'Lead us not into temptation …': the overworked notion of leadership

A leader is someone who has followers. He or she must therefore have qualities or values or ideologies that invite people to judge these qualities, values or ideologies and find them good. Leaders are therefore likely to have enemies, because some people will make hostile judgements. Leaders, in a sense, make things easy for other people. They focus attention on issues, and provide ways to deal with them. Leadership can manage change.

So far so good, but leadership is a word that is asked to do too much work. It is tossed around in many contexts, and its meaning is supposed to convey qualities that allow followers (presumably that includes most of us) to transfer responsibility to acknowledged leaders. There are times when leadership becomes an excuse for moral cowardice or stupidity - Adolf Eichmann simply did what his leaders told him to do.

Leadership can only be the prerogative of the few. If we were all leaders, there would be no one to lead. Leadership courses are supposed to reveal the secrets of leadership to more and more people. Sadly, the results seem to be measured by corporate corruption, increased avarice and a precarious moral sense that ranges from uncertainty to contempt towards ethics, principles and values.

Leadership is conflated with power and with charisma. It is also conflated with ruthlessness. Single-mindedness and determination are admired but shade into bloody-mindedness and obstinacy.

Leadership these days often means control and ideology. A leader has simplified beliefs for all situations and seasons, a slogan for everything.

How is the word used? Here are some examples:

1. Mr Churchill was a great war leader.
2. Spartacus was a leader of men and armies.
3. In theses difficult economic and political times, what the country needs is a good leader.
4. In times of change, the company needs a good leader.
5. The imam is a fine spiritual leader.
6. Mother Theresa gave moral leadership by her self-sacrificing example.
7. My indecisiveness was caused by the lack of a leader to tell me what to do.
8. I organised the transport of Jews to extermination camps because I believed in our leaders, and that is what they told me to do.

What do these sentences imply?

Mr Churchill's greatness as a war leader is a paradigm example of the qualities of a national leader. He was judged to be brave, clear-headed, single-minded, determined, resilient. He had ideals which he articulated with famous clarity and rhetorical force. His followers knew very well where they stood, and what was expected of them. Perhaps most significantly, he was a leader who won. The value of his leadership was confirmed by success.

Spartacus, on the other hand, ultimately lost. He was a heroic failure, but still a leader who could control people, motivate them and express ideals for which they would fight. He was a hero, who might have achieved much more as a leader had been born into the right race and family. He was a "natural" leader. He must, presumably, have had charisma, rhetorical powers, physical prowess and strategic abilities of an uncommon degree.

In difficult times… This expresses the longing we have for stability, and the faith we have that all we lack is a leader. It says that we believe that there is always a solution for human and social problems that one particular human can devise and implement. It denies that there are insoluble problems. It says things like "The effect of the drought wouldn't have been so bad if the Premier/the farmers/the water conservation authority had shown some leadership", or "AIDS in Africa wouldn't be half so bad if the governments/churches/health authorities had acted decisively and with real leadership".

In times of change… Change is like real difficulty, because it demands that we accommodate to it. As values change, as society becomes more sexually permissive, more willing to tolerate abortion, reproductive technology and genetic engineering, old values are challenged, and people again look for a mysterious quality of leadership which will somehow lead them through the change. They want the change to be smoothed, the old values to be salvaged. When abruption and disruption happen, and discomfort spreads among the community, the discomfort is blamed on lack of leadership.

Spiritual and moral leadership… Here is another face of leadership, the face of leadership without power. This is leadership which one person or a group of people establish by example. Such leaders express a spiritual or moral ideology by their knowledge and the example of their lives. Moses, Christ and Mohammed were people whose relationships with God were of a special kind, and who drew spiritual authority from the ways in which they lived in that relationship. Both Moses and Mohammed derived forms of political power from the authority they gained in their secular domains, but both began as spiritual leaders.

Mother Theresa, on the other hand, never gained similar political power. Her leadership remained leadership without power. Nevertheless, she was undeniably an example and a focus for charitable works in India. People followed her precepts and example. She was a leader because she had her followers in charity and good works, not because she moulded them into a political or military power.

Personal indecisiveness caused by lack of a leader to follow. There is a classic article, published in Harvard Business Review, by McCoy, which elaborates this concept of leadership. McCoy and a friend are climbing in the Himalayas, a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity". They encounter an Indian holy man, a sadhu, on the mountain. The sadhu is exhausted, ill-clad, possibly dying. Fellow climbers offer limited help, but no one is prepared to take responsibility for his life. The climbers press on, and never discover what happens to the sadhu. Ruminating many years later on his decisions and their ethical uncertainty, he wonders whether he and his fellow climbers acted as they did "…because we did not have a leader who could reveal the greater purpose of the trip to us." Leadership, in this context, seems to become a mode of moral authority necessary for personal ethical decisions. It is perilously close to Eichmann's defence at his trial in Jerusalem, which is the basis of the eighth example. It points to the most distasteful role of leadership - the leader as excuse for personal moral failing.

