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Values for leadership

Nov 25, 2011 Editorial

 

 

With only three days to the elections, maybe we ought to talk about leadership? Perhaps the subtlest, and therefore the most elusive dimension of leadership concerns values.
For some, the word ‘leadership’ is a totally value-neutral term. Anyone who influences others is a leader regardless of whether the impact is positive or negative. As educator Parker Palmer has noted, “A leader is someone with the power to project shadow or light” onto the world around him. The result can be a world “as light-filled as heaven or as shadowy as hell.”
From this perspective, many different kinds of people, good and evil, loving and tyrannical, can be called a ‘leader’ today. Undeniably, Mahatma Gandhi and Winston Churchill were leaders. Nelson Mandela is a leader. But Hitler was also a leader. So was Stalin.
Since the same word refers to mass murderers and heroes, visionaries and tyrants, the concept of ‘leadership’ yearns for adjectives. As a naked, unmodified noun, leadership is amoral. Marx claimed leaders “were blind defenders of their economic interests; Freud believed that they were egotistical manipulators of their follower’s projections. For Hitler, Stalin and other 20th century tyrants, ‘leadership’ was a license for genocide.
Unlike those who consider leadership to be a value-neutral term that applies to all who have significant impact on others, we hold the word to be inherently value-based. Perhaps more widely than any other author on leadership, Stephen Covey popularised the notion that leadership inherently involves core values, or principles, that inform the leader’s actions.
“The most effective leaders are, first, models of what I call principle-centred leadership,” writes Covey. “They have come to realize that we’re all subject to natural laws or governing principles, which operate regardless of our awareness of them or our obedience to them. Our effectiveness is predicated upon alignment with these inviolable principles – natural laws in the human dimension that are just as real, just as unchanging, as laws such as gravity are in the physical dimension. These principles are woven into the fabric of every civilized society and constitute the roots of every organization that has endured.”
James MacGregor Burns goes even further. He limits leadership to those situations “when one or more persons engage with others in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality.”
According to Burns, leadership is not only morally based. It actually lifts morality to a higher plane. This second, value-based perspective is most appropriate for us in Guyana because it directly addresses the obvious challenge in democratic societies of making a choice between competing leaders. But it also raises a further thorny question: If we define leadership as value-based, which values matter most? Whose values, yours or mine, will be used to define who are leaders, and whose are not?
These ambiguities can create a profound confusion of language and logic. But in our contentious society, the resolution of our conflicts can itself make a contribution to reducing this confusion. Leadership, we must accept, is context-specific – and our context almost dictates conflict which those who we call leaders should address. It is not only common but also inevitable that leaders come into conflict in societies such as ours.
Because they lead in the interest of the part they represent, they will eventually encounter other leaders who are defending the interests of their part of the whole. On this level, the field of leadership reaches its limit. Two opposing leaders, approaching their shared frontier with competing agendas and often widely divergent world views, cannot find a way out of the conflict without challenging the very concept of leadership itself.
However, if leadership in a divided society is defined as having the skills to bridge the divide, we will acquire a language and framework for filling this vacuum in leadership qualities. By this criterion we would vote for those leaders that have demonstrated through their actions (not just words) that they are committed to working to better all Guyana.

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