Zombie Leadership

Introduction to Zombie Leadership

0:00There's a lot of people who, you know, talk about the dark machinery of the leadership industrial complex, and the ways in which it rewards egotism and narcissism and self-aggrandizement, and, and, and, and, and that there's something sort of deeply problematic and toxic at the heart of that. And what is it? It's zombie leadership. People are the most consequential and dangerous forces on earth. Personality psychology is about the nature of human nature. It's about people. And wouldn't that be useful to know?

Welcoming the Co-Host

0:37Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Science of Personality podcast. You might notice something a little different. First, you're hearing and seeing. That's not your eyes playing tricks on you. The Science of Personality podcast is now on video. You can access this episode and all episodes moving forward on the Hogan Assessments YouTube channel. Also, today, I'm joined by a special co-host, Hogan's VP of Integrated Solutions, Jackie Somm, who many of you know from several previous episodes of the show. So, Jackie, say hello to our audience.

1:09Hi, everyone. It's so good to see you all. Good to see you, Blake. As you know, Blake, I'm a longtime fan and listener of the podcast. I've had a chance to sit as a guest a few times, but this is my first time. I'm honored to be on the side of the mic, so glad to be here. And I couldn't be more excited to talk about this topic and to talk with Dr. Haslam. Well, Jackie, it's great to have you. And now I'm actually excited to introduce our guest for this episode, who came highly recommended by Jackie herself.

Introducing Dr. Alexander Haslam

1:36So, today we are joined by Dr. Alexander Haslam, professor of psychology at the University of Queensland, to discuss the equally fascinating and destructive topic of zombie leadership, which is a term coined by Alex and his co-authors, Matt Alderson and Stephen Reicher, which is an epidemic that is plaguing organizations across the globe, whether they know it or not. So, that begs the question, what is zombie leadership? What are these undead ideas that continue to walk among us, refusing to die?

2:11Stay tuned for our conversation with Alex and find out. But, before we get to our conversation with Alex, if you wish to give us any ideas for upcoming episodes, or you want to ask us a question, shoot us an email at hello at thescienceofpersonality.com or drop a comment on this YouTube video or follow the Science of Personality on LinkedIn. Now, let's get to it. Alex, welcome to the podcast. Is there anything you'd like to share with our audience before we get started? No, it's just great to be here and thanks for the invitation.

2:42Jackie and I have been talking around these issues for well over, I think, two years now. And so, this is the first time we've actually had the chance to sort of make contact in this way. We've had a few failed attempts, but actually we're here in person, as it were, now. And that's great. So, yeah, I'm really looking forward to a conversation. And, you know, and I think this is fun and exciting and relevant stuff. So, I hope everybody else is too.

The Backstory of the Paper

3:08Well, Jackie, you have a funny story about how you and Alex got introduced. You want to tell our audience a little bit about that or am I putting you on the spot? It's a mildly embarrassing story. But I'm glad to tell it. So, the way I was introduced to Alex and his colleagues and their work was, I was actually forwarded the paper, Zombie Leadership, by none other than Dr. Hogan himself. And I read it and it was one of those, you know, Dr. Hogan sends papers around to, you know, people internally at Hogan on a fairly regular basis.

3:39But this one just kind of grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me a little bit. And I had a very visceral reaction to reading it. It kind of activated some things for me. And frankly, over time, although I don't know if I could have put my finger on it right away, why it was so gripping, over time, it's really reframed some of my thinking in a pretty fundamental way about leadership. So, I responded with this pretty effusive reaction saying, this might be the best paper I've ever read. And, you know, I want to read it over and over again.

4:13And yet, it's almost like I know it by heart. So, a very genuine effusive reaction, which Dr. Hogan proceeded to forward directly to Dr. Haslam here. So, I sort of sheepishly said, oh, hello, I'm your, apparently your biggest fan. But we, that got us off to a kind of a fun friendship. And we've been talking since and worked on a collaboration to try to get a panel into the PSYOP conference, which we did. But unfortunately, Alex wasn't able to travel to the US and PSYOP is not the best about allowing

4:45for virtual guests. So, what I feel like today is, is our chance to have that conversation we didn't actually get to have at PSYOP. So, I've been looking forward to this for a long time. You know, we've been having a sort of on-off email sort of exchange for really time. And every so often, it's kind of triggered by some sort of event. But yeah, it was interesting because there was a bit of a backstory there too, because, you know, we had, I'd had interaction with, with your boss several times previously around other papers. So, we're kind of familiar with each other's work.

5:15And I guess what's interesting is we come from quite different perspectives. We have very different kind of views of the world. And I think what's odd about this topic is that it unites people who come at leadership from, with different agendas, with different backgrounds, you know, different methods and so on. And I think it really resonated more than probably any other paper that I've written, but it was a very different type of paper to write. And it, and it, when it came from, in some ways, quite a different place, and I guess we'll get onto that too. So, what's fascinating about it as a, as a piece of work is that it has stimulated all

5:49these quite unique interactions of which this is one. And I, and I, I guess we often in science or in research, we kind of imagine that we're going to have these exciting, creative, different conversations, but actually the reality is most of the time we're just going round and round the, the, you know, the, the, the track and just putting in another lap. And I guess the, the, the interesting dynamic around this paper is that it, it got us out of that, you know, and, and, and, and so that in itself, I think is, is, is kind of

6:19remarkable and I guess that's one of the things that you want to do in science is you want to have interesting conversations with different people from time to time. And, and, and unfortunately we don't do it enough. So again, I'm sort of grateful for the paper for doing that really just that it's allowed, allowed a kind of discourse to open up in, in, with unlikely people in unlikely places doing unlikely things, which is, I'd say a lot of fun really. Well, Alex, I, I have to say, I'm really excited about having you on. Uh, I mean, Jackie did, you did bring this up to me about a year ago because I think,

6:52no, actually it was maybe a little less than a year ago, but as it was, as you all were prepping or had already submitted the PSYOP submission. And then I was thinking, Oh, I, I, it's an interesting topic. I mean, anything zombie related. I mean, for anybody who's listened, they, they know I'm into spooky season, but this isn't a spooky season episode, people. So I'm really excited that, uh, you're here to join us, but you know, let's, let's dive into this conversation on the topic of zombie leadership, because, you know, as the godfather of that term, Alex, how would you define it?

Defining Zombie Leadership

7:25Okay.

Defining Zombie Leadership

7:26So, so the, a bit of background is I, at the university of Queensland, I, I have a very close colleague and friend, uh, John Quiggin, and he's an economist. Um, and, and he wrote a book, uh, about five or 10 years ago now called zombie economics. And basically the idea of that book was just, there's a whole lot of ideas in the field of economics that have been thoroughly refuted. They've been shown to be false. They've been tried out. They never work, but that they just recycled again and again by policymakers, by politicians,

8:02by leaders of various forms. Um, and they just seem impossible to kill. And, and, and so he wrote that book, zombie economics from a place of frustration with the fact that, you know, he's a little bit like me, he's getting on a bit and he'd spent his whole career, uh, debunking these various ideas and economics, um, to no effect. And, um, in my conversations with him, I said, well, you know, actually I think that's true in a lot of fields, to be honest, but in our own work in the field of leadership, it's really

8:36true. And, and again, the three of us who wrote the paper, the Steve, Matt's and myself, we're all kind of old white, you know, dudes who've been around a long time and have written between us hundreds of scientific papers on the various things that are in this, that we allude to in, in, in this paper. And, you know, those, I think those papers are pretty good, you know, and they make a range of interesting points about leadership and critically, they, they point to serious

9:08limitations in, in, in the way that we often approach leadership. And in some cases, very serious limitations. Um, but as much as they might have been published in, you know, good journals and they might have been cited a few times or whatever, they'd had absolutely no impact. So far as I could tell, or we could tell on sort of mainstream thinking and practice, which just blundered on, carried on regardless. So, and, and when you really stand back then and look at the field of leadership, leadership

9:39research, leadership development, what you see is that, is that the academic scientific kind of research around leadership exists, if you like, behind a kind of blood brain barrier or behind a whopping great big firewall that nobody can access. And nobody's paying much attention to it. And then there's a whole world of stuff out there, you know, I mean, leadership development globally is an $80 billion industry. So this is a lot of stuff out there, which is pretty much untouched by what is going on in, in kind of academia and what I've been spending my life doing.

