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Zombie leadership: Dead ideas that still walk among us

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Alex Haslam explores the concept of “zombie leadership” by outlining eight core claims, or axioms, that define this phenomenon.

Image courtesy of interviewee. October 4, 2024

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The speaker discusses the disconnect between academic research on leadership and its practical application over the past 30 years. While there has been significant advancement in understanding leadership in theory, the practical field remains stagnant with outdated concepts. This video stagnation is attributed to practitioners' reluctance to incorporate scholarly insights, leading to persistent use of ineffective "zombie leadership" ideas—concepts that have been proven false yet continue to be popular. These flawed ideas are often perpetuated by elites who benefit from the status quo, promoting the notion that leadership is solely about individual leaders rather than the collective contributions of group members.

The speaker emphasizes that effective leadership should be viewed as a process of influencing and mobilizing group members towards shared goals, rather than focusing solely on the traits or actions of leaders. This video view aligns with research across various domains, indicating that organizations perform best when leadership is distributed among all members, fostering a collective effort. The speaker calls for a shift towards frameworks that support shared leadership and empowerment, urging researchers and practitioners to overcome barriers that have historically impeded progress in the understanding and practice of leadership. Overall, the conversation highlights the need for a comprehensive and inclusive approach to leadership that values the contributions of all members, rather than glorifying singular leaders.

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Here are five key points from the video regarding the state of leadership research and practice:

1. **Stagnation in Practical Leadership Applications**: Despite significant advancements in leadership scholarship over the past few decades, the practical application of this knowledge in real-world settings has stagnated. Many practitioners are resistant to incorporating academic findings into their leadership practices, preferring to rely on outdated ideas.

2. **"Zombie Leadership" Concept**: The video draws parallels between flawed economic ideas (like trickle-down economics) and outdated leadership concepts that persist despite evidence showing they do not work effectively. This “zombie leadership” persists because influential elites maintain a status quo that benefits them, obscuring the progression of more effective leadership methodologies.

3. **Importance of Defining Leadership**: The authors emphasize a clear definition of leadership as a process of influencing and mobilizing group members towards achieving collective goals. They argue that much of the traditional analysis focuses too heavily on individual leaders rather than the dynamics between leaders and followers, leading to misconceptions about what constitutes effective leadership.

4. **Need for Inclusive Leadership Dynamics**: Effective leadership is characterized by a collaborative group dynamic where all members contribute to the leadership process. This "leaderful" approach contrasts with the notion that leadership should be vested in a single individual, promoting a view that collective involvement leads to better outcomes for teams and organizations.

5. **Challenges in Leadership Development**: The existing leadership training programs are often dominated by outdated models of leadership that do not empower all group members. There's a need for innovative training initiatives that focus on building collective leadership capabilities within teams, fostering an environment where everyone plays a role in advancing the group's interests.

These points underscore a critical examination of current leadership practices and the need for a more integrated approach that values group dynamics and collective participation.

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Here are some key quotes extracted from the video that encapsulate the core ideas and themes discussed:

1. **On the State of Leadership Research**:
"There has been quite a lot of progress in the academic and the sort of research study of leadership, but actually the translation of that work into practice has been very mixed."

2. **On Resistance to Change in Leadership Practice**:
"There's a certain sense in which the practical aspects of leadership have got... are really sort of stuck in the mud."

3. **Critique of Applied Leadership**:
"The people who are working in the field of the applied field of leadership have no particular interest in learning the lessons of scholarship on the topic of leadership."

4. **Zombie Leadership Concept**:
"The idea there is... there are a whole set of ideas out there that policy makers... subscribe to... which have been shown time and time again not to work."

5. **Impact of Outdated Leadership Ideas**:
"What dominate... everyday analysis of leadership... are these totally outdated ideas about leadership... have really deleterious consequences for... the practices of leadership."

6. **Defining Leadership**:
"Leadership is the process of influencing a group in a way that motivates group members to contribute to the achievement of group goals."

