Not the cry but the flight of the wild duck leads the flock to fly and to follow.
CHINESE PROVERB
‘PAINTING A PICTURE or writing a book’, said the great artist Henri Matisse, is ‘always best done if I move from the simple to the complex’. The focus of this book is upon what leaders do: the action-centred leadership approach. Now if we take seriously the dictum that leadership is done from in front, it is that simple action which is our starting point. So let us try to understand that first and then explore the more complex aspects later.
Why do leaders go first in this manner? The common answer is that they do so in order to show the way, or – in other words – to ensure that those following behind them are going in the right direction. But a moment’s thought tells us that soldiers on a battlefield know in what direction they have to march or run to engage their enemy. And in wider contexts, showing the way is the function of a guide on land and a pilot at sea. As there are no exact synonyms in the English language we must look elsewhere to discover what function a leader – as opposed to a guide or pilot – is performing when he leads from the front. Oddly enough, the clue lies buried in the etymology of the verb ‘to lead’.
The word ‘leadership’ itself didn’t enter the English language until the 1820s. The three constituent elements, however, that make up the composite word – LEAD.ER.SHIP – all date back to Old English, the language of the Angles and Saxons, and its kindred North European languages. That is why today you will find the English word ‘leader’ in, for example, German (leiter), Dutch (leider) and Norwegian (leder).
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The first element in leadership – LEAD – means a way, path, track or the course of a ship at sea. It is a journey word. In its simple verbal form, to lead meant ‘to go’ or ‘to travel’. But in Old English that direct form of the verb is missing. What we have is only the causative form of the verb. So to lead (lædan) in English uniquely means to cause someone or something to move forward or to go on a journey.
How do you cause people – people who are both free and equal – to advance in this way? By the simple act of leading them from the front. Or, as Glubb Pasha put it in the last chapter, ‘Do it yourself.’
But why does it work? To find the answer – or at least pick up a clue – we must turn to the natural world. In the regions around the Mediterranean, the picture of a shepherd leading his flock of sheep from the front to pasture is still a common sight. For it is a fact that sheep are relatively easy to lead from the front but are difficult to drive forward without scattering them from the rear. Shepherds in northern Greece today, like their ancient counterparts, have mastiffs to help them guard their flocks against wolves. Sheepdogs, however, which are bred and trained to round up sheep and drive them from the rear upon signals from the shepherd, are a relatively modern phenomenon.
The same causative effect, we may surmise, has been observed among people. When one tribal warrior went ahead first, others would follow. If he did it more than once, he would become known as a lead-er (for the –er suffix indicates someone who does something more than once, as in carpenter or dancer).
When nation states began to form in the Near East, some of these warrior-leaders were chosen – or put themselves forward – to be kings. Saul in the land occupied by the twelve Hebrew tribes is one example, and the kings chosen by the Spartans another. The prime and most simple function of such kings was to lead the nation’s army into battle – from the front.
In fact, the earliest example of writing known to history – some words engraved on a Sumerian pottery shard found near Babylon and dated to about 4,500 BCE – makes a direct link between the causative function of a shepherd and that of a king. It is in the form of a proverb: Soldiers without a king are like sheep without a shepherd.
Beyond that proverb, it is fair to say that the ancient civilizations around the Mediterranean are silent on the subject of leadership. There is, however, one great exception: Athens in the age of Socrates (469–399 BCE).
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The ancient Greeks were a warrior people by origin. Homer, their great poet of the eighth century BCE, expressed the heroic Greek spirit in the Iliad, his epic poem of the long war against Troy:
All dreadful glared the iron face of war,
But touched with joy the bosoms of the brave.
Even in the cultural heyday of Athens in the fifth century BCE, the Greek cities spent an inordinate amount of time fighting each other or at war with their common enemy, the neighbouring Great Persian Empire. Socrates himself took part in three campaigns as a hoplite, as the heavily armed foot soldiers were called. Usually, hoplites fought in a phalanx, a compact body of soldiers drawn up in close order for battle.