10:12Um, and that is, I mean, that's just factually the case. I mean, it's really interesting to reflect on why that might be the case and how it could have evolved that way. Cause that's not true in lots of other fields. It's not true in, you know, molecular biology or analytic chemistry or something like that. Okay. Or, you know, quantum physics. Okay. But it, but it is true in the field of leadership. And then once you've come to that recognition that what you're doing, what you said is not having an impact, you think, okay, so what are we, what are we going to do about that?

10:45Or are we going to do anything? And of course, most of the time we don't do anything. You just carry on doing what you're doing and imagine it's going to make some sort of difference, which of course, that's Einstein would suggest that's a, that's a, that's a very foolish thing to do, but it's kind of what we do. So, but again, partly because we're all, as I say, a little bit older, I mean, getting close to retirement now, we just thought, okay, that's damn it. Let's just write something different. Let's just tell it like it is and just come out and really put our, put our minds to calling this thing out, but also let's try to write it in a way that is not dull and tedious and

11:21boring and, and jargon laden and, and accessible, you know, and let's have a bit of fun while we're doing it as well. I mean, I, Steve, we all like sort of writing. I think we all like the sound of our own voices. So kind of, it was, so we actually just set out to do something which was very, very different and see where it got us. That was, that was really the, the, the, the gist of it. And then the more we got into it, the more we, we thought, actually, you know, this is a thing really. And then, yeah, we, I mean, and one level, it's just another paper, but it has, as, as

11:52Jackie alluded to at the start, it has, it certainly triggered lots of things that I think most of our other research hasn't. And, and that's, that's, you know, that's a very pleasant surprise, really, you know, again, having spent the vast part of my career, just doing very, very traditional, you know, go, go and do the thing, collect the data, analyze the data, spend two years trying to publish it, then get rejected and then start again, all that, you know. And so this was just something, yeah, completely different. But, but the ideas then have, have, have really evolved a life of their own, actually.

12:26So I think, and again, as I say, allowed for all sorts of conversations about leadership because they bring a lot of things in, in one place. So when, as this conversation develops, I'm sure we're going to talk about the sort of components of zombie leadership. What are these dead ideas then? And they're sort of, they're many and diverse, but there's some core themes, but they're pretty, they, they touch pretty much the whole field of leadership, but they're very, very rarely brought together in the one analysis.

12:57And again, in our own work, we tend, have tended just to focus on one little element at a time and say, well, that idea is wrong, or this idea is wrong over here, or there's a little bit of a problem here. We really have not pulled them all together and said, okay, what's going on here? And like, how do these things hang together? And the answer is they hang together around this, this kind of philosophy of, of what we call zombie leadership. Well, Jackie, you had a follow-up question.

The Golden Axiom of Leadership

13:21Are you, let's, let's hear it. I know that you were just dying to ask this one. Yeah, yeah. I was just going to say thank you for that, Alex. And I, I think one of the things that struck me when I read the paper, you, you present these eight axioms or these kind of pervasive, somewhat dangerous ideas about leadership that just refuse to die. And to your point, despite the fact that these ideas have largely been refuted by many different fields, not, not just your own, but across different disciplines. And yet they still keep walking around.

13:56So we don't have time to cover all eight, but one of the things that, that struck me is how we have approached the study of leadership to the point you raised earlier in the introduction from very different perspectives. You more of a social psychologist background, you know, us through the individual differences lens as personality psychologists, kind of first and foremost, organizational, both of us organizational psychologists, maybe on a secondary, as a secondary love. But yet we've landed on a lot of the same strikingly similar conclusions and insights about

14:31what we've got wrong about leadership and some of these, these dead ideas. So we probably can't do an exhaustive review of all eight, but which would you say, maybe pick, I don't know, one, two, or maybe three that you feel have the strongest grip on organizations today and why are they so hard to kill? Yeah. Yeah. Well, so two questions there, but let's just start. Yeah. Let's, I think there's sort of the, the, the, as you said, there are eight axioms and they're kind of all interrelated, but there is kind of one, I think one kind of golden axiom, if you like, of zombie leadership, the first axiom.

15:02And in a way, all the others kind of hang off that in different kinds of ways. But that is the idea that leadership is all about leaders. So the idea that when to talk about leaders, people who are called leaders and to talk about leadership, but to talk effectively about the same thing. So again, if you look in any leadership journal, you go to a leadership conference, all you're going to hear people talking about is leaders and what leaders are like and what they do and what habits they have or what secrets they have or whatever it might be.

15:35So we're totally fixated on leaders and their character, their psychology, but, but leadership as a process is something that is about a relationship between leaders and the groups they lead. And fundamentally it's proved by the followership of others. So you can't do leadership. You can't talk about leadership without talking about and thinking about and reflecting on followership and then the psychology of followers and what's going on there.

16:07But followers and their enactment of the vision or ideas of leaders are really rarely studied, rarely talked about. They're very marginalized in the, in the, in the field. There's a, I, I, earlier this year I went to an international conference, I think it's called a followership research or whatever. And this is just a, these people have been saying this for 20 or 30 years, large groups of people have all this stuff and it's like, nobody's listening. So, um, and yet it's an incredibly destructive idea.

16:39If you just think that leadership is about leaders and you think all we need to do is fixate on leaders, what they like and pay them loads of money and all the other stuff and fetishize everything around them. You forget all the other people who are actually contributing to the things that make leadership work. So again, we do a lot of work in sports teams or in businesses or in, in community groups and so on. And again, the ones that I'm just as a one example of that, I work, do a lot of research with a voluntary organization in Australia called men's sheds.

17:11And these are all, uh, basically blokes who spend their weekends in these sheds making stuff and they're, they're old kind of blokes and they, most of them have retired and they do really interesting things. Well, in Australia, there's about a thousand of these men's sheds and they're kind of good. They're, they're really important community structures. They help people connect and they fight loneliness and they deal with some mental health kind of problems and other kinds of things. So they're really important. And we've done research looking at, well, what makes an effective shed, okay, in the kind

17:42of leadership space? And the answer is not someone who is fixated on their own leadership and is, and only wants to talk about and reflect on their own leaders. So what you see is that bad men's sheds, you just have a leader who what sets themselves up as a great eye in the space and really just wants to project their idea of themselves on the lead as a leader onto the shed. Well, these places are totally dysfunctional because nobody wants to be there with them and nobody wants to do any of the projects.

18:12What you see in the, in the effect, in the effective sheds is that people have a view of leadership as something that's distributed and shared and that we're all contributing to. And you don't have rigid differentiation either in esteem or time or reward given to people in particular roles. You're saying, no, we're all part of this and we all make it work, which is the truth. And that's very true of say elite sports teams, teams that have, have got leaders on pedestals as, as kind of different from us don't function very well.

