5.3.2 What Makes A Leader

What role does meaning have in leadership? Why are the people who we chose to lead us the way they are? These are questions worth asking.

I believe that it is possible to train people up to a certain level in leadership where they will be very capable, thorough, look after their staff, get all their budgets in on time, maintain very good reporting channels and attend to the detail that all competent leadership requires.

However I sometimes wonder if it is possible to train the kind of personality that finds meaning in leadership, and, as we say nowadays, wants to push the envelope (I love that expression for some reason [1]), and:

1. Break new ground and make what most people say is impossible – possible.

2. Exceed expectations – particularly his own.

3. See opportunities where others see obstacles, and then turn those obstacles into advantages.

4. Have vision, conviction, passion and want to move mountains, metaphorically of course.

All the above are applicable in many areas of work but for the Community Leader in an organisation that supports families and/or protects children in our Focus Group a further challenge is added:

5. Is willing to share power, and maintain connection with the people who matter most – while translating aspirations into actions.

Such qualities can always be enabled or facilitated.  But I wonder can someone be trained to be like that? Perhaps the personality that likes to take a risk, and make all the above happen is innate!

Does our education system encourage children to take a risk, or, put themselves out there?

Universal mainstream education, available from about age 4 to 17-18 (or to early-twenties if we go straight to college) is a very powerful influence on virtually all of us – and it can indeed be a suitable environment for the fostering of leadership.

And educational institutions, particularly third level colleges, in addition to their academic role, see themselves as having a role in the training of leaders.  I often read it in their literature and I have heard it at graduation ceremonies that I have been to.  (Yes, I was listening). 

The points system (which I critiqued in a previous Chapter) and subsequent exams in third level colleges train children and (mostly) young adults to be excellent in regurgitating. One might say that they can reach a high level of excellence in regurgitating, or indeed become leaders in regurgitation!

And I hope that this doesn’t sound too cynical but I have no doubt that skills learned in regurgitating topped up by clever tricks in keeping examiners happy have the potential to take someone very far in a career and probably to the top of a profession.

Many of the people (though not all ) who have leadership positions in the Pillars have graduated from third level colleges.

The challenge for educational institutions, if they wish to produce leaders, is to focus on creativity and innovation, and model the qualities that they wish for in graduates. Some leaders in education do this really well, and some do not.

The proof of the pudding is always in the eating, and when we look around at the institutions of our State, i.e. those institutions that form the Pillars, do we see a critical mass of good enough leadership?

[1]. Surely an envelope is so light an object that it is very easy to push.  But the expression comes from the Space Race where, I understand, the envelope is the boundary of outer space.

In many organisations people who are being led might feel that their choices are limited – that is, they, kind of have to follow the leader, even if they don’t believe in the mission of the organisation at all!

I will call the leadership that exists in such organisations coercive leadership.

Leadership in the Pillars (and, of course, in other sectors too, e.g. business, voluntary organisations etc.) can often be of a coercive nature because of low motivation and I will expand on this below.

I remember when working in various jobs disliking leaders that happened to be in charge of me but I did what they told me to do because if I didn’t I’d have got into trouble.

In other words my choice was limited, both by my financial situation (I didn’t want to lose my job) and (maybe more influential actually) the conditioning that I had experienced in school and my early life in the military – i.e. I sometimes have to put up with people who I think are doing a bad or mediocre job.

I have often met people who are working in the community sector who experience the same thing.

I came to the conclusion that coercive type leadership is necessary because many staff (not all – but quite a few) in organisations are disinterested, bored, discontented, unsupported, cynical, feel exploited anyway, and have more interest in what they can get out of the organisation than what they can put into it.

If I’m conscientious, but don’t have a sense of belonging, I’ll do my job well enough.  I might complain and moan, but my conscientiousness will ensure that the job is done as I tread through treacle towards retirement.

However if I don’t have a sense of belonging and am cynical or lazy, I will use (and abuse) the system for all that it is worth. This is not too unusual in many large organisations whether private, public or voluntary.

Because of this apparent cynicism management motivates me with a mixture of reward and fear. 

Increases in salary, promotions, bonuses, perks, subsistence and mileage etc. (reward) are balanced by sanctions, restrictions, HR policies, possible redundancy, disciplinary procedures etc. (fear).

The cynicism that I mention above, which often results from doing things for the sake of doing them rather than because they need to be done, is the basis of many classic comedies about the public service, prison, military life, hospitals, and other institutions. 

