After the debacle in the White House last Friday, I have been thinking a great deal about leadership and about how we all need to evolve moving forward, in a time of huge stress, challenge and insecurity for us all.
Firstly, great leadership isn’t simply using your power to bully others in to submission, anyone with power, authority or hierarchical advantage can do that… that’s easy. More importantly it is at best transactional and by it’s nature short term.
Real leadership is about catalysing transformation, about building the platform for meaningful and sustainable change. That begins with the ability to listen, to empathise and to understand.
The great skill of leadership comes from our ability as a leader to synthesise what you are hearing and understanding with what your goals are. Then, it’s about communication, it’s about contextualising what you need with others’ perspective and situation.
Most importantly of course, great leadership is selfless and devoid of ego… that is not to say lacking strength or conviction, quite the opposite.
Courageous leaders allow themselves to be vulnerable, to be open to challenge and to demonstrate a willingness to learn and evolve their own position and thinking.
The danger of the kind of macho faux leadership we saw in The White House on Friday is that it portrays a lack of ideas, of meaningful strategic thinking and of real conviction. Any solution that is forged in that kind of heat, will melt or break apart under real stress or pressure, it doesn’t bring people together behind a common aim, it forces people to pick sides and to polarise, which means it will ultimately fail. Why?
Because only half, at best, of the people involved want the success of what has been forced on to them.
Great leadership galvanises and builds a sense of purpose behind a bright and optimistic vision, in this kind of scenario, you can of course, disagree and find constructive solutions, based on open and honest debate because the entire foundation is one compacted, diamond like, on a bed of trust.
We must ensure that despite some of the pretty poor role models, in our current global climate, we cannot allow the populist simplicity, so attractive to people under pressure, to replace the delicate nuance that is needed to understand the reality of being human, in a deeply complex world.
