Читать книгу Epidemic Leadership - Larry McEvoy - Страница 23

In a recent article out of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the authors note the common placement of narcissists in essential and influential leadership positions with disastrous effects.¹⁰ Those effects marry the pathology of narcissistic people with the flaw of single-point-source leadership models and mal-designed selection biases (which themselves can be epidemic). As multi-point source phenomena with multiple sources of power and influence, social epidemics protect organizations by integrating a kind of “participatory source code” as a hedge against the over influence of a particular personality type. In a positive epidemic, a solitary narcissistic leader cannot create the negative effects of point-source narcissism. Collective intelligence blunts the risk and effect of singular “anti-intelligence.” Authoritarianism can certainly be its own epidemic, or rather the source of an epidemic of acquiescence; but a properly designed epidemic can blunt the rise of personality-based leaders.

The behavior of epidemics themselves rests in firm and accessible scientific principles that any leader can put to work, right now, in any environment, whatever your formal positional power. Epidemics appear with infinite variation and allow us to understand how to lead with analogous flexibility. Conversely, they all follow a similar structure and map and invite us to understand how to lead with simplicity and stability. What good things those would be embodied in leadership itself as an epidemic: flexibility, stability, simplicity.

These are serious times, potentially dark times. They are also fantastically open and potential times. We don't have to watch helplessly while the terrifying epidemics of our day wash over our collective well-being and institutional function. Sometimes epidemics cannot be stopped; sometimes they can. Sometimes the best answer is to overwhelm them with the same idea-trafficking, effect-multiplying, resistance-responding approach that epidemics already embody. Sometimes we don't need to wait for an epidemic to wake us up; we can spin them up, good ones, right where we are.

Leading this way is grounded in serious science, but that doesn't mean it has to be complicated or exhausting. It does mean taking a look at our assumptions about leading, organizing, and how things really get done sustainably and at scale. Your team, your company, your congregation, your community, and our world all wait.

Ready?