When it comes to managing relationships in business, leadership is critical. This has several implications. One is that some people will never make good leaders, while others have greater potential. After that it is down to what the organisation selects. As clan-dwelling humans, we do deserve better, and if we can reduce the rigidities of the hierarchy that leaders must ascend, and we create more multiple roles for different types of leaders to emerge, then perhaps we can reclaim the ideal of the respected leader who is still one of us.
Communications are key to relationships in organisations, and gossip is a natural human impulse.
We rely far too heavily on written forms of communication, for which we were not designed, and e-mail is just making this worse. We network furiously but our networks are barren of feeling. Business climates maintain defensive control of the media, especially in any area of sensitive issues, which leads the rumour mill to work overtime to compensate for nervously tight-lipped management. People are losing the trust they have had in the official media. We need to keep politics on the surface where we can see them, else they get driven underground and weaken the fabric of organisational life.