Monday, November 21, 2016

Show Me Your Leader And You Have Bared Your Soul

A friend of mine who works in non-profit fundraising says the best way to learn about a person is to ask about his or her top three charities.  Once someone reveals where they freely and enthusiastically give their money, you can quickly understand what makes them tick.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gary Wills has another way of sizing up people. "Show me your leader," Wills wrote in Certain Trumpets," and you have bared your soul."

Willis offered his book about leadership in 1994, a year brimming with leadership advice. John Maxwell offered Developing the Leader Within You and Leadership 101. Stephen Covey was flogging Principle-Centered Leadership. Max DePree's Leadership As An Art was selling well.  Warren Bennis's On Becoming a Leader drew on hundreds of interviews to try to define the inner qualities of leadership.  And, after 450 years, Machiavelli's The Prince--"it is much safer to be feared than loved"--still had its enthusiastic disciples.

Wills boiled the existing literature down to the description of two types of leaders.  The first was the "superior-person" model which said the leader must become worthy of being followed.  The second was the "ingratiating" leader who treated followers as customers that must be won and influenced.  "We have long lists of the leader's requisites," Wills wrote, including  "determination, focus, a clear goal, a sense of priorities, and so on. We easily forget the first and all-encompassing need.  The leader most needs followers."