PROFILE OF THE LEADER IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY!

Profile of a Leader in the Twenty-First Century

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2005

To be a leader of men one must turn one’s back on men.

Havelock Ellis (1859 –1939)

I have given considerable attention on how the leadership has lost the tribe. Conversely, I have given little attention to what leadership is in the twenty-first century.

The leader cannot continue to be everything to everyone because he will end up being nothing to anyone. The leader must be consistent within himself and true to that self in a greater since, as for example was Abraham Lincoln in our American history.

The twentieth century generated a spate of such leaders, especially during the past fifty years in virtually every institution and industry of society, placing American society and its influence across the globe in deep jeopardy.

The thought occurred to me that it might be apropos to give a profile of what I sense a leader in this new century might embody. Obviously, this is not a definitive profile, and inevitably incorporates my personal bias, but it may contain some of the ingredients to a more appropriate slate for discussion. For, alas, the reader as leader must decide that on his own.

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A PRAYFRUL PERSON

Prayer is a powerful device for the leader to get in touch with his own center. Read "Meditations" of Marcus Aurelius (121 -180), the Roman Emperor, and you are reading a prayer book of thought meant to be read by no one. Prayer was a powerful guide to leaders of the past, leaders whom we read about today thousands of years after their deaths.

The leader will practice prayer, but not consider it a ritualistic undertaking. Prayer allows one to tap into one's philosophy, and everyone has a philosophy, which guides one to self-realization or self-destruction. It is as impossible to live without a philosophy, as it is to live without the necessity of prayer in one's life.

One does not pray for show or influence. One prays with the will to clarify one's dedication to one’s appointed task. There is no need for church or chant, for genuflecting or crossing oneself, for being in high costume and sober countenance, or for bowed head and the rolling of beads.

These symbolic gestures distract one from the central necessity of the dedication of the will to finding resolution to what confounds it. The source of strength is never outside one, but always within one’s core essence. Prayer is the tapping of one's gifts to serve a common humanity.

PROBLEM SOLVING

The leader has a clear and synoptic grasp of what comes before him, assimilates it thoroughly and forms reliable judgments on it. He has a wide embracing and retentive memory, which enables him to cover much ground and to recall his conclusions for future use. His mind need not work quickly, certainly not hastily, nor need it be especially imaginative and inventive. Rather, his mind is the trustworthiest critic of what is presented to it.

Not uncommon, the leader has a prodigious ability to make order of any material presented to him, to comprehend it, to analyze it, and to put it together again, to remember both it and his own conclusions for future use. The leader knows that it is not the lack of solutions that tarries him from wise decisions, but his failure to romance the problem by defining it correctly.

REGARDING SCHOLARSHIP

The leader is not especially a lover or even comprehender of the classics. He sucks the juice out of literature as one sucks it out of an orange, but he does not necessarily distill from the whole fruit a particular essence.

This is a limitation not only of talent, but of time as well, for he must remain focused on what is of pressing concern, and abide scholars, intellectuals and the classics in which they live with due caution. Lord Acton was wise in suggesting that we give intellectuals everything but power, for it is power that corrupts and corrupts absolutely.

The leader is more at home with history, often ancient history. History he understands, for with history he can connect the dots as to how those who have gone before him encountered the wall, and found a way to negotiate it, if not penetrate this barrier.

The leader, by definition, is a man of action with little time for the luxury of contemplation. He understands the nobility of action. Therefore, history, which tells him the deeds of good to great men, is to him the best of all literature.

The quality of his mind is one built toward action, not sentiment. Verse deals with the deeds of good men and displays their noble sentiments in the best of poetry. The leader's poetry is what his actions imbrue, which is left for poets to record for posterity.

The sententious code of the poet is beyond the pale of the leader with his having no choice but to memorize the criticisms of others to interpret the depths of poetry's meaning. On the other hand, and this falls within his natural inclination, the leader is often a brilliant student of the law, and a stellar judge of his peers, where subjectivity is provided with some boundaries for preferred objectivity.

POWER OF MEMORY

The leader is not likely to be an original thinker, but an able processor of those that are.

His analytical and synoptic gifts are displayed in the powers of his memory. These powers may be so great as to constitute a quality of his genius and independent thought. Such a leader has been known to be able to appropriate printed briefs so completely that when answering questions of substance regarding them, he can see the printed page. Likewise, he may use the briefest of notes as a prop when speaking, or be given to holding papers in his hands as if they are the substance of his remarks, when to find later they are but blank.

ADMINISTRATOR

The leader is an administrator of superlative ability. He knows every part of his complex machine, often better than his department heads, a gift, which does not always endear him to his directors. He is often able to perceive the assets and limitations of the complex machines of other organizations, machines which complement or are in competition with his, providing him with a clear edge.

