The evolution of Leadership (Part IV)

A republic would be perpetual that has the good fortune often to find men who by their example restore the laws to their original purity and force, (as we have said elsewhere), and not only prevent her from falling into decadence, but rather carry her in the opposite direction. –Niccoló Machiavelli

 

    This is the turning point. A leader has accomplished their task. They turned their company around; they won the war; they stepped on the moon. Now, they must adapt to the new environment they have created. Similar to Moses not setting foot in Israel, most leaders will not change. What we see in the corporate world is a sort of type casting of CEOs. We have people that are good at bringing a company back from the brink of extinction and others that are good at managing an already performing ship. Keeping a leader onboard without the right qualifications for the new tasks could be dangerous.

    Nation-States and societies should therefore choose their leaders looking at what they are looking to achieve rather than what they achieved in the past. Given our nature, however, we always try to relive the good parts of our past. As an example, I heard a man this week talking about Lévesque was a great Prime Minister in Quebec and how there was no one like him around during the current campaign. I do not know the person, and cannot really imply anything from his words, but usually when someone says something like this, they think that the leader of their choice would the ideal leader in the current situation. This is not true. Older political leaders always try to get us to look at their past and judge them on their successes. What we should do however, is look at their personalities. We should then look at our goals and at how those personalities would interact with those goals. We can then find the person that we think would be the best leader to get us where we want to go. Honor your heroes' victories by keeping them away from nearly certain failure.

    For the leader, however things are different. Assuming he wants to stay in power, the leader will have to prove to his followers that he is still the most qualified to lead them. To keep his followers, the leader will have to find out how their needs changed and set new goals that will fulfill them. He will still be able to build on his past success since, even though it is generally a good idea, it is human nature to transpose our past unto our future. After setting the goals, the leader should then find out what skills he will need to achieve them, and set out to gain those skills.

    Another avenue for the leader, depending on how much power he wields would be to bring the needs of the followers back to those that matched his skills. Basically, a government could decide to keep their people starving in order to prevent them from needing anything that they can't actually provide. It is an effective way to control a population, but it is not very conducive to growth. Another example of this would be a leader exaggerating a security risk, such as terrorists or problems with the health system, so that the people see him, who's met similar needs before, as the right person to lead them. Since it is not true, the leader can then simply change his lie and meet the security needs of his constituents.

    The last avenue for a leader facing a change in goals is quite simple: bow down and let someone else take power. This is the most altruistic choice and probably the best for the society the leader is in. It will unequivocally let the people understand that times have changed and that the goal they were looking for before has been achieved. It will let them define new goals and choose the person with the best skills to achieve this. The leader can always help that person or use the time that the other person has in power to gain the skills necessary to come back as an effective leader in the future.

The evolution of Leadership (Part III)

Nurture your mind with great thoughts…" - Benjamin Disraeli

 

    Followers and the situation operate on a continuum. Followers grow (at various rates) and what they are looking for in their relationship with the leader changes with time. A good way of looking at this is using Maslow's pyramid.

 

From http://steves.blogharbor.com

 

Basically, Maslow's hierarchy of needs states that if your physiological needs aren't met, you are not going to care as much about your safety needs. Basically, if you are gasping for air, you won't care too much about someone stealing something in your house. To link this with Churchill and Qin Shi Huang, the first needs people had were low within the pyramid. The British citizens were looking for safety during World War II, but after 1945, people wanted to give more meaning to their lives. The idea there is that the people that fulfill needs of a certain level are not necessarily able to help people looking for different things.

One of the things that changes is the level of involvement of a leader with their followers. People looking to fulfill needs at the bottom levels are usually highly predictable and are easy to influence. They don't usually take complex decisions and their leaders are very "hands-on". As you get up the pyramid, the needs get more personal. To Influence someone looking to self-actualize (self-esteem 2) you will need to know what their values and their goals are. It's much more complicated for a leader to influence one person who has fulfilled all the needs from the four lower levels than to influence many people looking for food. This is better shown using the Situational Leadership theory.

 

 

From http://www.jerry-cao.com/blog/

 

    The Situational Model states that one leader must adapt their style of leadership to that of their followers. In a company setting, this means that depending on the level of knowledge (or experience) and the level of commitment of the employee the leader will either be dictating his instructions, delegate the tasks to the followers, providing a more supportive role, or a combination of both. Adapting this to a society, you get a leader who is directing in war time, where quick actions are needed to curtail an eager enemy. The same is true in times of crisis such as famines or drought. This is linked to the two lower levels of Maslow's pyramid. When the basic needs of the population are met, the leader should then start to let his constituents govern themselves, taking a less active role.