18:45Teams that, that are leader full and everybody is doing leadership and you can't really distinguish between the leadership and the followership. Those are the effective teams. So the fundamental point here, and it's a big point and it's been made by hundreds of people for dozens of years, is that if you fixate on leadership as a process that is only about leaders and you, and you, again, as I said, fetishize leaders, you will get it wrong. You will fail. The organization will fail and you will lose all those followers who will have no loyalty

19:15to those people. OK, so it's not only a wrong and a faulty idea, it's a dangerous idea and it destroys the very thing that you're seeking to build, which is, is effective, dynamic, engaged groups that people feel good about. And that's, and that's, I say, most of the others are kind of hanging off that in different ways and relate to the different ways in which we sort of, as it were, fetishize aspects of leaders. But again, I think, you know, again, if you look at the history of this podcast or others

19:48on leadership, you would have had dozens of people on over the years who've made that point in different ways. OK, and I think that's, that's Jackie's point at the start is, yeah, look, this, we are far from the first people to make this point. I mean, on the contrary, pretty much anybody who's actually working in the leadership space is going to, is going to be hit over the head by this fact, one, you know, some shape or form, you know. Well, Alex, this is becoming so clear as to why you and Dr. Hogan became friends. I feel like just the way you described that, and it reminds me of the story and, and Jackie,

20:22I'm not even going to try to butcher it. I don't, you don't have to either. But whenever Dr. Hogan, I think he asked a group of psychologists, what's the base rate of leadership failure? And, you know, they're like, you know, 3% was being thrown out. And I don't know, it was a much larger number than what the, the, the crowd was expecting him to say. And he had some choice words for those people after they started booing him with the, after he just stated the facts. So we won't get into what you need to have him. I mean, again, yeah. And just on that, you can riff on that point.

20:53So the other thing there, one of, you know, axiom number seven is that all leadership is good and leadership is always good for people. So the leadership, if you go to an airport bookshop and just look at the books, they're all about the glorious thing called leadership. And as if whenever anybody's doing leadership, effectively, this is all good. This is, this, this is just the, this makes for a wonderful world. And, and, and, and everything around leadership is, is, you know, has a positive ring to it. That's just the, the, the sort of observation.

21:24Well, you know, that's just obviously palpably false. If you just move along a couple of rows and read the history books, you'll see there's lots of people there who were doing leadership quite effectively, who did quite a lot of bad things, you know, and are in the process of doing some very bad things in the name of leadership. So to imagine or to quarantine the field of leadership to, to just all that is good and then call everything, the leadership that's bad, something else, which is actually what happens is, is hugely problematic. And, and there is the idea, which I think is again, a really a corporate idea that if

21:57you just sprinkle a bit of leadership dust on whatever it is you're doing, it will just turn it, you know, base metal into gold. And well, that's, that's, and, and I mean, that, that, I mean, just saying it like that, that is what people believe. They just think, oh, the problem here is we just haven't got enough, this gold dust sprinkled over our team or our unit or our organization. So let's go and invest heavily in some of this gold dust. Let's get it off Amazon or wherever you're going to get it from or something. And let's bring it in and let's sprinkle it liberally around and everything is going

22:29to come up roses, you know, no, no, no.

22:35Well, okay.

Systemic Issues and Self-Interest

22:36So this, this leads into my next question. You don't actually consider zombie leadership to be a problem with a single person, but rather more of a systemic or systematic issue that enables and fosters the, the zombie leadership epidemic. So can you elaborate on that a little bit? Yeah. Yeah. So I think, so that was a bit your second question to start, like, where is it and where is it promulgated? I think, look, I just think it's, it, yeah, it's, it's in the ether. It's just actually, and again, once you kind of, and again, Jackie alluded to this already,

23:06I think once you're going to tune into this thing, you just see us everywhere. Like you can watch football commentary and you can just see that basically the model of leadership that's informing the way they're talking about this thing, this, this foot, this match or whatever is informed by the view that, oh, well really, you know, when the game is over, they go in search of the people who are the leaders and then they want to talk to them about their leadership. And, and, and it's fascinating. Sometimes you see, I've got a couple of really good examples in my mind, but they'll be a bit lost on you because they're kind of Australian sport examples.

23:37But the, where, uh, after some big event, a team has done incredibly well, you know, the Australian women's soccer team, as an example, who got to, um, uh, got to the semifinals of the world cup, uh, you know, uh, when it was last held, whatever it was two years ago, um, you know, it was a huge achievement. Everyone's very excited by it. And they, you know, very nearly got to the final. And, and, and after they've had this great moment as a team, the sort of the press who've had shown no real interest in women's soccer up to this point, suddenly get interested.

24:12And then they sort of trying to track down the leaders of this thing who made this happen. And they go after the captain, Sam Kerr and the coach, and they want to talk to them about what was it that you did with special? And they're going, no, it's nothing to do with me. It's the team. It's the team. It's us, you know, it's an us thing. And yet they want to stick this sort of zombie leader narrative. They want to find those people and, and lionize them and, and, and, and tell stories about them of a particular form. And actually what you see in, in, in those really true moments is that people who are

24:42really good at leadership really resile from that. They recoil and go, no, I don't want that. I don't, I'm not, that's not who I am. I'm not that person. I was here with the team and actually this is a team process and, and I don't want you to drive a wedge between me and my team, which, which your narrative does. And again, I think you see that over and over again. And, and what you can see also then, if you just think about the sort of corollary of what I've said there is who are the people who don't, who don't reject that, those overtures? Well, of course they're the narcissists.

25:13They're the people who go, oh yes, it was me actually. Yeah, actually I'm rather good, aren't I? Thank you very much. And will you pay me loads of money? So actually not only is it, is it kind of wrong or bad and it alienates the people that you want to actually win over, the people that attracts and is alluring to are the very people you don't want to be in positions of leadership. So again, it creates its own, you know, dynamic where you get the leaders that you deserve because of the analysis that you have, but they're absolutely the leaders that the group

25:45or the organization doesn't kind of need. And again, I feel, and this is again, and again, you don't have to read very, there's a lot of people who, you know, talk about the, the, the, the dark machinery of the leadership industrial complex and the ways in which it rewards egotism and narcissism and self-aggrandizement and, and, and, and, and, and that there's something sort of deeply problematic and toxic at the heart of that. And what is it?

26:16It's zombie leadership and it's kind of everywhere. And you can, you can see it again. I mean, we, we have data on it as saying sports teams and organizations and community groups I alluded to, you can see it in families. If you're, if you know, a dysfunctional family is one that has some top of it who believes in zombie leadership and doesn't think this family is about us doing things together and sharing in the decision-making and the responsibility and the ownership of the things. So it's, it, it destroys pretty much every unit that it touches. And, and again, and it's not just, you know, corporations or organizations, it's sporting

26:51teams, it's community groups, it's communities, it's families, you know, it's a, it's a, it's, it's nasty stuff. Jackie, anything to add there? Yeah. I mean, what's standing out to me and then thinking about your question, Blake, about the system and how circular kind of this vicious circle, Alex, that you're describing and a lot of it stemming from one of those axioms that you called out, which is we've actually got the wrong definition of leadership, which is, you know, the, the way you put it is leadership is all about leaders and Hogan has, has arrived at that same, um, start conclusion.

27:28And we say it a little bit differently using different words, but we say we've got the wrong definition of leadership. But what happens in these organizational systems, whether they're corporations or otherwise is we start to engineer everything around that wrong definition, meaning that's how we write our competency models is, is using this kind of leadership exists somewhere, you know, down deep inside the person, these intra-psychic traits that somehow, uh, cause somebody to be born a leader, right?

28:00Um, whereas others are simply not. And we reward these certain behaviors. We select for them. We, we tend to sense potential in people based on these, these attributes that make them stand out from others. But what we really should be looking for is a leader who shows up for others, right? Who shows up for the team in those moments that not only do they matter, but these are leadership behaviors that can be performed on a stage.

