diasyrmus

Reading Plough, Sword and Book by Ernest Gellner, I enjoyed the ‘matrix’ of conflict and agreement between rationality or the observed world and maintaining the social norm in ‘pre-rational’ societies – societies of the plough in the framework of the book.

This situation is of course very far from being confined to those societies and the immediate contemporary and everday analogue is that of the CEO or political leader.

Business leaders, good ones, bad ones, set the allowable perception, speech and activity framework of their businesses, as do political leaders their parties.

It is very difficult to do anything outside how the CEO wishes to act of course.

I don’t think people always get the extended consequences of this, which is that organisations are very much in the sway of and shaped by the leadership. In fact even business leaders I have known don’t always get this very well. They don’t understand why their teams won’t tell them things. You can of course brute force these things with data, most of the time, and if the CEO has any sense of rational decision making. But those leaders can certainly make things difficult, asking for more information, for more data. In fact, even in a data driven environment, it’s perfectly possible to avoid having to make decisions you don’t want to make.

Leaders will often get frustrated that people haven’t told them things, or that a thing is done persistently badly, not realising that it is they who are responsible and have in fact created that effect.

One is rendered powerless in such an environment, if the leader is bad. Some of this at least may account for classic problems of managerial competence, in football say. Why is it that such and such a manager can excel at one club and fail at another? A lot of the time it will be about enabling the teams, but equally, the situation in hand can sit athwart the approach of the leader. Any given leader is not suited to every given environment.

And good leadership probably looks different in every environment – not to say that there aren’t good things that leadership consistently does, but its actions and its effect will be different.

Bad managers, however, are remarkably consistently bad, an observation I had cause to make when considering a job offer a former, very not good, manager of mine had made me in a very different industry, and indeed in a different country.

It was astonishing to see both at a board level and at a team level, the same dissatisfactions and problems that I had known under this manager before. What made it doubly remarkable was that these problems and dissatisfactions were not perceived to have any sort of locus around this particular manager.

This is in fact common in my view – the high priest element can mean that it is hard to even perceive that it is they who have agency in this situation, they who are the locus of control.

So organisations and teams struggle and grapple with a problem that’s hard to define, and all sorts of time wasting activities take place to try and solve a problem that is in fact to do with the leader or manager.

It is also true that this is a necessary quality even in good leaders, since they must sometimes make things happen through sheer force of will, and in fact this is why they have been selected. They will need to be able to bring people along with them, even those people aren’t always convinced, and ensure that organisational goals and incentives are aligned to deliver those outcomes.