The Read: Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time
Friday's Child is a Big Fan of Narcissism and Lying
Why did I get this book?
I picked it up in a bookstore back when it was published in 2015. The title caught my eye, and I was thinking a bit about how universities and colleges celebrate “leadership” as an attribute. The apparent cynicism of the title appealed to me, and when I saw it was a critique of the “leadership industry”, e.g., of life coaches and consultants who did workshops for aspiring leaders on how to lead, that seemed even more in line with my own skepticism.
Is it what I thought it was?
It’s a Jekyll and Hyde thing. Like a lot of business writing, it’s often paper-thin and pulls out a lot of the standard anecdotes and references. (If you invented a drinking game based on rapid-fire reading business-school books where you had to drink every time Atul Gawande and Ignaz Semmelweis get mentioned as illustrating a lesson that businesses need to learn, you’d be drunk by the third book.) A lot of the book consists of setting up a straw man and then huffing and puffing at it. That’s still pretty appealing when the target is what Pfeffer calls the “leadership industry” and its conventional wisdom.
It is not quite so appealing when you get into the heart of the book and realize Pfeffer is telling actual leaders to go ahead and be narcissistic self-aggrandizing liars, to not worry about whether there is trust in their organizations, and to look out for #1 always. The reasoning for the most part boils down to, “Well, that’s how CEOs and organizational leaders actually behave and it seems to work pretty well.” That is not what I was expecting.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
Considering that the book is more or less endorsing Donald Trump’s approach to leadership (though Pfeffer periodically spoke during Trump’s presidency about how terrible his leadership style actually was), it might have some historical value about explaining how our CEO/leadership culture got itself into the mess we’re in.
It also is a pretty good window into the moral world of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, if anybody needed any further clarification on that point.
Also if you happen to be a narcissistic, lying, self-interested leader who bullies people, you’re going to love this book, because it says you’re doing exactly what you ought to do. You’re a superstar, man, don’t listen to those leadership coaches.
Quotes
“To build a science of leadership, you need reliable data. To learn from others’ success, you need to know what those others did. The best learning, simply put, comes from accurate and comprehensive data, either qualitative or quantitative. But the leadership business is filled with fables.”
“Because inspiration does not work very well to produce tangible change, one can make a good living saying it again and again.”
“The motivation to believe in heroes and a just world circumvents people’s critical facilities. So people join organizations and sign up with leaders only to be disappointed, or worse.”
“Immodesty in all its manifestations—narcissism, self-promotion, self-aggrandizement, unwarranted self-confidence—helps people attain leadership positions in the first place and then, once in them, positively affects their ability to hold on to those positions, extract more resources (salary), and even helps in some, although not all, aspects of their performance on the job.”
“One of the reasons leaders lie is that they seldom face serious consequences for doing so.”
“I am a big fan of trust…But I no longer believe that trust is essential to organizational functioning or even to effective leadership. Why? Because the data suggest that trust is notable mostly by its absence.”
“Or as a former student told me one evening at a dinner accompanied by a little too much wine, ‘We live in an era of shared sacrifice. The employees sacrifice, and I share in the money they give up.’”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
Pfeffer’s main argument, such as it is—essentially repeated again and again after the stitching together of a highly curated selection of social psychology and social science with examples of business leadership and Pfeffer’s stories about anonymous confidences told to him at dinners and after talks—is that the leadership industry repeats a series of optimistic and upbeat recommendations for how leaders should behave that are neither true descriptions of how leaders actually behave nor are they useful recommendations that would positively change how organizations were led if they were followed.
The odd thing is that he also repeats two other points with some frequency: that failures of business leadership are far more common than they should be and that employees in workplaces are “distrustful, disengaged, dissatisfied, despairing”. That seems pretty on the money right now in the middle of “the Great Resignation”, and his conclusion is that workers feel this way because there is such a disconnection between what leaders and their communications teams say about the organization and the leader and the reality that most people experience.
I’m with him up to this point—that the gap between the utopian rhetoric of a lot of internal and external communications from workplaces and their leaders and the procedural and moral reality of their internal culture is corrosive and produces cynicism and dissatisfaction. It’s his resolution that unsettles me, which is that leaders should just stop pretending and embrace all those putatively negative characteristics.
What are those characteristics?
Go ahead and be a narcissist.
Don’t bother being authentic, people don’t want you to act like yourself.