The ambiguity of leadership

There is revealed in this examination a profound ambiguity inherent in concepts of leadership. On the one hand, Churchillian leadership can rise to an occasion, a challenge that would defeat a lesser person. The triumph of that kind of leadership can lead to a better corporation, institution, nation or even world. It focuses attention on fundamental issues - freedom, the institution's values, the corporation's mission - and strives single-mindedly to preserve and strengthen them. It has to be backed by clear beliefs and expressed in action with courage, persistence and commitment. Still more importantly, it is backed by supportable moral values that are fundamental to human security and flourishing. Whatever you may think of Churchill and his politics, he espoused a version of personal and national freedom that even his political enemies found it difficult to condemn. His was a kind of instrumental leadership, in which the leader becomes the means by which followers achieve a particular interest.

But we must not forget the other side of instrumental leadership. Churchill came to power as the antagonist of Hitler. Hitler, too, focused the attentions and energies of his countrymen, and strove to establish a new world order. He had vision, energy, charisma, persistence and endurance - all the qualities we might seek in a "leader". He also revealed in the starkest way the dangers inherent in this kind of leadership - leadership with a distorted moral basis. Hitler's leadership exemplifies the awful dangers of leadership which depends on charisma, ideology and expediency, on ambition, the use of fear and ruthlessness.

We can characterise another kind of leadership in contrast to the instrumental sort. It is the insubstantial variety, which may be intellectual, moral, spiritual or ideological, or a combination of any of these attributes. It is created from the recognition by others of qualities of mind or soul that attract a following. Medawar at Oxford had the intellectual capacity to make sense of the disparate work emerging from his various laboratories. Those who were working in those laboratories acknowledged his intellectual leadership. Ghandi combined intellectual, moral, spiritual and ideological qualities that made him a leader before he gained political power, and was vested with instrumental leadership.

Insubstantial leadership may translate into something bad if the morals and the ideology that create a following run against the possibilities of human security and flourishing. There are particular dangers when someone begins as a moral or spiritual leader, but becomes an instrumental leader, wielding political or military power. Such a person is not necessarily equipped to manage authority of that kind. Leadership without power has become leadership with power, and power carries the possibility of corruption.

The ambiguity of leadership, therefore, depends not so much on outcomes, but on inputs, the moral principles that underpin the ideology of leaders. Nowhere is the ambiguity of leadership better exemplified than in the Australian debate over "illegal" immigrants. The Prime Minister is praised by those who support detention and border closure for showing real leadership, which protects Australians against all manner of ills, ranging from terrorism to unemployment. Those who disapprove revile him for his lack of leadership, his lack of moral engagement, his cowardly courting of votes.

There can be little doubt that the Prime Minister shows leadership in the instrumental sense, since he has many followers. But that is to measure him by the kind of leadership that can have an ideological base without necessarily having a moral one. Leadership without a moral basis is always potentially disastrous.

Values leadership

Values leadership is one form of insubstantial leadership. It is the ability to bring together and express what a group of people value deeply. In Billy Graham's case, it is a form of Christian belief; in Ghandi's, it was a combination of spiritual belief and political nationalism; for Martin Luther King, Christian religion and a passionate opposition to racism. Value-leadership can exist as leadership-without-power, as it did in the case of Mother Theresa. Power is here understood to mean the ability to control others for particular ends. It may be perfectly benign but has the potential for corruption - for total corruption in the case of someone like Stalin.

Values leadership has obvious dangers. By proclaiming the "rightness" of an ideology, a charismatic, articulate person may persuade whole nations to take destructive and unjust actions. Hitler is the obvious example. Values leadership is good when it leads others to things that promote human security and flourishing, bad when its purposes and effects are repressive, increase suffering, demean fundamental dignities, remove liberties, cut across justice, and so on.

Instrumental and value leadership often go together, and in combination can be anything from very good to very bad. Hitler expressed a confused and destructive Nazi ideology, and surrounded himself with "thinkers" like Robert Ley to expand that ideology. He was also an effective instrumental leader, who drew the German people to follow him out of defeat and Depression.

Instrumental leadership without values leadership always runs the risk of turning bad, simply because it is opportunistic, and lacks a basis for consistent morally based policy and action. Values leadership without instrumental leadership can be just as dangerous. By detaching itself from practical actions and their consequences, it can lead to theory isolated from reality. Marxism proved to be of this kind. Marx's theories were taken over by instrumental leaders, who modified them as they saw fit, and distorted them to justify totalitarian regimes, like those of Stalin and Mao. Pure theory is too vulnerable to corruption and perversion at the hands of opportunists.