To my God,
A Heart of Flame;
To My Fellow Human Beings,
A Heart of Love;
To Myself,
A Heart of Steel
ST AUGUSTINE
ON SABBATICAL LEAVE during my time at Sandhurst I spent a year as the first director of studies at St George’s House in Windsor Castle. One of my tasks was to design and deliver a first-ever course designed to equip selected clergymen to be future leaders of the Church of England. Mainly for the purposes of winning support for the project, I met a selection of the diocesan bishops then in office. One of them, the bishop of Manchester, gave me a list of what he considered to be the six top priorities for the Church. On the list I noticed ‘Care for the Dying’.
‘How do you do that?’ I asked the bishop.
‘I do not know,’ he replied.
That evening in St George’s House I noticed after a supper a tall young woman standing alone in the drawing room where coffee was served. In conversation she told me that, having worked for some time as a nurse, she had recently qualified as a doctor. Her special interest was care for the dying – as it was expressed in those days – and with quiet enthusiasm she shared with me her vision for a great expansion of hospices in the UK and the world at large. Her name, I discovered, was Cicely Saunders.
Thanks largely to Cicely’s leadership over the coming years, the hospice movement came into being and has won widespread public support. In the course of time the National Portrait Gallery in London commissioned a portrait of Dame Cicely Saunders and she attended the unveiling ceremony. One of her friends stood beside her, looking at the portrait. ‘Cicely’, she eventually said, ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying so but you do look rather severe.’
‘Yes’, replied Cicely Saunders, ‘yes, I suppose I do – love and steel.’
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All real leaders have both those elements in them: love and steel. By ‘steel’ I mean toughness, which means firm, strong, not easily broken or in this context resilient. You may recall that in Xenophon’s judgement the Greek general Proxenus, for example, lacked toughness (p. 38).
The toughness in a leader should not be arbitrary: It should be a reflection of the toughness or demandingness of the task. Remember that the Three Circles overlap. If a leader demands the impossible and thereby secures the best in the Task circle, then there will be transformational effects in the Team and Individual circles. Nowhere is this principle better illustrated than in the domain of orchestral music.
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While I was at St Paul’s School, which is a day school, Sir Thomas Beecham used the empty great hall on Saturday mornings to rehearse the Royal Philharmonic orchestra. With his permission I watched these rehearsals with my attention on Beecham as a leader.
What fascinated me was how Beecham achieved results with so few words. Speaking in retrospect much later on, one of the orchestra’s members – the celebrated clarinettist Jack Bryman – put his finger on it: ‘For Beecham, conducting was a silent, choreographic art. When he turned his eye on you, you knew exactly how it had to be. Most of his magic was in his eye – it wasn’t in his beat.’
Another great conductor, Otto Klemperer, also expected the best from his players. He was not given to show his feelings, but after one rehearsal he was pleased enough with the result to turn as he walked off the stage and say with a smile ‘Good.’ After a few moments of silent surprise, the delighted orchestra rose as one to its feet and burst into applause. Klemperer, who had resumed his walk, turned again and said, ‘Not that good.’
What Klemperer, I think, is doing quite spontaneously is to stop the orchestra from becoming pleased with itself: for to be great, an orchestra needs great humility. In music one occasionally touches the stars but there is no dwelling place there.
Sir Neville Marriner, who once played an instrument in his early years as a musician in the London Symphony Orchestra, remembers the impact on them of Leopold Stokowski, a British-born American conductor of Polish descent:
In about three days he managed to transmit to us the notion that we were a great orchestra. It gave us enormous confidence and we suddenly realised, in one concert at the Festival Hall, that we could achieve, had just achieved, a great performance – that we could achieve it just as easily as any other orchestra in the world. I think it was a great turning point for the orchestra suddenly to be given this confidence in one performance.
From that moment the LSO never looked back – it was extraordinary. What did he do? He put more responsibility on the players than they had before. He more or less said to them, ‘This is your orchestra and if you want it to be good, then you must perform. I will do my best to make it happen but the responsibility is yours.’ He just had this remarkable ability to focus the emotion of an entire orchestra. His personality was immensely strong.
This element of demandingness in a conductor can produce great performances. As Sir Georg Solti says,
In my enthusiasm and intensity I will very often push people to the limits of their capabilities – and that must entail a certain degree of risk. The great thing is that the risk pays off when that person suddenly finds something in themselves they didn’t know was there.
