It is without any doubt that some of those in charge aren’t necessarily competent and working in everyone’s best interests. For this reason, we must think before we follow, because power isn’t greatness, but greatness will always find its power. In leadership, leaders are expected to visualize, inspire, instigate, and obtain the willing commitment and performance of subordinates and citizens for the purpose of achieving organizational or national goals. Personally, I see leadership as an opportunity to serve, rather than a trumpet call to self-importance. Steven Covey said it well that leadership is not position but moral authority, which comes from following universal and timeless principles like honesty, integrity, and treating people with respect. Coach Eddie Robinson of Grambling State University, Louisiana likened leadership to coaching, which he described as fighting for the hearts and souls of men and women and getting them to believe in you. In fact, leadership is about integrity, character, vision, probity, transparency, and the ability to motivate and inspire all and sundry. I learned in my adulthood that integrity is not something you show people, but how you behave behind their back. The late Professor Chinua Achebe observed that the truest test of integrity is its refusal to be compromised. It was Julius Caesar Watts Jr’s quip that character is doing the right thing when nobody is looking. Character is what impels us to always stand for what is right, even if it means standing alone. Thomas Paine remarked that character is much easier kept than recovered. Other equally important leadership traits, like honesty and honor, must be preserved because we never get a second chance to make a first impression.
In fact, leadership requires vision, a leadership trait many regard as its essence. The late University of Southern California (USC) Professor Warren G. Bennis was widely recognized by scholars in the field, including this author, as the “father of leadership.” Bennis related leadership to the capacity to translate vision into reality. Vision, as Jonathan Swift sees it, is the art of seeing what is invisible to others. Helen Keller, a blind educator who lost her sight and hearing at the age of nineteen months, remarked that the only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision. It is a leader’s role, David Gergen observed, to raise people’s aspirations for what they can become and to release their energies so they would try to get there. General Maxwell D. Taylor defined leadership as the art of influencing and directing men and women in such a way as to obtain their willing obedience, confidence, respect, and loyal cooperation in order to achieve a mission. General Collin Powell quoted his Fort Benning Army School Sargent that you will know you are a good leader when people follow you, if only out of curiosity. People tend to follow a leader who leads by example. Homer, the Greek Epic Poet, pointed out that the difficulty is not so great to die for a friend, as to find a friend worth dying for. It was the quintessential leadership of Jesus Christ more than two thousand years ago that propelled His disciples to inhale courage and exhale fear in the fulfillment of His mission.
Unfortunately and sadly, leadership in many cases today has been turned on its head into the pursuit of power and position for personal enrichment and the enablement of sycophants and thugs. Fawning around narcissistic and thoughtless people in positions of power has become common to the level of being a national pastime. Political correctness has become a synonym for the fear to call a spade a spade.
In a world laden with “alternative facts” noise, where falsehood has become pervasive, “selection” has superseded “election” to the highest offices in a nation, the argument to “save our democracy” is invoked where democracy never existed, the poor are ignored by the ruling class with the power and resources to mitigate their suffering, and accurate news report is disingenuously christened “fake news,” doing the wrong instead of the right thing has become the new normal. I suppose this is so because following the path of least resistance is what makes rivers, some politicians, and some leaders crooked. Nevertheless, I agree with Nobel Laureate Eliezer “Elie” Wiesel that there may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.
Akubue wrote in from St. Cloud, Minnesota, USA Email: gina.akubue47@gmail.com
