Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Maureen: [00:00:00] I’m your host Maureen Metcalf. I am delighted to have Barbara Kellerman with us today. Thank you for joining us.

Barbara: Thank you so much, Maureen. I appreciate it. How did you come to do what you’re doing? I go back really to two sources. One is I remember as a very little girl being very interested in the power dynamics among little girls.

I probably don’t tell you, but some little girls, and this is maybe the same for boys, but I was a girl, so I was surrounded by little girls. I noticed that some little girls were very powerful, and it’s a very politically incorrect word to use, but still it was my experience, bossy, and other little girls were much more passive, and much more, as we typically use the word, followers.

So I just remember being fascinated by that as a very young child, and I also grew up in a household which was extremely political, so I think I was interested in politics from a very young age. I did not know that I wanted to be a [00:01:00] leadership

Maureen: person. You’ve been involved with most major university leadership programs and have written a lot about the transitions in leadership and how it is changing.

What’s most interesting to you right now?

Barbara: Two things have interested me about what I call the leadership industry because it’s now a multi million dollar business annually. It’s a global business. It’s very big in the United States. I am every bit as interested in bad leadership as in good leadership. I do not understand why the leadership industry is so oblivious to the ubiquity of bad leadership.

By the way, I define bad along a spectrum from ineffectual to downright evil. Huh? I similarly do not understand why the leadership industry is so focused on leaders and so disdainful of, ignorant of, neglectful of followers. It does, after all, take two to tango. And I would say what’s interested me most has been [00:02:00] the schist in balance of power and influence from leaders to followers.

The shift in the balance of power, which is partly cultural, partly because of technology, meant that in order for leaders really to maintain control, they have had to become, certainly in the political sector, considerably more autocratic.

Maureen: I agree that we still don’t give enough attention to it. Say a little bit more about bad leadership.

Barbara: I remain as stunned as I was in 2004, and I kept trying to do something about it with precious little effect. I just remain dupified that although we are very aware, you’d have to be a complete idiot not to be aware of how ubiquitous bad leadership is. The leadership industry, people who teach leadership, people who study leadership, are so intensely focused on how to develop good leaders and pay nearly no attention to the problem of bad leadership, [00:03:00] whether it’s in the workplace, in a large organization, in a small business, whether it’s in, again, education, religion, the media, in the White House, Why do we not study how to deal with bad leadership when it’s so ubiquitous?

Probably the reasons for it have to do with where the money is to be made. The big money in the leadership industry is generally to be made by people who claim to be able to teach people how to be good. As in successful leaders. There’s much less money to be made by talking about bad leadership, even though if, for example, you Google the words bad bosses, you will be inundated by how many different sites there are.

So we know bad leadership. We know it’s a ghastly problem, endemic to the human condition.

Maureen: But somehow the leadership industry, by and large, ignores it. If I’m looking across my organization and I’m thinking, yeah, I’ve probably got at least one person who isn’t up to par, and I may actually have some people who are just downright bad, [00:04:00] what would you recommend people do if they’ve got folks working for them that are bad?

Barbara: Of course, Maureen, the answer to your question depends on where you’re sitting, and the way you stand depends on where you sit. I never anymore talk jumped about leadership. I always talk now, whether it’s talking or writing, about the leadership system. That system has three parts. It’s very simple.

Part one is the leader or leaders. I certainly never denigrate the importance of the leader. Part two is the other players. We can call them followers. We can call them stakeholders. You can call them employees. The bottom line is who else is in the system? And the third is the context. Are we talking about a large organization?

Are we talking about a small group? Are we talking about a city? Where is this leadership situation taking place? So the response to your question about what do you do about bad actors depends on, are you the leader [00:05:00] or are you the subordinate? As soon as you start analyzing things, not just in terms of the leader, but in terms of leader, other people, other players, followers.

Again, whatever you want to call them, and the context within which you’re situated, then you can start to answer your question with some measure of intelligence. In leadership, generally, there is no blanket response. It is always, the response always depends on the situation within which you’re trying to respond to the question.