It would be wrong to assume the leader’s gifts of ordering, comprehending and remembering material as an academic predilection, but rather a fundamental aspect of his leadership. His mind is a sorting bin of ideas and information, position papers and secret documents.

What limits these gifts in a creative sense, and this is a problem when the leader is a prisoner of his own design, is when he blindly aims to preserve the culture of the status quo when it no longer serves him or his purposes. The antic of his soul needs periodic revisiting, and this is accomplished through prayer.

CONFLICT AND COMPROMISE

The leader must always wrestle with the horns of the dilemma, which are to fight or flee, whether to fight and win or lose or simply retreat to save honor.

The leader who leads with personality appeal is likely to treat opposition as a public relations snafu when it is clearly a matter of published policy. The inclination with such a mindset is to avoid conflict at any cost.

Conflict is often misunderstood when such thinking predominates. Managed conflict is the glue that holds the organization on task and together.

Leadership is a combatant role where conflict and compromise are its natural components. Peace loving is for poets far removed from the center of human combustibles.

The leader driven by personality appeal wants to give circumstances a chance, even when the circumstances, from a rational perspective, seem hopeless on the surface. He is a prisoner of his culture, of his history, religion, customs and language. He is likely to take comfort in what he knows and allows himself to be hostage to what he doesn’t.

TRUTH

Hard on the tail of the horns of the dilemma is the matter of truth. The leader knows that truth is a subjective component of objective reality. Since the leader is a person dealing with people, his objectivity is tainted with his subjective lens.

Therefore, leadership calls for tolerance and understanding, patience and courage to see the virtue in another’s truth when there appears to be none.

The leader most certain of his truth with little capacity to engage doubters is most likely to repel the worldly and attract the earnest, to divide his charges into true believers and passionate doubters, where there are the wicked and the good, the hedonists and the puritans, the lost and the found. It takes wisdom for the leader to recognize that these dimensions describe his own population.

Two kinds of people listen to the leader, those who hate what he has to say, and those who believe he has possession of the truth, and the answer to their dilemma.

There is a third kind of people, namely those who believe in the same truth as the leader, but are quite unable to recognize the leader as a custodian of it. They see the leader as seemingly champion of a morality that is narrow and joyless, and perhaps worst of all, pointless.

Because of this, these people hate or despise the leader, or both. Morality that has no foundation in fact, but is adhered to out of taste and habit, and nothing deeper, becomes too little and too late for a population requiring tools to deal with internal stress and external accelerating demands.

IDEALISM

The leader is a believer in the human future. He is fascinated with and by the human past, by the evolving new theories of man’s origins, by the various estimates of the length of true human existence.

The leader is much in thrall of creation than of the Creator. If the leader enjoys communion with his God, it is through the medium of creation, that is, concrete reality, and not an abstraction.

The leader’s own creative mind is excited by the evidence of a supreme creativeness. It is all around him, as well as within him. The leader, as idealist, is in thrall by the contemplation of man, and of man's history and prehistory.

If the leader has a defect, it is not the defect of having misunderstood man. It is the greater defect, to having believed in man.

This belief in man is the secret of the leader’s power. As a physicist might insist that matter can never be destroyed only changed, the leader as idealist would insist that truth, beauty and goodness could never be lost but only viewed differently.

The leader’s idealism does not come from books, but from trials in the world.

FREEDOM

The leader walks a narrow line between a belief in men and knowing absolute freedom appeals to the mindless majority.

Institutions purely democratic sooner or later destroy liberty and civilization, or both. Universal suffrage, for example, when the electorate is ignorant of its responsibility becomes a ploy for demagogues and power brokers to assert their will. Elections become Olympic like races to see who can raise and spend the most money. A campaign of ideas has lost its vigor and wastes away in the desert of the outcasts.

People in power play to the apathetic middle in politics, government, commerce, industry, academia and the religious. The mindless partisans are their focus in a climate devoid of scrutiny or challenge.

Freedom has become limited to a choral tribute sung by an entertainer in the introduction of athletic contests, and then put back in the drawer until the next contest.

Control is a function of order but not of liberty.

The harsh reality is that people cannot handle freedom. It is too demanding. It requires that they take control of their lives and not turn them over to someone else to define, manage, run, and dispose of.

The leader is not a manager, a controller, nor the owner of other people's problems but their reflection in terms of freedom or self-imprisonment.

Self-imprisonment requires nothing of people in return for their vote of ignorance. The health of society rides on its view and appetite for freedom, which is a measure of its wisdom.

The wiser of the Founding Fathers never intended to have universal suffrage. They believed the vote should be restricted to mature property owners who had a personal stake in good government. This is heresy to speak in such terms today. But should society be plundered and laid waste by barbarian minds before the leader seizes the reins of control? We are not only speaking of government, but of every institution of society. That is the question. That is the dilemma.

A leader need not impose draconian measures, but rather balance rights with privilege, which must be earned.