7. **The Importance of Followership**:
"Leadership necessitates the study of followership... leadership must be about those group members."

8. **Dynamic Interaction**:
"What you see is that both of those parties... it's a kind of dynamic interactionism where leaders change the group, and the group also changes leaders."

9. **Empowering Leadership**:
"I don’t think that’s what society needs... I think people want leadership, which is empowering of them, and which listens to them."

10. **Effective Teams and Leadership**:
"Teams that are successful are ones in which everybody is trying to do leadership... it’s very hard to tell who’s doing the leadership and who’s doing the followership."

11. **The Role of Leadership Training**:
"We’re really interested in the alternative, how you develop leadership training initiatives and programs that are genuinely empowerment-oriented."

12. **Call for Progress in Leadership Research**:
"We need to really apply ourselves to the challenges of making that research heard... overcome the barriers and the impediments to progress."

These quotes represent the speaker's critique of prevailing leadership theories (termed "zombie leadership"), emphasize the importance of understanding the dynamics between leaders and followers, and advocate for more effective, empowering leadership practices.

X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:90000

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I and my sort of co-authors on this work have been working

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in the field of leadership on and off really for 30

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or so years.

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And one of the things that you kind of see there is that,

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you know, there has been quite a lot of

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progress in the academic

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and the sort of research study of leadership,

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but actually the sort of, there's the, the, the translation

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of that work into practice has been very, mixed.

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Um, and, and there's a certain sense in which

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the applications of leadership knowledge

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or the practical aspects of leadership have, have, have got,

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are really sort of stuck in the mud.

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I think quite deliberately.

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I think that the people who are working in the field

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of the applied field

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of leadership have no particular interest in learning the

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lessons of, scholarship on the topic of leadership.

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And they want to basically continue doing

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what they've always done and, and,

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and living out their prejudices

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around the study of leadership.

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And so at the same time, you have all this notional

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progress in, in our understanding of this topic.

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What you see in practice is there's very

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little progress at all.

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Um, and really the article came out of sort of desperation

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around that and saying, look,

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the field has moved a long way.

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What we know about leadership has developed massively,

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and yet the, the applied aspects

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of leadership have got feet of clay.

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And, and there's a, a total failure to kind

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of develop our understandings

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or develop a kind of sophisticated understanding

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of leadership on the ground.

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And as a result, what we get and what

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and what dominate, you know, everyday analysis

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of leadership, whether it's in sport or politics

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or government or business,

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are these totally outdated ideas about leadership,

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which are not only problematic sort of intellectually,

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but have really deleterious consequences for,

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I think the enactment or the practices of leadership,

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but more particularly for the groups

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and the societies that are being led.

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And, and I think all of us co-authors on, on this work are,

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you know, getting on in years.

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And I think we're thinking, look, we,

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we just gotta put this out there, you know, a a as a kind

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of last desperate attempt to, if you like,

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bootstrap the field out of it, this state of topa actually,

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the terms on leadership that is the reference really

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to the work of John Wiggin, who's a, an economist.

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And he wrote a,

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an award-winning book a few years ago now

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called Zombie Leadership.

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And basically this, the, the idea there is, look, the field

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of economics, again,

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it's pretty much the same thing

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we've just been talking about.

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There are a whole set of ideas out there that policy makers,

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politicians, practitioners, kind of subscribe

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to things like trickle down economics, privatization

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of public assets, these things which people talk about as,

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as, as positives

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and as things that we should be aspiring to do,

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and it should inform policy.

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But these things have been shown time

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and time again not to work.

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And so we, based on ideas that are basically flawed

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and false, but yet,

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and this is John Wiggin's point, they, they,

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they just live on despite all

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of these efforts to kill them off.

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And that's really exactly the

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same in the field of leadership.

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Look, there's a whole set of ideas that have been

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demonstrated to be false and to be wrong,

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and counterproductive again and again and again.

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And yet they just come back and they,

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and they sort of have this life of their own,

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and people resort to them.

