CRUCIBLE OF LEADERSHIP -- VOLUNTEERISM

CRUCIBLE OF LEADERSHIP – VOLUNTEERISM

JAMES R. FISHER, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 4, 2008

“VOLUNTEER: One who renders a service or takes part in a transaction while having no legal concern or interest.”

Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (Tenth Edition)

In “Democracy in America” (Volume One, 1835), Alex de Tocqueville quotes a letter written by an aristocratic Frenchwoman who mingles descriptions of the weather with news of the torture of local peasants who were revolting against a new tax. The lady was not an unkind person, Tocqueville explains, but was full of kindness only for her own class. Her range of sympathies extended only to those who were equals. She could not imagine herself in a place of the peasants.

In America, Tocqueville found a surprising display of charities of all kinds, as well as of good Samaritanism among perfect strangers. This sympathetic attitude is not inherent in the culture of the Americans, Tocqueville argues, but is rather a product of equalitarianism.

He points to the inability of the white Americans to sympathize with the plight of the Negro slaves, whom they do not regard as equals. It is the limits of equality, and not the cultural outlook, that set the limits of sympathy.

Would this revered observer be surprised with America nearly 174 years later? We can only wonder. Today we have an African American running for the Presidency of the United States on the Democratic Ticket, and a woman as Vice President running on the Republican Ticket.

One of the consistent themes through all the current campaign rhetoric is how common these candidates are, or want us to believe them to be. No one would suggest that equality has reached the point of totally supplanting the aristocratic Frenchwoman’s perspective, but it is clear we have reached the point where the rhetoric if not the reality would suggest that is the case. Let us examine some aspects of this phenomenon of assumed shared aims more closely and attempt to understand why it is important, especially now.

THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY REALITY

(1) INDIVIDUALISM COUNTS

There would not have been a successful Barak Obama candidacy for president without the people’s medium, the Internet. Hillary Clinton was all but the nominee until Obama used this new technology to recruit people and create a multi-million dollar war chest of funds from volunteers across the nation. True, more often than not these were young idealistic contributors with limited funds rather than old and established captains of industry and commerce.

Obama created excitement and enthusiasm with his theme of change and a new beginning. A nimble mind and gifted speaker, he chose to deliver his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention in Denver on the forty-fifth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech, “I have a dream.”

The Democratic presidential nominee made an effort to reach a demographic, geographic and personality profile of a citizenry wanting to be heard. He enabled them to resonate as if with one voice. He recognized that the volunteer is an individual but finds its voice in the collective conscience.

(2) PUBLIC SERVICE vs. SELF-INTERESTS

Not to be outdone on this issue of equality and equal opportunity, presidential nominee for the Republican Party, John McCain, has had a reputation of being a crusader against the so-called concentrated powers of selfishness such as pork barrel legislation, the oil lobby, the Alaskan $200 million bridge to nowhere of Don Young and Ted Stevens, and the outrageous contracts to Pentagon contractors by lobbyist puppeteer Jack Abramoff.

Corruption kills volunteerism while integrity seeds volunteers who rise from every section of the country when they feel they are needed and respected as meaningful contributors.

(3) NATURAL DISASTERS AND THE RESPONSE TO THEM

We witnessed the fiasco of Hurricane Katrina that hit the city of New Orleans and other communities along the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005, and the subsequent fumbling and bumbling of the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA). Not only was there a failure of coordination between local, state, and federal authorities, but also ordinary citizens were left out of the equation. They were made to feel they did not count.

This was especially true of those living in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. When the levee gave way there, and flooded the city taking hundreds of lives and leaving thousands scrambling for shelter, volunteers across the country rushed to help, only to find no one in charge.

Fortunately, this error was not repeated with Hurricane Gustav. Instead, there was coordination, cooperation, and sensible planning to enable more than 2 million citizens to evacuate the area safely. Unfortunately, more than a week later 1.2 million homes are still without electrical power.

Throughout American history, volunteerism has reached its zenith in dedication and selfless service during natural disasters. Yet, what Hurricane Katrina taught us is that volunteerism is not an occasional or emergency activity but needs to be part of the hard wiring of the collective psyche of society. When it is not, people wait to be led, and as Katrina proved, that can be disastrous.

(4) VALUES CANNOT BE TAUGHT, THEY ACCRUE, ERODE AND CHANGE

Many reading this know of World War II only from history books. It was a period of volunteerism on a grand scale. America was attacked by the Empire of Japan suddenly and deliberately on December 7, 1941 on Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands. Nearly 3,000 American military servicemen and servicewomen were killed or wounded, and the Seventh Fleet of the US Navy was virtually immobilized.

The United States was forced from a peacetime philosophy of isolationism into a wartime combatant society overnight. There was no sacrifice too great, no inconvenience too monumental for tens of thousands of young people to volunteer for military service, and tens of thousands of wives and mothers to choose to serve their country by working in defense factories. This collective effort grew out of the American culture and value system of the common good. It was not manufactured; it existed; it was the value system of the American people.

A value system cannot be taught. It accrues over time. Values are demonstrated in action, not in rhetoric. There is no substitute for this pervading reality.

Over the past fifty years or so, or since WWII, there has been erosion in the value of the common good. We have seen selfishness take precedence over service, what you can get over what you can give. It is obvious in the home and in the classroom, in the workplace and in the government.

