Chapter Eleven

To peruse Warren Bennis's remarkable oeuvre is to explore an encyclopedia of leadership. Themes are introduced and developed, then recur later more richly embellished with nuance and depth. Here, I shall select just a few of Bennis's recurring motifs—uncertainty, democratic institutions, and the limitations of leaders—to explore a frequently ignored question that bears directly on the quality of future organizations: Why do we so frequently tolerate poor, even evil, leaders? I shall use another concept—anxiety—as the needle to stitch together these seemingly unrelated themes.

Many authors examine leadership in terms of the rapidly changing external world in which it functions. In contrast, I find it useful to look inward, that is, to look at the impact of the uncertainty and change generated by that external environment on some enduring aspects of the human condition—our existential anxiety and the human search for meaning. I am concerned with these issues because the ability of leaders and their constituents to deal with dynamic uncertainty, anxiety, and meaning will largely determine the kinds of organizations we shall have in the future.

An Age of Magnificent Uncertitude

First, and perhaps most important, we live in an age of magnificent uncertitude—an uncertitude that is only bound to increase. Its magnificence, like that of Janus, the god of doorways, derives from the fact that it faces simultaneously in opposite directions: one oriented toward potential dangers, including chaos and catastrophe, the other toward enormous challenges, involving expansive, ennobling possibilities.

Potential Dangers

While all historical ages have faced uncertainty and change, our own times are characterized by unprecedented increases in the rate of change.¹ Changes and uncertitude drive our world toward greater and greater ambiguity, turbulence, chaos, and other dangers.² They fuel and intensify our innate existential anxiety born of the awareness that the course of our lives—including our death—is not within our control.

This deepened sense of uncertainty, heavily seasoned with complexity and lack of control, demands a response. Yet the rapidity with which things now change makes it difficult to know what response is appropriate. The press for quick decisions amid uncertainty provokes still more anxiety, a growing dread of succumbing to powerful forces beyond our control, even beyond our comprehension.

This era is also marked by spectacular experiments, scientific, sociological, and political. These efforts contain the potential for vast and intractable destruction. In recent decades, we have witnessed the Challenger explosion, Bhopal, Chernobyl, Kosovo, Chechnya, and many more calamities. We don't seem able to put these disasters back in the bottle. The interdependence that now laces together the globe only exacerbates the possibilities for additional chaos.³ Thus the magnificent uncertitude of our era heightens our underlying existential anxiety, the anxiety we must repress in order to live our daily lives.

Potential Challenges

Our growing uncertitude is nevertheless magnificent, for it holds much more than danger and devastation. First, it offers the promise of growth, change, and challenge. The challenges we confront stimulate new ideas and technologies that have the potential to reweave the very fabric of our lives. The Internet, cloning, and gene therapy are just a few of the amazing technologies that can transform, for better or for worse, the landscape of this age.

Second, this Janus-like uncertitude also offers us chances for making ennobling choices. Within our unfolding world, there are myriad occasions for us to dedicate ourselves, not to our own power and glory, but to great causes that hold the promise of a positive and lasting difference for society. Opportunities for transforming the settings in which many of us live, work, and think create ennobling chances for those who seize them. Occasions for ennobling action, large and small, arise everywhere—in neighborhoods, schools, churches, industry, and government.

This age of great perturbations also prepares the way for new leaders. It is a time not simply for the charismatic leaders Max Weber associated with turbulence, but for connective leaders who can integrate the goals of diverse constituencies living in today's interdependent environment and for other new types of leaders besides.⁴ Who those leaders will be, how they will act, and—perhaps most crucially—how we shall choose to respond to them will affect the very nature of future organizations and the world around them.

The organizations yet to come will inevitably operate in a vast, diverse, and interdependent environment, where uncertainty and change keep company, and where danger and opportunity are locked in a permanent embrace. Still, like the Chinese ideogram for crisis, the top character—the wei, danger—is the first element that we see; the chi, the opportunity or life force, beneath the danger, is often below our angle of vision. This essay looks to the chi, the opportunity or life force.

Uncertitude, Anxiety, and Leaders

Existential anxiety, angst, is fundamental to the human condition, as Søren Kierkegaard, Otto Rank, and Ernest Becker have eloquently explained. This angst stems from our peculiarly human self-consciousness, a self-awareness that painfully alerts us not only to our limitations but also ultimately to our mortality. It is a powerful force that works in tandem with our openness to life to shape our responses.

