Follow The Leader - Myth or Inevitability? (Patreon Preview)

Here's a preview of a bonus drop now streaming on Patreon. It's a peek behind the scenes at where we'll be heading next, with a critical examination of leadership that's likely to push some buttons. If you want to listen to the whole episode, you can access it via a 7-day free trial at patreon.com/thedeeperpulse.

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I'll be back here on the main feed in May. You can also find me on Substack in the meantime. 

Transcript

Candice Schutter: 0:13

Hey y'all. I'm working behind the scenes on some new content that's a very timely follow up to the'cult'ure series and in the meantime, I wanted to share with you my most recent bonus drop over on Patreon. The Deeper Pulse is completely ad-free, and I am very committed to keeping it that way. And one of the ways that I'm able to do so is thanks to the generous support of Patreon donors. Starting for as little as$5 a month, you can join The Deeper Pulse Patreon community, gain access to over a hundred hours of bonus content, and stay in touch with me when I'm not here on the main feed. I tend to drop content once or twice a month, usually twice, fingers crossed, when I have the time. And this content that I'm about to share with you is from my most recent drop, a one-hour episode that you can access on Patreon. It's just the beginning of me taking a more critical and informed look at what it might look like to seek solutions to the problems that have been outlined on the podcast the last few years. Just prior to this episode that you're about to hear an excerpt from, I released another episode on Patreon where I share very personally the backstory behind the'cult'ure series. And that is an episode I may at some point release portions of here on the main feed; but for now, it feels best to keep it available only to subscribers to the podcast. It's probably going to be at least another three weeks until I drop new content here on the main feed. So if you'd like more from The Deeper Pulse in the meantime, consider checking things out over at patreon.com/thedeeperpulse. Hey patrons, welcome to another bonus episode of The Deeper Pulse here on Patreon. Thank you so much for your support of this work. I strive to give back to you through these bonus episodes when I have the bandwidth to do so. And if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you know that I'm currently involved in a graduate program through Arizona State University. It's a master's of science program in organizational leadership. And I had a lot of reservations around it because, well, because of what I'm gonna go into today, my ambivalence around the whole concept of leadership. My aim in signing up for the program wasn't to, you know, become a CEO or lead some large corporation or even a nonprofit. I simply wanted to understand leadership and why things go sideways and what's, what's really going on there? And fortunately, one of the required core courses is around a critical examination of leadership. And it's like coming home, y'all. Realizing that a lot of what I was sensing was spot on, and that I just didn't have a vocabulary to describe it. And when I'm critiquing leaders on the podcast, which I've done an awful lot of, and I'm talking with people and they want to demonize the leader and just be like, well that person's a narcissist, it's as simple as that. And I'm like, it's not as simple as that. In some cases it feels as simple as that. We wanna reduce it to that. But as the'cult'ure series unfolded, and I started to see, okay, wait, this is about more than the Org and wellness culture. And Sarah and Nippy are talking about NXIVM. And Jennifer Rajala's talking about MLMs. And Trina's talking about Christian fundamentalism. And Nikki G's talking about evangelicalism and how it's moved into the White House. And oh, wait a second, okay. It's not just about small-c cults and big-C cults. It's about this water we swim in. And what is the contaminant in the water here? Like what's really going on here? It is not about bad leaders. And this is where I want to go next. Because we are currently in a crisis of leadership. That crisis of leadership is profoundly connected to the ways in which we have given ourselves over to the idea of leadership. Not just the ideals of leadership, but the whole entire idea of leadership and the way that we look at it and define it. And that there is another way of approaching it, and I'm finding language for some of that. Leadership is inevitable. One of our assumptions that I'm gonna be challenging. Secondly, anybody who's been chosen as a leader is in some way, superior and more equipped than those who follow. That they in some way deserve the authority that they've been granted. And because we believe that leadership is necessary and essential, we might defer to that individual. We might glorify that individual. And we might mimic that individual. And one of the ways that social systems remain intact is that they give us role models to replicate. The person who ends up in the leadership role isn't necessarily the person most qualified. Can be, in some ways, but is often if you look at the social system itself, is the person who best represents the ideals of that social system. That person walks the talk, possesses the skills that demonstrates that which the system has pedestal. They have become a representative of that, model of that. And then those people beneath them look to that person as a role model. I mean, think about the language that we use, a role model. That is the role that I should play and I will, thus, model myself after it. Yeah. Basic assumption of leadership. I haven't even gotten into the weeds around any of this. Basic assumption of leadership. Authority is real and necessary. The person who gets the authority deserves it in some way. Therefore, I need to mimic and copy and become a clone of said individual in