Saturday, November 21, 2009

Leadership Development and Anti-Authoritarian Organizing

Continued reflection upon an interaction with my supervisor at CCTC (Children's Crisis Treatment Center) continues to teach me a great deal about powerful leadership and the equal and opposite force of imposition upon the followers. A difficult dance to master, the downfall of most leaders is a perceived misuse of power and a lack of popular recourse. A few days into my CCTC training I encountered just such an incident. What has become obvious to me since then is inevitably some of the followership will be offended and frustrated with a superior and without recourse there is no accountability, and without accountability there is no solution to the problem of misused authority.

The players involved in this educational scenario are the supervisor, my peers (total of 5 people), and myself. Essentially, the supervisor who had been training the six of us for the past day and half felt comfortable saying explicitly to me and another peer in front of the entire cohort that the two of us looked 'scared'. I assume she made this determination after telling us of 'horror' stories of past CCTC clients. I also assume she was basing her assumption on my facial expression and body language. The problems with this scenario are numerous. Firstly, she was the authority in the room, which means she had more credibility and power than anyone else so her analysis supercedes any other. Second, she confronted the two of us publicly, no follower interested in being respected desires public ridicule. Thirdly, she made no attempt to further discuss or come to understand why I might have been looking the way I did. Fourth, she made no concessions regarding the power and damage she did. For instance, she could have said something like, "I don't know you from Adam, but this is how you look," such a remark would have entitled me to my past and possibly opened dialogue. I suggest such a skilled remark because truthfully she doesn't know me and for that reason has no context from which to judge me. All in all, the supervisor made a poor leadership maneuver and gave me no recourse to challenge her imposition.

Such an exchange has proven to me that the leadership-followership relationship is a fragile one if communication is not open. Without open dialogue the followership can not engage in the process of mentorship, which after all should be the goal of any sustainable organization. Certainly this process is difficult and requires skilled leaders, but the alternative is exactly the predicament I found myself in: feeling marginalized and internally questioning the legitimacy of the authority. Such a circumstance is not sustainable and will lead to hostility and a non-productive leader-follower relationship.

The myth of leadership figures a lone authority dictating a strategy to the followership; this is the myth of the 'historic moment'. MLK standing at the podium with the entire Washington Mall full of faithful followers working toward a common goal of equality. Now, of course, the ends of equality is justified and inspiring, but the means are delusional and counter-productive. After the climax of the dictation and the crowd calms, MLK remains the authority and the power of hierarchy remains in his hands alone. In other words, his speech did nothing to empower others to act based upon their diagnosis of the problem. This powerful myth of leadership is contrasted by the real power of the anti-authoritarian Shared governance model of leadership where authority is shared equally amongst all members and the duration of leadership is temporary. This model is based off of day-to-day leadership management instead of the 'historic moment'. What must be realized is that while consolidated authority (occuring when group confidence is concentrated with one leader) can produce some desired political/financial ends, in the process the group has also produced a social ends. In the process of giving consistent leadership consistent means to control the agenda of the group, a culture of 'spectator activism' reigns. This sort of activism promotes authoritarian control through the absence of dialogue. Undeniably, every organization has leadership, it is to the detriment of the group not to have a conversation about the sustainability of the organization and it's leadership.

It remains true to me that leadership is so critical because organization (management) and community (leadership) are the keystones of every successful, sustainable, venture.

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