As new year arrives, leaders are struggling to find clarity on how to guide their organisations in the right direction. The organisational field is filled with noisy and contradictory advice telling leaders how to get the best from their organisations. This essay brings two challenges to the fore.
Firstly, there is the need to move from immature organisations to mature organisations. To shift from the infantalisation of employees, challenging the old idea that a messiah leader will save them and bring success.
Secondly, to address the problem that leaders’ main focus is on demand i.e. they focus on the demand to raise productivity. This focus however overlooks the hidden desires that really make the difference in organisations.
Challenge 1. Salvation Culture
Since the 1990s a shift in organisational thinking took place. Previously the main driver for change was to draw on the most efficient scientific management available, and there was little talk of leadership. The idea that strong leadership could lead change followed the economic demise in the west during the 1990s, and the challenge that came from the Asian Tiger economies. There was a need for a radical rethink, and a need to regenerate and re-energise organisations. The Google NGRAM chart below shows how the term ‘organisational leadership’ rose drastically in the literature since the 1990s and continues to grow.
Leadership is unquestionably important in leading change. However, a key problem with leadership being at the heart of the drive for organisational change is the way leadership is thought about and practiced. The NGRAM chart below shows how the term ‘transformational leadership’ also grew astronomically alongside the growth of organisational leadership. This reveals that leadership is reduced to a very limited perspective, one that perceives leadership as being performed by a charismatic, heroic, visionary individual.
Transformational leaders fall within what I define as the ‘Messiah Leadership discourse’ (Western 2019). However, this individualist, heroic approach is counter-productive to sustainable organisational success, because it creates dependency cultures within organisations. Employees become awed by the visionary leadership narrative and feel less able themselves to take up distributed leadership. Messiah leadership approaches can kick start an organisation; a new vision and energised leader can be uplifting. Yet these ‘transformational leaders’ were not so innovative, but they followed a pattern set out by the big consultancies and business schools, that advocated a particular pathway to change. This was to strip out middle management, restructure the organisation and drive change through culture change. The CEO would set out a vision, and the dependent workforce would follow this vision. Culture control would be used to ‘police’ the changes; peers and even self-surveillance would be used to keep the organisational culture pure. Companies should be like families, companies should be communities, companies became like cults…..
This over-reliance on heroic individual leadership creates a top-down culture, that demands unquestioning loyalty to the leader and company and diminishes the potential of employees, and limits collaborative approaches with other organisational stakeholders.
Traversing the fantasy
The remedy to this challenge is for organisations to traverse the fantasy that a Messiah leader will save us. This means to reframing Transformational leadership from being the answer, to being a big part of that problem for organisations, because it creates an immature ‘salvation culture’. In essence employees are infantilised to follow a heroic Daddy or Momma figure to lead them. Raising expectations of employees, expecting them to speak out, and encouraging them to become active-adult company citizens with a real stake in creating a better future is the way forward. A mature developmental culture enables individuals and teams to fulfil their potential and to take up Eco-Leadership i.e. where leadership is expected from everybody, pending on their talents and the context. It is this collective endeavour that will transform organisations and society.
Challenge 2. Demand and Desire
Moving away from a salvation leadership approach opens a space for the organisation to ask, what is our collective leadership for? What continuity and what change are we attempting to lead?
The most common approach from leaders is to respond to demands. Leaders are confronted with demands, they are told their jobs depend on their fulfilling these demands, and they often get no further than this demand focus.
The demands come from boards, shareholders, and the senior leaders they answer to. These demands come from a variety of places depending on the organisation and the status of the leadership in question, but they reliably focus on production targets, service provision, and profit/financial results. Whether a politician promising to grow the economy, or a CEO getting bonuses for hitting productivity and profit targets, the demand is consistently the same- to increase productivity and performance.
The problem with demand-led change is that it is very reductionist and linear and lacks a systemic or holistic view. It lacks innovative, creative and strategic thinking, and is unable to see systemic disruptions coming from the technological and social-political spheres. Demand-led leadership boxes us in, it makes us respond to a very limited set of criteria. The leadership task is not to imagine a new future, but rather to fulfill the goals of an old past.