Xenophon (pronounced in English as Zenophon), the son of Gryllus, a member of an aristocratic and comparatively wealthy family, secured election as a cavalry commander at a young age. In 401 BCE, contrary to the advice of Socrates, he joined an army of Greek mercenaries hired by a Persian prince, Cyrus the Younger.
The real reason for their service the Greek army – known to history as the ‘Ten Thousand’ – only discovered when they arrived in the vicinity of Babylon: It was to enable Cyrus to seize the Persian throne. But although his Greek mercenaries fought valiantly in a decisive battle with the incumbent (who also had a Greek contingent in his army), Cyrus lost both the battle and his life.
Faced now with a stark choice of death or slavery, the Greek officers – as if by common consent by the more senior of their six generals, a Spartan called Clearchus – directed their army to march 900 miles north through enemy country to the Black Sea and freedom. Not long after they set out on this epic march, the Persians invited the six Greek generals to a parley – and after the final course of the feast, put them all to the sword. Now the advantage of democracy showed itself, for the remaining Greek officers, far from scattering like frightened sheep, assembled together and elected six generals to take their place. Xenophon, then aged about twenty-six years, was one of the chosen six. The Anabasis (literally the ‘goin g up’) is Xenophon’s account of the expedition and its return to safety. Incidentally, T. E. Lawrence modelled The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his epic account of the Arab Revolt in the First World War, on the Anabasis. Like Xenophon, he magnified his own role into that of being in effect the commandeer-in-chief. In neither man was modesty a strong point.
Imagine yourself on a sun-baked, stony hillside on the southern edge of Kurdistan (on the borders of what is now Iraq and Turkey) watching this scene unfold before you: it is about noon; the sky is clear blue, except for a line of white clouds almost motionless above a distant mountain range. Marching through these foothills comes the advance guard of the Ten Thousand. The hot sun glints and sparkles on their spears, helmets and breastplates. They are hurrying forward, eager to reach the safety of the mountains in order to be rid of the Persian cavalry snapping at their heels. But first they have to cut their way through the Carduci, the warrior tribe of the region. Across the pass you can see a strong contingent of these tribesmen already occupying the lower heights of a steep hill which commands the road. Now the Greek advance guard spotted them, too, and it halts. After some hurried deliberations you can see a messenger running back. A few minutes later a horseman – it is Xenophon – gallops up to the commander of the advance guard, a seasoned Spartan captain named Chirisophus. Xenophon tells him that he has not brought up a reinforcement of the light-armed troops that had been urgently requested because the rearguard – still under constant attack – could not be weakened. Then he carefully studies the lie of the land. Noticing that the Carduci have neglected to occupy the actual summit of the hill, he puts this plan to his Spartan colleague:
The best thing to do, Chirisophus, is for us to advance on the summit as fast as we can. If we can occupy it, those who are commanding our road will not be able to maintain their position. If you like, you stay here with the main body. I will volunteer to go ahead. Or, if you prefer it, you march on the mountain and I will stay here.
‘I will give you the choice’, replies Chirisophus ‘of doing whichever you like.’
It would be an arduous physical task, Xenophon pointed out, and he tactfully says that being the younger man, he would be the best one to undertake it. Having chosen some 400 skirmishers, armed with targets and light javelins, together with 100 hand-picked hoplites of the advance guard, he marched them off as fast as he could go towards the summit. But when the enemy see what the Greeks are doing, they too begin to head for the highest ground as fast as they can go.
Then there was a lot of shouting, from the Greek army cheering on its men on the one side and from Tissaphernes’ people cheering on their men on the other side. Xenophon rode along the ranks on horseback, urging them on. ‘Soldiers’, he said, ‘consider that it is for Greece you are fighting now, that you are fighting your way to your children and your wives, and that with a little hard work now, we shall go on the rest of our way unopposed’.
Soteridas, a man from Sicyion, said: ‘We are not on a level, Xenophon. You are riding on horseback, while I am wearing myself out with a shield to carry.’