    In the case of societal leaders, the problem is that, unlike within companies, the state at which they should be directing the people is nearly always undesirable. They are directing to initiate change and basically destroy the situation that prompted them to use this style of leadership in the first place. From this, to initiate lasting change, a person must believe in the change, nearly believing that the world will end if this change does not come. The leader gets emotionally involved with the change and publicly becomes the avatar of that change. When the change occurs though, it is now the time of the leader to change. Because of the constant motion of the situation the leader is in, the change he worked so hard to bring forth will become obsolete and another type of change will need to occur. The leader might think this is not the case and keep on going with his ideologies. This was true for Winston Churchill when he tried to keep the colonial British Empire alive. This was also true for the Parti Québécois within the last few years¹. From a societal point of view, it is simpler to choose another leader, one better suited for the task.

 

I will post about the leader's evolution in the last part… soon I guess…

 

 

 

¹ Yes, they haven't achieved sovereignty, but thanks in part to their actions, the standard of living of French Quebecers and place of the French language within the Canadian landscape have increased considerably.

The evolution of Leadership (Part II)

First off, I want to start by giving the link to another blog post which talks about the leader, follower and situation. This is where I got the idea to talk about Winston Churchill and his "downfall".

SimonStapleton.com

 

Part II – The Prime Minister

    We all remember Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill from his first term during World War II. As was the case with Ying Zheng, the situation was one of crisis. It lent itself to a strong, flamboyant leadership style. Churchill was an inspirational leader who was seen at the end of the war as a hero. However, in the 1945 election, he was defeated in a landslide.

    In 1940, Britain was already at war with Germany, but no real action (this is relative…) had been taken against Adolf Hitler's ambitions. By May, the current Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain had lost the confidence of the Houses that he could lead the country to victory. At that point, the Germans were invading Norway and were poised to attack France. The situation in the British Empire was not as bad as it would be a few months later, but everyone could sense that radical action had to be taken for the Empire to survive. . On the 10^th of May, Winston Churchill was appointed Prime Minister by King George VI.

Churchill had been part of the war cabinet during World War I and since the beginning of World War II and had considerable influence on all the parties in the House of Commons. He also had a lot of credibility with the various military leaders due to his time as First Lord of the Admiralty during the First World War. Through his inspirational speeches, he was able to connect emotionally with everyone throughout the Empire.

    For his followers, Churchill became the very embodiment of victory in the face of adversity. Throughout his more than 4 years as the leader of the British Empire, he worked really hard to make sure his country would win the war; he worked equally hard to make sure that the people knew that this is what he was doing. He was unwavering against the Germans, rejecting the idea of an armistice in 1940. He managed to transmit this dedication to his followers, the military and civilians of the British Empire. This kept the British resistance alive and increased the confidence the people had in him. This is the kind the leader the followers needed in this particular situation.

    In 1945 however, the focus was completely different. After 6 years of war and 10 years of depression, the focus of the Empire was on reconstruction. People were wary of the war and Churchill's status as a hero became an impediment to him. While, in theory, the skills Churchill had displayed could have been useful during peace time, the image he had built of himself made him undesirable. Instead, Clement Attlee was elected Prime Minister for two consecutive terms. Through certain natural consequences, the second Attlee government only lasted a year and the hero Churchill was re-elected Prime Minister in 1951.

    While the cold war was going on, this was still a reconstruction time for the Great Britain. Attlee had been pursuing a rather effective dismantling of the Empire but Churchill was still following his WWII vision of a glorious British Empire. His violent reprisal of rebellions led to several foreign crisis for Britain. The colonial rule of Britain was coming to an end, but Churchill would not see that. He would say (and funny enough, this is similar to Chretien's thoughts in 1995 in Canada) that "he [would] not preside over a dismemberment". His success in the war had made him think that this was yet another battle that he had to win, while this was just the evolution of society.

