What the leader believes and hopes
The only way to lead is to show people the future.
A leader is a dealer in hope.
NAPOLEON
BE, KNOW, DO sums up the conventional wisdom – much as outlined in this book – concerning the essentials of being a leader. Yet there are two other aspects which call for our attention – what the real leader believes and hopes.
Great conductors believe in the greatness of their orchestras, and that belief arms them to elicit greatness from the musicians involved, both corporately as a team and individually as instrumentalists. The human potential for greatness – if we view humanity as a whole, past and present – is theoretically unlimited, for the human mind is the greatest wonder in the universe. Leaders turn that theory into practice, just as turbines turn rivers into energy.
Another way of looking at the same picture is to turn it upside down and to say that great orchestras deserve great conductors. As the Roman historian Livy once said, ‘Rome being great, deserved great leaders.’ Not that it always found them. Then, as today, some nations, institutions and organizations have to prove their greatness only by surviving long tenures of poor leadership at their head. As poor leaders are without shame, only time brings any remedy for the damage they can inflict on their fellow citizens. As a Hebrew proverb says, When God wants to punish the sheep, he sends them a blind shepherd.
Even deeper than the leader’s implicit belief or trust in the greatness of people is their faith in the inalienable goodness of man. For example, Nelson Mandela, reflecting on twenty-eight years as a prisoner on Robben Island, has this to say:
Even in the grimmest times in prison, when my comrades and I were pushed to our limits, I would see a glimmer of humanity in one of the guards, perhaps just for a second, but that was enough to reassure me and keep me going. Man’s goodness is a flame that can be hidden but never extinguished.
Goodness may be understood as a holistic property of a group or a society as a whole, not just the quality of an individual’s character. As Aristotle points out:
It’s possible that the multitude, though not individually composed of good men, nevertheless in coming together becomes better than its members. Not as individuals but as a whole.
Compare communal dinners, which are better than those supplied out of a single purse. For when there are many, each individual has a portion of virtue and good sense. And when they come together, just as the multitude becomes a single individual with many feet and many hands and possessing many senses, so also it becomes one individual in its moral disposition and intellect.
In a letter to a friend, Pliny the Younger puts it even more succinctly:
In a group there is a certain great collective wisdom. Though its individual members may be deficient in judgment, the group as a whole has much.
Some individuals are – to all intents and purposes – thoroughly evil. Yet Shakespeare reminds us that ‘there is some soul of goodness in things evil, would men observingly distil it out’.
Shortfalls of goodness and integrity in some ordinary people – deficiencies of character not personality – mean that those who believe or trust in others will find themselves being let down from time to time. In professional as in personal life, this experience can be painful. It brings with it the temptation to become completely disillusioned about human nature, as if to punish all people for the sins of two or three. But cynics never make good leaders. In fact good persons tend to take a very different line.
‘It is happier to be sometimes cheated’, said Dr Samuel Johnson, ‘than not to trust’. Long ago in ancient China, Lao Tzu came to the same conclusion:
Those who are good I treat as good. Those who are not good I also treat as good. In so doing I gain in goodness. Those who are of good faith I have faith in. Those who are lacking in good faith I also have faith in. In so doing I gain in good faith.
In other words, they refuse to surrender their goodness on account of those who have treated them or theirs with inhumanity.
At first sight it may seem irrational to trust others as if they are men and women of integrity and honour. But there is an argument that it is a rational policy to adopt. That case is made by a German philosopher called Hans Vaihinger (1852–1933). In his book The Philosophy of As If, Vaihinger explored in some depth:
Notions which cannot stand for realities, can be treated as if they did, because to do so leads to practical results.
An obvious example is science, where the assumption as if truth or understanding order lies beneath the surface of things has led to discovery after discovery. Nobody knows what truth is, and yet, as Pascal says, ‘We have an idea of truth, invincible to all scepticism.’ But to act as if it exists and can be explored and mapped is the belief or faith of a great scientist like Einstein. Seneca, the Roman writer, who prophesied that great scientific discoveries would be made in the centuries after his death, gives today’s scientists their charter: ‘Truth is open to everyone, and the claims are not all staked yet.’
In other words, trusting others – believing in their integrity or goodness – can be justified on pragmatic grounds: it works.
