Leadership is like everything else. It changes. It’s vulnerable to the vagaries of fashion.
When Machiavelli penned The Prince power and authority were presumed the privilege of a single person, the man who was the monarch. When Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense power and authority were resources which, if harbored to excess, were to be snatched from leaders by their followers, by force if necessary. When Betty Friedan and Martin Luther King wrote, respectively, both in 1963, The Feminine Mystique and Letter from Birmingham Jail, power and authority were rights to be claimed by, finally, women and African Americans.
More recently much of the focus on leadership has been on power and authority in business. Two issues have been at the forefront. The first is the tension between leadership structures that are traditional, that is, hierarchical; and leadership structures that are more modern, that are deliberately and presumably demonstrably flatter.
The second issue was brought to the fore by the pandemic. Whether leaders – or if you prefer, managers – can work from home at least part of the time. Or whether, in contrast, they should be in the office full time, five days a week.*
Though it’s too early to say for sure, it appears the passage of time is resolving both issues. They both seem more settled now than they did even in the recent past.
While many modern companies experimented with or even embraced the idea that they would perform better if layers of management were removed, and if more people participated in decision making, and if more felt personally and professionally empowered, it now seems clear that high degrees of autonomy are not the wave of the corporate future. They appear either not to work at all, or at least not to work better than the traditional models, certainly not in organizations of any size.
This is not to say that leadership and management now are what they were fifty years ago, when “command and control” was the only way to go. They are not. But it is to say that while leadership and management change, some things remain fundamentally the same. More specifically, the “iron law of oligarchy,” which maintains that over time all organizations, especially large ones, will develop oligarchic, or hierarchic tendencies, still prevails. **
It could be too early to conclude that post-pandemic leaders and managers will again be expected to work in the office most days if not every day of the week. But this appears to be the trend. Again, this is not to say that Covid has had no impact. It did – hybrid work is here to stay.
But is it here to stay for those in the middle or high up the corporate ladder? Not clear. Even more to the point, it is clearly not here to stay for those who are ambitious, especially for those in their twenties and thirties who have come to understand that if they want to get ahead with reasonable rapidity, they’d better show their face. They’d better not work or hardly work remotely.
Leave it to JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon to spell out his position in no uncertain terms. In a recent memo he wrote he expected his managing directors to be “visible on the floor, they must meet with clients, they need to teach and advise, and they should always be [available] …. We need them to lead by example, which is why we’re asking all managing directors to be in the office five days a week.” It’s a position he reiterated this week when he told The Economist, “I don’t know how you can be a leader and not be accessible to your people.”
The more things change the more they stay the same. Leadership does change. And leadership does stay the same.
———————————————
*The words “leadership” and “management” are often assumed synonymous; they are often used interchangeably.
**The concept of an “iron law of oligarchy” was developed in the early 20th century by the German-born sociologist, Robert Michels.