28:31There, these are not performative acts of leadership that we tend to, uh, be attracted to and seduced by, but the real acts of leadership are happening in the, the dark, quiet places where no one is watching or, you know, the few people are watching. Um, so it's, you think about that whole system of rewards and selection and development and the whole cycle kind of perpetuates itself. And, and a lot of it, I do think stems back hinges on that, that wrong definition.

29:02Yep. I mean, I couldn't, I really couldn't agree more. I was in furious agreement with you there. I mean, I, I, when I teach on this or whenever I lecture, and again, I've been doing this stuff for 40 years or something, I, the second slide of any talk I give on leadership is, is a definition and leadership is the process whereby one or more people influence other members of a group in a way that motivates those other people to contribute to the achievement of group goals. So it's about groups.

29:32It's about mobilizing other people. And obviously then ultimately what you're interested in is that mobilization process is what others do and how they experience that and whether they are indeed motivated by what the leader is doing now. So you have to, that, that invites a very different understanding of what leadership is. That's not a controversial definition. I mean, I'd say that's every, that every textbook is effectively some version of that definition. So it's what everybody agrees leadership is. But again, it's, you, I, the reason I always have it as slide two in any talk I give is because

30:05you can give a talk on leadership or you can be having a conversation with someone about leadership and about halfway in, you suddenly realize that you're talking about something completely different. What they think leadership is, is again, just what leaders do, you know, good leaders do leadership and the story, right? So that's all we need to focus on is as it were, these good leaders and all the things that you just said. No, no leadership is this group process. It's an influence process and it's a process of being influenced. OK, and then, and then as, as we, or John Turner, who's Stephen, my PhD supervisor said,

30:38you know, leadership is about power through, not power over. So leadership is about mobilizing others to do things because they want to. So if you have power as a leader, it's, you get it through the actions of others. And it's what others do in your name that makes you powerful. The power doesn't reside in you and your qualities on their own, on their own. They're nothing. I, I often say, you know, as an example of that, you can, and lots of people have, you know, you know, talk about this in different ways. You can be, you know, in a, in a group, like I might be in, you know, at a conference or

31:11something and I might be giving a talk and people might be paying attention and, and, and, and you might feel very sort of empowered. It might be very effective and might be like, Oh, that's leadership or something. But you, you go outside and you get on a bus and you're, and you're just on your own. And there's nobody does in a, in an empty room. You can't do leadership. You're not, you know, you need other people. You need that group process in order for leadership to manifest itself. Um, and so to somehow imagine that this could ever reside in the individual and we only ever

31:42need to then study and engage with that and reward that is, is, is, is so far from the empirical reality. It's just not funny. Well, I mean, I, I actually love the way you frame that. Um, Alex, this is, we're already off to such a fun start here. You know, another issue and I, you know, loosely tied to some of the things we've already covered already, but, but one issue that really stood out to me, cause I was, you know, I, I like to do my homework for these episodes to the best of my ability, but, uh, it's an issue you raise about zombie leadership and the tension between leaders who act for us and leaders

32:15who act in their own self-interest by, you know, prioritizing their own personal gain over the collective, uh, welfare of the group or the team. So how is that in and of itself sustainable? I mean, could you, could you, I think, I mean, yeah, well, I think the answer is actually it isn't sustainable. I think it's, it's, if, if leaders prioritize their own personal interests over those of the collective, those are the, of the people they're meant to be doing leadership on behalf of, if they do that, if they make it a me thing, not a wee thing, well, you know, broadly

32:47speaking, everybody pays the cost that's somewhere down the track. I mean, I think, you know, I, and again, there's quite a bit of, I mean, I think a bit, you know, you can get with a bit of bluster and a bit of like a bit of puffing yourself up. You can, you know, you can get somewhere. You can, maybe you can land that job and you can get into a position where you can, you know, have quite a lot of influence, but influence in the sense of power over, not power through. So, and when you have power over others, you can, you can be pretty destructive. So you can do a lot of, you can do a lot of things in the world.

33:20Okay. And, but again, the, whether, you know, the, the net effect of those things, if they're not coming from the position of the group will be problematic. I mean, again, I, and, and, but they're not going to instant, sometimes there will be, sometimes there'll be immediately apparent that this is a problem, but actually they're most likely to manifest. It depends on what context you're talking about, but two, three, four, maybe 10 years down the track. And actually a huge problem then of the, again, this industrial complex is that by that time,

33:50most leaders and we've, and who listening to this podcast has not had this experience, like of some whiz kid who comes in, gets paid a trillion dollars, has all these great ideas, um, spit to churns everything up, creates total mayhem. And by the time you've realized that the turn of the place has been turned to clag, they've gone off to some better job because actually all they were really interested in curating was their own CV. Okay. Now I don't believe there's a single person listening to this podcast who hasn't had that experience. And if you're old like me, you've had it lots of times.

34:22Right. And it's, and when you see that person come in the door, you go, Oh my God, here we go again, you know, and it's, but, and, but what's sustaining that? Well, there's lots of things, as I say, the industrial complex around that and recruitment and HR and, and, and, and the, and the, and the cut that people get from appointing people to those positions. If someone stays in a job for 20 years and does it really well, there's not much money for the headhunters, is there? And, and, and, you know, so, so I, I, I, again, I think there's all sorts of, of, of

34:56peculiar incentives around that. And tragically, uh, one of them is, is not linked to, you know, the things that matter, which are about, uh, creating positive, sustainable organizations and societies. I mean, and again, I, you know, I, I read the news every day and I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of bad stuff out there and a lot of it can be understood through this lens, I think. Um, but, but make no mistake, we have created this world. And I said before that, you know, academics of talking about leadership have, have been

35:29off doing their thing behind the sort of paywall. And again, I think that in itself is part of the problem because we've been happy to do that. And we get, you know, we do that and we have our own little incentive things there and we publish in top journals and we get good jobs. Survives, providing we don't come out and rock the boat and upset anyone too much. And we, and that, and that's all there, that will all be fine too. So there isn't any great requirement on us to, to, um, to make a difference or to call things out. And indeed, just a little micro fact is before I, we wrote this paper, I obviously I've published

36:08a lot and written a lot in the field of, you know, organizational psychology, leadership science. I'd probably do two or three talks in a business school every year. And since I wrote this paper, I've never had a single invitation. And I think why is that? And that is because people don't want to have this conversation in a place where actually fundamentally that's their business model. Well, we do. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But again, that's interesting. I mean, and that's it worth, I think. So firstly, you know, I think that's, that's just what the quest for truth and also for

36:41discussion and debate, right? Because, I mean, again, I, we're open to the idea that we may have overstated things. We might be wrong. And I think we'd make that point in the paper. I would say too, nobody, and again, the paper's been out for a long time. Nobody's come up to us and said, this is wrong, right? And there's, I've yet to have anybody say there's something in here that you say that does, that's just untrue. Because I don't think, believe it is. But again, I, I feel some of these truths are quite uncomfortable. I think they're uncomfortable for all of us, to be honest. They're uncomfortable for me.

