Artwork

תוכן מסופק על ידי The Art of Manliness. כל תוכן הפודקאסטים כולל פרקים, גרפיקה ותיאורי פודקאסטים מועלים ומסופקים ישירות על ידי The Art of Manliness או שותף פלטפורמת הפודקאסט שלהם. אם אתה מאמין שמישהו משתמש ביצירה שלך המוגנת בזכויות יוצרים ללא רשותך, אתה יכול לעקוב אחר התהליך המתואר כאן https://he.player.fm/legal.
Player FM - אפליקציית פודקאסט
התחל במצב לא מקוון עם האפליקציה Player FM !

Podcast #1,030: The Problems With the Cult of Leadership

 
שתפו
 

Manage episode 445213545 series 2519111
תוכן מסופק על ידי The Art of Manliness. כל תוכן הפודקאסטים כולל פרקים, גרפיקה ותיאורי פודקאסטים מועלים ומסופקים ישירות על ידי The Art of Manliness או שותף פלטפורמת הפודקאסט שלהם. אם אתה מאמין שמישהו משתמש ביצירה שלך המוגנת בזכויות יוצרים ללא רשותך, אתה יכול לעקוב אחר התהליך המתואר כאן https://he.player.fm/legal.

Are leaders born or made? Judging by the 50 billion dollar leadership development industry, the answer is definitely the latter. From schools to workplaces, everyone is seen as a potential leader and expected to become one by undergoing leadership training.

My guest questions the assumptions underlying this phenomenon, which he calls “the leadership industrial complex,” and says that the cult of leadership, and its idea that everyone can and should become a leader, can create burnout and unhappiness.

Elias Aboujaoude is a Stanford professor of psychiatry and the author of A Leader’s Destiny: Why Psychology, Personality, and Character Make All the Difference. Today on the show, Elias describes the state of the leadership industrial complex, the mathematical impossibility it forwards that everyone can be a leader and no one is a follower, and the primary presumption it makes that leadership can be taught. Elias argues that, in fact, a lot of what makes for good leadership is innate and potentially unchangeable. We discuss the implications of this fact, and why it’s actually okay not to want to be a leader.

Resources Related to the Podcast

Connect With Elias Aboujaoude

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Apple Podcast.

Overcast.

Spotify.

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Are leaders born or made? Judging by the $50 billion leadership development industry, the answer is definitely the latter. From schools to workplaces, everyone is seen as a potential leader and expected to become one by undergoing leadership training. My guest questions the assumptions underlying this phenomenon, which he calls the leadership industrial complex, and says that the cult of leadership and its idea that everyone can and should become a leader can create burnout and unhappiness. Elias Aboujaoude is a Stanford professor of psychiatry and the author of A Leader’s Destiny: Why Psychology, Personality, and Character Make All the Difference. Today on the show, Elias describes the state of the leadership industrial complex, mathematical impossibility [0:00:50.9] ____ that everyone can be a leader and known as a follower, and the primary presumption it makes that leadership can be taught.

Elias argues that, in fact, a lot of what makes for good leadership is innate and potentially unchangeable. We discuss the implications of this fact and why it’s actually okay not to want to be a leader. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/leadership. All right, Elias Aboujaoude, welcome to the show.

Elias Aboujaoude: Thank you very much.

Brett McKay: So you are a psychiatrist, and you’ve taken a deep dive into what could be called the cult of leadership in America. And what kickstarted this exploration of leadership development in the United States is you got a request to write a letter of recommendation for a medical student. So how did that request for a letter of recommendation lead you to exploring our country’s obsession with leadership and developing leaders?

Elias Aboujaoude: Indeed. So one of the best medical students I ever supervised, I’ll call him Tim, approached me for a letter of recommendation in support for his application to get into a skin cancer program. Tim had really shown exemplary performance on the wards where I supervised him.

So I wrote the most, probably the strongest letter of recommendation I had ever written. And in it, I praised his bedside manner, his clinical productivity, his conscientiousness, his research contributions, really the kinds of things that every program wants to see in an application and in a prospective applicant. To sort of make him feel better and hopefully less stressed out about this process, I shared the letter with him and I watched as he read it in my office. And I was surprised to see his facial expression sink into a deep depression and deep sadness. So for a second, I thought I had mistakenly given Tim another student’s evaluation, the evaluation of a student who had been failing the rotation, but it turned out I hadn’t. What was missing apparently from my letter is any mention of leadership qualities and leadership potential. And Tim was convinced that as strong and outstanding as the letter was, he wouldn’t get into any competitive program without a supervisor predicting a brilliant future for him as a leader.

So that got me thinking about how we’ve come to really prioritize leadership over any other quality in our medical field. But also as I started looking and exploring way beyond medicine, I started paying attention, for example, and noticing daycare centers with names like Future Leaders of America or Leadership Academy, the kinds of things that suggest that we’re planting this leadership seed and inculcating people into this cult of leadership, leadership literally with breast milk. And I started noticing also that college applicants now have an entire section where high school students are expected to talk about their leadership experience. Who wants a shy violinist or an introvert when you can get the president of five clubs kind of thing. So all this speaks to a real leadership obsession in our society, and it speaks to very high demand for all things leadership. Now, this demand is being met, met and then some, by what I’m calling in my book, a leadership industrial complex. There’s a $50 billion leadership industry that’s now available to really convince us that leadership is something that’s within reach for practically anyone.

All you have to do is take the right course or sign on the right executive coach. So it’s a very sort of unhealthy combination between this kind of demand and this kind of supply. And as I see it, it may explain the failures of leadership that we see every direction we look and on every front, whether political, corporate, academic, really everywhere and anywhere. We’ve created a system where we have so much product out there that the only way for leaders to stand out and actually make it to leadership positions is to be unscrupulous, to have traits that are closer to sort of the narcissistic or even the antisocial end of the spectrum. And we don’t want that in our leaders, but this is the system that we have created. And this is what this unhealthy balance between exuberant demand and exuberant supply has created.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s one of the big points you make in the book is there’s this paradox that we’re seeing in the past, maybe 50, 60 years, this emphasis on developing leaders. We’re going to develop leaders and very be systematic about it, take courses, but it seems like there’s a dearth of leadership despite all the leadership development we’re doing.

