A633.1.2.RB - The Leadership Gap

I remember a time when “leaders” came straight from a mold. In my 8-year-old mind, they were essentially different variations on the Monopoly man, Rich Uncle Pennybags, or J. Jonah Jameson, the always-screaming newspaper editor from the Spider-Man comic books. These figures were “bosses,” and my image of them usually came from pop culture. They were the stiff, boring ones in suits who were always trying to foil the fun of the child protagonist. They were mean, and uber-rich, the ones in corner offices who slammed their fists on desks when they wanted something and wanted it now.

They were characters, these people — simplistic and childish and in positions that seemed wholly unattainable. They were the ones who told other people what to do, which made them intimidating. It made them jerks.

As I got older, this mindset thankfully changed — although I sometimes think (usually while scrolling through social media), that for some people, it never truly did. Leaders — when they come in the form of managers and CEOs, anyway — still seem to be thought of by some as an anointed few which, today, seems crazy to me. Leaders, as I’ve came to understand them, can come in any form. I’ve seen them on sports fields and the school bus. They’ve been artists and friends. They’re the ones who ask questions and dare to do things differently.

It has never been the position that makes the leader, I realized, but rather, the leader who makes the position.

Although my personal view of leaders has changed drastically over the years — from the idea of a kids’-movie villain to the grounded, well-rounded, and strategic thinker I now strive to be — it seems overly simplistic to say that that same evolution of thought has occurred on a macro scale across generations. However, I do believe that a shift has occurred. Maybe it has to do with increasing education, or increasing access (both to knowledge and the leader directly) through the Internet and social media, but leaders seem to be held to a higher standard today, which makes them more open to criticism.

I think of President Donald Trump’s Twitter account, for instance, and how easy that platform has made it for him to communicate directly to the people, and how easy it is for the people to disagree (often loudly and with disrespect). Politics aside, this kind of discourse simply wasn’t an option, say, 50 years ago, when the office water cooler was about the best place for people to find others with likeminded views and share any real dissent. It was that, or take an ad out in the paper, or put a flier up at the local coffee shop.

Today, obviously, this couldn’t be further from reality. The change started in my generation, and the generation that followed has never known a world without Twitter, Facebook, and the 24-hour news cycle. So it makes sense that news, knowledge and our response to authority has changed since my grandparents’ day. “People have higher expectations and faster access to what is going on around them and thus in many cases know more than the leaders do (especially as knowledge and skills have shorter ‘shelf lives’)” (Obolensky, pg. 18). 

Where I try to downplay the change, I suppose, is in the idea that this backlash against those in power that we see today didn’t exist in the past, as well, or didn’t always exist. The 1960s were a time of major civil unrest, for instance: There were protests in the streets, high-level scandals were revealed, and real change stemmed from that. Without the aid of the Internet, people were capable of organizing, and mobilizing. And they did just that.

The point, I think, is to acknowledge that people have always had opinions — they just didn’t have a powerful outlet through which to share and explore them. It seems more than reasonable to say that the networks of today, with their modes of instantaneous feedback, have shed a light on a reflex that was always there in people. By bringing it to the fore, however, that reflex has only strengthened and intensified.

On the other side of the coin, the problem with having such a wealth of information readily available is that people have the opportunity to pick and choose which facts and theories they want to believe, which can be complicated and divisive. As stated in Complex Adaptive Leadership, “The more we know, the less certain things are” (Obolensky, pg. 16). It isn’t only a matter of preference, though — it’s also exposure. Our online feeds are now all but fully customizable: If a point of view isn’t preferred, it can be blocked and replaced with something less challenging, something the user would rather believe.

Where the Internet was meant to make information accessible and draw people together, in a lot of ways, it has only made it easier for some to find their “tribe” and isolate themselves within it. This phenomenon is what spurred the creation of terms like “fake news” and “alternative facts.” It sometimes seems that there is no undisputed “truth” anymore, and so how could there be undisputed “best practices” when it comes to leadership or news reporting or anything else, either? It isn’t the Internet that created the ideological divides we see in society today, though — it is how we choose to use the knowledge the Internet makes so accessible that did that, and I assume the same holds true with any leadership-quality gaps we see.

What makes a good leader? Different people can pose different answers and, the reality is, they all could be “right.” By being open to all viewpoints and ideas, though, and by incorporating as much from as many different perspectives as possible, leadership, like any other intellectual endeavor, could be improved across the board. In a world where the concept of black-and-white truths no longer exists, complexity becomes a guiding principle. Without embracing complexity in this changing world, a leader simply can’t expect to adapt, let alone thrive.

References

Obolensky, Nick. (2014). Complex adaptive leadership: embracing paradox and uncertainty. New York, NY: Routledge.