By Gianpierro Petriglieri
To distressed people in troubled times, the least rational leaders make the most sense. This hundred-year-old theory harks back to the work of Sigmund Freud — and having to resort to it to explain a leader’s rise is never good news.
After all, a decade after he cast light on the social forces that would sink Europe into the abyss of totalitarianism, an ailing Freud was forced to flee Vienna for London, where he could, as he put it, “die in freedom.” It was 1938. Soon after, hundreds of thousands began to die for it.
Although most people associate the Viennese psychologist with his controversial conjectures about the unconscious mind, sexuality, and neuroses, fewer know (or acknowledge) that he also put forward one of the most enduring and validated theories of leadership.
In the 1922 book Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud turned his attention to the influence of groups on individual behavior. He did not regard groups kindly.
As Freud saw it, groups amplify emotions and inhibit critical thinking. When people come together in numbers, they are more likely to be swept up in a shared fear or to be enthused by a common faith than they are to engage in reasoned problem solving. For Freud, group membership is a kind of love that makes people vulnerable and often spells trouble.
Groups, he observed, are eager to follow not those who present the most accurate picture of reality, but those who most clearly reflect group members’ cherished ideals. And the more distressing the group’s reality is, the more those ideals became divorced from it.
Freud’s theory was both a challenge to so-called “Great Man” theories of leadership and an explanation of their enduring appeal. Behind every Great Man, he argued, there is an anxious group craving clarity, deliverance, or revenge.
What makes groups select leaders, in short, is not judgment but rather a force entirely opposed to judgment: a wish. “It is impossible to grasp the nature of a group if the leader is disregarded,” he wrote, because it is through picking leaders that groups bring their nature to life.
While groups might share a kind of love for an idealized leader, “the leader himself need love no one else,” Freud warns. “He may be of a masterful nature, absolutely narcissistic, self-confident, and independent.” People will love such a leader all the same — so long as the group continues to cherish the ideal that the leader represents, and so long as the leader can continue to credibly uphold it.
But since reality can only be defied for so long, the leaders who inspire the most enthusiasm by catering to powerful wishes also provoke the most disillusionment when those wishes do not materialize. And when that happens we hardly ever blame ourselves for being irrationally hopeful. We blame the leader for not being good enough — or for not being good any longer.
Like all theories, Freud’s does not apply universally. It suits groups under threat, where cohesion is neither assured by a shared enterprise nor ensured by trusted institutions. In other words, it suits the very circumstances many of us live in today.
Even though the “Great Man” theory of leadership has fallen into disrepute in academic circles, the wish for Great Leaders remains very much alive in both politics and business.
Contemporary social psychologists have found new evidence for Freud’s insights. A growing amount of recent research shows that the more uncertainty we feel, especially about our identities, relationships, and future, the more vulnerable we are to the reassuring appeal of leaders peddling the simplest and most dangerous of narratives:
We are good and they are evil.
It is a “we” defined sharply, superficially, and narrowly, defined to build a wall between those who can claim it and everybody else. Narcissism and divisiveness, Freud understood, aren’t flaws of a certain kind of leadership; they are what define it and make it attractive.
It’s wishful thinking to retort, as some do, that this is not real leadership. And so is to analyze it from a distance, as if only people with certain personalities or of a certain class become infatuated with leaders who look like they themselves wish to be.
Our own theories of leadership may also be made of private wishes. When writers praise gentle, thoughtful, inclusive, and process-loving leaders, they are no more or less in denial of what “real leadership” is than angry voters who admire a populist strongman or board members who select charismatic CEOs.
In the end, the Soft Leader is just a Great Leader in a different guise. Both are charismatic individuals who spell out visions and influence others, something we continue to celebrate rather than warn against. And so we should not be surprised when aspiring leaders who appeal to our judgment rather than our wishes are seen not as sane and rational but as lacking in leadership entirely.
Like romance, leadership might be always made of illusions, but that doesn’t make it less consequential. In picking leaders, groups might seem to lose their minds. It is more accurate to say that precisely then are their minds revealed.
Source: HBR and Gianpierro Petriglieri