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They recruit them time and time again, both deliberately,

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but also inadvertently

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or just casually in the way that they,

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they conceptualize leadership, you know,

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in a whole range of domains.

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And I, and I, I think in everyday life, if you watch

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sporting commentary, you watch the coverage

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or any kind of sporting event,

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and there's often implicit in the analysis is the idea that

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of, of what leadership looks like and what leaders are doing

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and what leadership will do for you, ideas that are just,

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are just fundamentally wrong.

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Um, and that are often, you know, really problematic

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and actually are not at where you see

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successful organizations.

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There is not these models of leadership

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that are responsible for it.

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And where you take successful organizations or teams

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or whatever, and you inject this kind

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of zombie leadership into them,

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what you see is it's a recipe for failure.

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I think that what you might call interested parties,

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and often it, you know, to a greater

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or a lesser extent, they, they are, if you like, elites.

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So they're people who want you to believe

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that they have the secret of leadership

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and they are the only people who can do leadership,

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and they are the people who should be rewarded

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handsomely for doing leadership.

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So I think probably the sort of classical stereotypical,

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sort of zombie leader are, are people who are like leaders

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of large entities

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and who are paid huge amounts of money

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for doing what they do.

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And it's absolutely in their interest to believe,

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to have you believe that only they have the secret of this,

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the sort of magic dust to sprinkle on the organizations,

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the teams that they're working for,

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and that nobody else could possibly do what they're doing.

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Um, and, and,

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and of course then the, the, the point is precisely to

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preserve a status quo that, that,

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justifies their sort of exalted, positions

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and their excessive in, in, in many cases,

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obscene levels of remuneration.

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As we say, if you're trying to understand zombie leadership

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and if you're trying to do something about it,

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it's really important.

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And I would say this is also really important

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whenever you have a discussion of leadership to ask

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and to what it is and to clarify what it is.

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And I think the literature and, and,

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and most of the people who work

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In the, the field of leadership are,

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are agreed completely on what leadership is.

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So leadership of is the process of influencing a group

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in a way that motivates group members to contribute

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to the achievement of group goals.

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So that's really the definition.

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It's an influence process that's about group mobilization.

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Um, and actually, if you like, most of the kind of ideas

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of zombie leadership fly in the face of that definition.

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So they neglect important aspects of it.

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And, and so understanding what leadership is, clarifying

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what it is, and using that as a basis for your discussions

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of leadership are what are we suggest one

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of the critical ways of actually ultimately being in a

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position to avoid it and to challenge it.

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This was a couple of years ago,

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we were just doing a survey, I think in a British library.

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There are something like 50,000 books on leadership,

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of which I think something like 18,000 are

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simply called leadership.

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So, so the literature is massive.

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I mean, just about anybody who's, anybody as, you know,

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as it were, has written about, leadership.

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I, I mean, just as an example, I just saw the other day

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that Tony Blair is coming out

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and he is written a book and what's his book about?

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It's about leadership. So if you are someone who has,

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as it were, succeeded, whether you're a football coach or a,

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or a, you know, a a an impresario of some form

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or a a a business leader or,

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or someone who's kind of made it in the world a a prime

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minister or whatever, you know,

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you don't talk about any old thing.

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You ultimately end up talking about leadership.

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Now that's kind of one part of the lit

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of the, of the literature.

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But, but in the aca in academic sphere

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and in the, in the, in the research sphere, again,

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the really vast bodies of leadership in, in a, in a,

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in a range of fields, I guess most of it is in the field

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of management and business,

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but it's in sport, it's in academia, it's education,

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it's, it's in pretty much every sphere of activity.

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And what I would say is that when we challenge,

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ideas of zombie leadership, the, the empirical evidence

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for our claims is substantiated pretty much across all

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of those different domains.

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So it's a very large body of research,

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and it is very clear about what it says.

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It's very clear in challenging these false,

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outdated, but nonetheless enduring ideas about leadership.

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The dead ideas are basically, we're using it as code

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for just these wrongheaded ideas.

