Epidemic Leadership. Larry McEvoy

a recent article out of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the authors note the common placement of narcissists in essential and influential leadership positions with disastrous effects.¹⁰ Those effects marry the pathology of narcissistic people with the flaw of single-point-source leadership models and mal-designed selection biases (which themselves can be epidemic). As multi-point source phenomena with multiple sources of power and influence, social epidemics protect organizations by integrating a kind of “participatory source code” as a hedge against the over influence of a particular personality type. In a positive epidemic, a solitary narcissistic leader cannot create the negative effects of point-source narcissism. Collective intelligence blunts the risk and effect of singular “anti-intelligence.” Authoritarianism can certainly be its own epidemic, or rather the source of an epidemic of acquiescence; but a properly designed epidemic can blunt the rise of personality-based leaders.

      The behavior of epidemics themselves rests in firm and accessible scientific principles that any leader can put to work, right now, in any environment, whatever your formal positional power. Epidemics appear with infinite variation and allow us to understand how to lead with analogous flexibility. Conversely, they all follow a similar structure and map and invite us to understand how to lead with simplicity and stability. What good things those would be embodied in leadership itself as an epidemic: flexibility, stability, simplicity.

These are serious times, potentially dark times. They are also fantastically open and potential times. We don't have to watch helplessly while the terrifying epidemics of our day wash over our collective well-being and institutional function. Sometimes epidemics cannot be stopped; sometimes they can. Sometimes the best answer is to overwhelm them with the same idea-trafficking, effect-multiplying, resistance-responding approach that epidemics already embody. Sometimes we don't need to wait for an epidemic to wake us up; we can spin them up, good ones, right where we are.

      Leading this way is grounded in serious science, but that doesn't mean it has to be complicated or exhausting. It does mean taking a look at our assumptions about leading, organizing, and how things really get done sustainably and at scale. Your team, your company, your congregation, your community, and our world all wait.

      Ready?

Seeking the Good Disease

      In May 2008, a few months into my CEO tenure, Cari Davis, our marketing and communications director, stopped in one day and inspected my whiteboard scribbling. Cari had been born in the hospital and grew up in our community. She was educated on the East Coast, had served on the board, and had taken a position in the organization a couple years earlier. She and I had been talking about how our communication, both formal and informal, could reinforce old or new patterns in the organization's function.

      “What is this?” she asked.

      “It's a map. Of our disease.” I pointed to various interconnected people, locations, and issues, outlined as dots and boxes with connecting lines. “I thought it was just here”—I pointed with my marker—“but then it showed up here”—I pointed again—“and then here. It's not every single person, but it's an awfully high percentage. It seems to be everywhere.”

      “What's the disease? ‘We've always done it this way’?”

      “Oooh, I like that,” I said. “But no. It's this.” I pointed to the CPD lettered within the big circle. “I call it Chronic Proliferative Dysphoria.”

“Sounds medical.”

      “It does,” I said. “It's a silly little term I made up for our organizational syndrome: unhappy people creating more unhappiness and proliferating it across their work, constantly, to the detriment of our results, our ability to change, and our vitality. That's my doctor's diagnosis.”

      “You're right.” She studied the circles and initials. “It is everywhere. So how do you cure something that's everywhere?”

      “Not sure yet. Not by surgery. I am positive the high power of the CEO megaphone is not going to cure this disease. I wish we had a vaccine, but it's too late. We need to replace the bad disease with a good one. We have to find out what that good disease is. Yesterday.”

Notes

      1 1 “2014–2016 Ebola Outbreak in West Africa,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, last reviewed March 8, 2019, https://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/history/2014-2016-outbreak/index.html.

      2 2 Colette Flight, “Smallpox: Eradicating the Scourge,” BBC, last updated February 17, 2011, https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/smallpox_01.shtml.

      3 3 Donald A. Henderson, “The Eradication of Smallpox—an Overview of the Past, Present, and Future,” Vaccine 29, suppl. 4 (December 30, 2011): D7–D9, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2011.06.080.

      4 4 Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 30; see figure.

      5 5 John Seven, “The Black Death: A Timeline of the Gruesome Pandemic,” History.com, accessed January 28, 2021, https://www.history.com/news/black-death-timeline.

      6 6 Robert Kessler, “What Is Disease X?” EcoHealth Alliance, August 3, 2019, https://www.ecohealthalliance.org/2018/03/disease-x.

      7 7 David M. Cutler, PhD, “The COVID-19 Pandemic and the $16 Trillion Virus,” JAMA 324, no. 15 (October 20, 2020): 1495–1496, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2771764.

      8 8 Jennifer Abbasi, “Large Meta-analysis Digs into Obesity's COVID-19 Risks,” JAMA 324, no. 17 (November 03, 2020): 1709–1711, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2772071.

      9 9 David Quammen, “How Viruses Shape Our World,” National Geographic, February 2021, 48.

      10 10 Lee Simmons, “How Narcissistic Leaders Destroy from Within,” Stanford Graduate School of Business, April 30, 2020, https://stanford.io/3f4169L.