I had my six month review at work today. We live to fight another day.
One of the topics that came up was on leadership. Thinking about it now in bed, I am reflecting on how little emphasis we put on it at the micro level while still recognising its importance at the macro level. Let me explain.
Even in families where the parents hold leadership roles, I think it is rare that you’ll see those skills actively taught. Many children have a parent that is happy to help them with organic chemistry, a skill that’s largely recognised as having marginal value (for all parties), but little time on leadership, and I imagine vanishingly small amounts of time on power acquisition and consolidation. Maybe it’s all a little unseemly. Even the word power feels like something dirty, when in reality, power is just your capacity to get what you want, a definition that is just as true for individuals as it for nations. Powerful nations can apply this to moral and immoral ends; the USA can support the war effort in Ukraine far more than Poland can, despite the latter having far more at stake.
So if it’s not taught within the family, where is taught? Unless you commission as an officer, I don’t know how many formal teaching paths the average person has access to, beyond trial and error. There are of course endless pages written on leadership, but that information is only transferred to those who actively seek out; a small number. Which leaves cultural transfusion, which has its own issues.
The main one is that we often select terrible examples. Ask someone who they think is a great leader, and you might hear answers like Churchill, Mandela, Caesar, Lincoln etc. But while these individuals were impressive, I wonder how much I can learn from them. The gap between what they did, and where I am, means that emulating them is like teaching Octavia to read with the Brothers Karamazov, or to drive by taking her to watch the F1. People rightfully expect to go through steps, starting small and progressively building. Reading about Julius Caesar’s invasion of Gaul isn’t going to provide many lessons on how to motivate your latest intern.
This post has largely been an exercise on getting thoughts on paper, and is thus a bit of a mess, probably self-contradictory, and possibly useless. It at least has me thinking more about the topic, which probably puts me in a smaller group than you would imagine. The number of people who just want to be told what to do is always surprisingly large.