Against leadership
Everywhere one goes, one is exhorted to leadership. The work academics do is described in terms of leadership. The work public servants do is described in terms of leadership. Everyone is a leader- or they are nameless, presumably simply led.
This is not, in the broadest possible sense of leadership wrong but it is a wrongheaded way to look at the world. Technically speaking, anything which directs the behaviour and attitudes of others might be termed leadership but creating a new and influential concept in pure mathematics is not most naturally thought of as leadership. Advising a minister on the nuances of industry policy based on deep learning and experience with a topic likewise might be called leadership but it is not most naturally thought of this way. Dying for a political cause you believe in through execution by a tyrannical government is not most naturally thought of as leadership.
Yet all these activities, and more, have been squeezed into the category of leadership. Why? Well, one natural speculation is that the people with a great deal of power- politicians, managers etc. want their ego flattered. What they do is in the strictest sense leadership and so they want all kinds of useful work that is peripheral to the concept of leadership to be thought of through that category. Leadership is a metaphor that centralises management as a category in thought, because management is the pardigim case. That is dangerous.
Another speculation is that it’s just harder to theorise important activities in terms outside leadership. Leadership is a ready to hand universal solvent metaphor that makes activity legible and comparable between domains. But this is just searching for the keys where the light is! Sure, the contribution of the mathematician, advisor or martyr is harder to understand than ‘leadership’- especially if one wants to theorise them jointly, but this does not give us permission to flatten the world.
This difficulty to theorise is a commercial as well as a theoretical problem. There is an army of management consultants, business school deans, and even somewhat pathetic figures like the self-help writer who win out from having a single legible currency of ‘leadership’ to sell as a commodity. On the demand side, organisations want a single currency of techne they can account disparate positions in.
Leadership as a metaphor is clearly patriarchal in effect, many skilled women do not so quickly think of themselves as leaders. One might say that we need to encourage them to do so- and this is doubtless true of a great many women who should come to see themselves as leaders, but I would push back on the idea this is the universal solution. Perhaps rather than the distortion lying with women, it is men who are too quick to assimilate themselves into this all-devouring category of leader. Perhaps rather than trying to push women into conceptualising what they do as leadership we would be better off challenging the hegemony of the category.
Class is another element here. The whole category has has the whiff of the old school tie about it. Command as the central category of signficiance. It naturalises the idea of a ruling class that extends across all areas of life. It is no coincidence, I suspect, that the consolidation of class power during the neoliberal turn occurs at the same time as the idea of leadership covers the world like Kudzu.
People have modified leadership with categories like “servant leadership”, “thought leadership” and “leading from behind”. To me, this looks like adding epicycles, losing the details that make the propagation of ideas, the service of a cause or group, and the acceptance of humility for the sake of the good so interesting. The power-mongering at the heart of the leadership metaphor colonises all areas of life.
This isn’t purely theoretical. iIn the Australian public service bureaucracy, one moves through APS levels 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and onto Executive levels 1 & 2, and then to the Senior Executive. The strong assumption here is that seniority means telling others what to do. Positions based around deep technical expertise, domain knowledge, policy understanding etc. seem like they should be essential to advise government, and there is no reason to think such roles must coincide with managing staff, but they are conspicuously absent in the official structure.
Another danger is that in treating countless activities as dimensions of leadership, we miss the specificity of the countless skills that are currently thought of as leadership. There is a presumption in the corporate world that management skills are interchangeable. A CEO might move between the service and industrial sectors quite naturally. Perhaps interchangeability is true of the corporate world or at least thought to be, but it is not true in many areas of life. An emblematic “leadership” quality tends to make us think that capability is more interchangeable than it is.
Finally, the metaphor, especially as a central organising principle for society, quite obviously tends to at least a soft authoritarianism. It is in tension with democracy, especially of a participatory sort. Democracy needs leadership yes, but when it is all consuming, it is stifling. It is in tension with the ideally (although admittedly often not in practice) flat collaborative and non-hierarchical world of scholarship. Leadership is in tension With the art world and the joyous proliferations of a good scene. It undercuts the easy community and fellowship of a group of friends (ever notice how popular culture seems increasingly obsessed with working out which of a friend group is ‘the leader’)?
Enough! If we must have a master key (and we really shouldn’t), let it be skill, in all its diverse forms.
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There's a dynamic you touch on that I think deserves one more turn of the screw: leadership isn't just imposed from above — it's also claimed from below, because the label feels good to wear.
"Leadership" carries a sense of distinction that "skill" or "expertise" doesn't. Calling yourself a skilled administrator is accurate but flat. Calling yourself a leader sounds like you've arrived somewhere. The label does double duty: it flatters the person claiming it and simplifies the evaluation for everyone watching. That's exactly what makes it so sticky — it serves both supply and demand.
There's a Japanese saying: "The hardships of youth should be bought even if you have to pay for them." The common joke is that this proverb was probably invented by the people selling the hardship. Leadership as a universal currency works similarly — the ones who benefit most from the label being everywhere are the consultants, business schools, and management structures that trade in it.
Underneath this, I think, sits a deeper assumption: that greatness is uniform. We tend to imagine accomplished people as high across every parameter — decisive, empathetic, visionary, articulate, all at once. Leadership as a single label feeds that myth perfectly. It flattens the reality that most genuinely skilled people are sharp in narrow, specific ways — and that this specificity is precisely what makes their contribution valuable.
Your point about the Australian APS structure is a clean illustration: the system assumes that "moving up" means "managing others," as if expertise without authority is incomplete. The label doesn't just describe — it ranks.
<nods>Calling out leadership as a favourite hammer, means everyone looks like a nail. </nods>
General the leadershhip called on in the references you draw attention to, is of a more diffuse and moral agency regardless of position in which, say, leadership actively means control.
But I take you point, and lead myself away from it.
Certainly the leader as a narcissist in a position of control would agree with your description, and then differ with you by seeing nothing wrong with it. And then think everyone is their nail, as well as the hammer.
this is why the orange baboon is telling NATO off for not coming to his party, I mean war. The tantrum can kill us all.
The conservatives have failed us all here, as they cannot do their one job-- Conserve by policing narcissists.