Ten virtues of outstanding leaders: leadership and character

Abstract

Al Gini & Ronald M. Green Ten Virtues of Outstanding Leaders: Leadership and Character New York: Wiley, 2013Reviewed by Howard A. DoughtyGeorge Bernard Shaw said somewhere that Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination. That may be true of inherited monarchies, but what about self-made sovereigns who may win their supremacy through combat or cunning? What about rulers who go by other names and who may even gain their spot atop the hierarchy by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote. And what about non-governmental leaders such as executives in the public or private sector, senior military officers, college deans or, for that matter, presidents of local service, suburban book or elegant wine-tasting clubs?The assumption that organizational efficacy depends on clear distinctions between the rulers and the ruled and well-defined chains of command connecting the leaders and the led is so ingrained in modern society that to question, much less to deny, its inevitability is to risk being predismissed as a joker with dangerous anarchistic tendencies.Though there have been ample additions to the literature, the classic text on the subject was written a century ago. Robert Michels study, Political Parties (1915), expressed the sentiment well. There was, he said, an iron law of oligarchy that governed all enduring organizations regardless of the personal preferences and philosophies of their members. Michels did not study massive corporations or authoritarian establishments where it could be assumed that power would be exerted firmly and directly from the top down. He looked instead at the internal workings of the German Social Democratic Party, a socialist enterprise where the values of and equality were almost universally and sometimes intensely endorsed. He found therein the basis for a claim of a universal tendency.Tactical and technical necessities, he insisted, required an asymmetric division of labour in the interest of effectiveness. Democracy and equality were fine principles; but, especially, large organizations demanded that decisions be made efficiently and authoritatively if any significant practical goals were to be achieved. Michels started out as an anarcho-syndicalist; he migrated to Mussolini's fascist movement. Circumstances change; so do people.Today, even tender-hearted democrats who might once have spoken about participatory democracy and expressed a desire to involve people in the decisions that affected their lives no longer seem depressed by the dominance of leaders. Yes, we can! they shouted back at candidate Obama with the anonymity of the audience substituting for civic action.Admiration, inspiration and emulation all partially describe the relationship between electors and their representatives. The adjective charismatic (now reduced to a common trait among people possessing popularity or celebrity) has become a term of adulation and affirmation. Meanwhile, more experimental, experiential, adventuresome, open and playful approaches to administrative and political projects seem strangely obsolete. The neoliberal agenda with its emphasis on instrumental corporate values of efficiency and productivity combine with a commitment to human resource management that specifically undermines or jettisons notions of institutional loyalty and long-term commitment. Market mechanisms dominate and vibrant civic life is transformed into a network of virtual friends and an algorithm of consumer choice. In such a world, leadership can be quietly transformed into tyranny as the victims are seduced into complicity in their own domination. Welcome to big data analytics.Gini and Green, meantime, take the general principle of hierarchy as an organizational necessity and the practice of visible leadership as a structural inevitability, and then they go on to insert the venerable concept of virtue into the scenario. …