Elias Aboujaoude: Absolutely. This is the biggest, one of the biggest paradoxes of the leadership industry that there has never been more opportunities to develop and train leaders. And yet leaders have never performed worse than they are today. So, one way to look at this is to think, well, we need more training. We need the industry to be even bigger, but another way to look at it and the position that I take in my book is that the leadership industry and this approach to leadership is actually contributing to leadership failure.

Brett McKay: And another point you make too, is that this emphasis, overemphasis on leadership in college students, in your career, it could be leading to burnout and just feeling inadequate. Tim, he was disappointed that you didn’t talk about his leadership skills, but did Tim want to be a leader like personally?

Elias Aboujaoude: That’s the thing. Tim had no interest in being a leader. All he wanted to be is the best skin cancer doctor he could become. And that’s what he eventually became. But Tim was also convinced that without coming across as having leadership qualities, he had no chance of actually making it. When I touched base subsequently with Tim, a few years down the road, I found out that some leadership opportunities had actually come his way, but he was all too happy to ignore them and turn them down.

And yet in his application process, he felt forced to, if you will, pretend to be interested in leading. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have made it into the program that he was eventually accepted into.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve encountered that too with letters of recommendation. So I mentor teenage boys at church and they’ll ask me sometimes to fill out letters of recommendations. And there’s always a thing on there about leadership, like what leadership skills does this person display? And some of these boys, they’re smart, they’re bright, but they’re not really leaders and they’re not really interested in leadership. But I feel like I got to come up with something because if I don’t, it’s not going to look good for them.

Elias Aboujaoude: It’s not going to look good. It’s going to count against them. And it speaks to a bigger problem in academia and in college and university life. Less than one in 10 students now major with a degree in the humanities. We’re shutting down English and history departments left and right. And yet there’s this curious rise of the leadership major and the leadership minor and leadership studies everywhere you look. So it’s a curious development and feeds into this cultural obsession and academic obsession with leadership that I was talking about.

Brett McKay: I want to talk about these courses, but before we do, when you’ve looked at the leadership industrial complex as a whole, what do they mean by leadership exactly? Because leadership can mean lots of different things. There’s lots of different definitions. So how is it described in the leadership industrial complex culture?

Elias Aboujaoude: What goes along with this leadership industrial complex, of course, is intense marketing. And to understand what leadership means to these programs, it’s interesting to look at the messaging and the marketing. So you’ll find words, really buzzwords like transformative, catalyst, a change driver, unleasher. You’ll be empowering people across many verticals and across many tipping points. You’ll almost certainly disrupt.

If I had the nickel for every time I came across the word disrupt in my leadership research, I’d be a very rich man. So these buzzwords add up to the leadership industrial complex’s definition of what a leader means today. And through these courses and through this coaching and through all this “development”, they sell the message that all these qualities and traits are perfectly teachable.

Brett McKay: So I mean, what skills or traits do they purport to teach would-be leaders?

Elias Aboujaoude: I don’t have a problem really with purporting to teach a skill. Where it becomes very problematic for me as a psychiatrist is where they start pretending or communicating that they can teach things like EQ, emotional intelligence, or even charisma, qualities and traits that are linked to personality. And if we know anything as mental health providers, as psychiatrists, as psychologists, is the difficulty changing people’s personalities.

People’s personality tends to be stubborn, not super malleable. If you want to make long lasting personality changes, it’s a long-term commitment that involves potentially years of psychotherapy. It’s not the kind of thing that you can pick up over a bootcamp or a weekend workshop. And yet this is the message that a lot of these trainings are selling. And this is the really misleading, no pun intended, notion that accompanies so much of the leadership industry’s offerings.

Brett McKay: Okay. So leadership in the leadership industrial complex, a lot of buzzwords, you’re a change maker, catalyst, disruptor. So it’s kind of an amorphous thing. It can kind of mean whatever and because it can mean anything you want, like you can create your content that you’re teaching however you want. Let’s dig into the actual content, these courses. I thought this was really interesting. You talk about what colleges and other businesses are doing to make money on leadership courses. You mentioned, I think you said a $50 billion industry overall?

Elias Aboujaoude: Yeah, it’s a $50 billion industry. And it’s an industry that’s been fully embraced by our top business schools, entities and institutions that know a thing or two about making money. And this has helped really transform this leadership development field into a full blown industrial complex. And when you check out something like Harvard’s program for leadership development, for example, you’ll be surprised to see that there’s an 800 number available for applicants to call. There’s an entire program advising team that’s waiting to take your call. You’ll also be, you might be surprised to see that really there’s no formal educational requirements to join. There’s this amorphous sort of leadership potential.

That’s pretty much the only requirement. The program is advertised to people at whatever role or career stage. Again, not really just meant for senior executives or folks already in the C-suite, but marketed as something that’s much more open and accessible than that. So the acceptance rate into it seems much higher than the 4.5% or so that undergraduates applying for Harvard usually face. What’s unquestionably exclusive though about the program is the price tag, $52,000 for the basic four modules of blended teaching. But if you want a lifelong Harvard email address, and if you want alumni status, then you can get that for an additional module and an additional $27,000. So strategies that to me feel very sort of marketing and business oriented in a way that to me fits uncomfortably within the educational model.

Another example that I talk about in the book is Wharton. Wharton is the premier, the oldest business school in the country. And I was checking out a program they have, a nine month, mostly self-based or largely self-based program called Global C-suite. And I read about it and then I wanted to close the window. And I had this very interesting pop-up show up offering me $1000 off the $20,000 tuition if I hurry up and apply in the next nine days. Again, marketing gimmicks and marketing strategies that have no place in education as I see it, yet this is what so much of the leadership industry and the leadership educational opportunities, this is the direction they take.

Brett McKay: Okay. So for $60,000, I could become a Harvard alum. I could put that on my CV. Yeah, that’s crazy. And then it’s not just colleges that are doing this. There’s also many businesses that offer leadership development courses as well.

Elias Aboujaoude: Oh, absolutely. If Harvard and Wharton are offering these kinds of opportunities, then you can imagine the Wild West out there and programs with names like Leadership Express Series or a workshop for $18.99 that promises to teach you how to become a charismatic leader. I mean, any number of such offerings that I review in my book.

Brett McKay: What’s the content of these courses? Like what exactly, when you sit down to through these modules, what are you learning?

Elias Aboujaoude: Well, a lot of the content is not research-based, certainly. There’s very little by way of long-term research results in terms of success that these programs can point to. There’s also a ton of mnemonics that I came across as I was researching. And this heavy reliance on mnemonics suggests that leadership is easy, literally as easy as ABC. One popular mnemonic is the so-called three Rs, three Rs.