Desire
Demand-led leadership is however at its most problematic because it leaves out desire.
Jacques Lacan says that desire is a surplus that comes out of demand. He claims that whatever we demand is never what we really want, it is never the real thing. When our demands are met we respond with ‘that’s not it!’ and we want something more or something else. This is how consumer capitalism flourishes, we buy something but it is never enough, there is always lack and we always desire something more, or something else.
With demand there is always something left over; a part of our experience that is not accounted for in the instrumental and transactional striving and meeting of our demands. It is this surplus that gives rise to desire.
If we think about this in terms of leadership and organisations, the demand is clear; for example: ‘Our goal for 2023 is to increase production and profit by 15%’. The NHS report for 2023-24 shows the demand in terms of transactional measured results.
Yet there is something surplus that is not mentioned here. This is the desire for a deeply human patient-care experience. When I worked as a nurse the wages were very poor, and yet there was a comradeship and a social status in working to do good in the world. The value I gained through nursing dying patients and comforting their relatives was something the demand-target culture couldn’t measure. The experience of a patient who is compassionately cared for can’t be measured in the demand culture either.
In 2023 I worked with corporate banks, car manufacturers, humanitarian organisations, and many others, and in each one, the understanding and focus on desire was lacking. Even when the rhetoric and language was there to create a caring company, the leadership was pressing for demand-led results - without addressing our true desires.
The desire is to be working with and associated with an organisation that has values, is deeply human, takes an ethical stance about society and the environment, and makes employees and stakeholders feel connected and engaged. Unless the desire is recognised, the demand will always be partial, lacking, and will not lead to sustainable success.
Four qualities to guide leaders
These qualities bring desire to the surface so that it is no longer hidden.
1. Connectivity and interdependence
Organisational ecosystems need nurturing to create human contact through high-quality connectivity and breaking down silos. Our interdependence with each other and with the environment is rarely accounted for in demand cultures. Yet our human desire recognises our interdependence is fundamental.
2. Systemic ethics
Systemic ethics goes beyond company values and individual leader morality. Systems ethics address the wider ethical implications of their organisations e.g. confronting social inequality, climate change, raising minimum wages and working conditions, especially for the downstream supply chain workers. Our desire for fairness, to feel good about our work, to work with valuehas to be accounted for, and when it is the organisational culture shifts
3. Leadership spirit
The importance of the human spirit is vital for leaders and organisations. It is perhaps the deepest and yet unacknowledged desire in organisations. Leadership spirit draws upon the beauty and dynamic vitally within human relationships, and between humanity and the natural world.
4. Organizational belonging
The desire to belong is central to us all. Organisations are part of the whole, yet they are often seen as being separate. Businesses and corporations, like schools, banks and hospitals, belong to the social fabric of community, and cannot operate as separate bodies. Organisations are a vital part of the environmental ecosystem, if they don’t belong they won’t act responsibly. It’s not just ‘the stick’ i.e. moral duty, marketing purposes or regulations that should drive environmental friendly behaviour- The carrot is the desire to belong, and when this is tapped into things change.
To participate in the joys and challenges faced by communities is vital for all our well-being. Organizational belonging is to rethink organizational purpose and meaning.
These four Eco-leadership qualities are taken from Leadership a critical text.
Together they offer leaders a way forward that addresses the desire leaders need to account for within organisations. This desire is not always made explicit, but if these qualities of leadership are applied something radical changes.
Firstly, the demand itself might be rethought in the light of addressing desires. What is valued and how success is measured may be re-imagined.
Secondly, when demands are agreed, the operational way they are met will nearly always change when desire is also accounted for. A more humanistic and engaging approach will follow.
Moving away from salvation cultures, and accounting for desire is my hope for your own leadership and organisation in 2024.
Desire is the fuel of organisational life- it powers the libidinal economy of the organisation, it drives change. Connecting with the organisations desire is paramount to sustainable success.
When you are thinking about the demands you put on yourself for 2024 in your New Year’s resolutions- also think about the surplus, what’s left out, what is not being addressed- and take account of your hidden desires!
Happy New Year!
Simon