“Leaders fail their people, their organizations, the larger society, and even themselves with unacceptable frequency.” That’s the first line of Jeffrey Pfeffer’s 2015 book, Leadership BS. He then delivers an alarmingly large number of examples and evidence to make the point.
This failure, Professor Pfeffer argues, persists despite “an ever-growing, enormous leadership industry consisting of an almost limitless number of books, articles, speeches, workshops, blogs, conferences, training sessions, and corporate leadership-development efforts.” And, no, he does not exclude the leadership research and development work of business schools.
Perhaps needless to say, I found this difficult to digest. At the time, I was working at AACSB and felt that the quality and impact of leadership development was, at least in part, our responsibility. So I sent Professor Pfeffer an email and asked if he would talk with me.
My notes are long gone, but I remember Professor Pfeffer being even more convincing in conversation than on paper. He reinforced a general lesson for all of us supporting business schools. If our objective is to improve management education and leadership development, we must first be willing to describe the gaps truthfully and transparently. “That means,” I said back then, “telling ourselves things we don’t want to hear.”
Now, more than a decade after Leadership BS, have we made progress?
I haven’t conducted a comprehensive review of the evidence, so I offer these observations cautiously. Overall, I am not convinced that the state of leadership, or the leadership industry, has improved nearly as much as we might have hoped—and the challenge moving forward is even greater.
Pfeffer identified at least two fundamental gaps. The first is that we tend to focus more on what leaders ought to be, than on what leadership actually is. Books and seminars teach the normative things like authenticity, humility, truthfulness, trustworthiness, service, and putting others first. These are not undesirable qualities, but Pfeffer’s argument was that the leadership development industry emphasizes these things over serious investigations of how leaders actually behave, acquire power, retain their positions, and succeed or fail.
The second gap is that leadership development generally asks what organizations need from leaders, while actual leaders also consider what decisions mean for their own careers, compensation, reputation, status, security, and power. At times those interests align with their organizations, most of the time they don’t.
In my view, there has been progress, especially in academic scholarship. Leadership researchers have become more rigorous and critical, with greater attention to issues like narcissism, power and politics, deviance, followership, context, and the limitations of heroic conceptions of leadership. Popular ideas such as authentic leadership have received more critical attention.
In economics and related fields, we have become more sophisticated in understanding how to align individual and organizational interests and, importantly, the unintended consequences of seemingly straightforward solutions. Stock options are a good example. Designed to align executives with shareholder interests, they can also create incentives for excessive risk-taking, short-termism, and other behaviors that may ultimately undermine the interests they were intended to serve.
Quality research matters, of course. Scientific evidence should empower people to make more informed choices and dispel misinformation. In leadership development, academic research should eventually replace what we wish were true with better evidence about what actually is true. Unfortunately, I’m not convinced that this academic progress has had a meaningful impact on practice. We must find ways of making scientific evidence more useful across the leadership industry. That’s one reason why AACSB’s Research Impact Initiative and the ongoing work of the Academy of Management are so important.
There are other challenges too. One revolves around technology and its impact on leadership. There is AI, of course. But another difficulty is posed by social media, which has grown significantly since Pfeffer’s book. LinkedIn, for example, has become a central place for professional reputation and leadership discussion. It has democratized access to ideas and enabled many thoughtful leaders to reach audiences they could never have reached before. And it has created new opportunities to cultivate a personal leadership brand.
I recall Pfeffer pointing out in the book and on our call that C-Suite guest speakers in MBA classrooms more often talk about the leader they want to be (or selectively remember) rather than what they actually are (or truly were). Now, through social media, leaders can publicly demonstrate humility, authenticity, vulnerability, purpose, and service while those same performances build visibility, reputation, networks, and career opportunities.
The language of selfless leadership can become part of a highly effective personal brand, further distancing our beliefs from reality—and amplifying our tendency to attribute outcomes to individuals rather than systems. “The CEO transformed the company” makes a more attractive post than an explanation involving institutions, incentives, technologies, history, culture, thousands of employees, and luck. It’s the “romance of leadership” theory advanced by scholars.
That brings us to an even bigger challenge. We need and expect more from leaders than ever before. It is no longer enough, as if it ever was, to ask whether leaders create value for their organizations. Increasingly, we also ask about the consequences for society and the planet. This is closely connected to GBSN’s mission “to empower business schools worldwide to work together to strengthen the contributions of management education to the development needs of society.” Rising expectations, and the GBSN mission, put systems squarely on the leadership agenda.
Just as what is good for an individual leader may not be good for the organization, what is good for an organization, particularly in the short term, may not be good for society. Leading across all three levels is difficult. The systems level requires understanding how organizations interact with governments, markets, educational institutions, communities, technologies, cultures, histories, and the natural environment. It requires understanding power, seeing where authority and influence actually reside. I have been known to say, the new economy requires “leading beyond our own organizations.”
Understanding systems is especially important when leadership ideas travel across borders. A practice developed in Silicon Valley or Shanghai may contain valuable insights for leaders in Lagos or Lusaka, but we cannot assume that the practice can be separated from the institutional and cultural conditions that helped make it effective. Leadership realities differ enormously across countries, cities, sectors, communities, and institutions.
That is why GBSN, in partnership with Loughborough University, is developing the African Leadership Impact Hub (ALIH), a pan-African initiative bringing together universities, businesses, governments, development organizations, and institutional leaders to better represent African social, cultural, and institutional factors in our leadership-related knowledge base and to inform and strengthen leadership development efforts across Africa.
Our starting point is not another universal prescription for what a leader should look like. It is to better understand the realities of the diverse contexts in which African leaders operate. ALIH takes a systems-based approach, recognizing that leadership is shaped by organizational culture and capabilities, institutions and governance, political and economic conditions, technology, history, and perceptions about who is or could be a successful leader.
But influence runs in both directions. Leaders need to see the system accurately enough to work effectively within it. At GBSN, we believe leaders must also understand systems deeply enough to change them.