In pursuit of the unlimited theories of leadership

“What is leadership?” This is a problem that has been asked frequently since the early 20^th century when Ralph Stogdill started to investigate the common personality perspectives of outstanding leaders. (UCIL, 2022) This started the most ancient, yet obvious theory of the leadership – the possession of traits.

Interestingly, in 1948, Mr. Stogdill concluded his research with the following statement: ‘A person does not become a leader by virtue of the possession of some combination of traits’. (Stogdill, 1947)

But Stogdill and his traits theory are not alone. In the decades academics and the general public have been seeking for an all-round theory of the leadership, and as a result we now have behavioural leadership, situational leadership, as well as the new leadership that contains multiple types.

Yet, up until today, the best answer we can give to the question, beside forty-two^[1], is this: we have a lot of theories, but none is proven to be working all the time.

If we were to list some names of good leaders half a year ago, many would mention Elon Mask, a typical charismatic, successful leader under traditional theorems. He founded SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company, co-founded Neuralink, and OpenAI. The above companies are mostly successes, with one currently being the largest electric car manufacturer around the world (Statista, 2022), another arguably made the greatest chatbot of all time (Wikipedia, 2022).

Musk was constantly praised for his leadership and ability to lead his team to create new things others deem hard or impossible, like the falcon 9 with ability to reuse its rockets multiple times (Sheetz, 2020). But in the final months of 2022, we have seen the charismatic figure becoming too controversial for many since the acquisition of the social media platform, Twitter.

The new ‘Chief Twit’ described this $44B deal as ‘promote free speech’, (Euronews with AP, 2022) but the actions he did to realise this wish and to turn the company profitable has been recognised by many as dangerous.

Within the first week of his control, as I signature of reform, Musk sacked 50% (later 70%) of the total employees (Rushe, Oladipo, Bhuiyan, & Middleton, 2022), this move is commented by a former executive as ‘does not know what he is doing’. Consequently, the company soon witnessed a rise on hate speeches (Das, Twitter fails to delete 99% of racist tweets aimed at footballers in run-up to World Cup, 2022; Silberling, 2022) followed by quit of advertisers (Nix & Merrill, 2022) and being criticised by President Biden as an outfit that ‘spews lies all across the world’. (Das, ‘Elon Musk doesn’t know what he’s doing’, says former Twitter executive, 2022)

He then, out of nowhere, produced a subscription service that would, among others, give out the verified tick, a recognised mark of trust of on platform, to anyone willing to pay $20 per month, with the price tag being finalised at $8 in a public conversation with Stephen King. (Musk, 2022) In short, he is being charismatic, playing his usual but controversial things.

But the attempt was proven to be an instant failure, with all sorts of people, ‘Jesus’ included, getting ‘verified’ and some spread misinformation which he was warned beforehand (Newton & Schiffer, 2022), and pushed the company on a ‘collision course’ with EU regulators. (Espinoza, 2022) This is also what he did before – he is both willing and comfortable to take huge risks and accept significant failures, or he couldn’t make the rocket company successful.

Then comes the accusation of him preforming dictatorship instead of leadership (Sky News, 2022), yet again the causes are something we have seen on him before (Mac & Ewing, 2022), like sleeping at offices (Faruvar & Schwab, 2022), or asking his employees to be ‘hardcore’ or leave. (Nolan & Hays, 2022)

With all these resemblances, it is extremely important to repeat that his leadership was being praised merely a few months ago, despite, as we have seen, nearly identical approaches being applied.

In the book ‘Thinking differently about leadership’ written by Suze Wilson in 2016, she has chronicled that ‘the conventional understanding we have of leadership today is profoundly limited, limiting and problematic.’ (Wilson, 2016, p. 2)

For now, let us assume it is true. But what does it mean to us, the ones who are trying to understand leadership in-depth? For this purpose, I will introduce a past figure who many consider as a representative of overall great leadership – Steve Jobs.

In case anyone here may be unfamiliar with this figure already, he revived the Apple Computer Incorporated in the first few years of this century (Fell, 2011) and the Pixar Animation Studios in late 90s (Bates, 1995).

Soon after his fall in 2015, an authorised biography of his life by Walter Isaacson was released. Within this book there are quite detailed descriptions regarding Job’s leadership approaches^[2], including, among others, dropping the first iPod prototype into an aquarium to prove that it could be smaller. (Tweedie, 2014) Also, one of the first things he did after returning to Apple is to terminate a handful of projects, which terrorised the whole company while having minimal impact to its functionalities. (Deutschman, 2000)

Leaders who utilise the method of promoting crisis and create stress among followers are usually subsequently seen as more charismatic (Halverson, Murphy, & Riggio, 2004). We can see both Jobs and Musk have adopted this with successful outcome, but why did it stop working at Twitter?

The New Leadership theory argues that effective leaders need to be ‘visionary’, ‘charismatic’, ‘transformational’ and, more recently, ‘authentic’. (UCIL, 2022) One of the critical problems with Mr. Musk here, is that he failed to prove his understanding of what he is doing to the ones he is attempting to target. (Das, ‘Elon Musk doesn’t know what he’s doing’, says former Twitter executive, 2022)

Not being fully authentic may not be a great issue during a quest to the unknown, since no one has definitive answers. However, it could be critical in an established business or industry. Also, over strengthening the charismatic part without considering consequences, like disabling the company by sacking an exceptional proportion of is employees, could yield a significant impact to the whole ship.

Then, what may be a better solution to this kind of problem? Let us look at Pixar Animation Studios.

After purchasing the team and tech from Lucasfilm (Pixar, 2005), Jobs decided to let the team do their job. Co-founder of Pixar, Ed Catmull described the conflict resolution scheme between them, after probably months of peaceful verbal arguments, as follows:

About a third of the time he said, ‘Oh, I get it, you’re right.’ And that was the end of it. And it was another third of the time in which [I’d] say, ‘Actually I think he is right.’ The other third of the time, where we didn’t reach consensus, he just let me do it my way, never said anything more about it. 

(Catmull & Wallace, 2014)

In Steve’s own words, they are: ‘he showed me his dream… and I end up buying into this dream both spiritually and financially’. (Iwerks, 2007)

In summary, his strategy is: be patient, open-minded, and willing to be wrong or to plough ahead even if an agreement could not be reached after reasonable efforts. In other words, inclusive leadership.

The point here, after all of these, is that the correct leadership approach is probably not the one that used to be working, but the right one that fits the aim most. Therefore, because our understanding of leadership may be limited, limiting and problematic as all theories are based on a subset across the universe of leadership theorems, we should never apply things used to be working to every scenario there is, like Must did.

At the end of the day, what we can say is this: leadership, like arts, remains mostly a human thing, one that not only varies across scenarios, but from person to person as well, and the perfect fit-all approach probably does not exist.

The recent developments of leadership models have already reflected such characteristics by introducing not one, not two but a collection of theories and combining them as one. (UCIL, 2022)

It is certain that current theories may get refined over time, with new ones appearing and getting modernised. In the meantime, it remains our task to explore the unlimited theories of leadership, while attempting to apply the best approach as it sees fit.

Thanks for listening!

_{[1] In Douglas Adams’s popular 1979 science-fiction novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the supercomputer Deep Thought reveals that the answer to the “Great Question” of “Life, the Universe and Everything” is “forty-two.” It is also the model answer of Google Assistant towards this question.}

_{[2] Because I currently do not hold a copy of the original book, hence all the events I have recalled here are though memory and then confirm with trusted external resources across the Internet, all of which is referred though brackets and references.}

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