As the commander, Xenophon had several options open to him. He could have ignored the man. Or he could have threatened him. Or he could conceivably have had him arrested and punished later. Xenophon took none of these courses. Writing of himself in the third person, he told us what happened next:
When Xenophon heard this, he jumped down from his horse, pushed Soteridas out of the ranks, took his shield away from him and went forward on foot as fast as he could, carrying the shield. He happened to be wearing a cavalry breastplate as well, so that it was heavy going for him. He kept on encouraging those in front to keep going and those behind to join up with them, though struggling along behind them himself. The other soldiers, however, struck Soteridas and threw stones at him and cursed him until they forced him to take back his shield and continue marching. Xenophon then remounted and, so long as the going was good, led the way on horseback. When it became impossible to ride, he left his horse behind and hurried ahead on foot. And so they got to the summit before the enemy.
Note that it was the other soldiers who shamed Soteridas into taking back his shield. Although Xenophon, burdened with a heavy cavalry breastplate, eventually fell back behind the ranks as the men rushed up the hill, yet he encouraged the men forward and urged them to keep their battle order. Eventually, he remounted and led his soldiers from the front, at first on horse and then again on foot.
Once the Greeks had gained the summit the Carduci turned and fled in all directions. The Persian cavalry under Tissaphernes, who had been distant onlookers of the contest, also turned their bridles and withdrew. Eventually, in the summer of the following year, the army reached the safety of the Hellespont, the narrow straits dividing Europe from Asia. They owed much to Xenophon who, not long afterwards, became the sole commander of the Ten Thousand.
Xenophon seems to have learnt a lesson from the skirmish with the Carduci. Later, when leading his men to attack an enemy in Thrace, he dismounted, explaining to a surprised fellow officer that ‘the hoplites will run faster and more cheerfully if I lead on foot’.
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If we fast forward to the history of England, we find the same phenomenon: It is the act of leading from in front which causes men to follow a leader, voluntarily and as if of their own free will. The movement caused by command from above or from the rear, backed as it may be by the threat of a draconian punishment for disobedience, simply lacks the same magic power.
Towards the end of Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, the generals still loyal to the ‘confident tyrant’ are discussing their master’s total lack of leadership. The most dangerous consequence one of them, Angus, declares is that in battle
His army moves only by command,
Nothing by love.
Therefore, Angus in effect concludes, the coming final battle to secure his ill-gotten throne is already lost.
By contrast, in Henry V, Shakespeare portrays an ideal leader – one with all the ‘king-becoming graces’ – who leads his army from in front to great victory at Agincourt.
Incidentally, Shakespeare puts into King Henry’s mouth some long and inspiring speeches before the siege of Harfleur – ‘Once more unto the breach dear friends, once more’ – and again before Agincourt: ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.’ But, according to a contemporary chronicler – very possibly an eye witness – what Henry actually says as he led his men forwards towards the much larger French army is ‘Come on, fellas’. True leaders are always strong on action and usually very economical with words. But then they don’t have a theatre to fill!
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What is now clear is the truth of Euripides’ verse: ‘Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head.’ Therefore wise armies foster a culture where officers are expected by their soldiers to lead them from in front, and officers can have complete trust that if they do so, the men will follow them.
By the eighteenth century the English standing army, the Redcoats, exhibited that unwritten contract – one of mutual expectations, as if between equals – between officers and the rank and file. In an article entitled ‘The Bravery of the English Soldier’, which appeared in a monthly journal called The Idler in 1760, Dr Samuel Johnson reflected upon this unseen but very real contract:
By those who have compared the military genius of the English with that of the French nation, it is remarked that ‘the French officers will always lead, if the soldiers will follow’; and that ‘the English soldiers will always follow, if their officers will lead’.
In all pointed sentences some degrees of accuracy must be sacrificed to conciseness; and, in this comparison, our officers seem to lose what our soldiers gain. I know not any reason for supposing that the English officers are less willing than the French to lead; but it is, I think, universally allowed, that the English soldiers are more willing to follow.
Our nation may boast, beyond any other people in the world, of a kind of epidemic bravery, diffused equally through all its ranks. We can show a peasantry of heroes, and fill our armies with clowns, whose courage may vie with that of their general.
