Kicking Command and Control Blog December Archive blog.topic  

THE COMMAND AND CONTROL MESSAGE

• Hundreds of millions of voters, otherwise known as the bewildered herd, are usually given the same messge by their political leaders that generations of employees have been given by their bosses. The message is: “We don’t need you to think! We need you to do what we tell you. If there’s any thinking to be done around here, we’ll do it.”    Dean Anderson and Linda Ackerman Anderson have written: “Command-and-control is by far the most common leadership style. Most of today’s leaders were mentored themselves by command-and-control managers, and the culture of most organizations is still based on command-and-control norms. It is hard to escape this leadership style’s historic influence and dominance.ⁱ

Command-and-control leadership assumed that most people are  thoughtless, lazy and unmotivated.   They need constant supervision either by specialists or by people who are smarter and/or more experienced: i.e. the people who have all the answers. Over time, the assumptions of command-and-control leadership become self-fulfilling prophecies. People become what command-and-control leaders expect them to be. The reservoirs of intelligence, creativity, good will and energy that some leaders liberate from the people they lead are unrecognised, untapped and waste

i Dean Anderson & Linda Ackerman, ‘How Command-and-control as a Change Leadership Style Causes Transformational Change Efforts to Fail’, Results From Change, Issue 7, 1 Jun 2002. See www.beingfirst.com/resultsfromchange/200206.html