It's almost election time, which means I am now being pitched left and right (so to speak) about which candidate I should elect. Which individual I should send to Washington (or Annapolis, etc.) who will either turn things around or continue us on our path, blah, blah, blah.

As you can tell, I'm fairly cynical when it comes to politics (well, political ads at least–I do vote in every election), but the piece that bugs me the most is the emphasis on the individual. The promise is always the same: elect this individual and he or she will change things. And, frankly, the complaints I hear from people in my community is along the same lines: either that individual is bad, so we need to elect a new individual, or that challenger is bad, so we need to stick with the current individual.

It's hard, because we do, in fact, need to make choices about individuals who will sit in positions of authority, but we NEVER have conversations about how the system needs to improve in order to solve the problems we have. We never assess the strength or capacity of our system and talk about what types of individuals we may need to bring into the system to help it work better.

Instead we talk about needing "leadership." We want vision and charisma and inspiration and decisiveness and an ideology with which we agree. We demand these individuals be "leaders," and they respond by reading the books to find out what Lincoln or Kennedy did (or Welch or Fiorina) so they can be better leaders.

This is a myth. Read Jim Stroup's post where he summarizes some of the (aweseome) writing he's done about the myth of individual leadership. It's like he's pulling back the curtain and exposing the Wizard of Oz as he points out that leadership potential or presence can't be predicted, that there is no agreement on what "essential" leadership skills are, that it forces people to act in ways that contradict who they are, and that it is disconnected from getting work done, improving organizations, and solving problems. He may be a bit harsh, but he says leadership is "irrelevant, distracting, and thus destructive on numerous levels."

Ouch. I understand our intentions, and they are noble. There is nothing wrong with individuals making themselves better, but as soon as we link it to the mythical notion of individual leadership, we end up going off track. We take our eyes off of the system's capacity. 

What we need is the ability to work on individuals and the system at the same time. And this doesn't apply to just "leadership." It applies to performance evaluation, and diversity and inclusion, and marketing, and a long list of topics in organizations that have typically been oriented around individuals, ideas, and repeatable (and mechanical) models, rather than systems that we can design ourselves, based on where we are and what we're facing. This is what I want to work on in the coming year.

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