PopeWatch despises books that attempt to distill leadership secrets from such diverse individuals as Napoleon, Attila, Lincoln, etc. The history is invariably shoddy, and the leadership “secrets” usually banal. However, Gary Hamet at The Harvard Business Review has looked at the verbal flogging given by Pope Francis to the Curia last Christmas and has distilled from it 15 diseases of leadership:
- Interesting, but ultimately unconvincing. Leadership, because it deals with human interactions, is always going to be an art rather than a science. Some tips can be useful, for example never dressing down subordinates in public, but there is no master style of leadership, and what works well for one person or one group can be a disaster if viewed as an infallible guide. Likewise for the pathologies. Treated like useful tips, many managers can read them and glean useful bits from them, but I have been involved with fairly effective organizations where such pathologies co-existed with good leadership, and sometimes they co-existed in the same leader.
Eeeh…there can be a time and place to dress down subordinates in public, but it’s got to be pretty dang precise, targeted and limited. Some folks won’t respond to anything else, but that’s on the “or fire them immediately” level. (And may very well result in them quitting.)
“Merry Christmas, you suck– by the way, we’re live world-wide” isn’t it. :/
I should print this out for my best friend to give to her Baptist boss. He’s into leadership via how-to/self-help seminars.
Mostly because he doesn’t know how to lead.
Another communicable disease that pathological leadership causes is found when those being led perceive indulgence and allowance of corruption and wasteful ineptitude.
The incomparable Walter Bagehot was surely right: “We have all heard the saying that “Frederic the Great lost the battle of Jena.” It was the system which he had established—a good system for his wants and his times—which, blindly adhered to, and continued into a different age, put to strive with new competitors, brought his country to ruin. The “dead and formal” Prussian system was then contrasted with the “living” French system—the sudden outcome of the new explosive democracy. The system which now exists is the product of the reaction; and the history of its predecessor is a warning what its future history may be too. It is not more celebrated for its day than Frederic’s for his, and principle teaches that a bureaucracy, elated by sudden success, and marvelling at its own merit, is the most unimproving and shallow of Governments.”