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I think the alive stuff

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and the where the literature of that is,

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is actually the stuff that,

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that challenges zombie leadership.

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And there's, and that takes many different forms.

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So if you look at the different, if you like aspects of,

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or axioms of zombie leadership, yeah, there's a,

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there's a kind of dead idea there,

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but actually o you know, over time alongside that,

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there's, there's quite a fertile

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and I think rich body of evidence that has challenged that

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and often in a, in a range of often very interesting ways.

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So the field of leadership is a, is a really interesting

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and exciting one once you move away from

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these kind of zombie ideas.

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But nonetheless, for, as we've said, for a range of reasons,

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people often wanna bring it back to these notionally,

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these sort of what they see as the fundamentals

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of leadership, which are,

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are fundamentally, wrongheaded.

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But, but, but move away from that.

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And, and leadership's a really, a fascinating,

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field to work in.

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And, and you get on the ground

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and look at what is happening when effective leadership

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is being done in groups.

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And it's, you know, it's, it's really interesting

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and nuanced, you know, so, and,

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and really, you know, you know, that's why

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so much has been written about it.

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And the tragedy of leadership is precisely that we ignore

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that richness and come back to these hackneyed, dead,

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corpus of, of, of, of ideas which are,

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which are really stultifying and,

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and really holding everything back.

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But in, as I say, in a very

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particular sense, that's the point.

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The point is precisely to ensure

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that we don't develop these enriched, empowering,

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ideas about what leadership might look like.

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Probably the core idea of zombie leadership,

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if there was kind of one super axiom, it is the idea

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that leadership is all about leaders.

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So when people talk about leadership, often

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what they're actually talking about as leaders,

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as if those two things are interchangeable.

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And if you wanna understand leadership, you just look at

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what people who are defined

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or who define themselves as leaders are doing,

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that's probably the core idea.

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If you go back to our definition of leadership,

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leadership is a process

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of influencing group membership group members in a way

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that mobilizes them to, advance group goals.

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What you're seeing is then leadership must

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be about those group members.

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It must be about what they do,

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as it were in the name of the group.

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So leadership necessitates the study of followership, necess

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the study of, of what group members are doing when they're

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motivated by leaders.

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But again, the standard, if you like,

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zombie leadership analysis is no, don't look at the group,

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don't look at the followers, don't look at team members,

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don't look at the holo.

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Just look at what these great individuals are doing.

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And if you do that, yeah, you find that indeed, you know,

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great leaders do do interesting stuff,

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but only insofar as they mobilize people to do things

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in their name or in the name of the group.

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And then what those group members do

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and how they enact that followership is,

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is really interesting.

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So actually I think, my colleague Steve,

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Matt's others that I work with, you know, what we look at is

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that dynamic interaction

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Between leaders and followers.

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How leaders take their cue from followers

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and how followers take their cue from leaders.

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And those things are actually incredibly interesting.

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And what you see is that both of those parties, if you like,

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are transformed by the others.

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So it's a kind of dynamic interactionism

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where leaders change the group,

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and the group also changes leaders.

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And it's in that dynamic interplay

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that the real interest in leadership

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and the really interesting aspects of leadership reside.

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But of course, those things are very much beyond the realm,

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beyond the purview of the standard zombie analysis.

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'cause it says, don't worry about the group, just look at

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these leaders, focus on them, what they're doing, ratify

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what they're doing, lionize what they're doing,

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and pay them, shed loads of money for doing it

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and give them lots of, accolades and, and, and rewards

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and awards for what they're doing.

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And neglect the group. Turn away from the group.

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You don't need to worry about that.

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'cause that's not important because leadership is

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just what leaders are doing.

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No, that's wrong. And if that's what you study, if that's

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what you focus on, if that's what you talk about, if that's

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what you reward only you're gonna have a big problem.

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It speaks to that kind of as, you know, the potentially sort

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of Occam's razor thing.

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Oh, let's just, it's too complicated

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to talk about this really, you know,

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dynamic kind of group process.

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So let's just focus on leaders on that.

