Commissioned, Curious, and Critical.

‘You’ll know you’re a good leader when people will follow you… if only out of curiosity.”

-General Colin Powell

‘President [Lincoln] never appeared to better advantage in the world …. Though he knows how immense is the danger to himself from the unreasoning anger of that committee, he never cringed to them for an instant. He stood where he thought he was right and crushed them with his candid logic.”

― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

By far most people who call themselves Leader or hold ‘leadership positions’ are Commissioned. Either someone anoints them to ‘lead’, or they dub themselves ‘leader’. These people almost exclusively rely on positional power to get others to follow. In exceptional cases they may bring leadership qualities to their job, or develop some over their tenure. But the absence of any need to do so means they are unlikely to do the ‘push ups’ necessary to develop their ‘leadership muscle’, or any they had will atrophy due to lack of use. The Commissioned leader dominates organisations. Most of our experience and therefore understanding of leadership is via the Commissioned Leader. Thus, should we reach a leadership position, sadly we will most likely emulate the behaviour of the Commissioned leader.

Then there is leadership spawned by Curiosity. Someone sets off to seek the answer to something. If at least one other person follows them - they’re a leader. The Curiosity Leader is also rare. They are almost never found in organisations, because they operate outside hierarchies and don’t wear the badge or title of leadership, nor seek its formalities and burdens. Their followers are usually unknown to them; following their writing or research without acknowledgement.

And the third source of leadership is Criticism. The Critical Leader draws their followers from those either converted by the Critical Leader’s response to criticism, or the Critical Leader’s criticism of another. As with President Lincoln, the logic in the response to criticism, or even the strength and poise of the Critical Leader’s character in the face of the criticism exchange, attracts disciples. The Critical Leader is even rarer than the Curiosity Leader, and is also almost exclusively found outside organisations. Only an exceptional organisation can accommodate a Critical Leader in its midst.

And yet organisations pride themselves in engaging and paying and celebrating the use of a Critical Friend to help them see their blind spots.

Successful start ups will have a disproportionate blend of Commissioned, Curious, and Critical Leaders. The Curious are the boffins who discover and develop a new product. They attract and welcome the Critical, who challenge the assumptions of the Curious, and either convert to the thinking of the Curious, or the Curious convert to the Critical Leader’s position. The start up needs people to administer the company, and thus the Commissioned Leader is appointed. If the organisation is successful, it grows to the point where Curious and Critical are overwhelmed and almost eliminated by the Commissioned Leaders.

It’s a matter of time before the organisation either fails or is bought out.

The exception is if the organisation is not exposed to market forces - in which case Commissioned Leaders dominate, and attract workers who seek to be told what to do.

This is the military, public service, religious institutes, and any organisation reliant on government funding.