Privileges appeal to the popular, to those that believe industry is a function of morale, when it clearly isn’t. Morale is a manifestation of groupthink where the apathetic middle sues for the most while giving the least.

Rights are a function of motivation, which is a manifestation of freedom where the conscientious do all they can because they live in a climate where they can.

Read the letters of common soldiers in the Civil War and compare them to stump speeches of politicians today. The difference is the equivalent of an essay by a Ph.D. in the case of the soldier to that of a kindergartener in the case of the politician. The dumbing down of society is an escape from freedom.

“To be a leader of men,” the physician Havelock Ellis insists, “one must turn his back on men.”

Libertarianism is poetry without a population in mind. It is a hopeless cause as Europe is now finding in its attempt to reduce the social welfare system of work to a day's pay for a day's work. It is equally a hopeless cause in the United States as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid absolved people for taking control of their lives with guaranteed subsidies for their submissiveness.

It is a hopeless cause as American corporations try to retreat from entitlement programs given in their booming years, plagued now with the corpocracy disease of myopia.

Corporate generosity failed to be tied to productive work, and now millions are losing jobs the likes of which they will never see again, while their former employers plunge into the murky waters of bankruptcy.

It is a hopeless cause when freedom is not tied to responsibility and accountability.

SENTIMENT

It is never easy and often unwise to neglect popular sentiment, but the leader must have the strength to be able to set such sentiment aside in those cases where it is wise to do so.

By the same token, the leader can never justify his actions merely by reference to the existence of popular sentiment. He must at the very least be able to find adequate grounds for its existence.

If he is not satisfied that he is able to find such grounds, then it is his duty to refuse to give way to such sentiments. Leadership has descended into a popularity contest, driven by polls and questionnaires, when leadership is the compound of detachment, humanity, and efficiency that keeps critics at bay while fulfilling the role of leadership.

LIMITATIONS

The will to do is not everything. The prizes do not always go to those who work for them, nor do they necessarily go to the virtuous. Prizes go to those who are fitted for leadership, by no act of virtue of the leader's own to receive them. He is the instrumentality through which leadership is demonstrated while being manifested by the led. If he cannot touch the soul of the led, there is no leadership. There is only management.

Consequently, leadership teaches the leader that he has limitations, which no amount of virtue, or industry can overcome. In the final analysis, the leader is alone and prisoner of the ultimate will of the led.

He can seek counsel but cannot delegate accountability. The end of the beginning of his leadership is when he confronts and accepts his humanity in all its limitations.

He is often scholarly without being academic, humorous without being frivolous, who urges one to action without being intimidating, knowing that he is likely to fail as succeed, and once succeeding always the possible groom of failure over the horizon.

ASSETS

The leader may have enemies, which contain intrigues but no intrigues against him. He is himself free from personal hates and grudges. He does not excite them in others by the simple expedient of being himself.

This allows him to hold people to a task of diverse interests and beliefs, from those who are clear-headed to those who are bull-headed. The pursuit of survival and the pursuit of justice are two sides of Janus.

The leader can always see that underneath any apparent injustice there is a greater and more fundamental justice, even when the injustice was flagrant and the justice unseen.

We see this when one believes it is his duty to maintain diversity, and the other believes it is his duty to achieve unity. Good and bad men believed in slavery, but President Lincoln saw through them both with his eye on a higher goal, the preservation of the union.


SPIRITUALITY

The spiritual and invisible unity of a leader’s vision is very fine. The visible unity stabs at his heart and takes away his breath because a vision realized is one filled with unspeakable and painful joy. It is unspeakable because it is realized and the realized is unspeakable. It is painful because it is all like a dream, and who expects a dream to be realized?

Spirituality is humbling as it is moving, and brings out the humanity in the leader, and awareness of his frailty.

HUMILITY

The bridge between a leader and his leadership, between his will and that of the led is like a bridge put together by Isaac Newton without nail or peg or dowel to that if one piece were taken out the whole thing would fall to pieces.

A leader leads by making choices where freedom for some may mean the destruction of freedom for others, where the benefits to some may mean the sacrifice to others, where the good of some may mean the cost to others, where progress may mean substantive retreat in the long run.

It is equally humbling for the leader to be dilatory when he might better be decisive, or prompt when he might better be slow to act. Because of this ambivalence, leadership often resembles the leader throwing seeds into the wind in the hopes that they will find fertile soil. Nations have been known to go to war with such suspect justifications.

The leader walks across this bridge with his Creator realizing one piece out of place may set it tumbling. Small wonder it requires qualities of tenacity, courage and integrity, massive self-confidence devoid of arrogance, and a deep certitude of self that remains forever mysterious.

The irony is that the leader with a happy center, which is constantly nourished by his childhood, is never totally formed.

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About the author: Dr. Fisher is an organization/industrial psychologist and author of many books and articles in this genre. See his website: www.peripat