But depending on which program or which professor of leadership or which coach you consult, the three Rs stand for different things. It could be reflections, resiliency, and relationships, but it could also be respect, recognize, and reward, and so on and so forth. So all this suggests a very sort of unscientific, make-it-up-as-you-go process that unfortunately takes up a lot of these offerings.

Brett McKay: Is there any research that’s been done on these leadership development programs that they actually work, like that people who go through them come out as better leaders? And how would you even measure that if you did research on that?

Elias Aboujaoude: Well, it’s not easy to measure, which highlights the need for good quality, large-scale, long-term research. And when you look for good quality, large-scale, long-term research that has assessed their success, there’s very, very little indeed that you can point to.

Brett McKay: Okay. And that’s interesting ’cause businesses are probably paying for their employees to go to these things. They don’t even know if it works or not.

Elias Aboujaoude: Oh, to the tune of $50 billion.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And what’s interesting too, you talk about how this is also creeping into middle schools and in high schools. I mean, I grew up in the ’90s, late ’90s. I was in high school then. And I saw that stuff. I was involved in student council, and we did this leadership development stuff. And typically, what it was like the school district was paying some organization to do the teaching.

Elias Aboujaoude: Yes. The leadership bug has fully infected our high school and college systems. And this is manifested in the place that leadership now takes up in college applications, but also it’s manifested in how so many schools seem to be changing their mission statements to emphasize leadership. Everybody wants to teach the future leaders of America. Nobody seems interested in teaching and informing the educated citizenry of the country.

And the downside, of course, of all this is the inferiority complex that it gives those who are not interested in leading, those who have the self-awareness to acknowledge that, so they’re not interested in pursuing leadership, who don’t succeed at leading. But there are real psychological consequences to that and a real inferiority complex that doesn’t get talked about as we send the message that all can be leaders and as we ignore the reality that the world also needs followers. And mathematically speaking, not everyone can be a leader.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. So the idea that everyone can and should be a leader and that everyone can develop into a leader with the right training is everywhere these days. And I think the big thing we need to talk about, and you mentioned this before, is that the whole idea and what the leadership development industry relies on is the assumption that leadership can be taught. And there are certain skills that can be taught and people can improve on a little bit body language, getting a little bit better with public speaking, getting better at strategy, but you talk about, if you actually look at the scientific research that’s been done on leadership, it suggests that a lot of leadership ability just comes down to inborn temperament. So what does the research say there about leadership ability and temperament?

Elias Aboujaoude: Yeah. So I talked earlier about how there’s very little long-term, long-term high quality research in terms of the success of leadership training. But there’s quite a bit long-term, high-quality research when it comes to people’s personalities and how people’s personalities evolve over time. And what this long-term, high quality research tells us is that personality is pretty sticky. I’ll just quickly mention a couple of studies. One involving a cohort of Harvard graduates who are assessed at age 22 and again at age 67, and you can imagine all the ups and downs and all the upheaval that can happen in a person’s life over the course of four decades or so.

And yet when this cohort was reassessed, the fundamental traits and their personalities were essentially unchanged. The fingerprint, their personality fingerprint was essentially the same. Another study looked at an even younger cohort, students aged 6 to 12 and assessed them on 39 personality traits and re-interviewed them again 40 years down the road. And what the researchers found was their personalities were essentially largely stable. So this is what a high quality long-term research from mental health and from psychology teaches us, and yet when you look at a lot of leadership offerings, there is this idea that we can teach you EQ and we can do it pretty easily. Now, nobody would dispute the importance of EQ in how leaders emerge and how leaders succeed. Up to 90% of leaders success has been attributed to EQ when other skills and when IQ is otherwise the same.

So the importance of EQ is pretty fundamental and pretty established. But the notion that you can teach EQ and transform EQ is highly problematic because EQ is pretty tightly linked to personality. And what the studies I mentioned about personality show is that it’s largely fixed over time.

Brett McKay: Okay. So yeah, when we typically think of a leader, with this idea, he’s charismatic, they take risk, they’re bold, they know how to manage people, they’re detail-orienting, and that kind of lines up with those big five personality traits, conscientiousness, extraversion, low on neuroticism. And let’s say you’re a person, you’re like, Okay, I’m kind of neurotic, I’m not very conscientious. I’m not a big risk taker. Can a course, a weekend course actually move the needle on that? And the answer looks like it’s probably not.

Elias Aboujaoude: The answer is probably not, because personality, again, is largely fixed and when psychoanalysis try to affect meaningful long-term personality changes, it was a year’s long endeavor, not for the commitment phobic. So to the extent that EQ is linked to personality and we know it is, it is not something that you can easily impart or teach.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And this idea of can leadership be taught, this reminds me, this goes back, this is like a couple of thousand year-old question. Like Plato is asking the same question. He was asking that can virtue be taught?

Elias Aboujaoude: Very interesting. Yes.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And he actually tried to figure it out. He actually had this theory that, yes, virtue can be taught. Like if you teach people about the good and they know the good, they’ll start conforming themselves to the good, then they’ll be good leaders. That was the idea. And then he had the chance to test it out. He got to go to Syracuse and be a teacher to this king guy who was having lots of problems and he was teaching him philosophy and teaching him about the forms and everything. And it ended in complete disaster. The guy did not change at all. And Plato was like, Okay, maybe this idea that I had that if you teach these philosopher kings to be good leaders, it’ll… Teach them the forms, they’ll become good leaders. It’ll work, and he actually had to take a step back and say, all right, that’s actually not gonna work. We have to try something else.

Elias Aboujaoude: Well, this is a vignette that clearly belongs in the book, Brett. Thank you for sharing that. You know what the Greeks were also interested in is charisma. In fact, the word charisma comes from a Greek root, that means a freely given gift like something that God endows you with or the gods endow you with. And again, it’s interesting how many people to this day when they try to define charisma will resort to religious sort of metaphors and religious terms. And yet this hasn’t stopped us from pretending we can easily teach it in a way that makes us look like we’re playing God.

Brett McKay: Okay. So a lot of these leadership attributes that we think of when it comes to a good leader, charisma, high EQ, lot of it is based in personality and a lot of that you can’t change. If you do change it, it’s gonna take a long time to do and you’re probably not gonna change it too much.

Elias Aboujaoude: Yes, indeed.