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Consider this sentence in Ordway Tead’s book The Art of Leadership (1935):
The greater leaders have acted as if life’s values were real and permanent; as if living possessed an inner meaning and significance; as if the good once attained could not be lost or destroyed; and as if courage, endurance and acceptance of the inevitable were worthy adult attributes. (Italics mine)
You can see that Tead is here boldly applying the philosophy of as if to life as a whole. ‘A man of hope and forward-looking mind’, as Wordsworth writes. For here I think that hope serves us better than believe.
To be optimistic, in contrast to pessimistic, usually im plies a temperamental confidence that all will turn out for the best. Unlike hopeful it often suggests a failure to consider things closely or realistically or, even, a willingness to be guided by illusions rather than facts. To be hopeful, on the other hand, implies some ground, and often reasonably good grounds, for one’s having hope; it therefore typically suggests confidence in which there is little or no self-deception or which may be the result of a realistic consideration of possibilities.
Hope implies some degree of belief – in the idea that one may expect what one desires or longs for. Although it seldom implies certitude, it usually connotes confidence and often (especially in religious use) implies profound assurance.
No one has proved with any degree of certitude that there is some ulterior purpose or meaning to our human life – some undiscovered ends that give humankind a destiny rather than a fate – and which has the potential of making our individual lives worthwhile.
It is equally true, however, that no one has yet proved with certainty that life does not have these values.
You can see now why Napoleon called a leader a ‘dealer in hope’: for what all leaders tend to do, regardless of their field – or indeed their level – is to create a climate of hope. They do so by themselves, sharing widely their confidence that the end or outcome is going to be favourable or at least for the best. Hope is the oxygen of the human spirit, for it is the atmosphere in which men and women can breathe; it breeds a spirit where all want to work together as one, giving their best to the common cause.
The important point is that while hope is still alive you are in with a chance. As Alexander Dubcek, leader of the Czech uprising against the Russians in 1968, said, ‘hope dies last; the person who loses hope also loses the sense of his future.’
Take Dag Hammarskjöld as an example. As secretary general of the United Nations, the second to hold that office, he was the leader in the efforts to maintain peace in a world divided into Western and Eastern blocs. As the vision of a higher form of international society after the trauma of the Second World War, a new order of peace, seemed doomed, Hammarskjöld refused to abandon hope: ‘Sometimes that hope – the hope for that kind of reaction – is frustrated’, he said, ‘but it is a hope which is undying.’
G. K. Chesterton once said that anyone can hope when things look really hopeful. It is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength at all. Like all the spiritual virtues, he added, ‘hope is as unreasonable as it is indispensable.’
That leaves us with a certain freedom to choose. And, as Robert Frost suggests, it is an important choice, especially for a young person standing on the threshold of their adult life.
Looking back with hindsight, you may be aware that at some point – you may never be quite sure when – you did make that momentous choice. The unpromising path, the one that you had to travel alone, proved against all the odds to be the right one for you. Robert Frost writes of such an experience in his poem ‘The Road Not Taken’:
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence;
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less travelled by
And that has made all the difference.
Leaders tend to be among those who choose the positive path rather than the negative one. Or as Teilhard de Chardin expressed it, they deliberately choose the plus rather than the minus. And, it must be added, you are also more likely to find better company on the positive path.
Such beliefs or hopes belong, however – it must be said again – to Vaihinger’s broad category of ‘notions that which cannot stand for realities, but which if treated as if they do produce a never-failing store of beneficial or fruitful results’. As you will have guessed, I am firmly in Vaihinger’s camp here, but it is just my personal opinion. What do you think?
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In 1930, thanks to a trust fund set up for the purpose by a local family, the University of St Andrew’s in Scotland became the first university in the world to establish a series of annual lectures on leadership. Many famous men delivered these lectures over the next twenty years, but arguably the best was the first one, ‘Montrose and Leadership’, delivered by John Buchan, novelist and governor general of Canada. In the course of the lecture, he uttered these words, a fitting conclusion for both this chapter and indeed this book as a whole:
One last word. We may analyse leadership meticulously, like a chemical compound, but we shall never extract its inner essence. There will always be something which escapes us, for in leadership there is a tincture of the miraculous.
I should define the miraculous element as a response of spirit to spirit. There is in all men, even the basest, some kinship with the divine, something which is capable of rising superior to common passions and the lure of easy rewards, superior to pain and loss, superior even to death. The true leader evokes this. The greatness in him wins a response, an answering greatness in his followers.
The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.