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What I would challenge is, I, I don't think

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that's society's need.

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I don't think that's what society needs.

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I don't think that's what people in

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society have said they want.

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And I don't think when push comes

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to shove, it is what they want.

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I think people want leadership, which is empowering of them,

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and which listens to them

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and which takes them on board for the trip, if you like,

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for the journey, not least.

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Because when that happens,

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that's when groups are really successful.

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So if you look in any,

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whether you're talking about a sporting team

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or a political party, the more that leadership is seen

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to be vested in just one individual, the more likely it is

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that the group will actually fail.

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Teams, organizations, societies do well when everybody is,

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you know, putting their shoulders to the wheel.

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And when those groups

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and entities are genuinely leader full in the sense

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that everybody is doing leadership.

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So some of our work that we've done in sporting context

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shows very clearly that teams in which there's just like one

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or two people doing leadership

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tend not to be very successful.

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Teams that are successful are ones in which everybody is

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trying to do leadership.

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And you are working together to create this,

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this collective effort in which actually it's very hard

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to tell who's doing the leadership

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and who's doing the followship

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because everybody's doing a bit of everything.

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There's a lot more to be understood about

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how these dynamics work, how this

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interaction between leaders

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And followers work, how you create leaderful teams

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and organizations effectively.

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And, and clarifying the, the benefits of that.

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I think how you also build, put that, inject

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that into I think leadership practice

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and leadership, training and development.

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These are really big issues

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because the other thing to say is that the, the practical,

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the practitioner side of the leadership equation

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and the field, you know, where as it were, the money bit

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of it, where you, we've got,

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people paying larger amounts of money

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for leadership development

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that is a field which is really dominated by, models

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of zombie leadership.

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And, and I guess in, in, in our work, our applied work,

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you know, we're really interested in the alternative,

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how you develop leadership training initiatives

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and programs that are genuinely empower, that create

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structures of shared leadership where leaders ca are in,

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are best positioned to work

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with the people that they're leading.

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And you actually build this sort of infrastructure,

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psychological material that allows groups to thrive

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because it allows everybody to, be, be,

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be having a role in, developing,

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advancing us and our, collective interests.

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And I think when it comes to that, I think really the, the,

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the, the, there's really, you know,

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we've really only scratched the surface of what those types

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of programs might look like

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and how they might be beneficial for organizations,

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teams, entities, and so on.

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Um, but I think what you see is that

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where teams are effective, they are kind

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of doing those things, but precisely how they do it.

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And indeed, more generally, how we can move beyond this kind

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of, phase of, of, of, of, of really, you know,

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stultifying, framing of the whole leadership problem.

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I think that's a, a how, how to do that.

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So, you know, that's a, that's a, that's still so much to,

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be, done there.

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What I would say is that there is progress being made,

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but again, I think as, as researchers, we need

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to really apply ourselves to the challenges of making

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that research heard, making that message heard,

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and working out how we're gonna overcome the barriers

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and the impediments to progress,

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which have held up the field really for so long now.

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And, and I feel that, you know, as things stand,

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there maybe isn't, there isn't always the incentive for

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that translational work to be done

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because there's, there's,

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there's a sense in which quite a lot of vested interests

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and, and relevant parties are kind of buy, buy into the sort

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of status quo that we have at the moment.

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Unsatisfactory as it is,

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but appealing as it is to, the limited few

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who benefit from it.

Stagnation in Practical Leadership: A Call for Transformation

00:00:00 - I and my sort of co-authors on this work have been working in the field of leadership on and off really for 30 or so years. And one of the things that you kind of see there is that, you know, there has been quite a lot of progress in the academic and the sort of research study of leadership, but actually the sort of, there's the, the, the translation of that work into practice has been very, mixed. and, and there's a certain sense in which

00:00:35 - or the practical aspects of leadership have, have, have got, are really sort of stuck in the mud. I think quite deliberately. I think that the people who are working in the field of the applied field of leadership have no particular interest in learning the lessons of, scholarship on the topic of leadership. And they want to basically continue doing what they've always done and, and, and living out their prejudices around the study of leadership. And so at the same time, you have all this notional

00:01:09 - What you see in practice is there's very little progress at all. and really the article came out of sort of desperation around that and saying, look, the field has moved a long way. What we know about leadership has developed massively, and yet the, the applied aspects of leadership have got feet of clay. And, and there's a, a total failure to kind of develop our understandings or develop a kind of sophisticated understanding of leadership on the ground.

