The almost daily news stories about the corruption, incompetence and poor judgment of some leaders and the criminal activity that seems so easily to infect leadership practices has created a growing sense that something is terribly wrong in our democracy and in our business corporations.
In almost every type of organization, be it social, corporate, religious or governmental, we have observed some with leadership rank - the organizational elites - take advantage of their power and position to conceal the truth or to unfairly extract wealth and resources in order to benefit themselves, enrich their friends and further their own ambitions. All of this comes at the expense of those beneath them in the hierarchy.
Americans are, by nature, optimistic. So the survey did show that those interviewed were hopeful that, in the future, better leaders would emerge. Yet, perhaps now is the time to ask why we believe future leaders will be any better than our current ones. Is it possible that the fundamental cause of the troubles in our democratic and business organizations is our very model of leadership?
Perhaps now is the time to examine our nearly universal belief that leaders and leadership are necessary and begin to explore an alternative to following leaders. The key lesson to be learned at the beginning of the 21st century might very well be that we can function quite well and successfully in business and government without leaders.
David Bohm, the late physicist and social thinker, first raised this possibility for me.
"Though we've all been taught that society cannot function without leaders," he would say, "maybe we can." The myth of leadership is the ideology that serves to establish, maintain and legitimize the system of authority where a select few are privileged to monopolize the information, control most decision-making and command obedience even through coercive and manipulative means.
Leadership implies ranking, division and separation. Whenever we think in terms of "leadership" we create a dualistic world. We create a dichotomy, two categories: one of leaders (a select and privileged few) and the second of followers (the vast majority).
There follows the implicit judgment that leaders are somehow superior or better than their followers. An entire leadership industry helps keep this illusion alive, while government and corporate hierarchies are set up to pamper with privilege those in executive positions. So you get secrecy, distrust, overindulgence and the inevitable sacrifice of those below for the benefit and advantage of those above.
The appointed leaders are saddled with impossible burdens, and the followers are left with few opportunities, or resources, for growth. There is a problem with our very concept of leader and practice of leadership. The heart of this problem is the corruption of communication they cause.
I have learned, through much good and bad experience, genuine communication tends to occur only between peers, and secrecy more often than not breeds corruption and abuse of power. We only tell people we think are superior to us what we think they want to hear, and we only tell people we believe are somehow inferior to us what we think they need to know. In the rarified heights of rank-based leadership, it is easy to think that the ordinary rules don't apply, and so the temptation of unethical action tends to overwhelm even the most sincere individual.
It should not be unexpected when organizations, or governments for that matter, which practice the rank thinking of the myth of leadership find poor communication the norm, discover a growing gap between reality and the mindset of the top executives, and perhaps even wind up in court facing civil charges and criminal indictments.
As long ago as Aristotle it was recognized that the wisdom of the many is frequently better than the expertise of the few in making many types of decisions, including public-policy ones. Today, the open software movement has realized the effectiveness of leaderless decision making. They have a saying that to many eyes all bugs are shallow; meaning that the less centralization and the more involvement and greater participation you can get in solving problems, the better will be the result.
The viability of the Linux operating system demonstrates the possibility of functioning well without rank-based leaders. When we learn to collaborate together as peers in our communities and in our government and work organizations, we discover that our shared wisdom, together in peer deliberation, makes it unnecessary to surrender to some rank-based leader control over our lives and the decisions that so profoundly affect us.
The answer, then, to our current leadership crisis is to replace the concept of leader and model of leadership with the practice of peer-based managing through peer councils. Peer councils are similar to the elementary republics Thomas Jefferson endorsed at the beginning of our republic. Now, unlike in his day, technology and the information processing capability in our business and political environments make peer councils, as a vehicle for governance, much more realistic.
We need to recognize and build our democracy and our work organizations on the basic peer principle that we all share the equal privilege to speak and likewise possess the equal and reciprocal obligation to listen regardless of our place or position in society.
We are at a crossroads in our history where we can make the choice to remain satisfied with surrendering information and decision-making authority, and hence control of our lives, to the next round of rank-based political and business leaders, or we can choose to create peer-based organizations and a greater peer-based democracy.
Our human inclination to cooperate with others makes peer-based organizations possible - our human propensity to take advantage of others makes peer-based organizations necessary.
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Jeffrey Nielsen is an organizational consultant who teaches philosophy at Brigham Young University and is the author of the book, The Myth of Leadership: Creating Leaderless Organizations, a finalist for two 2004 Book of the Year awards.