Much of the humour comes from viewers observing how we cannot help being human despite all the efforts by leadership to impose absurd conditions and rules on our behaviour.

Coercive leadership insists on regularity, conformity and adherence to bullshit and the impossibility of this makes for great comedy.

After that discussion on coercive leadership I will now ask what kind of a leader does an organisation that supports families in our Focus Group need?

Most of you might say a person who works hard or a person who is rooted in the community or a person who has integrity or someone who gives good example etc. etc.

All of those yes. But, also, a very important trait is that I, the leader, have the ability to attract people who believe in my vision.

And, in my experience, those who turn out to be most enthusiastic are what I will call sceptical believers. This it is probably truer for community leadership (and in particular those communities that are populated with families in deep distress) than for any other kind of leadership.

Let us say that I am a person who has lived or worked (or both) in a community affected by imprisonment. In my life and work I may often have had my hopes raised and then dashed – so it is a very healthy sign that I am sceptical.

Now it’s as important to want to be involved as it is to lead – because, obviously, if no-one wanted to be involved there’d be no-one to lead. And I, (a sceptical believer – remember) need encouragement to 1): stand up and be counted, and, 2): always question everything! 

This is done by the leader recognising commitment, enthusiasm, energy, motivation and questioning attitude, and proactively nurturing and reaching out – not disappearing into the distance and then wondering why no one is following.

And if elements like cultural matching, creativity, person centred modality etc. are to be fostered in the organisation, status needs to be given to those who are attracted to, or find meaning in them.

Much mainstream type leadership is described in the previous post.

The reason why leadership in respect of the Focus Group needs to be different is that most of us community/voluntary type people are very aware that we have a choice – and we vote with our feet. That is, if we don’t like something that we really don’t have to do we simply ignore it.

But, far more importantly, the opposite is also true. If we like something and we feel that it is relevant – and will improve our lives – we will want it, and this is where invitational leadership comes in.

Keeping this in mind, we will see why an organisation needs to make it easy for people to choose to be involved, rather than making it difficult for them to choose not to be involved.

When I first took up the post of a leader in a streetwork Project in Southill in Limerick there were certain other leaders far more experienced and established than I that I chose to be involved with.  They were the ones that I felt, in my heart, (I actually don’t remember thinking about it too much) had the best interests of the young people in the community in their hearts.

I felt invited into their world because their values mirrored my own – symmetry again – and I recognised them as leaders in the field that I was aiming to be part of. And I felt that they believed in me – i.e. gave me status.

Then there were others that I didn’t have much interest in.  They were the ones that (I felt anyway) paid lip service to the aspirations of the young people and their families, were hung up on image, or were on power trips, used big words, or, indeed, tended to complicate everything.

I wasn’t really put out that much, or even angry at that time, I just wasn’t drawn to them – so I didn’t include myself in their way of working.

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Let us now look again at the significance of invitational leadership in the context of people who may have given up hope that anything will change.

As I said above I may perceive myself (and my family) to have been badly let down by people who I looked up to as leaders – people that I depended on to improve my (and my family’s) life. Therefore I will be very selective (and rightly so) about who I will chose to believe in.

In particular, if I am a worker in a community, I have far more to lose if a leader is bad, or incompetent, or goes against what I believe in, than someone who works in a bank, or a shop, or even in a school or hospital.

And, as we will see below, being uppity, (as Paul Robeson said) or having an attitude can induce, in some leaders, a kind of negative attitude in itself.  In this negative attitude the big danger (and I use that word deliberately) is that if we are the kind of leaders who feel threatened by uppity people we will almost definitely leave others behind.

The people that we leave behind (that is, the ones who lose interest in us) are usually the people who don’t agree with us.  But they may be the very people from whom we have most to learn about ourselves.

And leaving good people behind is, in terms of community leadership, a very wasteful thing to do.

If we are leaders, and we aspire to be radical [1] we will see the value in bringing good people with us – and be alert to traits within ourselves that may well arise from our passion (and indeed cause us to be driven to achieve great things quickly) but might alienate or sideline others who have loads to contribute.

This, of course, is a recipe for the more things change the more they stay the same type of result, which is the last thing that any community leader wants.  (I cover this in far more detail in the Sub-Chapter on Processing Speed below).

[1]. When I say radical I simply mean will do something different to what is usually done because it works better.  Radical also involves having the courage to invite people to do it too.