Leopards and Leaders

I've been thinking about the concept of Leadership and what I think it means to me, after hearing other peoples' definitions of it I've realised that my definition differs quite starkly, whilst others define it in terms of vision, imagination, creativity, and direction, I define it in terms of conflict.

There is a difference between an opinion going unchallenged because there is no valid counter argument that anyone can think of, versus an opinion going unchallenged because of the nature of the person who holds it as they are perceived by others. I think of the gap between these two concepts is part of the reason why the Peter Principle exists, which if you're unaware of, the basic principle is that anyone in any job who is promoted for doing that job well will inevitably be promoted above their competence thereby guaranteeing that people always end up incompetent, doing jobs they're not actually good at doing.

An opinion you hold particularly in the world of business will more often go unchallenged because you're not perceived to be receptive to criticism or if you're perceived as being a confrontational person; I believe this is part of the reason why people have this idea that confrontational people do well in business - which I guess you could argue is actually true but not for the reasons that people think, if you define "well" as progressing up the corporate ladder.

The thing about confrontation however is that most people don't have the desire or the motivation to engage in an argument they don't think will ever end; when they face someone who is stubborn and they know is unlikely to back down then one of two things happens, either they concede even though they know they are in the right just for the sake of avoiding the confrontation, or they will actively engage in confrontation, not due to any desire to resolve it but rather out of the desire to escalate it, because they feel that they have been forced into confrontation and the resentment of engaging in a conflict you didn't want only fuels the intensity of that conflict.

Being a leader and being a dictator are not always one and the same, but the assumption that they are synonymous is the mistake that bad leaders make in business, they believe they should direct others and others should take direction, authority is their metric rather than communication and productivity.

To be blunt, you can only get so far by the grace of others saving your arse before you reach a point where you fail because the magnitude of your misstep is greater than those around you can compensate for and rectify. This comes into effect when the Peter Principle plays out, people get promoted to the point of incompetence when they are unable to fulfil the duties of their post with efficacy because they have relied on those "below" them picking up the slack, but they aren't the only one subject to this principle, those below them in the hierarchy are also subject to it, the result is that the residual net competence decreases the higher up the organization you go.

Leadership to me is defined as the ability to mediate, communicate, and resolve conflict. To lead a group of people you not only need to pick a direction of travel you also need that group to agree with you, and the perceived authority of your post will only give weight to your decisions to a point. The higher up you go within an organization the more the people around you consider themselves your equals rather than you subordinates and the more they are likely to challenge a direction of travel they don't agree with.

The likelihood that you will reach the pinnacle of your industry or your field without learning to mediate, communicate, and resolve conflict, is very slim. Capitalism likes to convince us that billionaires can be "self-made" but that's a lie, it's propaganda that spins the truth that amassing that much wealth is only possible through leveraging the productivity of others. Billionaires are made through the ownership of organizations through shareholding, their wealth is potential and not actual, it only gets realised when you sell all or part of that holding. There isn't a single company in the world worth billions of dollars with only 1 employee.

Creativity, production, distribution, marketing, sales, all of these things can grow a company to a point, but the resource that matters most is the people who work for the company, the decisions that are made about the direction of the company are cumulative that rely upon all of the data and information that flows up from the bottom to the top of that company, the more that information is corrupted along the way by arrogance and incompetence, the more likely a misstep will be.

The same is true of politics, and of social interactions, and any area of life that involves people coming together to work in cooperation. The more communication breaks down, the less effective the group becomes. Communication is a two-way street, it doesn't just rely on one party being able to articulate their point, it relies upon both sides being able to receive and comprehend each other, even when they don't agree, without that leading to conflict. Leadership is the ability to consider all sides and pick a path that is agreeable to all sides, or at least a path that all sides can accept as you won't always be able to get people to agree.

I don't define Leadership in terms of the ability to disrupt, innovate, or expediate, you can do things quickly or you can do things right, those two things almost never go hand in hand. With every shortcut you take, incompetence accrues almost like a resource, over time you will rack up a debt of competency and when you finally hit that limit everything collapses.

The aftermath of bad Leadership is often marked by the componentization of resources. In the extreme this happens through administration and liquidation when receivers break a business down into components to identify intrinsic value and sell those components off, but in less extreme cases this takes the form of a sea change, where new Leadership has to take stock of everything as it stands and attempt to navigate the company or the collective back towards the path it should have taken in the first place, whether this is even possible at that point which sadly it sometimes is not, and redundancies inevitably ensue.

As I said before, this applies not only to the world of business but to politics and every other part of life that involves working as a collective. Society more widely right now needs leadership, we have had bad leaders for too long and we are suffering from the burden of that debt of competency. Things need to change and we need leadership to make that happen, but as I said above, you need people to agree if you want to lead them in any direction and we're a society divided more than we have been perhaps more than any point in our history, even during the last two world wars there was a considerable consensus that emerged - nothing it seems unites two people more than mutual hatred of a third, which is quite depressing.

I will say that I may be marked as a nihilist for what I am about to say but I stand by this statement for the reasons I outlined above: I think those compensating for others incompetence have to take a step back and let them fail. Particularly when it comes to issues such as climate change, there is a disbelief that many still hold that things such as the hole in the O-Zone layer ever existed because we managed to fix it and avert the worst consequences of our inaction. The idea that things have to get worse before they will get better is something that I've come to accept and I admit I am quite pessimistic and cynical by nature but as long as there is credibility or social acceptance of disbelief then we're not going to get anywhere as a species.

The more we allow incompetent people to make decisions the higher that debt of incompetence becomes. By compensating for their bad decisions we as a collective only pay the interest on that debt and allow it to continue to grow. There has to come a point where you step back and let people feel to consequences of their bad decisions. That old meme of "I never thought the leopards would eat my face" can only come true when you let the leopards eat their face, because until it happens they're never going to believe that risk is real.