Nor does it end there. When our angst drives us to seek certainty and security, we turn to gods—divine and human—to transference objects such as parental figures, and eventually to leaders. We hold fast to leaders who take control, who can provide us with a sense of certainty—real or imagined—that we don't feel within ourselves. Such leaders can manipulate and exacerbate our uncertainty by identifying scapegoats and enemies on whom we can blame our angst. They assure us that when we destroy those evil forces, peace and security will reign supreme.

Gurus, priests, rhetoricians, con artists, bullies, political, corporate, and military leaders, as well as media stars persuade us that they have the certainty that we crave. Their rhetoric and sometimes their deeds convince us that they are anointed with powers beyond those granted to ordinary mortals, that is, that they hold the key to immortality.

We cling to leaders to repress our awareness of our mortality, our consciousness that death and destruction may strike from any quarter and at any moment. To live with this mortal knowledge, we must repress it. Constantly staring at the one real certainty, that is, our own eventual extinction, can only lead to paralysis and paranoia. Thus, we must keep it at bay with the illusion that life is somehow under control—if not under our own control, at least under someone else's. And this control is what leaders promise, implicitly or explicitly.

Accepting the illusion that life is controllable is important if much of social life is to proceed; however, examining and understanding that the apparent controllability is, indeed, an illusion is necessary for a confident society to flourish. For many, the unpalatable truth of a world roiling with uncertitude is too much to bear.

Freud noted the tendency of groups to seek illusions, arguing that they “constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real.”⁵ There is a powerful reason for this, as Becker suggests: “The real world is simply too terrible to admit; it tells man that he is a small, trembling animal who will decay and die. Illusion changes all this, makes man seem important, vital to the universe, immortal in some way. The masses look to the leaders to give them just the untruth that they need; the leader continues the illusions and magnifies them into a truly heroic victory.”⁶

In a chaotic, uncertain world, where we sense our smallness and the danger of being overwhelmed, these illusions provide a lifeline. Leaders who appear larger than life, who can create larger-than-life illusions, seem to connect us to the deepest aspects of life. Moreover, leaders who seem to burst beyond the very parameters of ordinary mortals create the illusion of their own immortality. Identifying with such figures enhances our own sense of self—at least sometimes. Small wonder that we weep disconsolately for fallen leaders whom we have never met face to face. Such tragedies force us to discover that they were mortal, after all. Worse yet, their death also rends our illusion of security to tatters. Albert Camus poignantly comments on this issue: “Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Hence one must choose a master, God being out of style.”⁷

The Propensity to Tolerate Bad Leaders

We idolize the good masters and often refuse, consciously or otherwise, to see the clay feet of poor ones, even when those leaders are patently incompetent, cynical, toxic, or evil. To acknowledge their ineptitude, even their malevolence, will only stir up our dreaded insecurities. John Byrne, in Chainsaw, describes this phenomenon in the case of Al Dunlap, who cut a drastic swath through organizations and people's lives.⁸ The age of uncertitude rubs raw our vulnerability to bad leaders.⁹

The illusion that leaders can both protect us and transform us into vicarious heroes lulls our anxiety. Of course, the price we pay for this enhancing illusion is high: unfreedom and submission to the leader's dictates.¹⁰ So, in our eagerness to quell our anxiety, we are often less willing to surrender ourselves to good leaders, who “tell it to us straight,” than to put up with dishonest, incompetent, perchance evil leaders. For what does the good leader do but dispel our illusions, or at least make us aware of them, thereby opening our eyes and heightening our tension? Denying their own omnipotence, such leaders are more likely to ask for help and expect others to participate in the leadership process. This strategy also more often promotes democratic organizations.

Even the very worst of leaders, the demagogues and tyrants, offer us the illusion of security that insulates us from the pain of our anxiety. Indeed, we should note that authoritarian leaders commonly create a stronger sense that things are under their control than do democratic leaders.

Moreover, authoritarian leaders with their self-confident illusions make us feel that they alone have the knowledge and skill to keep things that way. We therefore tend to stifle our concerns about their excesses, particularly as long as we are not the focus of their negative attention.

Turning Rationalizations into Control Myths

We become quite adept at giving ourselves a multitude of rationales for not toppling bad leaders:

• It is too difficult, and it takes too much effort to unseat them.
• We don't have enough support from others, and we can't do it alone.
• To try to overthrow them is too risky.
• More important crises need to be addressed.
• Besides, they're not so bad, after all, and, at least, we know what their faults are.