Brett McKay: So when companies or organizations are thinking about leadership, should it be less about leadership development and you know, this idea that you can develop anyone and everyone into a leader and more about leadership finding? Like is it better to focus on filtering for and selecting good leaders? Should that be the strategy?

Elias Aboujaoude: The subtitle of my book is Why Psychology Personality and Character Make All the Difference. And I think one shift that needs to happen for the health of our leadership culture is for us to start paying more attention to these things and ease up on the development, ease up on the steps and hacks and tips that supposedly guarantee good leadership. Basically go back to the basics and put psychology front and center where it belongs in leadership culture. And remember that there’s only so much planning and prepping and strategizing that one can do. And some of the most meaningful and significant leaderships that the world has seen, leadership found the leader not the other way around. So there’s a humbling message in this for leadership culture and it should be humbling for the leadership industry as well.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think that’s a… Something that I’ve taken away as I’ve studied… I’ve read a lot of biographies of great leaders and one thing I have discovered is what made them great leaders is like, yeah, they rose up to the occasion, the leadership found them and they leaned into their unique personality. They weren’t trying to conform themselves to this ideal leader. That’s charismatic and bold and visionary. And even guys who weren’t that, like they were still good leaders. I mean, here’s an example. Patton and Eisenhower had kind of different personalities. Patton’s very bombastic, led from the front, was very flamboyant and that worked for him. He leaned into that. And Eisenhower was more of a like a people person. Like he did a lot of the, I’m gonna be in the background working on alliances. When you look at football coaches, I love watching how different football… American football coaches coach. You have some coaches who are very just high energy, just on the sidelines. Rah rah rah. And then you have those coaches who just arms folded, never say a word.

Elias Aboujaoude: Yes.

Brett McKay: And they’re winning football coaches.

Elias Aboujaoude: Yes, yes. I think you’re talking about people basically aligning with their psychology and leaning with their psychology and not pretending to be someone they’re not. Winston Churchill is another great example of a transformative, truly transformative and truly disruptive maybe figure who was found by leadership and rose to the occasion as opposed to self-consciously and deliberately in a step-by-step fashion strategized to reach the heights that he reached.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Another one, Abraham Lincoln. Like he was not your stereotypical leader. He had depression, he was severely depressed. He would just lay on the couch and read the book of Job and just be like, I’m the saddest guy in the whole world. But Lincoln was still one of the most eminent and effective leaders in history.

Elias Aboujaoude: Absolutely. Absolutely. So all this is to say that we lose by limiting the profile of who we support in rising to leadership positions the way we are doing right now.

Brett McKay: Well then, I wanna go back to this point you made that this everyone is a leader culture that we have can contribute to maybe burnout, depression, inferiority complex, amongst particularly young workers, young students. Flesh that out a bit more for them. How have you seen that manifest itself?

Elias Aboujaoude: When we live in a culture that only values leaders and when we are subjected to endless marketing that all that counts is leadership and that leadership is yours to have for just a little bit of training and little bit of development. Then those of us who don’t become leaders, either because they’re not interested or they’re not successful, can be left with an inferiority complex and be left thinking, well what is wrong with me when it should be so easy. Where did I go wrong? And that’s an unhealthy state psychologically speaking, and it’s totally unnecessary because the marketing itself that’s driving it and the leadership obsession that’s driving it are what’s faulty with society, not the individual who doesn’t become a leader or isn’t interested in pursuing leadership.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And it also sets people up if they do pursue leadership because they feel like they have to, to feel like, I actually hate this. I am not suited for this. I am miserable, but I gotta do this because I have to advance my career.

Elias Aboujaoude: Right. I got the position that supposedly is what matters in life, but I’m absolutely miserable leading.

Brett McKay: So I think the takeaways from what we’ve talked about are leadership development, probably not a thing. I mean there are certain skills you can develop a little, but as far as those ineffable qualities that we think of when it comes to leadership, that comes down to personality. And that’s either… It’s kind of either you’re born with it or you’re not. So maybe organizations of all kinds should focus more on leader finding, filtering and selecting instead of leader development. At the same time though, I think we can expand on our idea of what makes a good leader. It doesn’t have to be the stereotype. So maybe you don’t have those qualities of a stereotypical leader, but you can still be a good leader in your own way. But let’s say whether or not you do have potential for leadership, you’re just not interested in it. It’s not something you wanna do. What advice would you give someone who they’ve got the self-awareness to know that they’re not a good fit for leadership positions, but they still feel this pressure to get on that track to advance their career?

Elias Aboujaoude: Yeah. What I would tell them is to do what aligns with their psychology. Don’t tie your self-worth to leadership positions. It’s okay to be a leader, but it’s also okay not to be one. And certainly don’t look down on followers including yourself if you happen to be one.

Brett McKay: Okay. And that could be tough ’cause you’re just told from a young age, you gotta be a leader.

Elias Aboujaoude: It is tough and that’s why the change has to happen on many fronts. It has to happen at the level of parenting. It has to happen at the level of schools and universities and it has to happen at the corporate level. I mean, this is not an easy change to make, but it’s a necessary change to make to the extent that we need good leaders. And our approach to leadership today is almost guaranteed to leave us with unimpressive leaders.

Brett McKay: Yeah. But I feel like it just comes down to being okay with being a follower and that maybe will require reframing what it means to be a follower some, right? ‘Cause it has… The word has a lot of negative connotations and baggage. Being a follower doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you or you’re deficient. You just have a different disposition or maybe you just different kinds of work. And actually this reminds me something we talked about on the site, this goes back to Patton and Eisenhower, is that some people are strategists and some people are operators, right? So like some people like to be the manager where they’re setting the agenda and other people they just like to be on the ground, in the field, doing the work. It’s like some people like to plan the action and some people just want to take the action. So it’s okay not to want to be a leader and just want to be an operator. That’s okay. Maybe you won’t get as much clout and money, but you’ll be happier.

Elias Aboujaoude: Absolutely. Leadership is not the only path to happiness and self-worth.