So what might work in my group or organization would not necessarily work in your group or organization.

Maureen: Which makes sense, and it’s probably part of why it’s so challenging to fix.

Barbara: I would agree with that. I think it is challenging to fix. By the way, the thing that usually comes up is not the superior or the leader trying to dispense with a bad follower, but people who feel they have, let’s say, a bad boss, or they have a bad president, or they have a bad mayor, or they have a bad,

[00:06:00] Rabbi, or priest, or reverend, or king.

Principal or superintendent, how does one get rid of people who are, quote, bad? Again, depending on how bad is defined. It’s a terrific problem and the leadership industry, by and large, completely ignores it.

Maureen: As a coach, I’m often called in to fix, quote, bad. There is a presumption that I can coach them out of the problem.

And yet, I’ve not run into anyone where the problem was only the person.

Barbara: Exactly. I don’t really do specific leadership coaching because as I always say to my students or my audiences, I don’t teach people how to lead, but I try to get people to think about how leadership is constructed. And so if I were coaching, I would very rarely analyze a problem in terms of a single individual.

Almost always systemically. Really that is the individual, that the leader, the other people. Followers, stakeholders, and [00:07:00] certainly the context within which leaders and followers are embedded.

Maureen: Is that generally a fit within context? Is it a lack of awareness, is it skill, or is it will, or is it some of all?

Barbara: It, again, Maureen, it’s, it is so dependent on who we’re talking about, and who are the other players, and, we can since we’re talking at a moment in time when everybody who’s certainly an American, but I think globally as well, is fixated on Donald Trump. For those people who are not especially enthusiastic, they’re focusing laser like on the individual.

But I would remind everybody that there are a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump. And there is something about the times in which we live and the country in which we live at this moment in time that got this man elected president. It’s stupefying in some ways. Census, because among other things, he’s had zero political experience.

The idea that we would, for example, promote [00:08:00] a business leader to be CEO who’s had zero corporate experience is inconceivable or an educational leader. And yet here we are, so to speak, promoting to the White House somebody who has had literally held no elective office and has not had any direct political executive experience whatsoever.

But there we are, this guy didn’t magically wave a wand and get into the White House, but he’s going to be inaugurated in a couple of days, and he’s going to be inaugurated because a lot of the American people Obviously, still somewhat less than Hillary Clinton, but many millions of Americans thought he would be the perfect president for this moment in time, or at least better than his leading opponent.

So you, if you want to understand what’s going on in the United States, it is inadequate and insufficient to focus on, and I would even say fixate, which the American media does, and most of us do. To obsess about, fixate on, this single individual, we need to understand it. [00:09:00] As I suggested earlier in terms of both the context within which we’re operating, and also all those people who decided he would be the better person to be in the White House over the next 4 years.

Maureen: Given your background in politics, what is causing this shift?

Barbara: Maureen, this is absolutely not just a Perican phenomenon. We’re seeing it globally. We’re specifically seeing it in countries such as Russia, which is more authoritarian now than it was five years ago. China, which is more authoritarian now than it was five years ago.

Egypt. Turkey, certainly Erdogan in Turkey. So the question, as I suggested earlier, is why is this happening in the United States? And you’re talking about France. Why did people contrary to every poll and every expectation, why did the Brits vote to quit the European Union? Why do we have Brexit? So this uprising against liberal democracy is again, by no means an American phenomenon.

And I would argue [00:10:00] it goes back to a discussion that I started to have with anybody who cared to listen in the end of leadership, partly it’s the historical trajectory, meaning followers have gotten more emboldened and are more willing to speak up than they have ever been before. So the changing culture is one reason, which is, we can go into that if we feel like it.

