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OPINION:
The polarisation of world views has never been more apparent. Not only from the perspective of fundamental values and beliefs, but via the proxy of leaders that we choose to lionise or vilify.
It's easy to focus on the character – the individual through whom actions manifest. It's easy and somehow comforting to blame Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern if you don't agree with her approach to the pandemic. "How can one person have so much power? They must be stopped!" we cry.
And yet, we rarely interrogate the historical, systemic realities that allow and enable the cult of personality to persist and flourish. Perhaps it's because we are not prepared to accept the reality that we are all complicit in upholding 'the system' and, that for all its faults, it's got us this far, so it must not be all bad...
It's also in play at the organisational level because hero-leaders help us feel safe. We see ourselves, or our idealised, potential selves in them. Often in business they are founders, inventors, visionaries like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. But just because they make us feel 'seen' or make it easy for us to align purpose or vision, does not make them good leaders.
This invites the question of the role of the leader versus manager versus boss. The classic, unquestioned, pyramid structure of 90+ per cent of all organisations – whether a small business, a multinational, a political party, or a global NGO.
Some organisations are 'brave' enough to admit that the efficiency of this system mitigates risk and is the best way we've designed (to date) that maximises shareholder value.
Others are not brave enough to admit it, claim that 'purpose' or 'mission' is the centre of the endeavour, and yet are not creative or courageous enough to recognise that replicating a system whose essence is extraction and maximisation may not actually be in service of the vision.
That's one of the reasons that even "for-good" prioritising organisations are riddled with bad bosses. The system is designed for it. And, as controversial as this sounds, these systems are designed to cause pain – not only for employees, but for managers and leaders as well.
There is so much freedom and potential released in naming the magnitude of the task ahead of us; it's terrifying and liberating, but it must be named.
The pandemic, Black Lives Matter, the war in Ukraine, the immediacy of opinion have unlocked something. Not all good, but not all bad either.
Arthur C. Brooks of The Atlantic calls it "Our once in lifetime chance to start over" and we can see this at the individual level through the Great Resignation.
But what about our companies? There is a lot to be positive about. Enforced WFH (work from home) created the conditions to disprove the hypothesis that if your boss couldn't see you, they couldn't trust you to do your work. We now have bucketloads of data to prove otherwise. According to a March 2022 study released by the Kantar Group, 64 per cent of workers feel their physical health has improved with remote-working, and 70 per cent of workers (and 75 per cent of millennials), globally, feel employees benefit from flexible working.
This is a monumental shift, albeit one that was precipitated not by will but necessity, helps us see that big shifts are not only possible – but that when, for whatever reason, a critical mass is enabled to experiment, both change and potential are released and integrated far more quickly than imagined.
Flexible working also opens the potential for increased freedom of movement in our more hybrid and virtual workplaces – and the power is shifting from the employer to the employee.
The reason that most employees are choosing to leave their current employers may then come as a surprise. Here's a hint: it's not resilience training, meditation, yoga, and mental health days! These Band-Aid measures are strategies to help employees cope better, without actually addressing the real underlying problems within organisations. It's not even wages.
The pressing issue is the way so many of our businesses are structured and operated. They are antiquated and oppressive for employees – and in fact managers.
A toxic corporate culture is by far the strongest predictor of industry-adjusted attrition and is 10 times more important than compensation in predicting turnover, according to an MIT Sloan Business School study.
They found that the leading elements include failure to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion; workers feeling disrespected; and unethical behaviour.
In other words, leaders who choose not to prioritise a culture of respect.
What are we so afraid of?
• That we might actually need to create something that is in service of what is possible today, rather than resting in what we've inherited?
• That we'll have to work harder in the short term - because it's harder to experiment and 'pay attention' to what our experiments are enabling?
• That we are in fact not victims of circumstance and history, but are more capable and free than we ever imagined?
Of course not all of the systems, practices, ways of working, ways of relating we've lived in our lifetime are bad or wrong. But we should become conscious about them. As the late David Graeber put it: "The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make, and could just as easily make differently."
We can make anything differently. Most of us, even as we identify ourselves as 'change makers', are content with tinkering around the edges. Rarely do we consider the systems that fool us into thinking this is the limit of our potential.
It's time to get brave - and be collectively unflinching in our ability to discern the WHY of our reluctance to question the systems we've inherited.
- Susan Basterfield is a systems transformation partner at Greaterthan Collective Aotearoa, a published author, speaker and commentator on management and leadership.
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