Brett McKay: I love it. Well, Elias, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Elias Aboujaoude: Thank you very much. They can go to my personal website, eliasaboujaoude.com or find the book on Amazon or any of their favorite venues.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Elias Aboujaoude, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Elias Aboujaoude: Thank you very much.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Dr. Elias Aboujaoude. He’s the author of the book, A Leaders Destiny. It’s available on amazon.com. You learn more information about his work at his website, eliasaboujaoude.com. Also, check out our show notes at AOM.is/leadership where you find links to resources we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

Help support independent publishing. Make a donation to The Art of Manliness! Thanks for the support!

  continue reading

12 פרקים

Artwork
iconשתפו
 
Manage episode 445213545 series 2519111
תוכן מסופק על ידי The Art of Manliness. כל תוכן הפודקאסטים כולל פרקים, גרפיקה ותיאורי פודקאסטים מועלים ומסופקים ישירות על ידי The Art of Manliness או שותף פלטפורמת הפודקאסט שלהם. אם אתה מאמין שמישהו משתמש ביצירה שלך המוגנת בזכויות יוצרים ללא רשותך, אתה יכול לעקוב אחר התהליך המתואר כאן https://he.player.fm/legal.

Are leaders born or made? Judging by the 50 billion dollar leadership development industry, the answer is definitely the latter. From schools to workplaces, everyone is seen as a potential leader and expected to become one by undergoing leadership training.

My guest questions the assumptions underlying this phenomenon, which he calls “the leadership industrial complex,” and says that the cult of leadership, and its idea that everyone can and should become a leader, can create burnout and unhappiness.

Elias Aboujaoude is a Stanford professor of psychiatry and the author of A Leader’s Destiny: Why Psychology, Personality, and Character Make All the Difference. Today on the show, Elias describes the state of the leadership industrial complex, the mathematical impossibility it forwards that everyone can be a leader and no one is a follower, and the primary presumption it makes that leadership can be taught. Elias argues that, in fact, a lot of what makes for good leadership is innate and potentially unchangeable. We discuss the implications of this fact, and why it’s actually okay not to want to be a leader.

Resources Related to the Podcast

Connect With Elias Aboujaoude

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Apple Podcast.

Overcast.

Spotify.

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Are leaders born or made? Judging by the $50 billion leadership development industry, the answer is definitely the latter. From schools to workplaces, everyone is seen as a potential leader and expected to become one by undergoing leadership training. My guest questions the assumptions underlying this phenomenon, which he calls the leadership industrial complex, and says that the cult of leadership and its idea that everyone can and should become a leader can create burnout and unhappiness. Elias Aboujaoude is a Stanford professor of psychiatry and the author of A Leader’s Destiny: Why Psychology, Personality, and Character Make All the Difference. Today on the show, Elias describes the state of the leadership industrial complex, mathematical impossibility [0:00:50.9] ____ that everyone can be a leader and known as a follower, and the primary presumption it makes that leadership can be taught.

Elias argues that, in fact, a lot of what makes for good leadership is innate and potentially unchangeable. We discuss the implications of this fact and why it’s actually okay not to want to be a leader. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/leadership. All right, Elias Aboujaoude, welcome to the show.

Elias Aboujaoude: Thank you very much.

Brett McKay: So you are a psychiatrist, and you’ve taken a deep dive into what could be called the cult of leadership in America. And what kickstarted this exploration of leadership development in the United States is you got a request to write a letter of recommendation for a medical student. So how did that request for a letter of recommendation lead you to exploring our country’s obsession with leadership and developing leaders?

Elias Aboujaoude: Indeed. So one of the best medical students I ever supervised, I’ll call him Tim, approached me for a letter of recommendation in support for his application to get into a skin cancer program. Tim had really shown exemplary performance on the wards where I supervised him.

So I wrote the most, probably the strongest letter of recommendation I had ever written. And in it, I praised his bedside manner, his clinical productivity, his conscientiousness, his research contributions, really the kinds of things that every program wants to see in an application and in a prospective applicant. To sort of make him feel better and hopefully less stressed out about this process, I shared the letter with him and I watched as he read it in my office. And I was surprised to see his facial expression sink into a deep depression and deep sadness. So for a second, I thought I had mistakenly given Tim another student’s evaluation, the evaluation of a student who had been failing the rotation, but it turned out I hadn’t. What was missing apparently from my letter is any mention of leadership qualities and leadership potential. And Tim was convinced that as strong and outstanding as the letter was, he wouldn’t get into any competitive program without a supervisor predicting a brilliant future for him as a leader.

So that got me thinking about how we’ve come to really prioritize leadership over any other quality in our medical field. But also as I started looking and exploring way beyond medicine, I started paying attention, for example, and noticing daycare centers with names like Future Leaders of America or Leadership Academy, the kinds of things that suggest that we’re planting this leadership seed and inculcating people into this cult of leadership, leadership literally with breast milk. And I started noticing also that college applicants now have an entire section where high school students are expected to talk about their leadership experience. Who wants a shy violinist or an introvert when you can get the president of five clubs kind of thing. So all this speaks to a real leadership obsession in our society, and it speaks to very high demand for all things leadership. Now, this demand is being met, met and then some, by what I’m calling in my book, a leadership industrial complex. There’s a $50 billion leadership industry that’s now available to really convince us that leadership is something that’s within reach for practically anyone.

All you have to do is take the right course or sign on the right executive coach. So it’s a very sort of unhealthy combination between this kind of demand and this kind of supply. And as I see it, it may explain the failures of leadership that we see every direction we look and on every front, whether political, corporate, academic, really everywhere and anywhere. We’ve created a system where we have so much product out there that the only way for leaders to stand out and actually make it to leadership positions is to be unscrupulous, to have traits that are closer to sort of the narcissistic or even the antisocial end of the spectrum. And we don’t want that in our leaders, but this is the system that we have created. And this is what this unhealthy balance between exuberant demand and exuberant supply has created.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s one of the big points you make in the book is there’s this paradox that we’re seeing in the past, maybe 50, 60 years, this emphasis on developing leaders. We’re going to develop leaders and very be systematic about it, take courses, but it seems like there’s a dearth of leadership despite all the leadership development we’re doing.

Elias Aboujaoude: Absolutely. This is the biggest, one of the biggest paradoxes of the leadership industry that there has never been more opportunities to develop and train leaders. And yet leaders have never performed worse than they are today. So, one way to look at this is to think, well, we need more training. We need the industry to be even bigger, but another way to look at it and the position that I take in my book is that the leadership industry and this approach to leadership is actually contributing to leadership failure.

Brett McKay: And another point you make too, is that this emphasis, overemphasis on leadership in college students, in your career, it could be leading to burnout and just feeling inadequate. Tim, he was disappointed that you didn’t talk about his leadership skills, but did Tim want to be a leader like personally?

