THE age of humanistic leadership is here to stay.
No one ever liked having an authoritarian boss (unless they liked to suffer), yet for decades, this type of leadership has been tolerated and even promoted in certain cultures.
I can already hear some old-timers groaning as they read this. ‘Why can’t things stay like they were! My style of leadership worked before. Why not now? Younger employees are entitled and spoiled. They have to pay their dues like I did and comply with what I want them to do.’
Here’s why.
If you make people fear you, or resent you, the last thing they are going to do is give you their support and ideas. In today’s tight employment market, talented people have a choice of who they want to work for and with. Innovation and creativity along with hard work are more valuable than ever before. Competition is fierce in almost every industry vertical, and change is a constant. Therefore, holding on to talented people and reducing churn is absolutely necessary to remain competitive and viable as a business.” (Marc Robertson, “Why Authoritarian Leadership Simply Doesn’t Work Anymore,” Forbes Magazine, Feb. 14, 2019)
In my own organization today, this philosophy of humanistic leadership is very much part and parcel of our organizational philosophy. Hardly anyone rules by fear anymore, and all employees are entitled to speak their minds without fear of repercussions.
There are two things, at least to us, that are quite obvious in terms of the superiority of this approach over the traditional authoritarian formula that other companies still employ to this day.
For one, the younger generation of employees respond better to persuasive and participative leadership. They want to feel that they are involved in running the company, and that their voices count. And from the results perspective, the quality of the decisions when alternatives are not coerced are noticeably better, and most often achieve the desired effects compared to when they are unilaterally simply handed down.
But if this principle works best in the corporate world, why is this so difficult to transplant into public governance?
Over the past week, the whole episode of Trump and the Ukrainian government has been playing like a bad B-movie over our TV screens. Seems like Trump’s leadership style as chief executive officer and now as US President isn’t necessarily humanitarian. He demands absolute loyalty from those who work for him, even going so far as to say that the whistleblower who reported the whole Ukrainian episode was a “traitor” to America. What he was in effect saying was that the person was a traitor to him personally, and not to the country. He was using himself and the country interchangeably, although in actual fact there is a big difference. And loyalty to the country should always be paramount for all citizens, while allegiance to the President is dependent on whether or not the President deserves such allegiance.
In the corporate world, the leader demanding such blind loyalty is now an extinct species. The norm now, is they see themselves as stewards and mentors, rather than autocrats and dictators.
Isn’t it high time that we should start to demand that our government leaders practice the same form of humanistic leadership?