Outdated Leadership Concepts and Their Impact

00:01:39 - and what dominate, you know, everyday analysis of leadership, whether it's in sport or politics or government or business, are these totally outdated ideas about leadership, which are not only problematic sort of intellectually, but have really deleterious consequences for, I think the enactment or the practices of leadership, but more particularly for the groups and the societies that are being led. And, and I think all of us co-authors on, on this work are,

00:02:11 - And I think we're thinking, look, we, we just gotta put this out there, you know, a a as a kind of last desperate attempt to, if you like, bootstrap the field out of it, this state of topa actually, the terms on leadership that is the reference really to the work of John Wiggin, who's a, an economist. And he wrote a, an award-winning book a few years ago now called Zombie Leadership. And basically this, the, the idea there is, look, the field of economics, again,

00:02:41 - we've just been talking about. There are a whole set of ideas out there that policy makers, politicians, practitioners, kind of subscribe to things like trickle down economics, privatization of public assets, these things which people talk about as, as, as positives and as things that we should be aspiring to do, and it should inform policy. But these things have been shown time and time again not to work. And so we, based on ideas that are basically flawed and false, but yet,

Perpetuation of Flawed Leadership Paradigms

00:03:12 - they just live on despite all of these efforts to kill them off. And that's really exactly the same in the field of leadership. Look, there's a whole set of ideas that have been demonstrated to be false and to be wrong, and counterproductive again and again and again. And yet they just come back and they, and they sort of have this life of their own, and people resort to them. They recruit them time and time again, both deliberately, but also inadvertently

00:03:44 - they conceptualize leadership, you know, in a whole range of domains. And I, and I, I think in everyday life, if you watch sporting commentary, you watch the coverage or any kind of sporting event, and there's often implicit in the analysis is the idea that of, of what leadership looks like and what leaders are doing and what leadership will do for you, ideas that are just, are just fundamentally wrong. and that are often, you know, really problematic and actually are not at where you see

00:04:14 - There is not these models of leadership that are responsible for it. And where you take successful organizations or teams or whatever, and you inject this kind of zombie leadership into them, what you see is it's a recipe for failure. I think that what you might call interested parties, and often it, you know, to a greater or a lesser extent, they, they are, if you like, elites. So they're people who want you to believe that they have the secret of leadership and they are the only people who can do leadership,

Understanding Zombie Leadership and Its Implications

00:04:45 - handsomely for doing leadership. So I think probably the sort of classical stereotypical, sort of zombie leader are, are people who are like leaders of large entities and who are paid huge amounts of money for doing what they do. And it's absolutely in their interest to believe, to have you believe that only they have the secret of this, the sort of magic dust to sprinkle on the organizations,

00:05:16 - and that nobody else could possibly do what they're doing. and, and, and of course then the, the, the point is precisely to preserve a status quo that, that, justifies their sort of exalted, positions and their excessive in, in, in many cases, obscene levels of remuneration. As we say, if you're trying to understand zombie leadership and if you're trying to do something about it, it's really important.

00:05:47 - whenever you have a discussion of leadership to ask and to what it is and to clarify what it is. And I think the literature and, and, and most of the people who work In the, the field of leadership are, are agreed completely on what leadership is. So leadership of is the process of influencing a group in a way that motivates group members to contribute to the achievement of group goals. So that's really the definition. It's an influence process that's about group mobilization.

