Thought Laggardship

One interesting thing I see in #leadershipdevelopment these days is that new CEOs desire to be thought-leaders, that is to extrapolate lessons from their experience to share with a broader audience. (So too do most employees, that’s a separate issue).

What is particularly amusing is when two leaders disagree publicly over the correct style of management, or approach to a certain issue. One might call this productive discourse, but what I see is two confirmation biases battling it out.

Most likely neither approach is correct, and both explanations are self-serving, and oddly nostalgic in orientation for the business environment. There is plenty of academic material on the increased self-serving bias of successful people.

How this type of content benefits the corporation, a hypothetical broader group of constituents, or future decision-making is truly beyond me. Desirability bias plays in too, with leaders wishing to believe the rosiest possible version of events in an era of virtue-signaling.

I have yet to see such an interaction where one party asks the other — what is different about your situation than mine, or what is different about your approach to leadership than mine? — if we ever got here we might see how attempting to teach from experience inhibits learning from experience.

Leaders would be much better served by counting the exogenous factors which may have contributed to their success, and by observing the ways in which they might be wrong. I would guess that thought leadership output and innovation are inversely related, in the long run.

I am thinking of these lessons in particular as we begin to question the assumptions of the growth environment and the management lessons we have gleaned from the last twenty years or so.