 

I will be posting part III soon…

The evolution of leadership

For the past few years, it seems that my life revolved around leadership. I got involved in politics with the ADQ, ran for MNA, and started a Leadership Diploma at McGill. Throughout this time, I kept hearing about how lacking leadership was bad and how being a leader was good; indeed, most of the great men and women we look up to have all been great leaders able to use their tremendous charisma to change the society around them. To me their actions as change agents are what really defined them as leaders. Lately however, I started to wonder if the very things that make them effective at bringing forth change in the first place make them refractory to new change as time goes by. Now those who know me know I can't possibly start a text like this without going back in the past for an example.

 

Part I – The Emperor

    We are in the fall of 210 BCE. The first emperor of a unified China, Qin Shi Huang had just died and the government was wondering about how they would assure the succession. The first advisor Li Si was trying to find someone with similar ideologies than that of the late emperor (and of course, someone who would keep him as chief advisor). Li Si managed to discard the prince Fusu, one of the emperor's sons who had been exiled by Qin Shi Huang earlier on. Instead, Huhai, the emperor's eighteenth son ascended to the throne and became known as Qin Er Shi (Second Emperor of the Qin Dynasty). The results were catastrophic. Within three years, the emperor had committed suicide. A few months later, his successor was toppled by rebellion which put a definitive end to the Qin Dynasty.

    The woes of the Qin after the first emperor's death could be partly attributed to the inability of his successors but a large of part of it was due to his policies while in power. These policies were based on his values which hadn't changed since the time where he unified the country. Ying Zheng, who would later become Qin Shi Huang, was a brilliant military leader. He was able to lead the army from the rather small Qin state to become the strongest force in the area. His leadership was undeniably effective. He was decisive, brutal and cunning. He took every opportunity he had to advance himself and his cause. His followers, his soldiers, relied on him because his tactics would give them victory and enable them to avoid death, or worse.

    When he took the mantle of emperor, his leadership style was still effective and making sure that the unification would endure. The reforms that he pushed needed a strong hand to see them through (and maybe another strong hand to push steel through their opponents). But gradually, his followers and the situation changed. Qin Shi Huang was no longer the leader of a warring state or a state in chaos. He was now the leader of a unified group of people that were starting to all themselves as brothers. His followers, who before were his army and his enforcers, were now mainly composed of his citizens. They were people who were not looking for glory but for comfort and his autocratic style of leadership was going against their needs. The very qualities that made him an efficient leader a few years before and made him able to instill the changes that were needed in order to create a country made him unable to adapt to the changing situation and better understand his followers.

The results were catastrophic for the Qin Dynasty, but China remained as one. Liu Bang, the rebel leader who toppled the third Qin ruler, became known as Han Gaozu, the first emperor of the Han Dynasty. The Han brought a new era of prosperity to the region lasted for more than 400 years. Their impact was such that the main Chinese ethnic group is still referred to as "Han Chinese".

 

Part II should be posted tomorrow…

The notion of Interculturalism

In Canada, we've had the idea of multiculturalism behind our immigration policies. The idea was a good one in the 80s, letting the newly arrived citizens adapt to the reality of Canada while keeping their cultures and their bearings. It enriched the lives of those already here, letting them learn about different people and customs. Here, in Quebec, it has come to be disliked by a lot of people as Quebecers, fearing their own assimilation, wanted to bring those immigrants into their own cultures, with the idea of making it stronger. The recent reasonable accommodation "debate" brought the problem back in the spotlight, with provincial party leaders asking for Ottawa to exempt Quebec from the multicultural policies of Canada.

For my part, I think that the two ideas, assimilation and multiculturalism, are retrograde in the 21^st century. In an age where you can virtually meet with people from anywhere for nearly no money, you do not need physical proximity to a culture to learn from it. In an age where your influence is not restricted to your neighbors and where the whole planet is affected by your actions, assimilating immigrants is not the best way to strengthen its culture. In the 21^st century, cultures must learn from one another to spawn new, autonomous cultural groups. The strength lies in amalgamation, where the mix creates something greater than the sum of both older parts. We have access to a tremendous amount of information from anywhere in the world. This makes the notion of national identity a rather weak, leaving the ideas of group and individual identities to fill the void. With Interculturalism, where cultures are mixed together, you ensure that those identities do not clash with one another, making intergroup and interpersonal relationship smoother. With interculturalism, you do not lose your values or impose them on anyone. You simply take from others, things that will add to your own values and enhance them. This gives you a better understanding of other people's positions and this is what enables you to interact efficiently with them.

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