Certainly the changing technology, which I touched on a few moments ago. The fact that people can now speak up and out in a way that they have never before historically been able to do. That makes leading in liberal democracies very difficult, because followers are that is ordinary people, are so difficult and recalcitrant and judgmental and critical and harsh, and the media is ubiquitous, and it’s social media, and it’s 24 7 old media, and it makes ordinary leadership, as we, for example, in the United States of America, or generally in Western Europe, Certainly in Western Europe [00:11:00] have been used to liberal democracy.

It makes liberal democratic leadership exceedingly hard. And so what we have seen in response to what is perceived to be ineffectualness, for example, how many times have we heard that the American political system is broken? In response to this perceived ineffectualness, voters are opting for the so called strong man.

In some cases, it’s the strong woman, not very. Often, but Marie Le Pen is certainly in France an example, turn to the strongman and the capacity of the strongman, whether again it’s in Turkey or in Egypt or in Russia or in China, to maintain control even though they’re more authoritarian is in response to the perceived ineffectualness of liberal democracy, which in turn is a response to followers who make leading in liberal democracies exceedingly difficult.

Maureen: One of the things I’m thinking is that the quote strong man creates a sense of safety and [00:12:00] security in a world that is innately right now, unsafe and insecure.

Barbara: Absolutely true. Now, again, there’s a, interestingly, I shouldn’t say again, I should say, interestingly, there’s a gap between what is and what we experience as What is reality and what we experience as reality.

In fact, Americans, for example, many Americans, even with the income inequity and the dwindling middle class, if you go back 50, 75 years, most Americans are living far better now than they did a hundred years ago. And the terrorism in the United States of America has so far been relatively scant. But because of the media and because of.

Extremely high and still rising level of expectations. We end up feeling dissatisfied and so we bitterly complain and it makes leadership from the federal government very difficult no matter who is sitting in the White [00:13:00] House. And Mr. Trump is bound to find that, indeed, he has already started to find it.

When he has resisted the idea that the Russians have interceded, and he’s resisted the intelligence community, he has found that people will stand up to him. He’s had a relatively easy ride so far, but I’m not sure that will continue once he gets to the White House.

Maureen: If it continues for him, he would be the only leader, in my opinion, who gets to have an easy ride.

Barbara: Again, the people like Putin and people like si, people like Putin and Russia. People like CC and Egypt, people like Ergen, although it’s been difficult lately in, in in Turkey they have had, quote, an easy ride because every time they’ve been resistance they’ve, gotten rid in one or another way of their opponents.

So the recent, the relatively recent rise in authoritarianism is in response to. The difficulties of governing when we let people have their say. It’s hard if we let people [00:14:00] have their say. Trump’s impulse might be to shut people up. It’ll be interesting to see how successful he is in that.

Maureen: So again, that brings us back to the idea of context.

And in The world of liberal democracy, technology, people have a say what changes about if we’re not talking the strongman approach. So there is that I can silence my opponents. But if I can’t do that, how do I change as a leader? So

Barbara: corporate leadership, like political leadership, is a lot more difficult than it used to be.

The rewards are still great, certainly the financial rewards, but by and large, leaders in business, leaders in education, again, leaders in the, in religion, they don’t get the respect that they used to. We’re very quick to criticize. They have to worry about a lot of things they didn’t have to, didn’t used to have to worry about.

Yes. And so what you’re getting is shorter tenures, we can talk about corporate leaders, we can talk about, again, educational leaders, by and [00:15:00] large, leaders are in office less long than they used to be, and they have to watch for a range of things that they didn’t used to have to watch for.

If you’re talking corporate leaders, for example, Shareholder activism which is much greater now than it used to be, including shareholder extreme activism, a few rich people who come in and simply try to upend the CEO, they have to pay attention to boards of directors, by and large, used to be in the hip pockets of CEOs that no longer is the case in the last 10 years, by and large, boards have gotten Stricter, they are obliged to pay closer attention and monitor more closely the CEO.

CEOs have to watch for the press, whether the press is defined in traditional terms or whether it’s social media. CEOs used to be able to control information that used to go out totally from the corporation to the customer. Now the customer is just as likely to talk back and to go online and complain [00:16:00]bitterly about something that a corporation has done.