In the process, we have confused rights with privileges. We have a right to a public education, but it is a privilege to learn. The honor of intellectual labor is not a college degree but the enlightenment, maturity, and understanding that such a privilege makes possible. Parents, teachers, priests and executives should differentiate the difference between rights and privileges. There was a time when only the upper aristocratic classes had access to scholarship and the privilege of enlightenment.

Tocqueville has an interesting take on this:

“There is no class in which the taste for intellectual pleasures is transmitted with hereditary fortune and leisure and by which the labors of the intellect are held in honor. Accordingly, there is an equal want of the desire and the power of application to these objects.”

We want the privilege of being wise without the effort. We desire an education but not the pain of its attainment. Students often hate the need for education but want to enjoy its fruits; parents are often afraid to be parents for fear their children won’t like them; teachers are afraid to be teachers complaining they don’t get enough administrative support; and executives are afraid to have honest feedback for fear it might compromise their intended course. Each of these dispositions kills self-expression and volunteerism.

Americans of WWII vintage generally think in terms of “what is good for the country is good enough for me." But Americans of the post Vietnam War era think more in terms of “the right to fail, the right to work, the right to civil disobedience, civil rights, human rights, or in terms of controlling their own destiny without any consequences for their actions." They have an antipathy for the collective reality. I have coined this disposition and orientation, personhood.

It has led to the Hippie, Yippie, X Generation, Y Generation, and the “Me” Generation, all in succession. Traditional American workers continue to value the common good while professionals increasingly have adopted the value system of personhood.

It appears personhood is a pivotal orientation, which is eroding as these “spoiled brat” generations come increasingly into leadership positions.

Americans who are now becoming 40, 50 and 60-year-olds have witnessed a perceptible gap between expectations and achievements; between the standing of the United States in the world with what they anticipated. They are disappointmented to discover the accumulation of wealth is a bridge to nowhere; while finding service to others, philanthropy, and volunteerism not only is gratifying but enriching to the soul.

This cyclic return to good sense could not be taught, but had to be experienced.

(5) THE WISDOM OF THE DIDACTIC IN ITS ASCENDANCY

We are in the age of a rebirth of volunteerism, which does not spring from emergency or crusader zeal, but from a spirit of natural connection. We are also in a transitional period in which institutional authority is disintegrating at a more alarming rate than the alleged dissolving ice caps in the Artic and Antarctica.

Authority is now a groundswell from the people, and not a trickle down condition from the top. Ordinary citizens have come into their own and never more powerfully than since the advent of the Internet and avalanche of bloggers. It is the Age of the Amateur.

Authority has moved almost imperceptivity away from defined authority to the amateur thinker. I write in “A Look Back To See Ahead” (AuthorHouse 2007):

“The amateur thinker can be defined as having the ability to articulate the world of ideas in broad philosophical terms comprehensible if not immediately applicable to the average man. He is a doer who thinks out of life. Compare this to the preference for technical language of the specialist. Specialization provides a place to hide from the masses in the cloistered abbey of omniscience. Instead of substance, the average man is offered the dribble of bastardized syntax of the technical in the vernacular. He is not the audience. He is a distraction. To console him he is given a few new words and terms that become popular without insight or understanding. In Iowa, we call that feeding slop to the pigs.”

The palpable evidence is in presidential candidacy of Barak Obama, a one-term senator of four years with no executive experience, and Sarah Palin, a vice president candidate and a one-term governor of Alaska for less than two years in a state with more moose and bears than people.

The African American Obama rose out of the bowels of mix race and a single parent upbringing while housewife and hockey mom Palin rose out of the same commonality. Much is made of the historical significance of this without realizing top down authority is dissolving while bottom up authority is just gaining its stride.

(6) A CASE IN POINT

A man I esteem is running for a city council seat in my local community. He emailed me his frustration with all kinds of people trying to give him advice on what to do and not to do. He thought the way they perceived him was the reason they pushed for his candidacy. I responded to his email in this manner:

“Your best counsel is yourself, and your best sounding board is your wife. Anyone beyond that has a vague idea of who, what, and why you are. They have a special interest in your candidacy but only know you in singular dimensions.

You have brought value added to whatever you have done, going into the US Army right out of high school, then qualifying for Officers Candidate School, rising to a full-bird Colonel, acquiring a college degree in business administration along the way, and always working within the community you found yourself to make it better. You are energetic, creative, yes, impatient, but we need that in people who run for public office.

You are not only a proven leader in the military sense but also more importantly, a proven leader in the volunteer sense. I know because I have worked and served with you in that capacity.”

I then shared with him my experience as a psychologist with Honeywell, Inc. I tried to get some executives who led with position power to do volunteer work. Leadership in volunteer work is demonstrated more through persuasion than authority. None took me up on that challenge.

Over the years, I told him, young engineers would come to me after attending a seminar on leadership, and say, “I’ll be a worker-centered leader when I’m a program manager.” Many of them became program managers and went on to being directors or above. Somehow in the transition they had forgotten the promise to lead by following, and instead asserted themselves as omniscient, or exactly as they had previously been led.

My friend had been commander of some 3,500 men and women, and was used to his word being the law. I know because the captain of my Flag Ship of the Sixth Fleet, USS Salem (Ca-139) was God incarnate as I would imagine the colonel’s people saw him. I didn’t meet him when he had that command authority, but when he was a community volunteer with no position power, but the power of his ideas, intelligence, social skills, and persuasion. These will all serve him well in elective office for volunteerism is the crucible of leadership.

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A version of this piece is to appear in the first issue of IMPACT in December 2008.