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Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time, by Jeffrey Pfeffer
JEFFREY Pfeffer is a professor of organisational behaviour at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. He is one of those writers on business issues whose books one should not overlook. His offerings The Knowing-Doing Gap and Power rank high among must-read business books.
This book is a reflection on a serious problem that is very poorly addressed. There are “too many leadership failures, too many career derailments, and too many toxic workplaces… and there is an almost unimaginably vast, list of leadership catastrophes”, Pfeffer asserts.
He brings evidence to show that workplaces around the world are, for the most part, “filled with dissatisfied, disengaged employees who do not trust their leaders” and that the leaders themselves are failing at ever increasing speed “in part because they are unprepared for the realities of organizational life.”
Some 24% of surveyed employees are actively disengaged. Employees are very unhappy with their leaders: fully 35% of US employees reported that they would be prepared to forfeit pay raises just to see their managers fired!
Contrast this with the finding by McKinsey that US companies spend about $14bn annually on leadership development (some R140 thousand million – even before our currency tanked) and yet so many workplaces are staffed by disengaged, disaffected, and dissatisfied employees.
The leadership industry in most countries is enormous and still growing. It “has failed over its roughly forty-year history to in any major, meaningful, measurable way improve the human condition, (despite) the thousands of leadership books, talks, blogs, classes, and leadership-development programs seeking to make leaders more effective”, Pfeffer notes.
This book is Pfeffer’s attempt to explain why so many leaders fail. He draws on solid argument and evidence as well as recognised psychological processes to explain this frightful state.
“Around the turn of the twentieth century, medical practice and medical education in America were pretty dismal. People were hawking untested and unproven 'cures,' dependent more on their slickness and persuasiveness than on the actual science or medical efficacy of what they were pushing,” Pfeffer explains.
When this became clear to the medical authorities, they closed a third of the medical schools and began the licensing of doctors and the regulation of the medical profession. This has greatly increased the efficacy of medicines and the practice of doctors.
The leadership industry in its current state “also has its share of quacks and sham artists who sell promises and stories, some true, some not, but all of them inspirational and comfortable, with not much follow-up to see what really does work and what doesn’t”, Pfeffer notes. The parallels between these two industries are striking.
Medicine is research-based and adapts and evolves with the growth of peer reviewed evidence. New medicines and techniques are constantly reviewed and revised based on their efficacy.
In contrast, the leadership industry lacks this rigour. It does not have clear criteria by which to measure what makes a better leader. “Performance? And if so, over what time period and using what metrics? Holding on to your job as a leader? Obtaining the highest-possible salary for yourself? Moving on to a more prestigious position in another company as quickly as possible? Increasing employee engagement and reducing turnover?” Pfeffer asks.
What specific workplace conditions should leaders be held accountable for improving?
Why don’t our leadership programmes work? Consider the last one you attended and see how many of these more common attributes were present.
“Not only do many of the leadership industry’s participants have no particular qualifications or training germane to their activities, but many also seem to possess little of the interest or intellectual curiosity that would cause them to do the work required to read and learn so as to build their expertise,” Pfeffer asserts.
Instead, the leadership development is filled with the retelling of myths and inspiring stories that are “worse than useless for creating change”.
There are a number of commonly accepted leadership traits that are taken as almost self-evident truths. These include humility, truth telling, modesty, authenticity and so forth. Pffefer debunks each with clarity and precision, and a single purpose: if we have been teaching that great leaders require these traits and they are not the traits required, that alone is a meaningful contribution to what doesn’t work, even if not yet to what does.
Take the need for authenticity, expressing what you really feel, doing what your feel is right, always and under all circumstances. This is often held up as the mark of a great leader.
Pfeffer uses the example of Alison Davis-Blake, dean of the Business School at the University of Michigan to illustrate his view.
Within her first two years, she hired 21 new faculty members, increased undergraduate student numbers by 20%, introduced new master’s programmes, and facilitated raising $100m for the business school. For any dean to achieve this, they require qualities much the opposite of Davis-Blake’s introversion and a reluctance to speak.
Quite the opposite of “authenticity”, leaders in the real world must be able to put on a show. It would be an error to foster being authentic as a desirable leadership trait.
Setting unrealistic expectations for leaders must be a contributor to leadership failure. No, humility is not what makes leaders who deliver, nor is modesty, truth telling, servant-style leadership, and more, Pfeffer argues with cogency and evidence.
Leadership BS was written to cause people to “rethink, to reconceptualize, and to reorient their behaviors concerning the important topic of leadership… it encourages everyone to finally stop accepting sugar-laced but toxic potions as cures”.
Pfeffer’s call for accurate and comprehensive data, and development back-up by standards and measurements made visible through charts, has the potential to do for leadership what it did for medicine.
Readability: Light -+--- Serious
Insights: High +---- Low
Practical: High ----+ Low
* Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy and is the author of Strategy that Works. Views expressed are his own.
