Freedom from leadership

By Jason Lim

In the last 30 years, leadership studies (both research and teaching) have become a multi-billion dollar industry around the globe. Books such as "Emotional Intelligence" by Daniel Goleman, "Leadership On the Line" by Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky, "Good to Great" by Jim Collins, among countless others, have become perennial bestsellers not just in the United States but across the globe.

Despite the boom in leadership industry, however, I cannot help but sense a lack of a certain solidity, even hollowness, when it comes to leadership studies ― there is a temporary euphoria, followed by a feeling of emptiness after reading all these insightful books and taking all there wonderfully literate leadership course. Perhaps this comes from the fact that there are as many definitions of leadership as there are authors who write about it. Perhaps this comes from my skepticism that leadership could actually be taught through a book or in a classroom setting.

You see, just because we can examine the lives of past leaders and analyze what worked and what didn't doesn't mean that we become that leader. We can even gain deep, intellectual understanding on how his leadership worked in what context, or why he failed miserably in other contexts by studying the lives of past leaders. But we feel certain dissatisfaction in leadership studies today precisely because such exercises don't really give us a special insight into what made him so effective as a leader, what about his person, not just his surface actions, that propelled him into great leadership.

We feel that there is something more fundamental about leadership than just arguments about styles of leadership, definitions of leadership, serendipity of leadership, nature vs. nurture of leadership, etc.

The more I studied leadership, the more I found myself asking this question: Isn't there something deeper, more fundamental that we all share as human beings that we can tap into to gain a deeper insight ― not just an academic understanding ― about leadership, something that can illuminate, enlighten, and inspire us to become leaders ourselves, leaders not just in organizational titles, bureaucratic positions, or even military authority, but leaders in a more authentic sense, beginning with ourselves? This was the emptiness I was sensing, even when I was being inspired and moved by stories of past heroes and incredible leaders who changed their worlds forever.

In short, leadership studies for me was search for a deeper understanding about what made me tick, what drove me to do more, to perform better, to become a better person ― leadership studies, I realized, was about self–leadership first and foremost, reflecting my almost instructive yearning to escape an invisible but supremely suffocating barrier that I felt enclose my innermost sense of myself as a human being; the yearning was almost spiritual in its quest and intensity, propelling me to search out other traditions and scholarship on leadership from all cultures and times, trying to glean a piece of clue that would finally allow me to ground the idea of leadership into my sense of who I was.

Then I came across this observation made by Fred Kofman and Peter Senge (1993):

"…we are startled to discover that at the core of the person, at the center of selfhood, there is nothing, pure energy. When we reach into the most fundamental basis of our being we find a pregnant void, a web of relationships. When somebody asks us to talk about ourselves, we talk about family, work, academic background, sports affiliations, etc. In all this talk, where is our "self"? The answer is nowhere, because the self is not a thing, but as Jerome Brunner says, "a point of view that unifies the flow of experience into a coherent narrative" ― a narrative striving to connect with other narratives and become richer."

Kofman and Senge hit me like a ton of bricks because they told me that my leadership journey was doomed from the start because a "self" doesn't really exist in isolation. We all exist in relation to one another. What we think as "self" is made up of a series of relationships with our parents, colleagues, friends, etc. Further, the relationships need not even be with fellow human beings. We have relationships with our habits, personalities, desires, ambitions, hopes, despair, prejudices, etc. We also have relationships with our ethnicity, nationality, culture, etc.

And all these relationships form a unique narrative that defines who we are to ourselves. Others see our narrative and define us by how our pattern intermeshes with their own respective narratives. We do not really exist without this complex mesh of interconnected relationship of, basically, stories through which we understand the world.

Recasting leadership as sense-making through interconnected narratives was actually supremely liberating in the sense that I was able to move away from a constant and tiring intellectual search for some universal leadership framework or even more tiring pursuit of professional titles and honors as proxy measurements for leadership. And with this newly found freedom, I can finally begin authoring my own leadership narrative. Actually, co-authoring would be a more accurate term.

Jason Lim is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture. He has been writing for The Korea Times since 2006. He can be reached at jasonlim@msn.com, facebook. com/jasonlimkoreatimes and @jasonlim2012.

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