Why leaders must change

BOOK REVIEW: The leaders we need: and what makes us follow by Michael Maccoby (Harvard Business School Press, €18)

Most people entering the workforce now do not come from traditional families and this has implications for managers' leadership styles, a trend this book tries to explain using a Freudian approach, writes Stefan Stern

It is also surprising to see the suggestion that followers are as interesting as leaders, and equally worthy of study, being presented as if it were a new idea

Foxes know lots of little things, according to the Greek poet Archilochus, while hedgehogs know just one big thing. This book puts its author, Michael Maccoby, in the role of hedgehog.

His sizeable observation is that society has changed fundamentally. Old leadership models, based on what people used to be like, cannot be effective today. The leaders we need will understand this.

Employees and their bosses emerge from their given social contexts.

Management literature takes insufficient notice of this point. But the people who turn up to work every day, whatever their level in the corporate hierarchy, are influenced by their social position and experiences.

"Take [western] corporations in the 1970s," the author says. "Most managers were white men raised in families with one male wage earner, the father.

"Today there are fewer of these families than those headed by a single woman.

"While many top leaders have come from traditional families, most people now entering the workforce have not."

Maccoby argues that this new generation of workers will have grown up in families where authority is shared, where there was no dominant father figure.

"It appears that many people raised in non-traditional families feel stronger ties to sibling figures than to parental-type bosses," he says.

The entry of women to the workplace, at ever-more senior levels, is another huge and, in terms of its implications for leadership, under-discussed phenomenon.

Maccoby, in effect, paraphrases the great ad man David Ogilvy and argues: "Your boss isn't an idiot - she's your wife and she's there on merit."

The era of so-called knowledge work, in which we now live, has changed the rules of the game as far as leaders are concerned, Maccoby argues. Before, we had stable bureaucracies. The workforce was far less diverse. It was relatively easy to plot your path to the top.

But steady-state bureaucrats must now deal with a workforce that is much more interactive.

"The strengths of 'interactives' lie in their independence, readiness for change, and quick ability to connect with others and work in a self-managed team," Maccoby writes.

"Many of them, especially those who have grown up playing video games with people around the world, feel at home in the global economy."

Interactives are not looking for father figures as leaders, our author says, but instead look for role models who "engage them as colleagues in meaningful corporate projects, ideally creating a collaborative community".

If this is true, the old leadership dogs are going to have to learn some nifty new tricks.

Maccoby is a psychoanalyst as well as an anthropologist and, if you hadn't seen this coming, finds that a Freudian approach can help explain the challenges faced by leaders. In particular, he calls on Freud's theory of "transference" to develop his argument.

"Typically, transference is the emotional glue that binds people to a leader, that makes them want to follow, even when they are unclear about where the leader is taking them," Maccoby writes.

"Employees in the grip of positive transference see their leader as better than she really is - smarter, nicer, more charismatic. They tend to give her the benefit of the doubt and take on more risk at her request than they otherwise would."

This can work well, Maccoby adds, as long as the popular image of the leader is not too far removed from reality.

Unfortunately, the author seems to have an idealised perception of the originality of some of his own material.

It is odd not to find the work of Insead's Manfred Kets de Vries referred to, as he has written extensively on these psychoanalytical aspects of leadership.

It is also surprising to see the suggestion that followers are as interesting as leaders, and equally worthy of study, also being presented as if it were a new idea: Why Should Anyone be Led by You? , published two years ago, was built on precisely that premise. Still, Maccoby makes one big point well. Times - and people - have changed. Leaders urgently need to come to terms with that fact.