Eventually, we elaborate these rationales and transform them into complex reasons why we should accept these inadequate and often destructive leaders. These transformed rationales ultimately reemerge as “control myths,” deep-seated beliefs that we use to control not only our own behavior but also that of others:¹¹

• We believe leaders are stronger than we are and know more than we do.
• We believe that the gods favor them, thus making it morally wrong to challenge them.
• We remain blameless for any negative fallout because they take on the tough decisions.
• We believe they have our best interests at heart. (They certainly tell us so often enough.)
• We see that leaders control valuable and otherwise unattainable resources, and we may be permitted to share in them—but only if we remain loyal.
• We take for granted this power relationship, embedded in the social structure. That's just the way things are and always have been.
• We buy into pervasive stereotypes of “leaders” and “followers” that keep both the leaders and the followers in their places.
• We perceive that the odds, based on institutional resources, overwhelmingly favor leaders.
• We come to believe the smoke and mirrors campaigns that the leaders' entourages are at pains to keep producing.¹²
• We don't join forces with other less powerful parties to overthrow bad leaders because we often buy into the stigmatizing social stereotypes that separate us from other sufferers.
• Our desire to find meaning in the world and in our lives makes us yearn to be where such meaning might emerge: where the action is, at the center of things, at the nexus of key ideas and institutions, where leaders and those who oppose them operate.¹³ Any unsuccessful attempt to unseat our leaders is a direct invitation to exile from the arena of action.
• And finally, as Becker wrote, “What we are reluctant to admit is that the admiration of the hero is a vicarious catharsis of our own fears, fears that are deeply hidden; and this is what plunges us into uncritical hero worship: what the hero does seems so superlative to us.”¹⁴

These are powerful control myths that compel us to tolerate poor leaders. The criticality and complexities of these control myths warrant far greater elaboration than is possible within the scope of this discussion. Not surprisingly, breaking free of their grasp is no simple matter.

A Different Option: Matriculating in the School of Anxiety

Tolerating poor leaders is a fearsome price to pay to avoid dealing with our anxiety. But there is another option: We can enroll in what Kierkegaard called the “school of anxiety.”¹⁵ Confronting our anxiety helps us to learn from it so that we can assume leadership roles ourselves. Of course, “learning something new, itself, produces still further anxiety,” as Edgar Schein reminds us.¹⁶ For example, taking leadership responsibility for a totally unfamiliar task commonly provokes anxiety. It is often easier to turn such an assignment over to someone who “knows how” or at least appears to have the background and skill to complete the assignment. Conversely, accepting the assignment and using the accompanying anxiety to fashion a creative solution helps an individual discover previously unrecognized personal resources and talents. This unexpected success subsequently leads to an increased level of confidence for the next unfamiliar assignment.

While confronting bad leaders—from the incompetent to the immoral—triggers profound dangers, it also offers great rewards. Taking them on allows us to act on our own integrity and authenticity, to restore our own and others' freedom, and to give meaning to our actions. Moreover, by failing to stand up to bad leaders, we remain in darkness and lose the opportunity to become our own heroes.

Anxiety is a remarkably complex force. It bears a curious relationship to both personal and social change.¹⁷ While it may be prompted by external social change,¹⁸ anxiety also stimulates internal psychological and cognitive change, driving us to think in new ways and expand our identity accordingly.¹⁹ Anxiety occurs when we realize that increasing external change, innovation, and disruption all demand a response.²⁰ Anxiety, after all, is an invariable accompaniment to serious change. Its appearance, however, need not signal that we are in trouble, but rather that the process of change is under way.²¹

Facing up to anxiety and the accompanying pain enables us to take the next step—even in the face of fear and uncertainty. Acting despite fear and trembling is one definition of courage, the very stuff of heroism. Under such conditions, we are most likely to take risks, to act as our own leaders, even to reach for the stars. The process is painful, but it can strengthen us enough to stop relying on false gods and to overturn toxic leaders.

When we arrive at that point, it becomes possible to give up the “control myths” that have kept us entrapped. Then we can acknowledge and confront leaders' inadequacies and urge them in new directions. As good leaders know, developing their people's insight, critical thinking, and courage to criticize their leaders has clear benefits: It enlarges the leader's vision and strengthens the whole organization. It is the very curriculum of leadership. As Bennis notes, “Perhaps the ultimate irony is that the follower who is willing to speak out shows precisely the kind of initiative that leadership is made of.”²² Accepting the responsibility to speak out is perhaps the first step in participating in a democratic organization that calls for multiple leaders at every level.

