Unleashing Leaders

Citation

Bennett, S. (2001), "Unleashing Leaders", Employee Relations, Vol. 23 No. 4, pp. 417-425. https://doi.org/10.1108/er.2001.23.4.417.4

It may be true that you can tell a good deal about a Review Editor’s views about you from the books he asks you to review. I’m still considering the implications of this but a first thought is that Ian Cunningham has cast me as his religious affairs reviewer because he has asked me to review two books that can reasonably be described as works of faith. Consider this:

Imagine telling everyone you work with, everyone you know, that they are leaders. Not only this, but you can show them that it is true and even help them find that leadership based on integrity and purpose beyond selfish desires. A radical transformation would happen. For most people use only a fraction of their leadership potential and the challenges of the world need their full capabilities. (In Search of Leaders, p. 34)

There might have been a time when I would have bought that, even given its ludicrous initial supposition, its naïve and immature view of evidence in social science, and its fantastical view of the results to be had from speech encounters. However, that was when I was 16, living as a romantic in South Wales, and had yet to be exposed to the intellectual rigours of life in Glasgow, where uttering or writing the first sentence of the passage above quoted would be enough to tell anyone all they needed to know about you.

Hilarie Owen is also Welsh and has written, in two books, a heartfelt account of her own personal voyage of discovery in the field of leadership. It is a voyage that has involved her in work with a variety of organisations (including the Red Arrows flying team) but has also engaged her theoretically. In the first book she presents an account of leadership that starts from the premise that the only crisis in leadership is one of perception and understanding, and tries to show that leadership is no more mysterious than being human. She discusses what she calls the seven essences of leadership which are – a clear distinction between leadership and management, everyone has the potential for leadership, leadership is a timeless concept and is part of the human spirit, to become a leader you must become yourself, leadership transforms the world, we express our leadership gifts when we act as part of an integrated whole, and we are all leaders and followers at different times.

The author devotes three chapters to discussing the existence of three circles through which “we have to travel” to find our “unique leadership gifts” (p.53). The first is the “transcendent circle” where we are supposed to be able to explore who we are as a human being. The second is the “translatory circle” where we understand the world in which we live, and the third is the “transformational circle” where we discover our purpose and a way to express our leadership. We also learn that there is a new organisation to support us, called the Institute of Leadership, the purpose of which is to facilitate the development of leadership throughout the world, and which has launched the “leadership challenge”. The Institute’s Web site tells us that the founder of the Institute is Hilarie Owen.

The second book is an examination of how organisational structures impede the development of leadership. Hierarchical structures are seen as particularly obstructive as is the “management mindset”. Ancient civilisations are described and “lessons” are learned from the Egyptians (hierarchy works when people want security above freedom of spirit), the Greeks (self‐interest will not be tolerated forever) and the Romans (the elite can become corrupt). The new model of organisation turns out to be the network structure as presented by Gareth Morgan; an analysis that hardly represents anything excitingly new.

Overall, these are not books that I would recommend academics to place on their students’ reading lists. There is little in‐depth evaluation of the literature as quick resumé of one theory follows quick resumé of another, and none satisfies more than the first thirst. Furthermore, the theoretical work she presents is typically selective and is used uncritically. For example, we are told that Peters and Waterman “showed” in In Search of Excellence (Peters and Waterman, 1995) that excellence in organisations was not only possible “but was in fact very often in front of our own eyes – but we do not always see it”. (InSearch of Leaders, p. xv)

Another problem is that sometimes, in the opinion of this reviewer, we are told things that beggar belief. For example, in an un‐referenced sentence the author suggests that “During the 1980s Warwick University found that change in organisations came from outside forces”. (Unleashing Leaders, p. 103). Once again, this is hardly news and lacks any in‐depth insight into the foundation of this claim.

In addition, we also have protracted discussion of developments in the natural sciences, which this reviewer suspects is based on only a superficial knowledge. Therefore the conclusions the author draws are confusing. An illustration of this, is when she states that people had apparently taken “revolutions like those of Copernicus and Darwin” pretty much in their stride. However, she then says that these were “changes that shocked many people, but the new concepts themselves were not difficult to grasp” (In Search of Leaders, p. 105). Those of you who have read John Banville’s Doctor Copernicus (Banville, 1976) might wonder at the logic of this interpretation.

The theoretical roots of this work lie in Maslow’s theory of self‐actualisation and the books reflect a commendable desire to see people better treated than they typically are in the world of large corporations. The books are also based on a belief that has long been widely held that human creativity and imagination are held in check or even smothered by the organisational arrangements of modern work. But if you want a critical examination of these ideas within the context of established literature, you will not find it here.

So these books are not for those who have a close academic interest in leadership. The trouble is that I don’t think they are good as popular texts either, because of their superficial approach to the theories that are reviewed. Indeed, to the unwary they might appear to carry more weight because of their relentless reference to, but lack of examination of, authoritative work. Where I do know something about those to whom she refers, such as Morgan’s work, I am less than impressed with what the author does with it. I am, therefore, less than trusting when the author makes reference to chaos theory, quantum theory or ancient civilisations about all of which I know a lot less.