Father’s no More a Leader

Financial Times published a review of the book by Michael Maccoby called The Leaders We Need: And What Makes Us Follow. According to the review, the book is of mixed qualities. Though, there is enough curious analysis of the social changes and their impact on leadership model. The author is looking from the point of view of a sociologist and psychoanalyst.

“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.”

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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.