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

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.