37:12And I think, well, what were you spending your time doing then? And why, how could you convince yourself that this was the right thing to be doing? How could you convince others to do that when, you know, you know? And so worthy as we all think we are, again, I, I feel there are some nettles here, which we haven't really grasped and we haven't really pulled through and we haven't looked at how those are driven home in the groups and the places and the communities that, that we, that we value. I mean, again, I, I'm, Jackie said, you know, I, I'm, I'm attuned to the context in which

37:46I fall prey to these ideas too, right? Like, and I think, and it's very, they're, they're sort of everywhere. So it does, it has got this, it does, it does require and invite a certain level of introspection and self critique, I think, which I think is, is healthy anyway. You know, we think we should, you know, the uninspected life is not worth living type thing. But beyond that, I think it does speak to a conversation that we should just be having

38:17lots of places like what, you know, whether it's politics or whether it's corporations, or whether it's community groups or schools or churches, whatever it is, what, what, what model of leadership are we putting out there? And what are the, what are the downstream effects of that model? And, and again, I think the answer is pretty clear, but we, we shy away from that conversation. And what academics like myself typically do is we just peel off a little bit of thing and we just critique that a bit and we, and we, and we buff and polish our critique and then

38:51we get it out there. And really nobody cares. I just want to react to a few of the things that you've called out there, because it's fascinating how you point out that when people read the zombie leadership paper, no one comes out and says that's wrong. And earlier you said, based on our own experience, our lived experience as human beings, everyone has had that leader who comes in and wreaks havoc on the organization. And we, we know it when we see it, we could see it coming a mile away in a lot of cases.

39:21And to your point, there's this time lag where we don't see some of the more obvious or some of the more destructive effects that they leave behind until later, till after their term is, is finished, so to speak. And that is a mirror image of what we've seen. We just published this study, which I shared with you about what it is that followers say they really want and need in leaders and what attributes executives in the world actually have. And the overlap was zero. And I've started referring to this, this research study, which we've called the leadership divide

39:55as the study that should have shocked the world, but didn't because the response to it has been that's striking and compelling, but not altogether surprising because to your point, Alex, everyone has had those experiences in the world. They, their lived experience suggests that, yeah, we are getting this wrong. We are promoting the wrong people. We are defining leadership incorrectly. And the proof is in the two thirds to three quarters of leaders who are incompetent at doing

40:28the most basic job of leadership, which is inspiring followership. Um, so I think that those two points you made about, no one is shocked and no one says, Hey, this is just crazy. And yet we have struggled to move the needle despite the, the decades, the centuries that we've spent, you know, inquiring around leadership and trying to study this subject. Bob Hogan often says this academic study of leadership has failed. And that sounds harsh, but I think what he really means is we have personally at Hogan, we have found

41:03a mountain of evidence and that so have others that shows what makes for bad leadership. We know how to, we know how to spot that, but we have failed to reach consensus and replicable findings on what constitutes great leadership. And I think it points to some of the missing pieces that have been called out, um, in, in

The Failure of Academic Study

41:22your paper and in the work from your colleagues. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I, I, yeah, no, again, I mean, I said to you, I think that paper's really interesting and it, as I mean, exactly what you just said there, like, okay, we've got this, we've got this, we say to people, what are you looking for in leaders? What is the thing that makes a difference for you in leaders? And we, and the people, you get a pretty consensual response. We want people who take care of us, people who, who inspire us, people who motivate us, people who make us feel good about what we're doing and help us to be better, you know,

41:53that type of thing, you know, and they make the business of contributing to the group and the group life, they make it positive and fun, you know, that's kind of what people want. They want that engagement. They're looking for it. Okay. And, and most of the time, that's not what they get. And when they get a parcel in the mail called lead with leadership on it, they know they're in for something different too. Um, so, but, but how could, how could we have got to that point is, is, is one question that you're asking there. Um, and, and, and then also how do we get out of it and how are we going to move beyond

42:28that? And, and I, I guess the key contribution of the paper then is to say, is to call it out and say, look, there is this, this fundamental set of things that we've just got really badly wrong. I think Bob's absolutely right. I, I think that the, the study of the academic study of leadership in a very deep sense has failed. Um, you know, of course I would suggest that the work that my colleagues and I have done, other, you know, it offers something different. And our, our approach to leadership is called the new psychology of leadership is much more

42:58new psychology of leadership is called, is all about group process and dynamics and the idea that leaders are people who, you know, create, advance, represent and embed a sense of us. So leadership is all about us-ness in, in our analysis, but that is a, that is a fringe idea. Um, and that, that struggles to get heard at the leadership table. And I, and I also see when some of our students, you know, go out into the world to try to put, press that message. I see that, you know, they, they get gently pulled to one side and, and, and, you know,

43:32um, asked if they want to make a cup of tea or something rather than actually have a job as a, as a, as someone who might make a difference, you know? So, so yeah, I, I think there's, you, you, as you say, there's some real structural things, really hard conversations to have. But, and part of our analysis is that, is that one of the reasons we haven't had them is we've never really had a language or a framework to do that from. And again, what's interesting about the zombie leadership thing is, is a thing that brings in lots of people into the same space to have that conversation. As you say too, I think, you know, I think the answer, what the opposite is, what good

44:05leadership looks like, it, you know, that, that's a, that's a harder question to answer. Um, but it's much easier to answer once you've had this conversation, I think, um, and, and it, and it, and it is going to, you know, direct you away from, I think some of the, of the, of the sort of pitfalls of, of, of the field. And I, and again, one of the problems, I'll tell you a quick story. This is, um, cause it's kind of germane to this. So I, I had some colleagues who were working and I won't tell you what the industry was cause

44:38I don't want to, I don't want to betray their confidences. They're working in a big industry on, on a really big project. Um, you know, multi-million dollar project, um, over a long period of time to look at what effective leadership looked like in this organization. Um, and they mapped it all out and then to put some leadership development stuff around that. Okay. And it was, and it was all the things you just said. It was all, uh, you know, it was, it was, it was, it was this non kind of zombie thing. They spent a lot of money and time to pull all this thing together, two or three years

45:11doing it. They got a document and they had to present it to the, to the, to the chief executives of the organization. And they go in with this big document to, for this session where they're going to be explaining what they found and how this is going to change the organization. And the CEO pulls the report out and he says, yeah, well, thank you very much for this. But let me tell you what leadership is, you know? So it was pretty much, they had done all this thing and he just pushes it to one side and

45:44says, no, no, I'm going to tell you what leadership is. And of course that was full on like 600% zombie leadership. But, but of course he's got the techs, he's doing the business, but he absolutely was not to say he wasn't open to the messages neither here nor there, but he was totally in a position and had created a world in which there was no, no space for this kind of alternative narrative. And again, I've had lots and lots of versions of that conversation of people who've done a lot of work or got a lot of insight into, you know, well, what this thing kind of looks

46:18like and what we really need. But when, you know, when the rubber hits the road or when someone has to sign off the checks, mysteriously, they get marginalized and sidelined. And what you get is more of the same, you know, you get the old wine in new bottles kind of thing and the latest iteration of magic dust, you know? And again, what you do see is I think as you get, as you go on in this profession, as people and you get to my age, again, as I say, close to retirement and you think, yeah, I think

46:51I can't, I just can't take it anymore. You know, I just, I can't, I can't get enthusiastic. Well, I've never been enthusiastic about this stuff you're peddling, but I really refuse to sit back and just say, yeah, please give me more, you know, because, because you know how problematic it is. But I think in all of everyday organizational life, that's just par for the course. I mean, again, I, I spend most of my time trying to get out of some of the, of these kinds of programs in my own organization, because, because that's, because that's what's

47:22on offer, you know? Well, you know, Alex, I'm a little jealous. You keep saying that you're close to retirement. I think Jackie and I still have a ways to go. So yeah, yeah, yeah. Good. Yeah. But I think I'll retire from academia. I don't, I think, I think I will partly because actually, you know, Tony Benn, the politician once, who's a British politician said he wanted to retire from parliament so he could spend more time in politics. I probably want to retire from academic life so I can actually spend my time doing things

47:54that make a difference. That might, that might be another way of putting it. I love that. I love that.

Personality and Dynamic Contexts

48:00Okay.

