The other day I lunched with an executive coach who serves big companies.
“Erik, you’d be surprised at the lack of leadership in the corporate world,” he said while we ate. “Looking from the outside, you’d think there was a lot of leadership horsepower within. But it just isn’t there.”
That stuck with me. It runs against my intuition to think great companies don’t have many great leaders.
But then again, maybe it makes perfect sense. Today I came across this insight by bestselling author Laurence Peter that throws light on the leadership void and reasons for it. “Most hierarchies are nowadays so cumbered with rules and traditions, and so bound in by public laws, that even high employees do not have to lead anyone anywhere, in the sense of pointing out the direction and setting the pace,” writes Peter. “They simply follow precedents, obey regulations, and move at the head of the crowd. Such employees lead only in the sense that a carved wooden figurehead leads the ship.”1
Political leaders. Corporate leaders. Anyone inside an organizational hierarchy who works within the system instead of working on the system. Peter calls them wooden leaders. They’re not actually leading anything.
Maybe there are few leaders because big establishments in business and politics simply don’t need them. They need managers to make sure everyone follows the rules. And to be sure, management is a valuable skill. Companies and government organizations need good people to manage and maintain.
But they don’t need that many leaders.
1Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull, The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong (New York: Collins Business, 2009), p. 55.