Lie always and often.
Distrust is good, it keeps people on their toes and self-interested.
Go ahead and get all the money and benefits for yourself that you can.
Look out for #1 always and only. Bully anybody who gets in your way.
The folks who follow these prescriptions, he says, are successful leaders. Here’s his list of examples: Carly Fiorina, Rebekah Brooks, Lyndon Johnson, Henry Kissinger, Roger Ailes, Linda Wachner, J. Edgar Hoover, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, Paul Allen, Tina Brown, Martha Stewart.
He acknowledges that from some standpoints, maybe these don’t look like such of a success—a lot of them had unhappy lives precisely because of their personalities. He doesn’t really seem to give much of a shit about what they did to other people or the world in general while leaders or what they did to their own organizations. He wants us to understand that when you hear about an honest, modest, trustworthy, authentic, selfless leader you’re generally hearing a bunch of lies. His point is that our organizations are built to reward those negative characteristics so those are the people who get the leadership roles and that if you don’t like that, well, change the world or whatever, you hippy, don’t try to pretend that’s how leadership works under the present conditions.
On his list of characteristics, I could do a bit of Sesame Street’s “one of these things is not like the others” and acknowledge that I think even what I’d prefer from leaders is not authenticity if by that we mean “behave as exactly the person you are”. Leadership definitely is a performative art, and basic emotional intelligence involves reading the room you’re in and being the version of yourself that the room needs you to be. But on everything else? Maybe power in its present form rewards lying, self-interested, bullying, mistrustful, egomaniacal leaders but that’s no good for anybody but the leaders. Pfeffer’s sense of “successful” here seems entirely tautological, despite his complaints throughout the book that nobody has good data on leadership and nothing gets measured—if we were going to be genuinely systematic about leadership and outcomes, then we’d have to rigorously set the terms of what we mean by “success” and we’d have to have a dataset that isn’t “people Jeffrey Pfeffer thinks are hardasses who succeeded”. There’s nothing that makes me more irritable than light social science where someone complains of a lack of rigor and measurability and then goes on to pass out judgments and make recommendations with the same careless abandon as the people they’re criticizing.
What seems to escape him is that work environments are horrific and people are dismayed not because they just want leaders to be honest about their own lying, inauthentic, narcissistic and self-interested behaviors, but because they want their experience of work to be different than it is, including how leaders behave. Yes, sure, let’s not confuse the normative with the descriptive, let’s be truthful about how things actually are—but let’s not settle for the truth, which seems to be mostly what Pfeffer does when he’s not actually endorsing it. If there’s anybody mixing up the normative and the descriptive, it’s Pfeffer, because he thinks that having identified the descriptive, it must be the inevitable and desired normative. Philadelphia set a record for homicides this year, and we should be clear about that, but being clear-headed about that being the truth doesn’t mean that we should just say “oh well people gonna kill each other, that’s just the way it is, must be a reason why. I mean, almost everybody is still alive and things are going on as normal, Gritty is still the Flyers’ mascot, this is what success looks like”.
I suppose if I were being rigorously fair, I’d read Pfeffer’s book Power to see if he grasps what he doesn’t seem to grasp here, which is that he’s describing what is descriptively true about having power as if it were normatively true about the necessary dispositional and behavioral characteristics of leadership. E.g., he’ll look at a case like Larry Ellison and conclude that there is plenty of evidence that Larry Ellison lied frequently in his leadership role and then argue from there that this really worked for Ellison, hence, it’s what leaders really do, so let’s stop lying about lying, because nobody really had a problem with him doing that. Whereas I look at the cases he’s citing and think, “Nobody said they had a problem with powerful people behaving badly because that’s what power is: the ability to coerce people to accept conditions they dislike and suffer under.” Pfeffer keeps wondering why no one does “due diligence” to see whether the story of saintly behavior by a CEO is actually true, and the answer is nobody tells the truth not because they believe in all the leadership bullshit that Pfeffer is rightly cynical about but because it’s dangerous to their careers and lives to do so.
I don’t have any sense actually of why Pfeffer did seem to think that Trump’s White House was an organizational disaster, because Trump as President seems to have been 100% on board with the basic recommendations of this book. “Sometimes you have to behave badly to do good” is maybe a solution for the CEOs and leaders that Pfeffer is fluffing, but it’s not a solution for anybody else in the world.