Breaking Trust

What To Do About Our Leadership Crisis

A Shift Marks a Breaking

The moment it happened I do not know. But at some point in the early years of this century, a cultural shift took place where the relationship between leaders and those they lead changed. Before this transition point, leaders saw themselves representing the people that they led. Then as sudden as the wind shifts in the midst of a storm, leaders no longer represented the people, but outside interests or purposes.

Politically I describe this as the parties no longer serving in the best interest of the nation. Instead, they represent what is in the best interest of the party. The party has a greater claim on their allegiance than does the nation. I trace this as a political shift that took place in the early 1990s. But probably began before then. For me, it meant that I became a non-aligned voter. All the crises of the past thirty years, I trace back to this political shift. In this, I do not distinguish between the two major parties in the US. They both use national crises to advance their positions within government and beyond.

When members of the US Congress can practice insider trading with impunity, their service to the nation becomes compromised. They now represent their own financial interest. At the local level, when a member of a city council or county commission pushes through new rules that serve the interests of their friends in the property development industry. They no longer represent the community that earlier established guidelines that preserve the community’s historic character.

Two Patterns of Behavior

In business, I saw this shift through two patterns of behavior.

One was a sort of clique or club developing between senior executive leaders. We don’t see the relationship. We can see how similar their actions and their articulation of their actions are. Their behavior manifests itself as leadership representing leadership’s own interest. Some people with whom I have talked describe this as corruption. I describe it as a loss of trust through the breaking of the structural relationship between authority and accountability (See my Where Has Trust Gone?: Restoring Authority and Accountability in Organizations.).

One of the manifestations of this behavior is how governing boards develop to serve the interests of the executive team or the individual members of the board. Unless you are actively involved at this level of an organization or a local community, you could easily have missed this.

The other shift concerns the relationship that the organizational leader has with those who work for the company. I saw this through the eyes of those in the workforce. Here’s what it looks like.

When I work with an organization, I talk with everyone. I ask questions about their perception of their work, its value to the company, and the conditions that they work in. When I speak with people who have daily contact with the leaders of the organization, I ask them similar questions. I am not going behind the back of those who hire me. They understand that I am going to do this, and report to them what I find.

Think of this process as exploratory surgery of an organization. If a consultant only talks to the executive that hired him, he is only getting an initial indication of what the situation in the company is. We then need to do some diagnostic work.

There are three projects where talking to people in the workforce affected my impression of the company and helped me know what to recommend to those that hired me.

Working with a small business of less than ten people, I learned that the owner’s team could run the company without her. Working with a medium-size company in a leadership transition, I gained my first clear sense of this cultural shift that I describe in the opening paragraph. Then, through conducting seminars with a large workgroup from a global organization and an executive assistant within their division, I became convinced that the broken relationship between the executive leadership of a company and the people who work for them explained the problems that the company faced.

The best way to describe what I see is as a crisis in the perception and role of leadership in our world. The crisis is that leaders no longer represent the company or the nation that selected them to lead. Instead, they represent outside interests. This is not a new phenomenon as I have learned. This breaking of trust by leaders weakens companies, communities, and nations. The crises that we have experienced over the past two years have been made worse because of this pattern of behavior. I have written about this here and here.

Defining the Problem

Everything that I have described is an impression of the situation that I see. It is my opinion based on engagement and reflection. The outcome is a problem that has grown over time. What is this problem?

Let us identify the problem by utilizing my Circle of Impact model of leadership. I designed it to be a tool for problem-solving. I am asking the question here, “What explains this change, this transition in the function of leadership in organizations and nations?”

Is the problem a structural one? Does the hierarchical structure set up an authority structure that no longer provides adequate accountability for the problem?

Is the problem a conceptual one? Have we lost clarity about the purpose and function of leadership?

Is the problem a relationship one? Does the transactional nature of relationships in the modern world lead to people gravitating towards those who offer them the greatest reward?

Based on my experience, all three of these explanations are possible. In fact, they could all be happening at the same time. In other words, we have a perfect storm of crisis in leadership.

The next step in this problem-solving process clarifies which one of these problems is the most critical and therefore provides the greatest leverage for change.

Clarifying the Problem

I have spent almost forty years addressing these kinds of problems. I’ve done so as an organizational leader, a business owner, and a consultant. It is my assessment that the problem begins with the conceptual. We lack clarity about what leadership is. Most people see it as a role or a function in an organization. The president is the leader. The owner is the leader. The CEO is the leader. And we all follow them.

This highlights the problem that we have.

What do we do when the people whom we are to follow no longer see themselves leading us?

They are not leading at all. Instead, they are using traditional language and accepted perspectives of leadership as a cover for representing their own and outside interests. It is a relationship of broken trust.

Where does this leave us?

It leaves many organizations and nations leaderless. The people remain in place with no one to follow. But all is not lost.

The over-valuing of leadership as a role or a title in an organization has meant not only the loss of trust but the breaking of the authority–accountability relationship. As a result, the relevance of the executive function of an organization or nation has been diminished. In many respects, that level of leadership is not needed as it is an obstacle to change.

The problem is structural, relational, and conceptual. We resolve this first by becoming clear about what leadership is. When we do, I believe we will discover that our structures are poorly designed to foster relationships that serve the interests of the company or the nation.

A New Conception of Leadership

Conceptually, leadership has been conflated with management. We already know this. The great leadership thinkers of our time, like Peter Drucker and John Kotter, have made this point. In effect, we have over-valued leadership in order to limit it, to marginalize it. It is only for the select few who are worthy of leadership.

For many people, the word “leadership” carries a bad taste in their mouths. It is a word that means domination and exploitation. This is what it means to be a world leader. They don’t want to be considered a leader, even if they are.

As a result of looking at this all my life, very early on I came to the conclusion that leadership is this.

All leadership begins with personal initiative

to create impact

that makes a difference that matters.

The implication of this radical departure from the traditional view is that everyone can not only function as a leader but can be trained and supported to do so.

Not only that … the concentration of leadership to a certain few means that the potential impact that resides in each person has been ignored, or worse, suppressed.

In addition, this leadership is already being practiced in organizations. It comes from the natural desire of people to want to do their best. Where they don’t, I am convinced that they have been conditioned or programmed to avoid contributing their best.

Also, when this kind of leadership is endorsed, it provides additional incentive for collaboration that is already taking place.

In every organization that I have served, there is a phenomenon that I call “a persistent, residual culture of relationships.” It is a culture that persists through time, through the transitions of leadership, and through the complications of life, because it resides in the shared values of people.

Understanding leadership from this perspective is how leadership trust can be restored.

To move forward we need to enter into a conversation about …

The human dimension of this leadership perspective.

The relation of my definition of leadership to my model, the Circle of Impact, and,

How to elevate the leadership capacity of your organization.