some capacity, right? And now we have authentic leadership. But there's a lot of debate around what that even means, right? Maybe the person's bringing a little bit more emotional vulnerability. But what is it in service to? If that person is encouraging the people around them to grow and to personally develop, to what end? Because often, like in the space of the Org, we were doing that to line the pockets of the people at the top of the pyramid. And yeah, we received some personal benefit from it, but we were turned into a commodity in service to a system. So this is not to say personal growth shouldn't be a thing. Or that leaders shouldn't exist. Of course, those things can happen. There's other ways to do this, but we have to critically dismantle what we're doing already in order to get there. The people who are the quote unquote followers become a commodity. And the only way to gain power in the system is to become a leader yourself. So you've got people mimicking the model they've been given. And they're clamoring and in some cases competing with each other to become leaders. And this is the thing that, that's always really gotten me, especially around coaching.'Cause I started coaching like, in 2006 or 2007. There wasn't a ton of life coaches at the time. I'm not pretending to be on any sort of leading edge. It just wasn't like, a mainstream thing. But I noticed over the course of almost two decades, just how many people would become coaches of this or that, or it was just like a thing. Like the explosion of the coaching world. And I realize like, oh, these women mostly, are just, like I was, desperate for a voice and some authority in the world. I want my voice to matter, therefore I must lead. Now, of course, that's not inherently true. All of our voices matter. But the culture that we've set up, the society we've created, is such that in order for my voice to matter, I must lead. I must have followers. Look at social media. The way that I gain influence is that I become a leader. That I become an influencer. I become that role model that people look to. That is not a, a well system, y'all. There are so many ways for us to create collective change and to move the needle. And creating more leaders is not the answer. I assure you. Because why is leadership the default? We might actually get better results if we partner up and band together with other people who share our values and collectively move forward together, arm in arm. Versus trying to find somebody who is a lighthouse pointing the way. Which is one way based on one particular vantage point. How is that better? It's not. Nor is that person better than us. And we should question any part of our own thinking or the social order that tells us that other people deserve to be positioned above us in any way. Even if they have more knowledge in a particular domain or more skills in a particular domain, that ladder is a fucking social construction. There's no ladder. There is a ladder because it's socially constructed. But we don't have to reify, this is a word that's used a lot in my studies. Reify, which is thingify, turn a concept, an idea into something tangible that exists. The social ladder has been reified for centuries, which is why it's so hard to not see it as the answer to our problems. Because it's real, in that we have constructed it socially. But it is not truth and it is not essential, and it does not have to exist. And leadership is one of the ways we reify the whole damn thing. And yeah, you take a hit to your identity if you start to question leadership and you have defined yourself as a leader over time. But it's also a huge relief. Because the structure oppresses everyone. Leaders attempting to live up to ideals that are absolutely impossible. Who either burn out or become sort of a divided self. I mean, you look at people who are famous, and they have like, a double life. There's who they are in public, and then there's who they are behind closed doors. Because it's impossible to live up to the ideals that we set. So the leaders aren't any freer. They have more privilege, to be sure. But they're not any freer than the followers. A lot of the people that I talk to have worked or do work in leadership capacities. And again, I'm not trying to take your jobs from you. What I'm trying to do is help us to understand how leadership can become an event and not an identity. And how we can actually create cultures around us that don't encourage followership as a general rule. And the subjugation of self that often comes with it. The inertia that followers experience because of the ladder that the leader holds before them and asks them to climb. That's a problem. It's getting in our way of real true collective change, activism, and impact. Because everyone here is equipped. Not to become a leader. Even this language"to lead themselves." Like how, how embedded is this in our psyches that we even think that way? To lead ourselves. Why must we be led? Aren't we enough? Can't we just move ourselves forward as we are? We don't need to dissociate in order to move forward. We don't need to develop a leader within us. The call is coming from inside the building. I've made that joke a few times, right? Like the cult leader lives within. This is what I'm talking about. It's all connected to this. We need to divorce that idea. And it's not easy. It's complex, which is why I'm gonna go into the weeds of this soon. I'd like to give mad props to my professors at ASU, Dr. Suze Wilson of Massey University, and critical theorists who have been bravely challenging mainstream leadership discourse for the past few decades. I'll be sharing more about their work in the weeks to come. If you'd like to listen to this full one hour episode, check things out over at patreon.com/thedeeperpulse. I'm also now on Substack. It's a great alternative to social media if you wanna stay connected to this work. Thanks for tuning in, and I'll see you next time.