Democracy, Personal Responsibility, and Organizational Leadership

Confronting our anxiety helps us to discover the leader within us. We begin to tap our own human potential. When many members of an organization have made that discovery, the organization becomes both stronger and more democratic. It becomes an organization in which the many, not the few, share the burdens, the responsibilities, and the rewards of leadership. So students who graduate from the school of anxiety are likely to foster more democratic organizations.

Nonetheless, a curious and sometimes frustrating circularity arises: Because democratic institutions require that we look to ourselves, they also generate anxiety. We rarely dare to practice organizational democracy in its undiluted form. Participative management in organizations, a noble movement toward democracy, often generates so much anxiety—in leaders and followers alike—that it dwindles into thinly disguised authoritarianism.²³ What does it mean when the leaders of an organization say that Joe isn't a “team player”? Most often it signifies that Joe is not sufficiently obedient, that he doesn't always follow his leaders.

Democracy takes patience and strength. It requires far more ego-strength than ego. It also demands the ability to criticize and the even more painful capacity to be criticized. In addition, democracy is messy, both in and out of organizations. It's slow, and it's not very efficient, even though it is effective.²⁴ In the short run, it is often easier to turn the organization over to someone who will make the trains run on time. In the longer run, however, those trains may carry people to the death camps of demoralization, downsizing, and dead ends before grinding to a rusted, depleted stop.

Democracy, at least Jeffersonian democracy, requires each of us to do our part as leaders. It is a responsibility, not a privilege, to assume some of the leadership burdens of our society, both within and beyond organizations. And surely, as Bennis has pointed out, there is more than enough leadership work to go around.

Whatever the other strengths and weaknesses of organizational democracy, for my purposes here it has one incontrovertible forte: Democracy provides a well-oiled mechanism for removing bad leaders. Although most Western organizations are far from democratic, they live in a democratic environment, amid a broad general ethos that supports democracy and abhors tyrants. That democratic ethos also values merit. To the extent that their participants matriculate in the school of anxiety, organizations can become less vulnerable to incompetent and malevolent leaders.

Facing our anxiety, albeit a painful process, is the first step toward acknowledging our responsibility for leadership and participating in a democratic society. But that is not all within the human condition that prompts us to cling to leaders.

Leadership and the Search for Life's Meaning

Another aspect of the human condition that makes us vulnerable to bad leaders, beyond existential anxiety, is the human search for meaning.²⁵ Our search for meaning also has two faces. On one hand, it attracts us to leaders who have the ability not simply to manage meaning but to create it. Our search for meaning is another need that evokes our dependence on leaders, bad as well as good. Sometimes the meanings are real, sometimes not, sometimes uplifting, at other times cynical and manipulative.

Some leaders offer us explanations of life, purporting to tell us why things are the way they are.²⁶ For as long as those explanations seem to fit the reality we experience, we are likely to accept both the exegesis and the leader who formulated it. When that explanation is shown to be illusory or inadequate, as in crisis, we are forced to look elsewhere for meaning.

On the other hand, the Janus-like quest for meaning also offers us release from the thrall of flawed leaders. Heroic striving, a part of this search, is one human strategy for dealing with the need to transcend our inevitable mortality. It frames our effort to leave behind some memorable fragment for the ages, some immortal crumb of our symbolic self that will remain when our cloak of creatureliness dissolves, when we succumb to our finitude, our mortality.

In our quest for meaning, we seek to discover that we have a significant role in a meaningful universe.²⁷ We need to believe, despite the magnificent uncertitude, first that the world is not a meaningless, random place, and second that the grand struggle we call our “life” has significance. The death of that meaning, in fact, can be ultimately more awesome than one's physical death.²⁸

Death need not end either the significance of that life nor our symbolic self. We are aware that it is possible, at least symbolically, to transcend physical death by various means: through our biological heirs; through religious and mystical beliefs; through creative achievements in various human fields of endeavor; and through the imprint of our actions, personalities, and thoughts on others.²⁹ In all these ways, and more, we can leave a residue that lasts beyond our own finite lifetime.

Still, striving to determine how to satisfy this longing creates another source of uncertainty and anxiety. The meaning behind this ultimate mystery of our singular lives in a wondrous world is one that we unceasingly try to penetrate. The very best of leaders are engaged in their own personal odysseys for meaning, and they invite their constituents to join the search.³⁰

Our insatiable pursuit of meaning is one of the great turbines of progress. It is manifest everywhere around us. All the great discoveries that propel contemporary life were driven by a desire to grasp the meaning of things—things spiritual, social, artistic, scientific, and technological. It is in this search for meaning that we play out our days and make our fateful choices.

