Leadership Is A Scam

You may have noticed that conservatives tend to not take college majors like Feminist Studies and Queer Studies all that seriously. In fact, conservatives are generally dismissive of all the “Identity Studies” majors that have emerged in the last thirty years. Ask why and you’ll hear, “They’re fake.” They exist because of massive grants that keep them propped up, which is necessary because such degrees aren’t productive or useful or self-sustaining. They’re pseudo-historic, pseudo-scientific, but they’re also very fashionable, which means you’re not supposed to subject them to any real rational scrutiny. They appeal primarily to an elite class which fancies itself misunderstood by anyone on the outside—and conservatives gleefully jeer at such “elites.”  

What’s odd, though, is that the same people who make such criticisms of Feminist Studies and Queer Studies also tend to treat Leadership as a serious academic matter, even though the trajectory and justification of Leadership is basically indistinguishable from that of Queer Studies. Leadership is just Queer Studies for straight white guys.  

To be clear, I’m not an egalitarian or an anarchist. In fact, I insist on hierarchies. My issue is not with leaders per se, but rather with Leadership as a trendy intellectual discipline invented in the 1990s which has since become a $366 billion dollar industry. Actually, I’m content to let the world waste their money on leadership training, leadership development, leadership conferences, workshops, degrees, and so forth, but what I find laughable is the way that modern Christians have been suckered by it, even those in classical Christian education. In the last ten years, the Leadership virus has infected the LinkedIn accounts of countless headmasters, board members, and principals at classical schools. Why? Because the corporate world treats the ability to trade in Leadership jargon as a valuable asset and many classical schools are now run by men who take their intellectual marching orders from Fortune 500 companies.  

Obviously, my personal experiences with Leadership wonks haven’t won me over to their cause, but neither have the academic essays I’ve read on the fad. One of the best recent assessments of the Leadership cult is “Sheeple in Leaders’ Clothing,” wherein author Clifford Humphrey opens with the fact he used to teach a college course called “Introduction to Leadership,” but ultimately came to believe that Leadership training sessions “tend to be composed of empty platitudes and personality assessments, designed to pad the pockets of the purveyors and stroke the egos and inflate the CVs of the participants.” As opposed to embracing the manifestly aristocratic nature of office hierarchy, Leadership training can show you how to present yourself to employees in such a way that obfuscates the hierarchical nature of your relationship. A good leader must learn to present himself as “a team player” and “a good listener,” both of which are democratic virtues. Nonetheless, it is far more important for a leader to be perceived as a team player than to actually be a team player. Being a team player isn’t necessarily lucrative or moral, but being thought a team player will pacify the egalitarian PR and HR needs of the modern business. 

Of course, most people (other than middle management) understand the cosmetic nature of the Leadership persona, which is one of the reasons The Office is still so beloved. Michael Scott is the perfect example of a Leader who desperately wants to be thought winsome, humane, supportive, and successful—often co-opting the latest jargon and business practices to these ends—even while he’s self-obsessed, authoritarian, and blithely indifferent to the senseless burdens he foists on the people beneath him. Every decision he makes for his employees, no matter how stupid, has some theoretical justification, and no amount of real evidence to the contrary will dissuade him from doing what he wants to do. The success of the Scranton branch is entirely based on the people who work below Michael, a fact to which the corporate office is blind. Beyond the small, backroom poker game of Leadership played with insularly valuable LinkedIn chips and glamorous resume filler, The Office is the way most people see the corporate world.   

Occasionally, someone from within that world grows heretic and speaks out about it. In “Zombie leadership: Dead ideas that still walk among us,” a recent article for The Leadership Quarterly, S. Alexander Haslam (School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, Australia), Mats Alvesson (School of Management, Department of Business Administration, Lund University, Sweden), and Stephen D. Reicher (School of Psychology and Neuroscience, The University of St Andrews, UK) lay waste to “eight core claims” of modern Leadership, though I genuinely don’t know what’s left of Leadership when they’re done. As a discipline, the authors argue that Leadership lives on “not because it has empirical support but because it flatters and appeals to elites [and] to the leadership industrial complex that supports them…” Leadership is a self-evaluating ghetto that just happens to think itself necessary, productive, and beautiful. Leadership theories tell leaders what they want to hear. It supplies them with a pseudo-scientific rhetoric for justifying their positions apart from the effectiveness of what they do. In my experience, the more deeply involved a leader is in Leadership, the less competent they are at actually leading. What’s more, Leadership wonks always want to tell you about their Leadership game. They say, “You see, I embrace a vision of leadership that…” and, “As a leader, I want people to…” and, “The greatest leaders are the ones who…” Many Leaders compensate for the fakeness of Leadership by overperforming the image they seek to convey. Their work isn’t real enough for the right image to emerge naturally, so they have to tell employees how to think about them.   

