By this I mean, organize around some single person for leadership, or in other contexts focus on a popular figure. Even societies that tend to be described as more collectively-organized/oriented tend to do this.
People are people and are as flawed as one another, so this pervasive tendency to elevate others is odd to me. It can be fun and goofy as a game, but as a more serious organizing or focal principle, it just seems extremely fragile and prone to failure (e.g. numerous groups falling into disarray at the loss of a leader/leader & their family, corruption via nepotism and the like, etc.).
Word. I think you’re correct and I think a big part of things is that leadership truly requires taking responsibility. So they often mistake their own failures as bad leadership because people have a much easier time blaming the problem on anyone but themselves. Talk to just about anyone about why they didn’t get a good review or got fired or got passed by for a promotion, and very rarely do they take ownership of the problem and instead blame just about anything else.
This is also I think tying into your idea that it’s easy to be a bad leader and the common conception of bad managers (especially middle managers.) Bad leaders blame the team or the market or the next level up in management, and rarely take ownership for the failures of the team because again, people just aren’t wired to do that very well.
These sound sort of contradictory, but I think that the ideas can coexist. A person might fail that has a good leader, but if they really are a good leader, they’re going to be asking themselves if they could have done something differently to help that person under them succeed. And if they are a good leader, that person’s failure won’t be allowed to become the team’s failure.
Parents used to read a quick story out of Guideposts every morning at breakfast. Think of it as a nondenominational, “I believe in god” sort of publication. Extraordinarily useful stories, didn’t require much, if any, religion.
One story about a pilot stuck with me then, and has for 40-years. Pilot’s telling his buddy how he’s responsible for everything on his aircraft.
“Yeah, but what if the ground crew gives you bad fuel.”
“I should have checked that.”
“Fine. But what if an engine fails?”
“That’s on me. I should have checked maintenance records.”
“FINE. What if terrorists hijack the plane?” (This was the 80’s when such events were hilariously common.)
“All me. The safety of my plane, my crew and my passengers is my responsibility alone.”
I’m doing an awful job retelling the story, but you get the gist. No matter what his friend threw at him, the answer was, “I could have done $X.”
Imagine the world we could live in if everyone thought, “I could have done something differently”, instead of whining. I’d be hard pressed to describe a bad spot in my life where I could not have made a different decision.
Related:
President at my last job came to my office and said, “Look. You’re going to fuck up at some point. All I ask is that you don’t lie, deflect responsibility or try to hide it. Just come to me, tell me about it and we’ll figure out how to fix it and make it not happen again.” Good as his word.
One time our biggest client’s managers figured a way to see each other’s salary in the new system. My fault? Meh, I could have blamed the software, it really was their oversight. OTOH, I could have found the bug myself with a little more diligence.
Pulled him out of a meeting, shaking in my boots, explained the issue. He just chuckled and said, “Don’t worry about it. Let’s go look.”
That’s the kind of attitude that makes you a trusted leader, on both our parts.
(Someone who had abusive parents is going to object to all this. I can’t help that. Taking responsibility, no matter what, has worked quite well for me in life.)
This is pretty much what I was getting at. There are always circumstances and things that hold you back, but foregoing your own agency is the one that will hold you back the most.