If we passively surrender to anxiety, we cannot find meaning—only a false, temporary security through external leaders and other bulwarks outside ourselves. And, in this age of uncertitude, leaders themselves are becoming increasingly fragile and vulnerable, no longer able to guarantee safety to followers, even if they so desired.

Actively exploiting and transforming our anxiety into constructive tension, however, helps us discover not only internal leadership strengths but also the essential meaning of life. What are we doing here? What is worth doing? What do we want to leave as our legacy?

Using anxiety in this positive way, we can explore the “thick description” of our lives, much as anthropologist Clifford Geertz uses “thick description” as a strategy for interpreting cultures.³¹ Examining our actions and our choices, our strengths and weaknesses, as well as our roles in families, organizations, and communities provides an inkling of what all this does or could mean. Self-scrutiny that pierces the mists of anxiety enables us to catch glimpses of ourselves as the leaders we might be. It is one way for us to try to apprehend and interpret our lives, the actions we take, and what they signify.

Finding and nourishing the leader within is only one aspect of our central life task. We might think of this as part of our “immortality project,” that lifelong enterprise we all engage in to satisfy our symbolic selves.³²

The more we mature, the more complex the meaning we seek. We search for meaning that plumbs the depths of our own individuality and that of others far beyond ourselves. Creating such a complex meaning system requires a balancing act between understanding and differentiating ourselves from others and integrating ourselves with the larger world.³³ Attaining this balance allows us to seek ennobling opportunities by committing ourselves to significant social enterprises.

Ennoblement and “Victories for Humanity”

Eventually, we want more than an explanation of who we are and what that means; we want opportunities to be more than our narrow selves have allowed us to be heretofore. We also want to fathom what our contribution should be to the larger world. We sense that it is time to overcome the tyranny of our ego and our dependence on external leaders. Heroically breaking free of the bondage of protective leadership allows us to wrestle with life's major challenges as we dedicate our efforts to something greater than ourselves.

In short, we seek ennoblement by committing ourselves to heroic causes that benefit others beyond ourselves, even beyond those we hold dearest. In the words of Horace Mann, whom Bennis fondly quotes, “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”³⁴

Leaders who engage in their own quest for meaning and ennoblement will fashion organizations where they and others can find what they seek, can win such victories. It is here that immortality projects become relevant, be they the creation of a groundbreaking technology, a global industrial organization, or a soup kitchen for the hungry.

For each of us, our immortality project offers the possibility of an ennobling undertaking, a heroic act.³⁵ Becoming a hero often entails facing, surviving, and symbolically transcending fear and death, but there is more to heroic behavior than that.³⁶ Courage, by one definition, is the ability not simply to look death in the eye in the traditional heroic fashion but to see death continuously out of the corner of the eye and still function at the fullness of one's potential.³⁷ Instead of hiding obediently within the thicket of cultural expectations, those individuals who courageously confront life's daily dilemmas and events are enacting their own brand of heroism.

The greatness of the cause that lies at the heart of our ennobling enterprise is in the eye of the beholder. Each and every one of us works hard at our immortality project, whether consciously or not. Here, too, our existential anxiety—thickened by uncertitude and learning—is at work. So, too, is our natural striving toward life.³⁸ These forces catapult us beyond our ordinary limits, perhaps to cosmic heroism, demonstrating that we deserve to be up there among the stars.³⁹

Where and how do our immortality projects fit into the larger scheme, even beyond the organizations in which we spend most of our days? Graduating from the school of anxiety and forgoing our dependence on leaders are clearly only the initial steps. Breaking the chains of our control myths and freeing ourselves from the bondage of bad leaders both move us along an important path. Building democratic institutions where freedom exists and everyone has a voice is another key step. Searching for a complex understanding of our self and our world vaults still another barrier. Finding the leader within and winning those victories for humanity take us beyond our creaturely selves to the expression of our noblest instincts.

Finding the leader within, our heroic self, does more than unshackle us from the external leaders to whom we so desperately have held fast. It also frees up much more leadership talent for the entire society, in every organization, at every level. This new breed of leaders will be more self-reliant and thoughtful. These will be leaders who can handle the magnificent uncertitude of our times, the anxiety it augments, and the opportunities for learning and change that both uncertainty and anxiety generate.

There are no easy answers. Still, taken together, these strategies may offer a nutritional cocktail for future organizations. They present one road map for overcoming our vulnerability to bad leaders. Then, magnificent uncertitude and anxiety will have been put to good use, and democratic organizations surely will flourish.