Four Ideas About Leadership

I presented earlier today on leadership for our Sigma Kappa Delta chapter. Slides are below. It's worth talking about why I did this.

I never thought I'd talk about leadership in the way business schools or youth pastors do. This isn't to say I held their advice in contempt. It is more to say that I preferred reading through a philosophical text. Or that I wanted words to describe the amazing things I saw. Could leadership be descended upon from a higher plane? Could I talk about how wisdom works? Or outline what I thought was beautiful? Maybe that would lead (no pun intended) to leadership.

I don't know anymore that you can "descend" on leadership. Some places give the impression you can. Consider someone who believes the skill of statesmanship can be attained by carefully meditating on Ben Franklin's literary works. Maybe there is a higher truth about the American experience hidden in the thought of the Framers. Still, if you get that higher truth and you want to promulgate it, does that make you a statesman or a prophet? Someone might say there is no difference between those roles, but in truth, there's a huge one. To a degree, a leader must serve all they purport to lead regardless of what they believe; you're leading them to empowerment and encouraging them. The truth serves them, and maybe they will serve it, but the latter is not a requirement.

This is not to deny that religious leaders exist. They very much do and at least one of them is a veritable founder. It is more to say that a concept of truth entirely beholden to a fundamentalist pattern of belief will only yield ersatz leadership. The mannerisms, rhetoric, and structures will be present in what is called leadership, but it won't be leadership. People won't benefit and they will be pushed not to see benefits in any way other than they are told. By contrast, consider how flexible MLK is – how he sees his movement growing where others see trouble.

All this is to say that the question of leadership revealed itself when I learned that some will not accept insight. It doesn't matter how helpful or right you are. It doesn't matter you see the accident about to happen. Once you understand that some are stuck in their ways, you know leadership is a descent, but not the one you first anticipated. You know you want to see how things work or do not work for others–you want the relative character of knowledge to be operative–before you act or speak.

I believe what I've outlined in the slides fits with knowing where you are before leading. I've set forth four ideas for leaders: emphasize/recognize uniqueness, commit to building a vision, work on awareness, and see yourself as courageous. Each of these pushes back on a complaint about leadership training, e.g. "it all sounds the same," "people want us to do lots of stuff with no reward," "there's no real science of leadership," and "what if all I want to do is follow?" However, they not only address the complaints, but they should enable one to see goods where they weren't visible before. For example, a major breakthrough for me was learning to almost never impose on a situation until I've seen how others are working with it. I had to exercise awareness. Even in extremely dysfunctional environments, you want to take the time to see what is already effective. If you can increase that impact you've done a lot of good without reinventing the wheel.

(Sometimes you must impose because they are doing the absolutely wrong thing. I remember a flooded basement after a hurricane. The person in charge of the family told the family to empty a flooded basement with buckets because they did not want to ask the neighbors for a generator to run the sump pump. Ask me more about this in person.)

I've ended the slides with some quotes from Aristotle and Xenophon which are useful for further inquiry. Aristotle speaks of "political rule" as ruling and being ruled in turn. Is that how things work in today's culture, you think? Do we prepare people to follow in a way that they can lead? Or vice versa? From Xenophon, I've cited his Socrates, who strongly implies that if someone can manage a household, they can manage a city. Nowadays, I find myself drawn to the more radical ideas this engenders, rather than trying to explain what rhetorical game Socrates is playing.