Elias Aboujaoude: That’s the thing. Tim had no interest in being a leader. All he wanted to be is the best skin cancer doctor he could become. And that’s what he eventually became. But Tim was also convinced that without coming across as having leadership qualities, he had no chance of actually making it. When I touched base subsequently with Tim, a few years down the road, I found out that some leadership opportunities had actually come his way, but he was all too happy to ignore them and turn them down.

And yet in his application process, he felt forced to, if you will, pretend to be interested in leading. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have made it into the program that he was eventually accepted into.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve encountered that too with letters of recommendation. So I mentor teenage boys at church and they’ll ask me sometimes to fill out letters of recommendations. And there’s always a thing on there about leadership, like what leadership skills does this person display? And some of these boys, they’re smart, they’re bright, but they’re not really leaders and they’re not really interested in leadership. But I feel like I got to come up with something because if I don’t, it’s not going to look good for them.

Elias Aboujaoude: It’s not going to look good. It’s going to count against them. And it speaks to a bigger problem in academia and in college and university life. Less than one in 10 students now major with a degree in the humanities. We’re shutting down English and history departments left and right. And yet there’s this curious rise of the leadership major and the leadership minor and leadership studies everywhere you look. So it’s a curious development and feeds into this cultural obsession and academic obsession with leadership that I was talking about.

Brett McKay: I want to talk about these courses, but before we do, when you’ve looked at the leadership industrial complex as a whole, what do they mean by leadership exactly? Because leadership can mean lots of different things. There’s lots of different definitions. So how is it described in the leadership industrial complex culture?

Elias Aboujaoude: What goes along with this leadership industrial complex, of course, is intense marketing. And to understand what leadership means to these programs, it’s interesting to look at the messaging and the marketing. So you’ll find words, really buzzwords like transformative, catalyst, a change driver, unleasher. You’ll be empowering people across many verticals and across many tipping points. You’ll almost certainly disrupt.

If I had the nickel for every time I came across the word disrupt in my leadership research, I’d be a very rich man. So these buzzwords add up to the leadership industrial complex’s definition of what a leader means today. And through these courses and through this coaching and through all this “development”, they sell the message that all these qualities and traits are perfectly teachable.

Brett McKay: So I mean, what skills or traits do they purport to teach would-be leaders?

Elias Aboujaoude: I don’t have a problem really with purporting to teach a skill. Where it becomes very problematic for me as a psychiatrist is where they start pretending or communicating that they can teach things like EQ, emotional intelligence, or even charisma, qualities and traits that are linked to personality. And if we know anything as mental health providers, as psychiatrists, as psychologists, is the difficulty changing people’s personalities.

People’s personality tends to be stubborn, not super malleable. If you want to make long lasting personality changes, it’s a long-term commitment that involves potentially years of psychotherapy. It’s not the kind of thing that you can pick up over a bootcamp or a weekend workshop. And yet this is the message that a lot of these trainings are selling. And this is the really misleading, no pun intended, notion that accompanies so much of the leadership industry’s offerings.

Brett McKay: Okay. So leadership in the leadership industrial complex, a lot of buzzwords, you’re a change maker, catalyst, disruptor. So it’s kind of an amorphous thing. It can kind of mean whatever and because it can mean anything you want, like you can create your content that you’re teaching however you want. Let’s dig into the actual content, these courses. I thought this was really interesting. You talk about what colleges and other businesses are doing to make money on leadership courses. You mentioned, I think you said a $50 billion industry overall?

Elias Aboujaoude: Yeah, it’s a $50 billion industry. And it’s an industry that’s been fully embraced by our top business schools, entities and institutions that know a thing or two about making money. And this has helped really transform this leadership development field into a full blown industrial complex. And when you check out something like Harvard’s program for leadership development, for example, you’ll be surprised to see that there’s an 800 number available for applicants to call. There’s an entire program advising team that’s waiting to take your call. You’ll also be, you might be surprised to see that really there’s no formal educational requirements to join. There’s this amorphous sort of leadership potential.

That’s pretty much the only requirement. The program is advertised to people at whatever role or career stage. Again, not really just meant for senior executives or folks already in the C-suite, but marketed as something that’s much more open and accessible than that. So the acceptance rate into it seems much higher than the 4.5% or so that undergraduates applying for Harvard usually face. What’s unquestionably exclusive though about the program is the price tag, $52,000 for the basic four modules of blended teaching. But if you want a lifelong Harvard email address, and if you want alumni status, then you can get that for an additional module and an additional $27,000. So strategies that to me feel very sort of marketing and business oriented in a way that to me fits uncomfortably within the educational model.

Another example that I talk about in the book is Wharton. Wharton is the premier, the oldest business school in the country. And I was checking out a program they have, a nine month, mostly self-based or largely self-based program called Global C-suite. And I read about it and then I wanted to close the window. And I had this very interesting pop-up show up offering me $1000 off the $20,000 tuition if I hurry up and apply in the next nine days. Again, marketing gimmicks and marketing strategies that have no place in education as I see it, yet this is what so much of the leadership industry and the leadership educational opportunities, this is the direction they take.

Brett McKay: Okay. So for $60,000, I could become a Harvard alum. I could put that on my CV. Yeah, that’s crazy. And then it’s not just colleges that are doing this. There’s also many businesses that offer leadership development courses as well.

Elias Aboujaoude: Oh, absolutely. If Harvard and Wharton are offering these kinds of opportunities, then you can imagine the Wild West out there and programs with names like Leadership Express Series or a workshop for $18.99 that promises to teach you how to become a charismatic leader. I mean, any number of such offerings that I review in my book.

Brett McKay: What’s the content of these courses? Like what exactly, when you sit down to through these modules, what are you learning?

Elias Aboujaoude: Well, a lot of the content is not research-based, certainly. There’s very little by way of long-term research results in terms of success that these programs can point to. There’s also a ton of mnemonics that I came across as I was researching. And this heavy reliance on mnemonics suggests that leadership is easy, literally as easy as ABC. One popular mnemonic is the so-called three Rs, three Rs.

But depending on which program or which professor of leadership or which coach you consult, the three Rs stand for different things. It could be reflections, resiliency, and relationships, but it could also be respect, recognize, and reward, and so on and so forth. So all this suggests a very sort of unscientific, make-it-up-as-you-go process that unfortunately takes up a lot of these offerings.

Brett McKay: Is there any research that’s been done on these leadership development programs that they actually work, like that people who go through them come out as better leaders? And how would you even measure that if you did research on that?

