In the interests of productivity and health, there is no need for traditional leadership.
Let’s start by looking at some telling information:
- Bad leadership is the number one cause of people quitting their jobs. Gallup reports 75 percent of people worldwide say this.
- Poll: 65 percent of Americans say they would rather change their boss than get a pay raise.
- Whitehall studies I and II: The more bosses you have above you, the sicker you will be and sooner you will die from it.
Workers who are in increasingly subordinate, “low job control” roles have the highest correlation of any recorded factor to preventable chronic illness and mortality such as coronary heart disease. - Managers are nearly always paid more, retained longer, and rewarded better than than the people they manage.
- Read just about any list of top 5–10 reasons why small businesses fail and you’ll see leadership/management issues are always listed and frequently are the majority of reasons.
I couldn’t find any similar lists with about large businesses but I think the same rules apply for failures like layoffs, bankruptcy, divestment, etc.
In summary: leadership is the reason why people change teams, quit their jobs, get sick, die young, get paid less, and businesses fail.
So… why does nearly every business in the world HAVE leadership? Why does nearly every organization have so many LEVELS of leadership? It clearly has nothing to do with overall competence, happiness, health, or productivity. Isn’t it obvious that after thousands of years using totalitarian structures like these, they don’t work well?
I think the answers are there but they’re not good, or clear. I feel like the answers are mushy, tragic, and not very flattering for anyone involved.
Why do we have leadership
1) Evolution
I think like a lot of things in the human condition, it goes back to very early survival traits. Hominids who were able to escape predators and competing hominids had among other mutations — developed cognitive biases that favored groups organizing under leadership which allowed groups to take collective action faster than any other method of multi-person decision-making at the time. Faster does not equal better but in the face of primitive calamity, I think faster proved itself the winner in the brutal arena of natural evolution.
Note: It’s important to remember that natural evolution does not mean that winning traits are 100% better. It only means that the traits that carried on were either:
A. not terrible enough to stop an organism from reproducing.
B. immaterial to an organism reproducing or not.
C. just barely more appropriate in some situation to allow an organism to reproduce where one with a different trait does not.
Fast forward somewhere between 20–100 million years and you’ve got us with those same traits rattling around in our overworked heads. Thanks evolution! 😃 👍
2) Social evolution
Another flavor of brutality I think is responsible for why alternatives to single-actor leadership are not largely known or considered in contemporary society: persecution. Throughout human history there are either records or clues of collectives which have formed espousing what I’d consider very advanced and enlightened systems of organization. The trouble is that most of those brilliant points in human achievement are punctuated by an infestation or a massacre from outsiders — suppressing or erasing their progress from subsequent generations to inherit.
I’m sure “It’s easier to destroy than it is to create.” is among our earliest platitudes and it rings true here. Along the string of every tragedy to befall people who were finding a better way, we have another reason why people feel the popular structure of leadership is necessary and “the only way we’ve ever known”. Cultures die too.
Leadership is fertile ground for abuse, which is most often harnessed to retain yet more leadership. Leadership is a system which begets itself.
Why layer and stratify leadership
All things real have limits. If you want to be king of many people then you soon run into your limits of time, language, influence, and understanding. There are only so many people you can manage interactions with in a given day — so you layer in order to simplify.
You order five people to do something. They in turn order five or more other people, and so on until everyone with their manageable groups are doing (more or less) what you’ve ordered them to do. Is this a good thing to do? The data tells me, no, the problems outweigh the benefits. Also as I’ve pointed out in another article, stratifying is especially useful for monetary profit.
A world without leadership, managers, and bosses
So we can see that there are many terrible reasons why it exists and persists but it would be really nice to eventually get our way out of this mess. Don’t you think? I’d certainly like to live in a world where everyone uses one or more systems of collective decision-making that causes longevity, satisfaction, health, and success. It’s entirely possible because this has happened before, it continues to happen at small scales, and with advances in technologies that boost human capacity — it has the potential to happen more comprehensively now than at previous times. We could really live this way.
This may sound like a version of John Lennon’s “Imagine” because, well, basically it is. Just like my previous couple of sections were basically a wordy version of the Autonomous Collective skit in Monty Python’s Holy Grail movie. If you’re hoping for me to spell out exactly HOW we get from here to there or exactly the form that THERE should take, I don’t have a good handle on that yet. But I care about it so I’ll try to follow up.
Best of luck to us all, before the fallout from leadership kills the planet.