Everything that I have said about political leaders applies equally to corporate leaders. As we also know, command and control style of corporate leadership is less successful now than it used to be. If you divide leadership up into power, into resources of authority, and into resources of influence, by and large leaders, corporate leaders, are less able to rely on power, less able to rely on authority, And therefore obliged to rely more now than they used to have to in the past on interpersonal influence.

It’s harder to lead in the corporate sector just as it is harder to lead in the private sector. So if you were

Maureen: teaching a

Barbara: new leader, if I had to redesign, if I were queen of the leadership industry, I would de emphasize the fixation on the self, on self awareness and [00:17:00] 360 degree feedback and I need to improve my skills in the self care.

To me, the self focus is really misplaced. So if a coach is now people like you and leadership teachers and instructors and coaches and consultants of all kind they generally focus on the individual and on improving the skills of the individual. And I’m not opposed to that, but if that occupies a 90 percent of a coach’s time, I would say it should occupy 30 percent of a coach’s time and the other 30 percent should be spent teaching a leader to.

Understand the context within which he or she is operating and teaching a leader to pay greater attention to all the different stakeholders, all the different people that he or she needs to bring along in order to lead reasonably effectively. That makes sense. Maureen, I’m not suggesting one shouldn’t focus on the self and managing the self and being self aware and managing your appetites and all those things.

I think that’s just fine. We in the leadership industry over [00:18:00] emphasize it and under emphasize other ways of educating, training, coaching, et cetera leaders. The leader, leadership is about a lot more than self management.

Maureen: In fact our innovative leadership focus, one of the areas we talk about extensively is situational analysis.

So looking at myself, the culture and the systems as a whole. And it is only through understanding all of the components that I as a leader know how to lead.

Barbara: I think that’s right. I would say one of the components though is followers, subordinates, other people, employees, stockholders. Again, if you’re, it depends on where you’re leading.

I can’t say what those individual or group players would be, but it’s not just about, it is about the context very much. As I said, I basically believe a third and a third and a third. I just think it, it should be a much more broadly a person. based approach to teaching how to lead. And one, another problem with the leadership industry is usually we get [00:19:00] people to think, gee, if I take this course, gee, if I go to this executive program, gee, if I have this trainer or this coach in a few weeks, I can learn how to be a leader, but of course we know real leadership work takes a very long time.

Maureen: So you have me thinking I need to be more explicit about. Followers. In my mind, it’s built in, but in the writing, it’s not explicit enough.

Barbara: I can’t tell anybody else what to do. I can only tell you that my own approach, and I think it’s very much a 21st century approach, because followers don’t shut up.

You know, they don’t fall into lulling. They don’t behave the way they used to. We’re just whether it’s Americans or people around the world, this is by no means an American phenomenon, and it’s not purely a political phenomenon. Every statement that I’m And have made in talking to you, Maureen, is applicable globally and is applicable across the different sectors.

This is not particularly about the United States of America, nor is it particularly about politics or any other single sector. I tend to write and [00:20:00] speak very broadly. The world has changed and the leadership industry by and large has not changed with the world.

Maureen: Which is exactly why I do what I do. Let’s get a little tactical.

Barbara: How do you advise leaders to do that? I am sorry to give you a, what may sound like an evasive answer, Maureen, but any concrete recommendation I would have would grow out of the situation within which the leader Finds himself. In other words, again, what would work in one group in one country would not necessarily work in another group or in another organization in another country or context.

I’m a big believer in. Not giving blanket pieces of advice. Are there some conventional wisdoms that are to be gained? Absolutely. But when it comes to specific advice, the only way, and I do this at the Kennedy School where I teach and I [00:21:00] try in my various writings to do the same, which is to teach people not to turn to experts, presumably like me, but To use a framework that I might provide them for them to do their own analysis as to what might work in the situation in which they are.