Personality and Dynamic Contexts

48:01Well, this is the science of personality podcast. So we've got to dig into the personality side of this for a moment. So if zombie leadership, you know, it warrants us against assuming that all great leaders possess special qualities that, but that obviously doesn't mean that individual differences disappear. So people differ in personality, motives, ability, social skill, and so on. So where do you think those differences belong in your account of leadership among these? That's really interesting. You know, so that, as I said, we, we come at these things from a very different position,

48:33but actually I think, and having had a few chats with Bob over the years and interactions, I, I think actually, even though I'm really not a personality theorist, I think I would be very critical of traditional models of sort of personality. And I think, but I think you would too. So I think the, the idea that really behavior is just the product of sort of pre potent personality characteristics and that certain things are very, you know, drive particular types of, of, of, of outcome. I think, no, I don't think that.

49:04I think, I think, I think firstly, obviously individual differences exist. That's an obvious fact. I mean, obviously individual differences in skill and experience. So in our own space, I think, you know, I think insights and things like that come from experience and they, and they, and they craft your approach to these issues. So, so I think they're always part of the story. What I think is though, is that, is that, you know, my take on personality and I think, and I'm not a personality theorist, but I, but I do read it and I do find that literature

49:37interesting is historically, we've had a very kind of what you might call mechanical view of personality, which is, and that, that if you think about this classic formulation in psychology, is that the behavior is the interaction between the person and the situation. That's the Lavinian formulation. Nobody would disagree with that, right? It's a product of the person and the situation. But what I think is that in mechanical theorizing, mechanical individual difference theorizing, you think that both the person and the individual differences are fixed.

50:11And actually, if you look at those classical personality models, that's how it works. You know, if you think about something I really hate, sort of Myers-Briggs type nonsense, you know, again, thoroughly debunked, but, but, you know, you're this type of person and then you have this type of situation and you get this type of outcome. Well, no, not really. And there's no evidence for it, right? What, what is true though? What if it is that is, is that those things are more dynamic. So individuals shape context and context shape individuals and in that mutual configuration

50:44are dynamic potentialities, which allow for particular, sometimes creative and novel outcomes. So actually, you know, individual differences and where they come from and, and they come from other lots of things like group memberships, like a lot of the attributes that we have are products of the groups that we're members of and identify with. If you start to see that, if you start to see individual difference as a manifestation of those group and interactive dynamics, then I think you're much closer to what's kind

51:15of going on. But what you don't want to fetishize is saying, oh, well, this person has this characteristic and therefore this is going to happen because no, that, you know, the, you know, what we know about psychology is yeah, those, those characteristics will manifest themselves and be restructured by the situation which they find themselves. But also the reason that we study leadership is precisely because people have the power to change the situation, the contextual aspects of that too. So to anybody who goes on a leadership program and is encouraged to just see the world as a

51:46product, as a, as a, as a, as a static fixed function of those two unfixed elements, I think is going to be in for disappointment. And all of the literature, again, suggests that the case. But if you embrace a more kind of dynamic, you know, socially informed model of personality and individual difference and understand the way in which that both changes the world and is, has, and is responsive to it. Then I think, I think you're going to be, firstly, you're not going to be so disappointed when you see the data, but you're also then in a position to understand what you're actually

52:21really trying to do in leadership, which is around, is around, is around, um, help people to create the right kind of structures for them and their group, um, that will allow that group to unlock its potential. But, but again, part of what you don't want to do is just to look at that person in isolation. You want to look at them in the context of the group in which they're functioning. And I will always say as a psychologist and as someone who's interested in leadership, you want to turn people towards their group and to engage with it rather than away from

52:56it. And one of the problems, I think, with the leadership literature and leadership development programs is that they often just say to people, oh, find out what you're like and they, and they, and you lose interest in the people that you've got to work with because you just imagine it's all about me. Um, the more, if you fixate on that and you think that's all that matters, you're really going down the wrong track. What you want leadership development to do is to direct people towards the people that they're trying to lead. And actually one of the big meta analyses of, of, uh, leadership development programs, one

53:29of the basic points is that, that leadership development that cuts people off from their groups. And, you know, you go off to a five-star retreat and do this in isolation with your mates and just think about the world. It doesn't really work very well, but if you do leadership development that encourages you to work with your teammates, and then you do that in a sort of developmental basis and come back and look at how that's going, you're much more close, much more likely to get outcomes that work for everybody. And you're much more likely to have a situation where the people that you're leading will

54:01benefit from your leadership development, as it were, which is ultimately the proof of the pudding, but sadly, very rarely part of the analytical equation when it comes to those things. So when people procure leadership development, they typically do it from using the sort of zombie leadership spreadsheet, not the, as it were, the group functioning spreadsheet. Jackie, I got to hear your, your thoughts on this as well. Oh, so many thoughts are swirling. Um, yeah, so let me ask you this, because one of the things that we find in our work

54:34is, you know, we study individual differences and in particular, we look at relationships between personality and performance. And this can be a lot more straightforward in certain kinds of jobs, right? So when the job requires that one relies mostly on oneself, right? And not, is not necessarily as much of a group process like leadership is, you know, for for instance, air traffic controllers, customer service representatives, uh, you know, sales professionals where the metrics are harder, uh, not as squishy as they can be in the leadership

55:09space. And when the job is more straightforward and self-reliant, we can actually do a pretty fair job of that. Um, it is a much harder, we run into a lot of problems when we try to do the same thing with leadership and two of our extremely load bearing findings, I think point toward some of the things that you're sharing here. And the first we've already talked a little bit about, which is access to leadership qualities that tend to predict access to leadership are very well understood and they're quite

55:40stable. So things like charisma, confidence, boldness, they don't predict leadership effectiveness, but so, and they, I would imagine don't predict the, um, the ability to create the for us or that sense of us-ness that you talk about, but they do predict emergence, the ability to be identified as a leader, selected as a leader, identify as a hypo and those kinds of things. But they often, in fact, degrade actual leadership. But the second, and we have covered that, but the second low bearing finding is we tell the,

56:14we tell our organizational clients, you have to then judge the leader by the performance of the unit. You can't look for the proof of leadership inside the person. You have to look for it in what the team does. And that can come in, um, sort of one of my colleagues, one of our colleagues, Rob Kaiser talks about vitality of the team and productivity of the team. And those are two very important and related, um, outcome variables or kind of categories of outcome variables we might be thinking about. So does the team feel good about the work they're doing?

56:46Is, are they cohesive? Is their morale? Do they feel a sense of purpose in what they do? And that's that vitality component. And then the productivity, are they, are they producing results? So we're those kind of low bearing findings around the unit of analysis is, is wrong with leadership in general. And that's pretty, and that's pretty pervasive. But then there's this third thing that I find myself wondering about as I was listening to you talk, which is how power changes people and what it does to their tendency to, to serve,

57:23to, to work in service of the group and the collective versus to serve oneself. Um, and I'd love to hear your perspective on that. Um, you know, what activates that tendency and is it something in your opinion that can be learned and developed and cultivated, or is there a tendency for people to move kind of more in one direction versus the other? Yeah. Well, firstly, you made a lot of good points there. And I, and I actually, I think I agreed with everything that you said. I mean, I mean, part of one of the sort of tricks of traditional old fashioned sort of

57:56personality theory is it's true. If, if you keep the, the role and task stable and static and you keep the context stable and static and you put everything and you can only do these things in individually and in a darkened room type thing, then, and you know, and it's, and you imagine that everything's, nothing's changing, then you have a certain amount of predictive power. The problem of course is that's not the way the world is. All these things are much more changeable. So that's the first point. So the minute that you talking about a professional or a job, which has, you know, where, where

58:28the, the nature of the work or the tasks or the goals or whatever is, is really changeable. Then all of a sudden, yeah, this thing that you had recruited these people for, well, actually that's not what they need to be doing. So that's a bit of a problem anyway. And that's, and I think, I think the, the founders of, uh, personality theory, Munster, Rogue and others, you know, anticipate that problem. The second thing though, yeah, I think, look, I, I, I think the, um, the idea that, that, that there are things that hang around leadership that, that, that you can sort of predict,

59:02like, as you say, whether or not you're going to get a leadership position, like being confident or charismatic, being seen to be charismatic, those things are quite predictable of whether you're going to acquire the status of being a leader, you know? And, and I think that's kind of interesting. And a lot of the time too, then a lot of the literature and a lot of the practices, okay, well, if we can predict that, let's imagine that that's what really matters, right? Whether or not you get called a leader. And so there's a lot of research on leader identity, like, until, you know, because it's, you imagine, because you can actually anticipate, predict who's going to do that.

