Governed by Psychopaths
George Monbiot | Not Followership, But Emergent Leadership | Factoids
Quote of the Moment
We are a society of altruists governed by psychopaths.
| George Monbiot
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Not Followership, But Emergent Leadership
Reading the Economist, I came upon this Bartleby piece — Bartleby is their anonymous byline for work: How to be a good follower. It is basically a pale summarization of Robert Kelley's In Praise of Followers from 1988.
What I find interesting is that Kelley — even in 1988 — was already testing the edges of what I have come to think of as the emergent organization, and distinguished from linear organizations
I wrote about this at some length in From Linear to Emergent Culture at Webex Ahead, touching on the various differences. Here’s Emergent Management:
Emergent Management
‘Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.’ | Bertold Brecht, Life of Galileo
The role of management, or more fundamentally, the purpose of management changes significantly in the shift from linear to emergent culture and operations.Â
At the organizational level, this shift involves a change in focus of what senior managers do, which increasingly can be thought of as gardening instead of architecture. Emergent management, at the highest aggregated level, is about creating and stewarding an environment in which the many elements of an emergent organization are balanced. Instead of answering the hardest questions, the emergent leader makes sure the hardest questions are asked, and that the organization is prepared to answer them.
Emergent management has a second meaning, at the more personal level. One of the most important skills in modern organizations is the capacity to step up to lead a project, an initiative, or some other group activity as needed, and once that need has been met, to be willing to step down from that role.Â
These two sorts of leadership are the same in one sense, although the timeframes may differ.
Any management in an emergent culture is grounded in the concept of subsidiarity: the organization should accede to the individuals what they can accomplish, to small groups only what individuals cannot, and to larger groups only what small groups cannot.Â
An emergent culture will produce individuals that assume management roles from a sense of duty and commitment rather than a desire for power or control, and upon a foundation of subsidiarity. As Brecht suggests, we are best off when our societies do not rely on heroes.
Even Bartleby perceives the ways in which the old terms — and the implied social hierarchy of leaders over followers — are increasing unhelpful in today’s organizations, despite Bartleby’s insistence on ‘levels’, and Robert’s apparent disdain for three of the four sorts of followers he identifies:
Hierarchies can be more fluid than they sometimes look: as teams form and dissolve, you may be running a project one month and contributing the next. Things generally go better when people at every level are engaged in their work and prepared to take on responsibility. And everyone has some agency, even if they exercise it only to take or ignore a call from the boss.
Proactivity is a big part of being an effective follower. One of the fathers of the field, Robert Kelley, has usefully identified five styles of followership: sheep, who are wholly passive; yes-people, who enthusiastically do what the boss wants but never think for themselves; alienated followers, who can think for themselves but mainly to explain why the organisation is being stupid; pragmatists, who get on board with things but rarely initiate changes; and stars, who think for themselves and have bags of positivity and energy as well as a willingness to offer constructive criticism. (Star followers, in other words, behave like leaders in waiting.)
In Kelley’s own words, one of the most important characteristics of effective followers is self-management, which in my table above I call autonomy:
Self-Management. Paradoxically, the key to being an effective follower is the ability to think for oneself—to exercise control and independence and to work without close supervision. Good followers are people to whom a leader can safely delegate responsibility, people who anticipate needs at their own level of competence and authority.
Another aspect of this paradox is that effective followers see themselves—except in terms of line responsibility—as the equals of the leaders they follow. They are more apt to openly and unapologetically disagree with leadership and less likely to be intimidated by hierarchy and organizational structure. At the same time, they can see that the people they follow are, in turn, following the lead of others, and they try to appreciate the goals and needs of the team and the organization. Ineffective followers, on the other hand, buy into the hierarchy and, seeing themselves as subservient, vacillate between despair over their seeming powerlessness and attempts to manipulate leaders for their own purposes. Either their fear of powerlessness becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy—for themselves and often for their work units as well—or their resentment leads them to undermine the team’s goals.
Self-managed followers give their organizations a significant cost advantage because they eliminate much of the need for elaborate supervisory control systems that, in any case, often lower morale. In 1985, a large midwestern bank redesigned its personnel selection system to attract self-managed workers. Those conducting interviews began to look for particular types of experience and capacities—initiative, teamwork, independent thinking of all kinds—and the bank revamped its orientation program to emphasize self-management. At the executive level, role playing was introduced into the interview process: how you disagree with your boss, how you prioritize your in-basket after a vacation. In the three years since, employee turnover has dropped dramatically, the need for supervisors has decreased, and administrative costs have gone down.
Of course not all leaders and managers like having self-managing subordinates. Some would rather have sheep or yes people. The best that good followers can do in this situation is to protect themselves with a little career self-management—that is, to stay attractive in the marketplace. The qualities that make a good follower are too much in demand to go begging for long.
I will not replow all the fields that Kelley turned over, but it seems apparent that he was intuiting at least the first lineaments of the emergent organization, back in 1988. I can’t be too hard on him since 35 years later the majority of businesses are linear organizations, and the emergent organization is still an aspiration.
The old ways are slow to change.
Factoids
A time of growing uncertainty
There were a record-setting 28 billion-dollar disasters last year, causing $94 billion in damage. Thunderstorm events accounted for 19 of those disasters, and more than half of the costs. A decade earlier, seven thunderstorm events topped $1 billion in damage. There have been at least five billion-dollar thunderstorm events so far this year, through early May, according to NOAA. | Scott Dance
Houston is not a fluke.
…
Homelessness
There is a certain out of sight, out of mind quality to temporary accommodation, but it accounts for more than 80 per cent of homelessness across the OECD. Hundreds of thousands of people across the developed world live this peripheral and fragile existence, and Britain’s record is dire. After declining for several years, the number of English households living in temporary accommodation more than doubled between 2010 and 2023 from 48,000 to 112,000, the highest figure since records began. I’m quoting figures for England because it has the most complete data out of the four UK nations, but the others are if anything worse. | John Burn-Murdoch
Hey! A chart where the US is not the worst! (We are the worst for sleeping on the street, however.) Finland once had a growing homelessness problem, so they decided to a/ build more homes, and b/ put the homeless in them.
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An argument for universal free childcare
The total [U.S.] fertility rate fell to 1.62 births per woman in 2023, a 2% decline from a year earlier, federal data released Thursday showed. It is the lowest rate recorded since the government began tracking it in the 1930s. | WSJ
If we want to halt this slide, we have to remove the impediments to child rearing which is both financial and cultural. Universal childcare would work. We had such a system during WWII but shut it down when the GIs came home.
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Earth’s rotation is slowing
Climate change is causing so much polar ice melt that it's slowing down Earth's rotation and — here's the kicker — it will alter how we measure time in the future.
| Sharon Adarlo
Angular momentum is a bitch.
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