So this is much more, this is much less about giving somebody a fish than it is about teaching somebody how to do their own fishing. So they themselves are equipped much better than by focusing too much on the self to do, to analyze the question on their own. And respond to the question that you pose by themselves because they have done an analysis and they have some more sophisticated understanding of what leading wisely and in their particular circumstance

Maureen: might entail.

I’m assuming you have put forth frameworks in your book.

Barbara: Yeah, [00:22:00] the last book I wrote is called Hard Times, which is all about the context. So it is this country that the, I’m talking about the United States of America at this moment in time. The book that I’m writing right now is called Professionalizing Leadership, which is how one makes leadership work.

more professional than it is now because by and large it is not very professional to put it politely. The book that I wrote called Followership talks about how we need to think about followers. Somehow we collapse them all into one basket. Oh, my followers. Oh, my employees. But we all know that the way to think about employees, for example, if we’re talking about business, Small is large is by my understanding that there are differences among the different employees.

So what motivates, excites, inspires one group of employees or scares another or intimidates another group of employees. Those are different things. If you have 100 people working for you. [00:23:00] 30 of them might be one way, another 30 another way, and another 30 plus another way. Employees or stakeholders have to be analyzed, have to be understood, have to be motivated, not necessarily in the same way.

So again, yeah, every book I’ve, every single book I’ve written, and there’s lots of them, as I, as you probably know, Yeah, by the way, women in leadership and I’m big in the liberal arts and how the liberal, what the liberal arts has to say about leadership. I think one could do worse than read Shakespeare about leadership.

So I’m all, I’m across the board, Maureen, and every, I would argue that every one of my books Really has lessons on how to lead, but those lessons need to be applied by individual leaders in their respective situations. And by the way, all of these roles are now fungible. So if I’m a leader in one situation, no matter how important, no matter how much of a CEO, as I said, [00:24:00] Donald Trump will find that to his irritation.

I have no doubt. He thinks he’s going to be able to tell people to do this or to do that. And guess what? It’s not going to happen. We need to equip ourselves by being intellectually aware of leadership as it functions in the 21st century, the differences between leadership today and even 10 years ago, technology alone, the impact of technology.

Especially, as I said earlier, of social media on patterns of dominance and deference is huge. And those leaders who don’t bother paying attention to technology or who don’t have around them people who are highly sophisticated on the impact of technology and on the uses of technology are going to be left behind.

Again, not enough to do self analysis. Gotta understand the world in which we live.

Maureen: So when you talk about evaluating followerships, what comes to mind is [00:25:00] hyping. When you say you evaluate them, do you have a preferred or is it a bit of all?

Barbara: In the book Followership, I do have my own typology. First of all, very, very few people have written about followerships.

There’s a billion books on fewership is three and a half on followers or followership. So there’s very, very little literature. What I generally tell my students and my audiences is that they should determine, again, this sounds like I’m retreating to the same same template, which I actually am. I believe in dividing followers into different groups.

Again, if I have a hundred employees, I need to start to see them in somewhat different ways. They’re not all the same. And it will be to my advantage to have some understanding of who these hundred people or a thousand or 10, 000 people are. So they need to be broken up into, in some category or some type or some group.

It’s up to the individual [00:26:00] leader or leadership team or executive team or human resources to figure out how this is These people should be divided. What is a logical way of dividing them, given the situation in which these leaders and followers are finding themselves? The way I divided them in followership was by level of engagement.

So I had some followers who were extremely active and extremely involved in the group or organization. I had other followers who I called isolates, who did very little. They would be in a, I respect the kind of employee who simply punches a time clock, but is in no other way engaged in the group or organization.

I had another type of follower who was a bystander, who met, who I characterize a bystander as somebody who is perfectly aware of what is going on, but who chooses for whatever set of personal or professional or political reasons not to become engaged. So I did, in that, in the book Followership, I [00:27:00] divided followers a certain way.