59:36But as you said, the problem is that's not actually what leadership is. Leadership is not about getting the job of, it's not being about having the title leader. Okay. If that's all you had to predict, you know, that would be somewhat easier to do. Okay. The third thing, which I think you alluded to is there's something going on as, as well as these changes in context and so on, there's something, something goes on as people kind of develop, particularly around the leadership space. And I think we see that, I think in lots of our empirical work.

1:00:07And, and I think just our experience in the spaces, the, when we do our own approach to leadership, and I think the people who get really passionate about like zombie leadership paper are often people who are in, who are in the sort of middle ranks of organizations. They're sort of mid-level people who really see these realities and they really care about their groups and the, and the teams that they work with. What you see a bit like that story I told a while ago is when you get right higher up in the organization, they start not to be so enthusiastic about the ideas and they start,

1:00:43they don't embrace them quite so much. And I think part of that is what we refer to as the leader identity trap is that once you get up to a certain level in the organization or whatever it is, then, then you're obviously, you're in this kind of crazy Ponzi scheme, we call leadership development, you're a kind of a winner. You're at the top of the triangle, everything. So you have, you've got to sort of buy into that to justify all the stuff that comes with it, like the crazy salary that you're getting. How can you justify a CEO getting the average CEO in the US is paid 400 times what an average

1:01:19worker gets? Okay. How can you justify that unless you believe these people are godlike? Okay, so you have to believe that. And in a way, you won't be allowed, and this is, you won't be allowed entry into that club unless you espouse these ideas. So again, if you're, if someone's listening to this podcast and they're thinking of going, applying to be a CEO of a major company, well, for God's sake, don't read the zombie leadership paper and pay attention to it because that is not your entry ticket. Your entry ticket is around just talking about how wonderful you are and how brilliant your

1:01:53TV is and all these God-given gifts that you have that we're so lucky to benefit from and that we should be glad that we're only paying you 400 times what the rest of us get because you really are wonderful. Okay. So don't listen, turn off now. Okay. And go and do that. Go and tidy up your CV. Okay. And that's what those people are doing. They're not part of this. That's not, they know they're in a whole bit, other bit of the stratosphere. And don't we know it, you know, is, would be my sort of take on that. So, but I don't think those people are doing leadership.

1:02:24They're not interested in influencing or shaping the group. They're just influencing in asset stripping, if you ask me, but, you know, but that's another, you know, and we shade then into some other points about politics really as well, which I think are interesting too.

Democratic Processes in Groups

1:02:38So, you know, I think fundamentally good leadership is a, is a democratic process in the sense that it's something that's shared and distributed and that we all have a role to play in your family. If your family is functional, you're not doing zombie leadership. Everybody's doing leadership and everybody steps up to help everybody out. And we don't, we don't call someone a great leader and, um, and pay them loads of money. We just ask them to get on with their, their job in the interests of the collective. And they generally do. And yeah, and if they do a good job when they die, we give them a eulogy and say, thanks very much. You know, and that's how it should be.

1:03:10Right. But, but, um, but we somehow imagine that that thing, which we would all, you know, we would all understand how that works, um, that somehow those same things don't apply in the world at large. I, I, and I absolutely believe they do. And I, I think we should start to run the world the more that we would want the way we want to run our families. And we should start to be more attentive. And again, one of the things I say is again, the, the leadership, one of the sort of strange

1:03:40things about leadership is that we only imagine, we saw when we say leadership, what does that trigger it? As I said before, all this positive stuff, but we somehow imagine that leadership is only stuff that's done in corporations and, and in big organizations, you get lots of leadership going on and it's done really at the top, right? Well, no leadership's done everywhere. There isn't any group on the planet that doesn't have leadership going on in it. If it's effective and that can be a family that can be, that can be a gang. I mean, you know, we've, uh, Steve has done research in adolescent gangs, you know, there's

1:04:12lots of effective leadership going on in those places. It just doesn't make way into the leadership literature, but the, but I'm saying everybody who's in the business of making groups work is, is, is doing kind of leadership. Um, and we need to have a much broader, I think, um, appreciation of where we can find good leadership and start to celebrate it in the places where it isn't routinely celebrated as an, as a, as a countervailing force to that, um, lionization, the fetishization of this particular kind of corporate model of leadership.

1:04:45Uh, I say to, when I, when I lecture to my students, I say, if what I say doesn't, isn't something that you would do with people that you love and care about, then don't do it. Okay. And I think that's a very, very simple test, right? If, if, if what I'm asking you to do in the name of leadership, like all this crazy restructuring, who would do that with their family, come home one night and say, well, you know what team, we're just going to reorganize and we're going to, are we going to move off somewhere to some other city and let not, not have a conversation around it.

1:05:16And we're just going to pull you out of school and doesn't matter. You know, nobody in their right mind, of course people do do that, but you know, yeah. And what, and we, you know, we call them bad parents or whatever it might be, but, and we see the consequences, but we somehow imagine that that might be a model for the rest of the world. No, if you wouldn't do it to your family, don't do it to the people that you're leading. You know, I, I don't know, Alex, I think after we're off here, I think I'm going to go out. I'm going to actually tell my wife that she now reports to my border colleague said, um, we're

1:05:49going to see how that goes. Yeah. Yeah. So I'll be the last episode of the science of personality podcast. If I do that. So, yeah. Uh, I think anybody who has a dog knows the dog really is the leader. Yeah. Anyway, they really are. They can't. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, Alex. Okay. So we've covered a ton of ground here. So I'm going to, I'm going to, uh, frame this, uh, this last question. It's two questions that I'm going to put into one before we bring this thing in for a landing. So I just want to, uh, the first one is first up zombie leadership ideas, or this idea of

1:06:24zombie leadership is still prevalent in a lot of these, um, you know, organizations globally, obviously we wouldn't be talking about it if that wasn't the case. So there might be our listeners who are out there, maybe in a position where that is the case or they're underneath that. Well, so first question, what advice would you give to those people who, um, are trying to, uh, you know, deal with it or cope with it? And the, the last question, uh, before we, we, we, we close this episode out is, you know,

1:06:56just like any other person in a zombie movie who is still among the living, I'll ask that question. What's the cure? Cause we really want to know.

Finding the Cure

1:07:04So I, yeah, and I think that's when at the end of the paper, I think when we, that was when we'd done a few drafts and then we would think that was always, those are the sort of questions you, uh, pretty much come back to always. I, I think that the first thing I, and I think we, the thing we say at the end of the paper is firstly, you're not alone. Right. So part of this conversation is around saying, actually, look, yeah, if you're on the receiving end of zombie leadership, that's the norm. That's not the exception. So firstly, yeah, join the club and actually really join the club.

