Leadership Style
Where in your life do you already have a leadership role?
In what area of your life do you have authority, either formal or informal?
Where do you have greater knowledge than others?
Where do you provide a role model for others?
In these areas you are already a leader. How could you become even more influential?
Do you have the role of a teacher?
Where do you give others knowledge and skill?
Are you a designer? Where do you shape others’ lives by what you make?
Are you a coach? Where do you try to bring out the best in others?
Are you a healer? Where do you help others who are hurt in mind or body, or where do you bring people together and make them feel good? (A negotiator is also a kind of healer.)
Are you a steward? Do you keep important values or objects safe in times of change?
What aspect of leadership particularly appeals to you?
How could you develop more of this in your life or expand what you already have?
What matters to you about being a leader?
Why do you want to develop as a leader?
What will that get for you?
‘Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’
Lord Acton
All virtues flip into vices when taken to extremes and leadership is no exception. Leaders must develop others to become leaders, otherwise leadership can sink into a self-serving authority, where power becomes its own justification. All types of leaders face this danger.
The dark side of the authoritative leader is an authoritarian leader. An authoritarian leader demands unquestioning obedience and in order to achieve it must either undermine their followers’ selftrust, so that they cannot think for themselves, or threaten dreadful consequences for disobedience. In extreme cases, authoritarianism dehumanizes the followers – they become instruments of the leader and not people in their own right. Unquestioning obedience is always suspect except in exceptional situations such as armed combat and even then higher values of shared humanity continue to operate – obeying orders has never excused war crimes. In business, ‘boss’ is shorthand for an authoritarian leader.
Coaches work with colleagues to help them and improve their performance. The dark side of a coach is a jehu – a wonderful word that means ‘a furious driver’ and conjures up a picture of a charioteer in the final stages of a chariot race, neck and neck with the next man, whipping the horses and everyone around him in his desperate frenzy to win. Coaches can turn into jehus when they try to fulfil their own unsatisfied needs through others, instead of trying to help them achieve the best they can in their own terms. They blur the boundaries between themselves and others and do not own their own striving. They turn people into slaves.
A healer has patients who need their help. The dark side of the healer is the quack – someone not so much interested in helping people as in making fame and fortune from the remedies they peddle.
Likewise a steward who forgets that he guards in service of renewal and development becomes a jailer, holding onto the past, blinded to the present and the future by the ghosts of antiquity. A steward makes you a guest; a jailer makes you a prisoner of their prejudice, rooted in the past.
A designer is a leader through the skill and knowledge that they put at the service of their public. They will have apprentices who study their work and gain skills to design in their own way. A designer who forgets that their success depends on pleasing others and ignores the wider community becomes a prima donna. They may indulge themselves and forget that they are only leaders because of the value they create for others. Such a designer loses touch with their public and needs an uncritical audience who will follow their whims regardless and imitators who will copy the designs rather than learn the design skills and then use them to create something that expresses their own personal vision.
Then there is the role model who suffers from delusions of grandeur and acts as if they are specially favoured and above those who admire them. Paradoxically, as soon as they do that, they lose their value as a role model. We pick role models for who they are and what they can teach us, not who they believe they are. A person cannot be a role model on their own, they can only be chosen as a role model. So once they think of themselves as role models irrespective of their followers, they lose touch with reality and create an artificial self that they then have to maintain at any price. Although this is a false self, in a final ironic twist they may then depend on it for self-esteem. So they want worshippers or clones who can feed their image, rather than real self-knowledge.
The shadows fall and the dark side of leadership creeps in when leaders lose touch with themselves and those qualities that made them leaders in the first place. First they demand their followers be blind to their weaknesses and then blind to their blindness. They become more concerned with keeping their power than with developing others. They may still influence others, but a leader who loses themselves will surely lose others as well.
The most extreme example of the dark side of leadership comes from a devious kind of authority sometimes called the ‘guru syndrome’.1 A guru is a holy man who serves as a spiritual guide and source of enlightenment in Eastern spiritual traditions. Genuine gurus are honourable leaders of the best kind. However some people set themselves up as quasi-gurus, promising their followers inner and outer freedom – but only at the price of inner and outer slavery. Their message is ‘Depend on me to be free!’ These are bigots, not gurus. They want obedience and compliance from their followers and they usually claim that their way is the only way. Their demands are as authoritarian as those of the most rigid hierarchical military organization. They gain power by eroding the self-trust of their followers, who then cling to them for certainty. Real leaders never demand a person’s self-esteem and self-trust, they seek to increase it. They develop others, they do not impoverish them.
Leaders have power in the sense of having the ability to get things done. There is another, darker side of power – power over other people: a one-way passage of influence that ignores the other person’s freedom of response. Influence is universal – we all influence each other, we cannot stop ourselves. To be alive is to be influencing and influenced. Most influence is random and purposeless. Leaders use their influence for good effect and their followers allow themselves to be influenced through the shared vision of where they want to go, while also in turn influencing the leader. But sometimes a leader’s attempt to maintain power becomes more important than the vision that inspired it and the tasks needed to reach it. Such a leader will try and manipulate people, to get them to do things that are not in their interests. No one likes to be manipulated, but some people allow it because they need someone to take responsibility for them.
Many leaders create hierarchies, or find a position in a hierarchy, usually near the top. Hierarchies are not bad, but mostly useful ways of structuring power and authority, and are a natural means of organizing people working together while maintaining clear accountability. Hierarchies alone, however, tend to be rigid. They need to be balanced by small groups or self-organizing teams that bring innovation and creativity into an organization.
However, when an authoritarian power-driven hierarchy tries to maintain power rather than