Leadership

Recently, HolacracyOne posted on Facebook:

There is a lot of buzz about "Leadership Development". Enlightened leaders are indeed needed to make up for the lack of organizational capacity to digest whatever comes from the environment. Holacracy precisely helps building this organizational capacity, making leadership development much less necessary.

This comes at a time when I have just finished the book "The End of Leadership" which talks about the Leadership industry. The book and Holacracy tend to agree that the current offerings of Leadership development are not what they should be. The book says that the leadership industry is failing us and is a self perpetuation sham. The book contains many pages of real world example. Holacracy says that leadership is not need to the level that our organizations think that it is needed. Both seem to me to shed good light on the issue, but I have a slightly different view.

My knowledge about the material taught in the current leadership training is about how a single person leads and motivates groups of small to very large people to do what the leader wants.

From the examples in the book, even with current organizations this has not worked very well but since it is very attractive to leaders in organizations, it really strokes their egos to think that everything revolves around the leader, leadership consultants teach what brings in the money. And it is a lot of money, to the tune of $50 billion a year.

Holacracy proposes a radically different distributed power system from conventional organizations in which this leader centric training has very little value.  There is still leadership, it is just radically different.

My proposition is that leadership training is very important, but not the leadership training that is currently being promoted by the industry today. 

With current organizations the leaders at the top are usually very autocratic. They give the orders and everyone below marches always looking over their shoulders in case the leader does not like the way they are marching.  Holacracy turns this on its head.  Purpose flows down from the top, but how each marches is determined autocratically by the person doing the marching.

As everyone in the organization is an autocrat over their own identified scope, they do need leadership training on how to lead that scope effectively.  As I indicated before, this leadership is fundamentally different.  Instead of learning how to get others to do what you want, you must learn how to get yourself motivated, how to stay organized and focused to do what is needed by the purpose guiding that scope.  Self-leadership is also need to effectively act a organizational sensors, to know how to recognize the tensions, how and when to speak-up to the organization, and how not to be personally attached to your idea as to how to resolve the tensions that you sense.

I see many people working in a conventional organization that will do nothing unless directly motivated and directed by the leader.  This approach will not work in Holacracy.  If a person executes a role with this do nothing unless externally directed approach, nothing will get done and after a while the holacratic organization will eject them as not being suitable for the role.

This failure is not a fundamental human weakness.  All humans are capable of working is such a system. Instead, it is a weakness in training and socialization of the person. Most of the skill are not taught at all or even worse suppressed by the more effective conventional leaders. It is a positive feedback loop, the more effective the conventional leader, the more repressed and dependent the follower.

These self leadership skills are the skills needed in leadership training for the future.  Even more, most people will need this training and refresher courses throughout their lives.  This new direction would seem to be a larger industry than the current leadership industry, providing more revenue if teachers and consultants can get past the sunk cost put into the existing models and experience. Further more, the new direction would meet the real needs of organizations instead of simply massaging the egos of the leaders and repressing the lead.