The real heart of leadership -1

The leadership role is exercised in line with one or more of three styles. The first type, autocratic leadership functions by fiat. It is the type of leadership that operates with the “my way or the highway” mindset. An autocratic leader brooks no dissent and any semblance of it is viewed as disloyalty and meets with tough sanctions. After the leader has spoken, no other opinion is considered.

The second type of leadership is the democratic leadership that operates by consensus. It conducts a ‘referendum’ on almost every issue and hardly takes a decision without a vote. It is swayed by popular sentiment and not necessarily by exigency. To this type of leader, it is always about looking good in the eyes of the majority even when the majority may not be right.

The third type is the authentic leader who leads from the heart. He is passionate about his ideals and is always concerned with providing visionary interventions that guide his followers towards those ideals. This type of leader is confident, engaging and empowering. He is not afraid to stand alone if taking that position would lead the followers to the ultimate El Dorado. The authentic leader does not compel respect or compliance. He commands it. His actions are not designed to keep people locked in status quo but to guide, not goad them into a more desirable end. In doing this, even though it may mean taking some tough decisions and stepping on a few toes, he takes the bull by the horns and embraces challenges with a fortitude that earns him the respect and trust of his followers. He does not seek centrestage attraction or the limelight. Popularity is never his pursuit, consistency and relevance are. Paradoxically, he becomes famous because he does not seek fame. Fame seeks him. While the leader who loves to hug the limelight seeks popularity and acceptance, the authentic leader is vision and values driven.

Martin Luther King Jr. changed the course of an entire nation in his mid-thirties with his classic speech at the One-Million Man March, “I Have a Dream” which reverberated round the whole world and ignited the unstoppable conflagration of the Civil Rights Movement in America. Today, a holiday is named after him in that nation.

Mother Theresa was sold out to the cause of giving succor to the poorest of the poor in a remote, nondescript corner of Calcutta in India. She died and was buried around the same time that Princess Diana was. Princess Diana was a celebrity, identified with the royal family in England. Her death and burial did not in any way take the shine or the world’s attention off that of Mother Theresa!

Mahatma Ghandi altered the history of India with his philosophy of peaceful resistance. He remains one of the world’s most revered and referenced leaders, long after his death.

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Kept in jail for twenty-seven years by the apartheid regime in South Africa, Nelson Mandela refused to compromise on his ideals and dream for an egalitarian society in his country. He was motivated by the vision of a country where people of all races would co-exist without one claiming superiority over another. Several times he refused the offer of a compromised release until he was granted an unconditional release in 1990. In 1993, he won the Nobel Peace Prize and became the first black President of South Africa in the country’s first multiracial election.

Jesus Christ lived on earth for only thirty-three years. He died over two thousand years ago but continues to live in the hearts of billions of people all over the world who have embraced and continue to embrace His message of hope and salvation from everything – sin, sickness, lack, social injustice, etc., – that makes man live less than God’s original design for him. Today, more books have been written about him and His life and doctrine studied than any other person who ever lived. Our contemporary calendar is gauged around His death, before and after (B.C and A.D.).

In studying the lives of authentic leaders, I asked the question, “What is the one characteristic feature that is common to all leaders who have ever made significant, positive impact? Is it the strength of character? The visionary zeal? Goal-setting? A high level of motivation? A strong value system? Benevolence? Inspiration?” As good as these virtues are however, I found out that it is possible to have them and still not make any significant, POSITIVE difference. In fact, every dictator that ever lived, Hitler, Mussolini, Napoleon, Emperor Jean Bedel Bokassa of Central African Republic, Idi Amin Dada of Uganda, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Sanni Abacha of Nigeria, had a mix of more than one of these attributes. So what is that thing without which no leader can make himself eternally relevant to his followers and to the organization in which he functions? It is COMPASSION. This is the very heart of great, impactful and positively impacting leadership.

Although sometimes considered synonymous, compassion is not the same as sympathy. Sympathy may evoke compassion but it is not capable of sustaining the compassionate ethos. Sympathy is a sentiment of sorrow for another’s misfortune or condition but it hardly feels a sense of duty to do something.

Sympathy can demonstrate benevolence or provoke generosity that reaches out to bring temporary solutions to another person’s problem but it is hardly engaging or committed enough to seek a permanent solution to it. A demonstration of sympathy is usually short-lived and more often than not, dismissive, once we have done what we feel is our best in the circumstance. Sympathy therefore is that conscience-assuaging feeling that we have done what we could. It is more a pang of conscience than a desire for change.

When we give money to a beggar or the needy (like an orphanage), we do it more out of sympathy than a desire to take the beggar off the street or the orphan out of the orphanage into our home! Neither are we interested in knowing what got the beggar into the trade. Interventions of sympathy are more palliative than remedial. They require neither response nor responsibility from the recipient beyond a mere acknowledgement or at best an effusive expression of gratitude where possible. Conversely, compassion is the deep-seated emotion that pushes the frontiers beyond what is to what ought to be! It is the overarching desire to do what we should, rather than what we could!

Like sympathy, compassion sees and interrogates the status quo. But unlike sympathy, compassion measures the status quo with the ideal and where there is a dissonance, seeks to go to any legitimate length to bridge the chasm. Compassion therefore stands in the future to operate in the present. Consequently, it takes responsibility for engaging the situation or crisis until there is a closure or an intended resolution. Sympathy’s intervention focuses more on the present predicament or misfortune of the recipient and seeks to apportion blames as if to rationalize or justify the need for the one being pitied finding himself in that logjam… continued.

Remember, the sky is not your limit, God is!