QAnon: What can we learn from this leaderless movement?
Many of us have had the misfortune of poor leadership in the workplace. In some cases, poor leadership feels the same as no leadership. Consider the leader who is somehow absent all the time for no reason anyone can explain. This leader shows up from time to time only to disappear again. Or think of the leader who is physically present but doesn’t participate in anything with anyone. This person stays holed up in the office behind closed doors apparently conducting very important business that nobody else is involved in.
Over the last several months we have seen a leaderless movement play out on the world stage in the name of QAnon. Kevin Roose from The New York Times describes QAnon: “QAnon is this big, sprawling conspiracy theory about this global cabal of satanic pedophiles who run the world. No basis in fact. It’s totally made up.” QAnon doesn’t have a leader, and yet there are many thousands of followers who believe in QAnon.
Leaderless groups are a special kind of organizational challenge, whether the leader is literally absent or physically there but not present in important ways. A leaderless group will have a chaotic influence across the organization without the steady hand of guidance from a leader.
But the absence of a leader will be felt most strongly—and most painfully—by the group left leaderless.
There are some things we might learn from studying QAnon, an extreme example of a leaderless movement. In my experience, the behavior exhibited by QAnon followers is predictable and understandable in the context of an absent leader. These behaviors show up in organizations all over the world wherever leadership is absent. Here are some common behaviors for groups lacking a leader:
1. A leaderless group of people will look for a leader.
The first thing that happens in the absence of a leader is that a group will look for one. A power vacuum wants to be filled. In order for a leader to emerge from the crowd and take up the mantle, “specialness” must be conferred on the leader. In the case of QAnon, Q, an anonymous poster on conspiracy message boards, claimed to be a “high-level government insider.” Q also had wildly imaginative ideas about what was happening in the U.S. government, which was itself quite special. While Q didn’t behave as a leader for the movement, and even refused the title, for a while followers decided Q was the leader. At different times followers have also thought Donald Trump was the leader, and perhaps are now giving this title to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The most detrimental outcome for a leaderless group of people is instability. For a team to function effectively, its members must feel secure and safe. That’s impossible if people don’t have a trusted leader to look to for direction. A reluctant leader is similarly damaging, because this uncommitted leader makes people feel uncertain and nervous.
2. The group will look for clues to help them understand what’s happening.
Without a leader, the group is never really sure what’s happening. This can make it hard to rally around ideas, or to know what direction to take. So the group starts looking for clues that will guide them. This is how the group invents their direction. They give meaning to normally meaningless events or circumstances. In our QAnon example, when Donald Trump spoke to the crowd on January 6, there were 17 flags on the stage with him. QAnon followers saw this as a sign, since Q is the 17th letter in the alphabet. The signal they saw was that Trump was acknowledging them. For many, this was all the encouragement they needed to continue believing their narrative.
In an organization with a leader who has poor communication skills, we see the same thing play out. The group is forced to puzzle through cryptic messages and random actions that may or may not mean something. They’ll gather to dissect what’s being said, or what they think is being said, and try to get a sense of how it applies to their own circle of the business. They’re looking for clues to help them understand what’s happening. They want to understand how safe or unsafe they are.
3. The group will rewrite the belief system to support unexpected outcomes.
With QAnon followers, “trust the plan” is a rallying cry often repeated as outcomes don’t match predictions by the group. They formed a generalized explanation for any outcome. This helps them rewrite the belief system to support things that have actually happened. The longer a group can incorporate a total rewrite into the belief system, the longer the group can carry on without a leader, searching for cryptic clues and hidden signals to know what’s next.
Shifting a belief system in the workplace is difficult and painful work. There are two common scenarios that see an organization’s belief system rewritten. One reason is when a company is working through a culture change, an intentional and deliberate shift. But in this case the re-write is taken under the guidance of leadership. The other reason for an organization’s belief system to be re-written is when significant events warrant it. For example, if misdeeds and wrongdoing by leadership are uncovered publicly, the group will shift the belief system. This happens almost organically, a spontaneous response to unexpected outcomes. When a group is met with an outcome that doesn’t align with previously held beliefs, the group has no choice but to rewrite the belief system.
What can we learn?
While QAnon is an extreme example of a leaderless movement, and one that continues to unfold, it’s clear that much of the group’s behavior is reflected in organizational psychology. From a research perspective, we can—and should—learn from every bit of it.
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