Slaying the leadership zombies inside us

I recently had a flashback to an appraisal I had around five years ago. I’d been acting up into a more senior, vacant role for some time and was getting great feedback. So my confidence was knocked when I heard words to the effect of, “You’ll definitely be great in a management role at some point, but you’re too young right now”.

I was stumped. I asked questions and tried to understand what was being said to me. I was certain there must be something within my control that I could fix or improve – deepening my emotional intelligence or resilience, perhaps. But there wasn’t any tangible practical feedback I could leverage, simply the notion that I was ‘too young to be a manager’. The experience was frustrating, and it stayed with me. Looking back, the comment was one of my earliest experiences of ‘zombie leadership’.

Zombie leadership refers to beliefs and practices that won't die out, despite there being no evidence of their use or value in the 21st -century workplace. Often presented as obvious and rooted in convention, they are rarely challenged, but you can spot them if you know what to look for. For example, zombie ideas about leadership oversimplify and avoid nuance (‘All leaders are charismatic’), lack hard evidence (‘Leaders are born, not made’) and reinforce elitist hierarchies (‘Only senior staff can be leaders’).

The zombie idea I was confronted with was that leadership comes with age – that it’s not something you can learn or exhibit during the early part of your career. Some zombie ideas can seem comforting and validating to those already in leadership positions. This is because zombie leadership operates by protecting and serving those already in and with power. It rejects the voices and presence of those who simply don’t have the ‘exclusive’ skills required. And it’s for this reason that disproven, archaic leadership ideas resurface time and again. At its core, these ideas appeal to the egos of those who have already ‘made it’ and make it harder for others to join them.

For the first time ever, the health and care workforce includes four different generations: Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials and Generation Z. Each brings its own cultural expectations and baggage to work, although not all of this is unhelpful. In fact, the combination of hugely diverse generational insights and experiences might even be a potential superpower in the modern health and care workplace. But the presence of zombie leadership ideas – such as ‘All leaders have a specific set of traits’ or ‘Only some people have it in them to become leaders’ – won’t help us realise that superpower.

Leadership in health and care can and should come from anywhere, and be built on diverse experiences, life lessons learnt, and leadership inclinations and behaviours that aren’t necessarily visible on a CV. In a health and care system under immense strain, and in a rapidly evolving world of technology and artificial intelligence, we need a much more distributed and collective perspective on leadership. We cannot afford to miss out on the potential talent, energy and skill of those who don't 'look' like or fit traditional, outdated leadership moulds. The health and care leadership of the future will need to break the patterns of the past and the undying ideas that keep us trapped there.

We must try something new for a future-focused, sustainable workforce. In practical terms, this ‘something new’ starts by opening our eyes to fresh or unexpected leadership behaviours, wherever they may come from. Our definition of and criteria for leadership needs to evolve to meet our rapidly changing world of work. This evolution comes at the cost of doing the hard, honest work of letting go of our own outdated ideas and practices. And it’s about acknowledging that the leadership of the future will need to break the patterns and principles of the past.