocative papers like this one; and conversations. It is too easy to read something that sounds nice, a soundbite, something we would love to see in real life, and accept it as the truth because it makes us feel better.
“Zombie leadership contrives to get all these things wrong. In the first instance, it does so by reducing leadership to the leader alone. As with a dictator speaking in a darkened amphitheater, zombie leadership casts the analytic spotlight solely on this figure while leaving all else (followers, relationships, collectivity) shrouded in darkness. It then imagines that true leaders go it alone, a prepotent bundle of traits and attributes, propelled by instinct and native guile to pursue their goals and drag everyone along with them. It imagines leaders as solitary heroes who single-handedly drive history-making group success. In the process, it reduces group members to mere groupies who idolize the leader for doing what they cannot do for themselves. It imagines too that everyone sees leaders as superheroes and that people are only too happy to acknowledge the leader’s superheroic powers because these are something from which they themselves will always benefit.”
You can find the whole paper here if you are interested and have time to read it: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1048984323000966?via=ihub.
I am working my way through it, but as I am also thinking while and in between reading, I don’t yet know what I do or do not agree with. But having the conversation and challenging leadership tropes that sound good but are not necessarily helpful or as generally applicable as some would like to believe is important.
And THAT is my real problem with much of the leadership material I come across: things that might work under specific circumstances are being pushed as a general panacea. That, and the fact they are often not written by people on the ground in the first place.
Leading with Questions
In any case, I’ve been thinking about the need for leaders to be much better at asking questions. We need to lead more by asking good questions. I don’t mean asking leading questions so we get exactly what we want, hidden behind a false debate. I mean bringing an element of curiosity, humility, and exploration into the discourse while keeping our confidence, clarity, and vision intact.