On occasion English soldiers could be quite outspoken to officers whom they suspected to be shirking their role of leading from the front. One soldier in Wellington’s army during the Peninsular War, for example, writes in his memoir, ‘Our men had divided the officers into classes – the “Come on” and the “Go on”’, for as Tom Plunkett in action once observed to an officer, ‘The words “Go on” don’t befit a leader, Sir’. Plunkett was absolutely right.
Both on land and at sea, soldiers and sailors – as their memoirs often reveal – scrutinized their officers very thoroughly, both in terms of their professional knowledge and experience and with regard to their leadership qualities. This kind of upwards scrutiny, of course, is not confined to the armed services. Even at school, if you remember, you knew within days exactly how far you could go with a given teacher.
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To lead soldiers from the front to make a highly dangerous and risky journey, often towards a waiting enemy, may be causative but it may also be a death sentence for the leader. The reason why this should be the case is indicated by a proverb that Jesus is said to have quoted (Matthew 26:31): Strike the shepherd and the sheep of the flock will scatter. If an enemy force is advancing towards you it is instinctive to shoot the leaders – those out in front – first: not just because they are the first to come into range but because by downing them it may cause the followers to waiver, lose their order and turn to run away.
Even in ancient times, leading from the front was extremely life-threatening. Research shows that no leader of a Greek phalanx on the losing side of a battle ever survived. With the introduction of the machine gun in the First World War – there were over ten million of these deadly weapons in service – the death toll of regimental officers was appalling. In the Second World War, when, as chief of the General Staff, Field Marshall Alanbrooke had great difficulty in finding generals who had the necessary qualities of leadership at that level, he blamed it on the First World War. In his private diary he wrote: ‘Those that had fallen were the born leaders of men, in command of companies and battalions. It was always the best that fell by taking the lead.’
Even before the end of the First World War, the German Army, and belatedly the British Army, had begun to develop new tactics that did not turn their officers into fodder fire for the machine guns. But such deadly ingrained role expectations are not so easily eradicated. Professor Sir Michael Howard, the eminent military historian, recalls his discovery of this fact while serving as a newly arrived platoon commander in the Coldstream Guards at Salerno during the Second World War. He received a command to take part in a daylight attack on a strongly defended hill, an episode he describes in his autobiography:
When I gave the leading section its orders, the sergeant in charge asked incredulously ‘Aren’t you going to lead us, sir?’ The look of amazed contempt that he gave me when I said that I was not is something that I shall never forget. The other platoon commanders did lead their platoons. All were killed or badly wounded.
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On the above (p. 5) I raised a fundamental question: How far is leadership, as exhibited in military contexts, transferable to other domains or fields?
What is clearly not transferable is the specific form of military command; the rationale for that practice is rooted in the unnatural conditions of war. (Although in the English language the term ‘commander’ was once a close synonym of ‘leader’, it is now restricted as a role title to the armed forces and to certain uniformed emergency services such as the police.)
If we take leading from the front (in the physical or literal sense) as a particular form of leading by example, then the door of transferability is wide open, for there are a thousand ways of leading by example. And, incidentally, a thousand ways exist for not leading by example! Take pastors as a case in point.
‘It is certain’, Shakespeare wrote in Henry IV, Part Two, ‘that either wise bearing or ignorant carriage is caught, as men take diseases, therefore let men take heed of their company’. In the West no less than in the East, or in tribal societies, the power of moral – or immoral – example has always been well understood. In Christendom the failure of spiritual leaders to lead from in front, by good example, always troubled the best minds. As Shakespeare put it,
Do not like some ungracious pastors do,
Show us the steep and thorny way to heaven,
Whi le they the primrose path of dalliance tread
And reck [follow] not their own rede [advice].
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‘We shall find again and again’, writes C. S. Lewis in Studies in Words (1960), ‘the earliest senses of a word flourishing for centuries, despite a vast overgrowth of later senses which might be expected to kill them’.
