The Algorithmic Tyranny of the Aspirational Average Leader

In an age dominated by social media and digital platforms, the popular discourse surrounding leadership has become thoroughly mediated. The offerings and content of what Barbara Kellerman a decade ago called the “leadership industry” – a nexus of management consultancies, business schools, publishers, and thought leaders – increasingly manufacture consensus, if not conformity, around circumscribed leadership ideas that are engaging but often superficial (2012). Many core ideas are amplified and circulated through social media algorithms, streaming platforms, and podcasts and saturate popular consciousness. Personal branding, marketability, and commodifiable tools are prioritized over rigorous analysis, substantive exchanges, and nuanced perspectives.

As a result, the very structures, incentives, and dynamics of predominant institutions and media platforms constrain leadership thinking into narrow, shallow, and repetitive forms. The hard work of leading and developing leaders in the real world is displaced by generic frameworks, pithy slogans, and folk theories of leadership. Wannabe leaders are inundated with content but deprived of depth and context, left unable to find specific, evidence-based solutions to their own challenges and the messy realities of leadership. Progress is assumed as inevitable in today’s technology-driven media landscape, yet it may actually be regressing leadership discourse.

More specifically, the regression is to the idea of an “average leader” marked both by an ongoing celebration of exceptional, high-performing leaders and entrepreneurs and by a largely consensual vision of what good and effective leadership development “should” look like. The average leader emerges through triangulation: neither larger-than-life senior executives or young but precociously accomplished leaders, nor practicing the gamut of personal and professional improvement activities constantly being promoted, the majority of readers or viewers occupy an aspirational middle ground. The incessant consumption of others’ success stories and of self-improvement recommendations drives a quest for continuous self-improvement, fed by concerns of personal and professional inadequacy – and averageness.

By applying a critical lens at the intersection of the leadership industry, management research, and media ecology, we can illuminate how the contemporary media environment produces this more homogenous and potentially restrictive around view of leadership while too often excluding alternative perspectives. We can also draw upon critiques of media structures and cultures, connecting historical arguments to the present day of algorithms, virality, and always-on content. Ultimately, we can call for more systemic, creative, adaptive, heterogeneous, and deep-thinking approaches to leadership practice and development.

Leadership Entertainment

The premise here is that the field of leadership development should be continually shaped and driven by multiple viewpoints, critical discourse, and emergent thinking. It should be more adaptive, interactive, and rough-edged. Yet the institutional arrangements and incentives of the contemporary leadership industry, as currently structured, dictate a much narrower purpose than supporting the open exchange of ideas and advancement of practices that are fit for purpose. Many of the major players – whether business schools, consultancies, or individual gurus – are driven to deliver the excitement, emotional uplift, and good feelings wanted in training programs by their clientele. As Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer observes bluntly, “the leadership industry has clearly been better at providing heroes, myths, stories, and inspiration than it has been at making workplaces better or leaders last longer in their jobs” (2015: 48) This means sustaining a market for generic yet enticing leadership lessons, frameworks, and credentials that can be bought and sold at scale.

Read the full article on Substack!