1:07:34So again, we say like, join the anti-zombie leadership alliance kind of thing. So again, in that sense, you have a shirt for Jackie, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, when we catch up, I've got it. I'm going to hand it over. Actually, I meant to dig it out. It's somewhere in the cupboard over here, but yeah. So when we catch up, I've got the, got the t-shirt. We got the, we got the, um, we got the board game here. There's zombie leaders as well. Um, so there's, um, no, the card game. So actually there's lots of, I think there's lots of fun things that you can do in a kind of subversive way just to kind of keep yourself entertained. But also I think, I think there are a set of ideas here, which it's interesting to engage

1:08:08with. And I think people do enjoy engaging with that's one thing. So, so I, I, I think, I think you're not alone. There's a lot of people out there and we need to, we need to get this story over and we need to start having this conversation a lot more. And I think calling it out is, is, is a pretty good place to start. And I think the fact that we haven't hitherto, I think is, is a large part of the problem. What the cure is, again, I, I think, I think the, I think the cure really comes out of that. Uh, what I, what I, what I, what I would say is do we just, to start with, we need to have

1:08:43more of these kinds of conversations. We need to create communities around these conversations. We need to, I think we need to also start close to home and, and, and look at the organizations and the units that we're members of, the ones that we really can change. So, you know, and, and I think, you know, just have a look at, you know, your, whatever your, your local community group that you're a member of, or your charity or your church or your, or your, you know, your sporting group that your kids are a member of or whatever it might

1:09:14be and just say, hang on a minute here, let's have a look at this model. Cause if we get it wrong there, if we get it wrong, when we know what's right, then how can we expect everybody else to get it right? So start to rethink those things and question the way you do things at that level, I think, and see what the benefits of doing things differently are. And then I think, and then get other people interested in, in getting on board, I think. And then on that basis, start to challenge some of the more egregious examples that we encounter.

1:09:44And I think that's a, that's a bigger task. And I, and I think it's hard to necessarily to summon up the sort of appetite for that, as it were, cold. I think you need to get warmed up with other people, get excited about it. And not at one level too. I, I don't want to shy away from the fact that there's a, there's a political dimension to this too. I mean, I, I think that, um, I, I think the people who are running the zombie leadership writ large, the industry, uh, really want us. Not to be challenging the way they do things.

1:10:16Um, and they're not going to cede power to us or to cede influence to us straightforwardly. We're not part of the group they're trying to influence. We're part of the group they're trying to subjugate. Um, um, um, and, and, and I think, uh, then start to just ask difficult questions in all the places that you can ask them. And that can be from the next time you go on a leadership development course in your organization or whatever, just say, hang on a minute, where's the evidence for this? And, and I actually, I think this is taking us down the wrong path.

1:10:49I think we should be looking at this and on what basis have we procured this and who's been involved in the decision-making those types of things. So make, uh, own the decisions that we, that we make and gather data and engage with that data and say, let's go with the stuff that works for us. And that is producing the right outcomes, not the stuff that we're doing because it's expensive or because we're being paid loads of money to, or we're, we're being seduced into going down that path by people whose interests in, uh, and aren't aligned with our interests,

1:11:20which is, I think a lot of what's going a lot there. I think there's lots to be done. And I think the other thing too, is, yeah, I think, you know, be hopeful. I mean, we, these are big tasks that we have here, but we desperately need to challenge this narrative because I feel it's, it's one that's hugely destructive at pretty much every level of society that we sort of care about. So it's not just the conversation we have to have. It's one that we need, and we need to be having this conversation as widely as possible, which is one reason, one of many reasons why I'm very excited to have had the conversation

1:11:54with you today. Cause I feel like, you know, on the, is it just a paper research paper? No one reads it. No one talks about it. It doesn't make any difference at all. If we start to have conversations, we get interested, we start to challenge things. We say, it doesn't have to be this way. Then I think then we can go into the world with hope in our hearts that we can actually make a difference. And we do need to make a difference.

Hope and Future Direction

1:12:16Poetic, Alex. I love it. Jackie, anything to add before we, we let Alex go? I know Alex, it's, it's just now, you know, you, you still have to get out the door to go to your, your day job and we're wrapping up our day job over here. Yeah, no, this is a lot more fun. I mean, I, you know, I, yeah, I really, yeah, I love the questions and I love the, and again, I, for me, the excitement is that you coming at this from a different perspective and that we can have a conversation. I'm a big believer in, you know, one of the things that I think is struggle in contemporary society is to have conversations with people who don't agree about everything.

1:12:50And I, and I'm a, I'm a big believer in the power of engagement and that we shouldn't always just be talking to people who share our views. We should talk to people who may be coming from somewhere different, maybe need a bit of persuading or need a bit of encouragement, or maybe they can tell you things that you need to learn too. Yeah. Thanks so much. And I would just like to reiterate the last point you made there about the need for hope. And one of the things that, that I tried to do for myself and others is just imagine what a world would be like with better leadership.

1:13:20If we really, I mean, even if we could move the needle 1%, 5%, 10%, what would that world be like if we had more of the leaders working in, in effort to, to serve us and not to serve themselves? And I think that helps give people the sustenance they need to keep working on such challenging problems. Cause I think no one is under the illusion that these are easy problems to solve. They're, they're certainly not, but, um, the reward at the other end could be tremendous

1:13:52if we did. And the other thing I try to do is remind myself and everyone else that change all it takes is a little spark, right? We don't have to, the tectonic shift in the plates doesn't happen overnight, right? It's the build of pressure over many, many moons that causes that sudden earthquake or that sudden shift in thinking. So, you know, bit by bit, we can chip away at, at the problem. And I do, I feel like I have started to see the pendulum move a little bit more in the

1:14:25direction of, you know, humble leadership and creating psychological safety in these themes that we haven't heard, um, before quite as, as strongly. So maybe we can be a part of that, the starting a movement, right? That's a, that's an exciting thought. So I would agree with you that it's important to have hope and imagine a better world. Yeah. I mean, I would also say, you know, I, I think in a very particular sense, we're in a very dark place at the moment. Like there is a, you know, I, I, I, I mean, I can't imagine a world in which things are worse than they are on some of these things.

1:14:56So the idea that as it were, things can only get better is something you also have to believe. But again, that's not going to happen without our effort. Right. But I think, I think I'd like to think that there is, there is a, that there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a turning point now and inflection and, and that there's, and that basically people actually can join the dots on the, on lots of the things that we've been talking about and say, no, these aren't the right choices that we should be making at any level individually or in, in collectively.

1:15:26And it's time to, to rethink lots of these quite fundamental things that we're doing. And if we do, yeah, then we, together, we can recreate much better solutions. Cause I mean, again, you know, the idea that we have got to, that we require leadership to deal with the, the various problems by which the world is beset, I think is, is palpably the case. Okay. But we're not going to do it with the wrong leadership. That's, that's only going to make matters worse. And so getting it right is imperative.

1:15:59Alex, thanks so much for joining us, Jackie. Great job as well. This is fun. Alex, we'll have you on again in the future, but really appreciate you taking the time to join us. Lovely. Yeah. I've really enjoyed it. Thanks very much for the invitation. It's great to have finally, you know, interacted Jackie too, but yeah, I'm really happy to circle back and, and, you know, and, and pick up on the, on some of the difficult topics here and see where we get and see if, and see again, how people, when people road test these ideas in the world and they come back with their questions, you know, and, and maybe

1:16:30their challenges, you know, how, how can we have, take the conversation further, but yeah, absolutely. Wonderful. Thank you very much indeed. And that does it for this episode of the science of personality podcast. Be sure to join us in two weeks for another fun and informative episode. Cheers, everybody. Cheers.