Way, according to a top five different types, but that doesn’t mean people have to follow my template. I, all I’m saying is I think it’s a good idea to start breaking down people who your stakeholders, your followers, your constituents, whatever word you want to use into different categories. So you have a relatively highly developed understanding of who these people are, what motivates them and how you’re going to be able to get them.

I get them on board with your particular leadership initiative.

Maureen: As you were talking, I was thinking about the airline categories. So gold, silver, platinum based on frequency versus vacation travelers,

Barbara: right? How people break them down. If you’re running for political office these days, as you well know, a good political campaign will be a highly sophisticated political campaign.

Which means they have a highly sophisticated understanding of who the voters in their districts are. They do that kind of work. People in the corporate sector, [00:28:00] by and large, don’t, because they think they don’t have to.

Maureen: But it’s a big mistake. When I’m coaching people, that’s one of the things that is foundational to their success, is I have to understand, and we take org charts, and we plot them out, and we look at, how do you interact with your chief stakeholders?

Whether they be employees or bosses or peers. Yep, that sounds

Barbara: reasonable. That, to me, is a good way of beginning to break away from the focus on the self. And to move toward a greater focus of, again, the situation, the task at hand, and indeed the other players.

Maureen: Most of our folks who are less than perfectly effective are fine when they sit in a room by themselves.

It’s when they interact

Barbara: with people. Yeah leadership happens to be a two person game, at least. It takes a minimum of two people to do that tango, and mostly it’s not just two people, but more. So, if you want to be able to bring them along without leaving a lot of blood on the floor you’ve got to figure out how to do it reasonably [00:29:00] wisely and reasonably well.

Maureen: I like that we’re talking about a framework because I’m assuming any of our listeners can think about who are their constituents, whether they have followers or they’re leading a project team, but they don’t actually manage people, but they still have groups of folks they’re trying to influence. Most of us

Barbara: work in situations where there’s and even are in communities in situations where there’s some number of people and our relationships to these people are in every which direction.

Most of us have somebody above us, they have somebody below us, they have somebody who’s horizontal and our relationship to them is peer to peer, horizontal. Again, that needs to be understood. Most of us are not leaders all of the time, and indeed leaders, no matter how vaulted, have to be followers some of the time.

We need to do a much, much better job of getting people to understand that in order to have the, Wheels turn [00:30:00] relatively friction free, they need to collaborate and cooperate and go along some of the time and not just assume that every leadership moment is one where they are directors. The problems with groups and assemblages like Congress, it’s not about a crisis of leadership, it’s a crisis of followership.

Everybody thinks these days they need to be a leader, when in fact what people need to be socialized to do much better. It’s to learn to get along and go along, to be, in some cases, a good, supportive, vibrant follower and not always a leader.

Maureen: All of us, no matter how senior we are in our organization, our government, our community, do have times where we’re not in charge.

We may think we’re in charge. But I think of many leaders who go home, and they have a spouse, and they have kids, and they thought they were in charge until they had children.

Barbara: Well, there’s that, and also in the workplace, you think you’re in charge, and you find you’re not in charge.

You think you’re in charge, and suddenly [00:31:00] you have a board member who’s making your life difficult. So there is no such thing in this day and age as a leader who is fully in command and fully in control. Good leaders. Understand that sometimes they have to follow and the fungibility of the leader and follower role is one of the hallmarks characteristics of

Maureen: 21st century leadership.

Barbara, thank you so much. I know you have a lot of people who are seeking your time, so I really appreciate that you’re sharing your insights with me and with our listeners. Do you have a website or a place that people can go to learn more about your work?

Barbara: I have a very active blog, barbarakellerman.

com, and lots and lots of blogs on all kinds of issues pertaining to leaders, followers, and context. And if you’re interested in the leadership system in particular, I wrote an article about It’s called, It’s Not a Person, It’s the System, which appeared in the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and [00:32:00]Sciences, which is called Daedalus, in the summer of 2016.

So I have an article on that specifically.

Maureen: So this is Maureen Metcalfe and Barbara Kellerman. We’d love to hear your feedback and the experiments you’re doing to become more effective.