I believe, particularly with great musicians that I’m able to collaborate with, that the sky should be the limit. And therefore as I am prepared to take the risks and shoot for the limit, then why shouldn’t they follow?
The best conductors are actually not the egoistical ones, who present themselves and not their orchestras as the star of the show. Like Lau Tzu’s excellent leader – ‘When his work is done, the people will all say “We did this ourselves”’ – the greatest conductors are self-effacing. And in this respect they are a model for the modern leaders at all levels. It is well expressed by the eminent American-Estonian conductor Paavo Järvi:
Success as a conductor has nothing to do with movement. It has everything to do with persona, the personality and a person’s ability to communicate with the musicians and co nvey your ideas. The strength of the performance comes in conveying your involvement in the process, rather than being a god who wields the whip with the capacity to open and close the door. You must be someone who embraces and helps the orchestra. The most effective leadership, to me, is the leadership that doesn’t look like leadership. The moment somebody walks in looking and sounding like a ‘leader’, that’s quite suspicious to me. You must be part of the process – so convinced by what you are doing that everyone else has no choice but to follow you. It’s intuition and personality. You have to encourage people to open up, seduce them, not scare them, to follow you. That’s a great leader!
Toughness and demandingness, however benign their purposes, need to be balanced by justice and fairness. Justice derives from the Latin jus; ‘fair’ is Old English by origin. Although in modern English they have slightly different connotations, essentially they refer to the same thing. The Roman lawyer Justinian expressed it in a nutshell: Justice is the constant and unceasing will to give everyone their right or due. A distinguished lord chief justice of England, Lord Denning, described justice as a spiritual thing with no satisfactory or precise definition, though as a working definition he proposed that ‘it was what right-thinking men and women believe to be fair’.
Equivalence, the equal value of giving and taking, seems to be a guiding norm in human relations, which isn’t to say that it’s always the case. As you may have observed, few human relations have perfect symmetry in this respect; they may have it for a time, but time and change have a way of altering the balance.
There is certainly a case for saying that our instinct for equivalent reciprocity is a matter of nature and nurture. I find it fascinating that in the first six months of a human baby’s life its mother hands objects to the baby and the baby takes them. Gradually the baby is encouraged to hand them back. By the time the baby is about twelve months old these exchanges involving giving and receiving have become more or less equal. The exchange of smiles probably follows the same pattern. Gorilla mothers and their babies do not exhibit this particular pattern of behaviour with their young. But then personality is not a gorilla attribute, or at least only in vestige.
There are two broad types of contracts: spoken or written contracts, and unspoken or unwritten contracts. The former are explicit agreements, sometimes exactly spelt out in all their details, so that there is no room for ambiguity or reason for difficulty in interpretation. Work for lawyers here! An implicit ‘contract’ by contrast is left largely unexpressed. As a general principle, the more impersonal the relation, the more we tend to make the contract explicit. The more personal the role relation – as in those we experience within families and among friends or neighbours – the more we rely upon unspoken mutual understanding and trust: for roles are composed of mutual expectations, which include fairness. All children expect equal slices of the birthday cake.
It is an error to think of justice and fairness – that hidden impersonal element in our role relations with each other – as being antithetical, inferior or second-best to personal relation. The proper connection between them is that the former is a necessary condition for the latter. It is the base line in the music, and music is perfect harmony. William Temple, the archbishop of Canterbury during the Second World War, captures this principle for us:
Justice is the first expression of love. It is not something contrary to love, which love mitigates and softens. It is the first expression of it that must be satisfied, before the other and higher expressions can rightly find their places.
Or, as Thomas Aquinas says, ‘Grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it.’
You should remember, however, that justice and fairness – like all the other ‘king-becoming graces’ – are what philosophers call regulative ideals. They serve to inspire or give direction to our behaviour and to prevent our minds from falling into error. But in practice we shall not get it right every time – be it fairness or love.
Take courage to persevere, however, from Tolstoy’s insight. Yes, we are human beings and not gods. Yes, we sometimes miss the mark where justice or fairness is concerned. Yet nonetheless there is a real difference between a just person and an unjust one, between a loving person and an unloving one. As Tolstoy says,
Not a single person can be completely just in all his deeds, but a just person can be completely different from an unjust one with his efforts, in the same way as a truthful man is different from a liar, with his efforts to speak only truth.