Enabling is not Ennobling

One of the key tasks of leadership is to bring forth the best of what those who follow the leader are capable of being. By this, I don’t just mean the development of their professional competencies, though this is no doubt important, but more fundamentally, the formation of their character that will provide them with a firm foundation for leading themselves and others as they progress along their life journey. This quality in the leader can be characterised as ‘ennobling’, which is a term that in my opinion isn’t used enough in modern leadership discourse. Perhaps why this is the case is because in more recent times, we have become more sensitive to and cynical of the power that leaders have in relation to those who follow them. The term also sounds rather highfalutin, as if reference was being made to a monarchy or the nobility.

Regardless of this, I don’t think we should let it scare us off expecting our current leaders to embody this quality. The other day I came across a term that I have never heard before, being ‘leanability’, which was used to denote a leader who fosters the dependence of their followers in order to fortify the power inherent in their position. So rather than making their followers more self-reliant and competent people who will grow their own leadership capacity, these individuals tend to encourage their people to lean on them as they go about the process of performing their work, with the effect that they aren’t forced to grow beyond their current levels of capability or comfort. Whether such leaders do this consciously or subconsciously is up for debate, but no doubt, leading in such a way furthers the leader’s personal interest in entrenching themselves as the central node in the network from where they derive their authority.

I suspect that in a good many cases, it is the ego of the leader that is reflexively driving their practice of this leadership style. What makes this all the more insidious is that this way of leading to the untrained eye can take the guise of benevolent care or even love for those being led, when those who are meant to be cared for or loved are essentially just being smothered, or actively prevented from flourishing in the way they would desire to if they were allowed to spread their wings and taste how enriching it is to their sense of autonomy and confidence to move beyond the boundaries of their coddling. In one of its most malevolent forms, we see this dysfunctional leadership style being practiced by cult leaders who claim to be the point of salvation for their devotees against the evils of the world that lurk behind the walls of their commune. While they may profess to their followers that they desire to be a channel only for their followers’ enlightenment or connection to the divine, in reality, this is the last thing they want because were their followers to achieve that state/connection, they would become redundant as that bridge, and with that would come the loss of power to manipulate and exploit those who are so frequently abused in these sects.   

Taking this back to an organisational context, whatever shortcomings or deficits in ability that followers may have are effectively enabled in such a system of operating, which is highly problematic because an entity cannot logically be expected to grow if those who work within it are being stifled as they go about the process of making their contributions to its functioning. Instead of enabling in this sense, leaders should be equipping and empowering their people to make the contributions that they genuinely desire to make, but for this to be discovered, the focus has to become those others rather than the leader and their ego.

When I was doing my research about individuals living their calling or life purpose and how that shaped their leadership behaviour, it was very noticeable how they took steps to ennoble the people who worked with them. While they may not have described it that way, it was clear in its effect that this is what they were doing. Being more evolved in their self and spiritual awareness than the leaders described above who are more egocentric, they practiced in their own way a form of subsidiarity that distributed their power in a decentralised manner to uplift and enhance those who they felt they had a stewardship responsibility to help grow into their fullness. Bringing us back full circle to our premise of ennobling those who we lead, those who understand the idea recognise as an orienting principle that the role of a leader is to create other leaders who can succeed them and expand the horizons of what is possible, not to entrench as followers those who would seek to actualise their innate potential for leadership.

Meritocracy without the Mirror (Part 1)

The idea of meritocracy says that in order for people to advance in institutional and social life, they should earn that privilege through applying their means of contribution in the domain that they inhabit. The benefits that accrue from this system include having the best and most qualified people in roles that meet their standard of competence, the building of character in the journey of becoming a person who deserves the success they achieve, and the pushing back of our limits of human potential as people strive (and are incentivised by this system) to become all that they can be. In this way of thinking about how we organise our institutions, there is no room for nepotism, tokenism or flawed attempts at ensuring equity such as ‘equality of outcome’ initiatives.

Despite the clear progress that such a system enables, in the age of entitlement that we live in, the idea of meritocracy has become unpopular. The argument against it goes along the lines that it is in effect a façade beneath which structural and other societal barriers exist that prevent individuals from advancing in the way that equality would demand. In some ways I am empathetic to this view. In the world of work, there are no doubt institutions that are run dysfunctionally to limit opportunities for a range of people who would otherwise be qualified for roles or deserving of an opportunity based on some other qualities that they possess. In some of these organisations, what is playing out is a mirror-tocracy. So what do I mean by that term?

In a mirror-tocracy, the people who get ahead are not those who work the hardest or care most about the clientele they serve. Instead, those that advance are individuals who most remind the leaders and decision makers of themselves. In this ego driven system of promotion and succession, those who are selected for greater opportunity share at least one, and often many, of the identity markers which characterise those who are in charge. Among these identity categories are gender, race, political affiliation, religious beliefs, educational lineage, membership to other elite institutions, or more broadly, social class. In the legal field in which I work, it is not uncommon for hiring partners at firms to give preference to graduates from the same university that they studied at. Perhaps part of their justification for that is familiarity with the standard of education that they have attained, or a nostalgic kinship of sorts that draws on shared relational ties, but at the deeper level, it is likely that less flattering vulnerabilities are animating those unconscious biases and selection decisions. 

Some of those vulnerabilities can include a false pride in the superiority of one’s pedigree, or the fear of losing power to a group of outsiders. On this first point, I recall former US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia remarking (quite publically) that he wouldn’t have hired one of the best law clerks he ever had if he had known of the law school that the clerk had attended (Scalia attended two of the finest law schools in the US: Georgetown and Harvard, and inherited the clerk – from the less prestigious Ohio State law school – from another judge). On the point of fearing the loss of power to an outgroup, we see this quite clearly in the politicised nature of the judicial selection process in the US. Whether those in power are Democrats or Republicans, a prerequisite for those who are selected for judicial positions will be the sharing of the fundamental ideological or philosophical perspectives of the party in office (so as to preserve their balance of power in the court that allows them to enact their policy objectives through the judgements made). While the executive and judicial branches of government are meant to remain separate to preserve independence, accountability and credibility in the decisions made, in a co-opted and thus corrupted system, the tendrils of one organ will inevitably find permission to extend its reach to the heart of many others.

Through overreach such as this, and other abuses of power to increase the amount of it that can be wielded at the expense of others, the cultures of these institutions erode to attract those who have the same self-serving motivation to manipulate others or the system in order to enrich themselves. No matter what the domain, a broken system is the light that entices the moths who desire to game it for their own purposes. I would be willing to bet that where you work, there will be a handful, and often more, of disengaged individuals who are working to a personal agenda that doesn’t coincide with the collective mission that they signed up to advance. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take many of these people to have a pervasive negative effect on the people around them and sabotage their morale or the larger Esprit de Corps. So how did these malcontents get to where they are in the first place?