Clarifying the Landscape of Leadership: Navigating Zombie Leadership Myths

00:06:22 - of zombie leadership fly in the face of that definition. So they neglect important aspects of it. And, and so understanding what leadership is, clarifying what it is, and using that as a basis for your discussions of leadership are what are we suggest one of the critical ways of actually ultimately being in a position to avoid it and to challenge it. This was a couple of years ago, we were just doing a survey, I think in a British library.

00:06:53 - of which I think something like 18,000 are simply called leadership. So, so the literature is massive. I mean, just about anybody who's, anybody as, you know, as it were, has written about, leadership. I, I mean, just as an example, I just saw the other day that Tony Blair is coming out and he is written a book and what's his book about? It's about leadership. So if you are someone who has, as it were, succeeded, whether you're a football coach or a, or a, you know, a a an impresario of some form

00:07:23 - or someone who's kind of made it in the world a a prime minister or whatever, you know, you don't talk about any old thing. You ultimately end up talking about leadership. Now that's kind of one part of the lit of the, of the literature. But, but in the aca in academic sphere and in the, in the, in the research sphere, again, the really vast bodies of leadership in, in a, in a, in a range of fields, I guess most of it is in the field of management and business, but it's in sport, it's in academia, it's education,

Challenging Zombie Leadership: Insights from Empirical Research

00:07:57 - And what I would say is that when we challenge, ideas of zombie leadership, the, the empirical evidence for our claims is substantiated pretty much across all of those different domains. So it's a very large body of research, and it is very clear about what it says. It's very clear in challenging these false, outdated, but nonetheless enduring ideas about leadership.

00:08:30 - for just these wrongheaded ideas. I think the alive stuff and the where the literature of that is, is actually the stuff that, that challenges zombie leadership. And there's, and that takes many different forms. So if you look at the different, if you like aspects of, or axioms of zombie leadership, yeah, there's a, there's a kind of dead idea there, but actually o you know, over time alongside that, there's, there's quite a fertile and I think rich body of evidence that has challenged that

00:09:04 - So the field of leadership is a, is a really interesting and exciting one once you move away from these kind of zombie ideas. But nonetheless, for, as we've said, for a range of reasons, people often wanna bring it back to these notionally, these sort of what they see as the fundamentals of leadership, which are, are fundamentally, wrongheaded. But, but, but move away from that. And, and leadership's a really, a fascinating, field to work in.

Beyond Traditional Notions of Leadership

00:09:33 - and look at what is happening when effective leadership is being done in groups. And it's, you know, it's, it's really interesting and nuanced, you know, so, and, and really, you know, you know, that's why so much has been written about it. And the tragedy of leadership is precisely that we ignore that richness and come back to these hackneyed, dead, corpus of, of, of, of ideas which are, which are really stultifying and, and really holding everything back.

00:10:04 - particular sense, that's the point. The point is precisely to ensure that we don't develop these enriched, empowering, ideas about what leadership might look like. Probably the core idea of zombie leadership, if there was kind of one super axiom, it is the idea that leadership is all about leaders. So when people talk about leadership, often what they're actually talking about as leaders, as if those two things are interchangeable. And if you wanna understand leadership, you just look at

00:10:36 - or who define themselves as leaders are doing, that's probably the core idea. If you go back to our definition of leadership, leadership is a process of influencing group membership group members in a way that mobilizes them to, advance group goals. What you're seeing is then leadership must be about those group members. It must be about what they do, as it were in the name of the group. So leadership necessitates the study of followership, necess

Dynamic Interplay Between Leaders and Followers

00:11:09 - motivated by leaders. But again, the standard, if you like, zombie leadership analysis is no, don't look at the group, don't look at the followers, don't look at team members, don't look at the holo. Just look at what these great individuals are doing. And if you do that, yeah, you find that indeed, you know, great leaders do do interesting stuff, but only insofar as they mobilize people to do things

00:11:37 - And then what those group members do and how they enact that followership is, is really interesting. So actually I think, my colleague Steve, Matt's others that I work with, you know, what we look at is that dynamic interaction Between leaders and followers. How leaders take their cue from followers and how followers take their cue from leaders. And those things are actually incredibly interesting. And what you see is that both of those parties, if you like,