The authors of “Zombie leadership” attack the idea that leadership is only accomplishable through formally recognized positions of leadership. In other words, the leadership present in a certain Humanities department is exclusively the possession of the department chair, regardless of how banal her or his meetings are. The leadership present in a certain school is exclusively channeled through the administration. If a basketball team works well together, the team captain ought to receive credit. And yet, plenty of teachers at apparently stable schools might report that the headmaster and principal completely checked out years ago, and that the school is “actually run” by a secretary with no formal commission to lead, or a dynamic teacher with a self-derived power to direct faculty interests and practices.   

More importantly, “Zombie leadership” attacks the idea that, “Leadership is a special skill limited to special people.” While it’s against the democratic image that Leadership needs to convey, when pressed, many Leaders would report that their abilities are born of “a certain something” they possess—some charisma, some genius, some talent that can’t really be taught. The Leadership cult thus perpetuates itself through something like apostolic succession. Only Leaders have the ability to determine other Leaders. Only Leaders can anoint Leaders. All charisma has to be validated by the guys at corporate, and any charisma which exists outside the proper channels is contraband. Fake Leaders always perceive real leaders as a threat, regardless of how much good they’re accomplish.  

While the “special skill/special people” axiom caters “to the tastes of the powerful [by] telling them what they like to hear,” there’s no real evidence for it. Rather, there’s evidence that putting Leaders on special Leadership pedestals “limits the willingness of subordinates to provide the feedback that is essential for the detection and correction of problematic decisions and arrangements,” or, as may be more commonly the case, the pedestal gives Leaders warrant to dismiss corrective feedback from the unanointed. No matter how badly the faculty rate the administration in their yearly survey, the administration should stay the course. Only Leaders get it.      

Interestingly enough, the authors of “Zombie leadership” argue that bad ideas about Leadership have been “on the advance” in recent years, but especially in academia. Zombie leadership is what prompts many classical Christian school boards to make headmasters out of men who have business degrees, but no classroom experience and no desire to read old books. Those boards assume, as Haslam et al put it, that “All leadership is the same,” and that Leadership skills, once acquired, can be easily transferred from one field or business to another. Thus, the captain of a football team has “Leadership skills” that make him suited to run a car dealership (even if he knows nothing about cars), a kitchen (even if he can’t cook) or a school (even if he’s never taught a class in his life). After ten years in the industry, most classical Christian teachers have spent time working for an administrator who didn’t have a classical bone in his body, and those teachers would be happy to disabuse you of the notion that all leadership is the same. Granted, those teachers haven’t been anointed with the Leadership chrism, but their experience and their scoffing might be intriguing nonetheless.  

While it’s nice that “Zombie leadership” provides scholarly support for the frustrations of common people bored by the banality of self-important and delusional middle management, it shouldn’t be necessary. I’ve offered an extensive treatment of the article here for the sake of those readers who need a peer-reviewed journal before they’ll take an idea seriously, because I want to wake those people up.   

I’m also trying to stigmatize Leadership and make people in classical Christian education a little embarrassed to spend money on Leadership training or use their LinkedIn accounts to strike fashionable Leadership poses. Given how much of the Leadership fad is based around jargon, I think a good way of fighting the foolishness is to lampoon the jargon by mangling it with a straight face. The next time you’re in a pointless meeting with a Leadership wonk, try to sound as cool as you can while saying, “Let’s put a pivot in it,” “Is this going to stroke the needle?” “We should take a low-hanging brain dump on that idea,” “Pivot the envelope,” “Put the pivot before the horse,” “Think outside the pivot,” “Tie up loose pivots,” “Tie up loose brain dumps,” and so forth. If you can wreck the Leadership jargon, you can force people to confront reality—and everybody wins when you confront reality, or, at very least, the right people lose.  

To all this, some would argue that Leadership has actually been around for a long time, that “mirrors for princes” are a venerable and ancient genre of literature, and that modern Leadership training exists in continuity with ancient thoughts on government and organization. However, modern Leaders are unwilling to use the same language that those “princes” used. The modern Leader refuses to acknowledge his rule. He wants to “guide,” “manage,” “direct,” “empower,” and “enable,” but he bristles at the idea that he’s a ruler who rules over his employees. He won’t admit to using power. He doesn’t want employees to obey, but to “get along” and “work together” and “partner.” And yet, the more insistent he is on that egalitarian image, the more brutal he must be when the rubber meets the road. He’s Dolores Umbridge, the prim and proper, smiling, absolutely savage headmistress of Hogwarts who carves up student flesh and harasses faculty who get on her bad side. The less willing a ruler is to admit their rule, the more ferocious their rule must become on the back end.  

This might be overly generous, but I tend to think that many people involved in the Leadership industrial complex know that Leadership is fake. The problem is that fake things can provide real cover for incompetence and diffidence. Leadership is easier than the alternative, which is virtue. Sure, classical Christian schools need people who know how to crunch numbers, and a principal needs a different skill set than a Latin teacher. However, what school communities need from administrators is courage, wisdom, strength, honesty, justice, and eloquence, not amoral “leadership skills.” We need good men who stand up to bullies, bribes, dolts, arrogant rookies, and the followers of fashionable ethics. We need men and women in power who have raised happy, obedient children, and we need to get everyone else out of power.