Elias Aboujaoude: Well, it’s not easy to measure, which highlights the need for good quality, large-scale, long-term research. And when you look for good quality, large-scale, long-term research that has assessed their success, there’s very, very little indeed that you can point to.

Brett McKay: Okay. And that’s interesting ’cause businesses are probably paying for their employees to go to these things. They don’t even know if it works or not.

Elias Aboujaoude: Oh, to the tune of $50 billion.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And what’s interesting too, you talk about how this is also creeping into middle schools and in high schools. I mean, I grew up in the ’90s, late ’90s. I was in high school then. And I saw that stuff. I was involved in student council, and we did this leadership development stuff. And typically, what it was like the school district was paying some organization to do the teaching.

Elias Aboujaoude: Yes. The leadership bug has fully infected our high school and college systems. And this is manifested in the place that leadership now takes up in college applications, but also it’s manifested in how so many schools seem to be changing their mission statements to emphasize leadership. Everybody wants to teach the future leaders of America. Nobody seems interested in teaching and informing the educated citizenry of the country.

And the downside, of course, of all this is the inferiority complex that it gives those who are not interested in leading, those who have the self-awareness to acknowledge that, so they’re not interested in pursuing leadership, who don’t succeed at leading. But there are real psychological consequences to that and a real inferiority complex that doesn’t get talked about as we send the message that all can be leaders and as we ignore the reality that the world also needs followers. And mathematically speaking, not everyone can be a leader.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. So the idea that everyone can and should be a leader and that everyone can develop into a leader with the right training is everywhere these days. And I think the big thing we need to talk about, and you mentioned this before, is that the whole idea and what the leadership development industry relies on is the assumption that leadership can be taught. And there are certain skills that can be taught and people can improve on a little bit body language, getting a little bit better with public speaking, getting better at strategy, but you talk about, if you actually look at the scientific research that’s been done on leadership, it suggests that a lot of leadership ability just comes down to inborn temperament. So what does the research say there about leadership ability and temperament?

Elias Aboujaoude: Yeah. So I talked earlier about how there’s very little long-term, long-term high quality research in terms of the success of leadership training. But there’s quite a bit long-term, high-quality research when it comes to people’s personalities and how people’s personalities evolve over time. And what this long-term, high quality research tells us is that personality is pretty sticky. I’ll just quickly mention a couple of studies. One involving a cohort of Harvard graduates who are assessed at age 22 and again at age 67, and you can imagine all the ups and downs and all the upheaval that can happen in a person’s life over the course of four decades or so.

And yet when this cohort was reassessed, the fundamental traits and their personalities were essentially unchanged. The fingerprint, their personality fingerprint was essentially the same. Another study looked at an even younger cohort, students aged 6 to 12 and assessed them on 39 personality traits and re-interviewed them again 40 years down the road. And what the researchers found was their personalities were essentially largely stable. So this is what a high quality long-term research from mental health and from psychology teaches us, and yet when you look at a lot of leadership offerings, there is this idea that we can teach you EQ and we can do it pretty easily. Now, nobody would dispute the importance of EQ in how leaders emerge and how leaders succeed. Up to 90% of leaders success has been attributed to EQ when other skills and when IQ is otherwise the same.

So the importance of EQ is pretty fundamental and pretty established. But the notion that you can teach EQ and transform EQ is highly problematic because EQ is pretty tightly linked to personality. And what the studies I mentioned about personality show is that it’s largely fixed over time.

Brett McKay: Okay. So yeah, when we typically think of a leader, with this idea, he’s charismatic, they take risk, they’re bold, they know how to manage people, they’re detail-orienting, and that kind of lines up with those big five personality traits, conscientiousness, extraversion, low on neuroticism. And let’s say you’re a person, you’re like, Okay, I’m kind of neurotic, I’m not very conscientious. I’m not a big risk taker. Can a course, a weekend course actually move the needle on that? And the answer looks like it’s probably not.

Elias Aboujaoude: The answer is probably not, because personality, again, is largely fixed and when psychoanalysis try to affect meaningful long-term personality changes, it was a year’s long endeavor, not for the commitment phobic. So to the extent that EQ is linked to personality and we know it is, it is not something that you can easily impart or teach.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And this idea of can leadership be taught, this reminds me, this goes back, this is like a couple of thousand year-old question. Like Plato is asking the same question. He was asking that can virtue be taught?

Elias Aboujaoude: Very interesting. Yes.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And he actually tried to figure it out. He actually had this theory that, yes, virtue can be taught. Like if you teach people about the good and they know the good, they’ll start conforming themselves to the good, then they’ll be good leaders. That was the idea. And then he had the chance to test it out. He got to go to Syracuse and be a teacher to this king guy who was having lots of problems and he was teaching him philosophy and teaching him about the forms and everything. And it ended in complete disaster. The guy did not change at all. And Plato was like, Okay, maybe this idea that I had that if you teach these philosopher kings to be good leaders, it’ll… Teach them the forms, they’ll become good leaders. It’ll work, and he actually had to take a step back and say, all right, that’s actually not gonna work. We have to try something else.

Elias Aboujaoude: Well, this is a vignette that clearly belongs in the book, Brett. Thank you for sharing that. You know what the Greeks were also interested in is charisma. In fact, the word charisma comes from a Greek root, that means a freely given gift like something that God endows you with or the gods endow you with. And again, it’s interesting how many people to this day when they try to define charisma will resort to religious sort of metaphors and religious terms. And yet this hasn’t stopped us from pretending we can easily teach it in a way that makes us look like we’re playing God.

Brett McKay: Okay. So a lot of these leadership attributes that we think of when it comes to a good leader, charisma, high EQ, lot of it is based in personality and a lot of that you can’t change. If you do change it, it’s gonna take a long time to do and you’re probably not gonna change it too much.

Elias Aboujaoude: Yes, indeed.

Brett McKay: So when companies or organizations are thinking about leadership, should it be less about leadership development and you know, this idea that you can develop anyone and everyone into a leader and more about leadership finding? Like is it better to focus on filtering for and selecting good leaders? Should that be the strategy?