00:12:11 - So it's a kind of dynamic interactionism where leaders change the group, and the group also changes leaders. And it's in that dynamic interplay that the real interest in leadership and the really interesting aspects of leadership reside. But of course, those things are very much beyond the realm, beyond the purview of the standard zombie analysis. 'cause it says, don't worry about the group, just look at these leaders, focus on them, what they're doing, ratify what they're doing, lionize what they're doing,

Redefining Leadership: The Importance of Collective Empowerment

00:12:42 - and give them lots of, accolades and, and, and rewards and awards for what they're doing. And neglect the group. Turn away from the group. You don't need to worry about that. 'cause that's not important because leadership is just what leaders are doing. No, that's wrong. And if that's what you study, if that's what you focus on, if that's what you talk about, if that's what you reward only you're gonna have a big problem. It speaks to that kind of as, you know, the potentially sort of Occam's razor thing.

00:13:12 - to talk about this really, you know, dynamic kind of group process. So let's just focus on leaders on that. What I would challenge is, I, I don't think that's society's need. I don't think that's what society needs. I don't think that's what people in society have said they want. And I don't think when push comes to shove, it is what they want. I think people want leadership, which is empowering of them, and which listens to them and which takes them on board for the trip, if you like, for the journey, not least. Because when that happens,

00:13:44 - So if you look in any, whether you're talking about a sporting team or a political party, the more that leadership is seen to be vested in just one individual, the more likely it is that the group will actually fail. Teams, organizations, societies do well when everybody is, you know, putting their shoulders to the wheel. And when those groups and entities are genuinely leader full in the sense that everybody is doing leadership.

Empowering Collective Leadership for Team Success

00:14:16 - shows very clearly that teams in which there's just like one or two people doing leadership tend not to be very successful. Teams that are successful are ones in which everybody is trying to do leadership. And you are working together to create this, this collective effort in which actually it's very hard to tell who's doing the leadership and who's doing the followship because everybody's doing a bit of everything.

00:14:46 - how these dynamics work, how this interaction between leaders And followers work, how you create leaderful teams and organizations effectively. And, and clarifying the, the benefits of that. I think how you also build, put that, inject that into I think leadership practice and leadership, training and development. These are really big issues because the other thing to say is that the, the practical, the practitioner side of the leadership equation

00:15:19 - of it, where you, we've got, people paying larger amounts of money for leadership development that is a field which is really dominated by, models of zombie leadership. And, and I guess in, in, in our work, our applied work, you know, we're really interested in the alternative, how you develop leadership training initiatives and programs that are genuinely empower, that create

Empowering Leadership Through Collective Efforts

00:15:50 - are best positioned to work with the people that they're leading. And you actually build this sort of infrastructure, psychological material that allows groups to thrive because it allows everybody to, be, be, be having a role in, developing, advancing us and our, collective interests. And I think when it comes to that, I think really the, the, the, the, there's really, you know,

00:16:20 - of programs might look like and how they might be beneficial for organizations, teams, entities, and so on. but I think what you see is that where teams are effective, they are kind of doing those things, but precisely how they do it. And indeed, more generally, how we can move beyond this kind of, phase of, of, of, of, of really, you know, stultifying, framing of the whole leadership problem.

00:16:50 - So, you know, that's a, that's a, that's still so much to, be, done there. What I would say is that there is progress being made, but again, I think as, as researchers, we need to really apply ourselves to the challenges of making that research heard, making that message heard, and working out how we're gonna overcome the barriers and the impediments to progress, which have held up the field really for so long now.

Barriers to Leadership Progress: The Status Quo Effect

00:17:44 - there maybe isn't, there isn't always the incentive for that translational work to be done because there's, there's, there's a sense in which quite a lot of vested interests and, and relevant parties are kind of buy, buy into the sort of status quo that we have at the moment. Unsatisfactory as it is, but appealing as it is to, the limited few who benefit from it.

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