Leadership from in front is a case in point. The earliest sense of it is still with us today. Even in the military field, where occasions for literally leading soldiers from in front into battle are now far less common, it is still a very potent phrase. And it serves as a concrete and visual reference point, a kind of hidden anchor beneath all our metaphorical uses of such terms as ‘leading’, ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’.
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One archaic survivor, however, of the original metaphor is the word ‘follower’. It is a fossil word. For it applied to those who followed a leader on a literal journey, just as sheep follow a shepherd. Remove that literal journey and the term ‘follower’ has to be treated as a metaphor, nothing more.
Unfortunately, the English language has no clear-cut replacement name to denote those who work in teams with leaders. Therefore, to some extent, we are still saddled with leader–followers as a general coupling, comparable to doctors–patients or teachers–students, lawyers–clients, or sellers–buyers. But it carries some of the wrong connotations for today’s world. Here are my reasons for that judgment.
In English, ‘supporter’ is the general term for one who allies himself or herself with a cause or shows allegiance to its leader. ‘Follower’ and ‘disciple’ are related because they emphasize devotion to a leader rather than a doctrine or cause. A follower plays a more passive role than a supporter or a disciple. A disciple is one who studies under a leader or teacher of great influence and puts the leader’s teaching into practice, perhaps to the point of proselytizing for him.
Just to complete the picture, an adherent places emphasis on support of the doctrines rather than of the leader himself. So it is that we speak of Lenin as having been an adherent of Marxism, not an adherent of Marx himself.
Notice that overtone or connotation of passivity in the notion of being a follower: the word suggests not much more than imitating the person in front of one, not unlike the children’s game Follow-my-leader, in which each player must exactly imitate the actions of the leader or pay a forfeit.
Apart from the implied sense of sheep-like passivity, ‘follower’ also has – at least in modern usage – a potentially more dangerous connotation: for it is the inclusive term for a person who attaches themselves to the person or opinion of another. That attachment may spring from choice or conviction on rational grounds. Equally, however, it may be an unhealthy form of attachment, where a charismatic leader such as Adolf Hitler demands complete loyalty to him personally, right or wrong. Even in cases where malevolent charisma is not involved, some of the synonyms for ‘follower’, such as ‘partisan’, ‘henchman’ or ‘satellite’, designate a person in whom personal devotion overshadows or eclipses their critical faculties. No true leader demands personal loyalty as of right or at the expense of all other considerations.
In 1928 the term ‘followership’ made its first appearance in American dictionaries, where it was defined as ‘the capacity or willingness to follow a leader’. In recent years there have been attempts to give the term more substance than that, to build it up as a counter-balance, so to speak, to leadership. But because ‘follower’ is actually an archaic term, these efforts are like trying to inflate an empty balloon. The –ship suffix here denotes neither a single generic role (as in leadership) nor a collection of generic skills (as in craftsmanship).
Yet there remains a fundamental truth that proponents of followership are right to emphasize: namely that occupying a subordinate role in a work group or organization doesn’t ever strip away or erode one’s moral responsibility as a person and as a citizen. If any leader – at any level – oversteps the mark in the moral sense, members of such a body should refuse to follow in their footsteps, and moreover, call them to account, for it is the essence of democracy that, as free and equal people, leaders are ultimately accountable to the people.
For the time being, alas, we simply don’t have an inclusive term to connect with ‘leader’ in the generic role relation, so we shall continue to use ‘follower’ or ‘followers’. To adapt an old proverb, ‘There are no bad followers, only bad leaders’. This is true up to a point, but yet isn’t it as much true to claim ‘There are no bad leaders, only bad followers’?
Montgomery once told me his secret as a leader: ‘I made my soldiers partners with me in the battle.’ Isn’t that what all real leaders aim to do? They want equals, not followers or subordinates, and they see their role as being what the Romans called primus inter pares: ‘first among equals’. And the devotion they solicit is for a common cause, not for themselves considered as individuals. Banesh Hoffman wrote of his experience as a colleague of Albert Einstein: ‘If you worked with him he made you aware of a common enemy – the problem. And you became his partner in battle.’