Elias Aboujaoude: The subtitle of my book is Why Psychology Personality and Character Make All the Difference. And I think one shift that needs to happen for the health of our leadership culture is for us to start paying more attention to these things and ease up on the development, ease up on the steps and hacks and tips that supposedly guarantee good leadership. Basically go back to the basics and put psychology front and center where it belongs in leadership culture. And remember that there’s only so much planning and prepping and strategizing that one can do. And some of the most meaningful and significant leaderships that the world has seen, leadership found the leader not the other way around. So there’s a humbling message in this for leadership culture and it should be humbling for the leadership industry as well.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think that’s a… Something that I’ve taken away as I’ve studied… I’ve read a lot of biographies of great leaders and one thing I have discovered is what made them great leaders is like, yeah, they rose up to the occasion, the leadership found them and they leaned into their unique personality. They weren’t trying to conform themselves to this ideal leader. That’s charismatic and bold and visionary. And even guys who weren’t that, like they were still good leaders. I mean, here’s an example. Patton and Eisenhower had kind of different personalities. Patton’s very bombastic, led from the front, was very flamboyant and that worked for him. He leaned into that. And Eisenhower was more of a like a people person. Like he did a lot of the, I’m gonna be in the background working on alliances. When you look at football coaches, I love watching how different football… American football coaches coach. You have some coaches who are very just high energy, just on the sidelines. Rah rah rah. And then you have those coaches who just arms folded, never say a word.

Elias Aboujaoude: Yes.

Brett McKay: And they’re winning football coaches.

Elias Aboujaoude: Yes, yes. I think you’re talking about people basically aligning with their psychology and leaning with their psychology and not pretending to be someone they’re not. Winston Churchill is another great example of a transformative, truly transformative and truly disruptive maybe figure who was found by leadership and rose to the occasion as opposed to self-consciously and deliberately in a step-by-step fashion strategized to reach the heights that he reached.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Another one, Abraham Lincoln. Like he was not your stereotypical leader. He had depression, he was severely depressed. He would just lay on the couch and read the book of Job and just be like, I’m the saddest guy in the whole world. But Lincoln was still one of the most eminent and effective leaders in history.

Elias Aboujaoude: Absolutely. Absolutely. So all this is to say that we lose by limiting the profile of who we support in rising to leadership positions the way we are doing right now.

Brett McKay: Well then, I wanna go back to this point you made that this everyone is a leader culture that we have can contribute to maybe burnout, depression, inferiority complex, amongst particularly young workers, young students. Flesh that out a bit more for them. How have you seen that manifest itself?

Elias Aboujaoude: When we live in a culture that only values leaders and when we are subjected to endless marketing that all that counts is leadership and that leadership is yours to have for just a little bit of training and little bit of development. Then those of us who don’t become leaders, either because they’re not interested or they’re not successful, can be left with an inferiority complex and be left thinking, well what is wrong with me when it should be so easy. Where did I go wrong? And that’s an unhealthy state psychologically speaking, and it’s totally unnecessary because the marketing itself that’s driving it and the leadership obsession that’s driving it are what’s faulty with society, not the individual who doesn’t become a leader or isn’t interested in pursuing leadership.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And it also sets people up if they do pursue leadership because they feel like they have to, to feel like, I actually hate this. I am not suited for this. I am miserable, but I gotta do this because I have to advance my career.

Elias Aboujaoude: Right. I got the position that supposedly is what matters in life, but I’m absolutely miserable leading.

Brett McKay: So I think the takeaways from what we’ve talked about are leadership development, probably not a thing. I mean there are certain skills you can develop a little, but as far as those ineffable qualities that we think of when it comes to leadership, that comes down to personality. And that’s either… It’s kind of either you’re born with it or you’re not. So maybe organizations of all kinds should focus more on leader finding, filtering and selecting instead of leader development. At the same time though, I think we can expand on our idea of what makes a good leader. It doesn’t have to be the stereotype. So maybe you don’t have those qualities of a stereotypical leader, but you can still be a good leader in your own way. But let’s say whether or not you do have potential for leadership, you’re just not interested in it. It’s not something you wanna do. What advice would you give someone who they’ve got the self-awareness to know that they’re not a good fit for leadership positions, but they still feel this pressure to get on that track to advance their career?

Elias Aboujaoude: Yeah. What I would tell them is to do what aligns with their psychology. Don’t tie your self-worth to leadership positions. It’s okay to be a leader, but it’s also okay not to be one. And certainly don’t look down on followers including yourself if you happen to be one.

Brett McKay: Okay. And that could be tough ’cause you’re just told from a young age, you gotta be a leader.

Elias Aboujaoude: It is tough and that’s why the change has to happen on many fronts. It has to happen at the level of parenting. It has to happen at the level of schools and universities and it has to happen at the corporate level. I mean, this is not an easy change to make, but it’s a necessary change to make to the extent that we need good leaders. And our approach to leadership today is almost guaranteed to leave us with unimpressive leaders.

Brett McKay: Yeah. But I feel like it just comes down to being okay with being a follower and that maybe will require reframing what it means to be a follower some, right? ‘Cause it has… The word has a lot of negative connotations and baggage. Being a follower doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you or you’re deficient. You just have a different disposition or maybe you just different kinds of work. And actually this reminds me something we talked about on the site, this goes back to Patton and Eisenhower, is that some people are strategists and some people are operators, right? So like some people like to be the manager where they’re setting the agenda and other people they just like to be on the ground, in the field, doing the work. It’s like some people like to plan the action and some people just want to take the action. So it’s okay not to want to be a leader and just want to be an operator. That’s okay. Maybe you won’t get as much clout and money, but you’ll be happier.

Elias Aboujaoude: Absolutely. Leadership is not the only path to happiness and self-worth.

Brett McKay: I love it. Well, Elias, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Elias Aboujaoude: Thank you very much. They can go to my personal website, eliasaboujaoude.com or find the book on Amazon or any of their favorite venues.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Elias Aboujaoude, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Elias Aboujaoude: Thank you very much.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Dr. Elias Aboujaoude. He’s the author of the book, A Leaders Destiny. It’s available on amazon.com. You learn more information about his work at his website, eliasaboujaoude.com. Also, check out our show notes at AOM.is/leadership where you find links to resources we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

Help support independent publishing. Make a donation to The Art of Manliness! Thanks for the support!

  continue reading

12 פרקים

כל הפרקים

×
 
Loading …

ברוכים הבאים אל Player FM!

Player FM סורק את האינטרנט עבור פודקאסטים באיכות גבוהה בשבילכם כדי שתהנו מהם כרגע. זה יישום הפודקאסט הטוב ביותר והוא עובד על אנדרואיד, iPhone ואינטרנט. הירשמו לסנכרון מנויים במכשירים שונים.

 

מדריך עזר מהיר