the leadership zombies walk among us 🌱

(4 minute read)

Hi! Welcome to Our Best Work Weekly, a newsletter from Healthy Pour where you'll get weekly tips on creating a healthy workplace, becoming a more compassionate leader, and cultivating a regenerative relationship with work. 

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OK, I’ll just come out and say it. We don’t use rotary phones in the workplace anymore, right? Our computers aren’t running on MS-DOS. We aren’t saving our work to floppy disks. We don’t listen to the dulcet tones of the model dial-up as we log in to our AOL. I don’t travel to visit my clients in a horse and buggy. 

Why? Because science and technology have improved, and we utilize the newer, more efficient tools available to us. 

So whyyyyyyy are we still cool with accepting outdated leadership strategies? Ineffective at worst and harmful at best? 

I was reminded this week not once but twice of one of my favorite (and most easily readable!) published leadership articles: first when I was finishing up an article about burnout for a trade journal and again when I saw my dissertation supervisor share it in a comment on LinkedIn (I knew I liked that guy!). 

In Zombie leadership: Dead ideas that still walk among us, Halsam, Alvesson, and Reicher explore eight core claims of outdated leadership that “have been repeatedly debunked but which nevertheless resolutely refuse to die” (pg. 1). They include:

1. Leadership is all about leaders

   1. The claim: Leadership is the preserve of those who occupy formal leadership roles and can be understood by focusing on leaders alone.

   2. The reality: Leadership is proved by followership and necessarily requires us to study and understand followers (or we might call them members).

2. There are specific qualities that all great leaders ‘have’

   1. The claim: Particular qualities (e.g., intelligence, charisma) equip particular people for leadership.

   2. The reality: What matters is whether people are perceived to have these qualities by followers.

3. There are specific things that all great leaders do

   1. The claim: Particular behaviors (e.g., being fair, initiating change) are the hallmark of effective leadership.

   2. The reality: Leadership requires behavior to be attuned to the circumstances of the group being led.

4. We all know a great leader when we see one

   1. The claim: There is a consensus that some leaders are better than others.

   2. The reality: There isn’t. Consensus is produced by privileging particular perspectives.

5. All leadership is the same

   1. The claim: There is an essential ‘leadershipness’ that can be discerned across all contexts.

   2. The reality: There isn’t. What leadership looks like changes (and needs to change) with context.

6. Leadership is a special skill limited to special people

   1. The claim: Leadership is an elite activity that is extraordinary, exclusive and expensive.

   2. The reality: Treating leaders as superior to the groups they lead creates problems for those groups.

7. Leadership is always good, and it is always good for everyone

   1. The claim: Leadership is a universal good from which everyone benefits.

   2. The reality: It isn’t. They don’t. Leadership can support inequality and tyranny.

8. People can’t cope without leaders

   1. The claim: Everyone needs leadership, and leadership is always required for group success.

   2. The reality: They don’t. Leadership can make groups less effective, especially if it leads followers to disengage.

(From Table 1, pg. 2)

I find the most important takeaway from this article is not necessarily that too many people and organizations continue to engage and delight in these outdated, scientifically dull, and ego-centric leadership practices; it’s how these practices and assumptions about leadership actively maintain oppressive norms, codifying ideas that exacerbate the inequitable divide of power and class, which the authors say “preserves 19th-century elitism in the 21st-century” (pg. 9). Damn, though. Say it louder! 

With that, in an age where we’re seeing an abandonment and outright dismissal of science, including organizational and leadership science (hello, DEI), it’s crucial that we challenge these axioms and adopt the best social sciences available to us. Like, we aren’t using fax machines. Why are we using the asbestos of leadership? 

Definitely give the paper a read. They even challenge leadership researchers' elitism and gatekeeping practices (yussss), including implementing paywalls on research articles so it’s free to read. I’ve also attached the paper to this email. They also offer practical ways to counter Zombie Leadership, which is excellent. You can also always book time with me, and we can talk about our favorite zombie movies and how clever this paper is.

coffee is for closers.

See you next Monday!