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Tag: "Election"

What Can We Learn From Donald Trump and Leadership?

The stratospheric rise of Donald Trump as the Republican party front runner can offer us many real world lessons about leadership.  Keep in mind that I’m looking at this from a clinical perspective.  Whether you’re pro Trump or anti Trump, you can’t argue the fact that he was created a massive following in a very short period of time.  Why? If you are willing to keep an open mind, let’s unpack this phenomena known as Donald Trump.

The brilliant sociololgist Max Weber would sum up Trump’s success in one word: charisma.  The etymology for the world charisma is Greek, meaning of divine origin.  Weber wrote about charisma being “a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin…an on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader.”

Isn’t that what Trump has managed to do when he claims that all he does is “win?”  He has positioned himself as a demi-god imbued with supernatural powers. And he has promised to use his powers to improve the lives of his followers.

A soft spoken, non-charismatic person will never elicit the rabid loyalty that Trump has among his followers. One only has to look at Jeb Bush to see this was proven true. Despite the establishment power and money behind Jeb, Trump was able to steam roll right over him (along with the others) without breaking a sweat.

We could say that the core of Trump followers make up a cult.  The word cult is derived from the Latin word cultus which means “worship.”  Most cults are made up of people who felt alienated from society at large and have congealed around a shared common belief in one person whom they feel crackles with charisma and can take them to the “promised land.” In this case the disgruntled masses of Trump followers feel that the GOP has thrown them overboard.  Add in a convenient enemy whether real or imagined that the group can focus their collective rage on and you have the formula for a powerful movement.  I can tell you right now that the Republican establishment has no idea what they’re dealing with, and the more they try to crush Trump, the more power they give him.

In one of the most insightful books every written on human nature and mass movements, Eric Hoffer shared his timeless wisdom. The True Believer: Thoughts on The Nature of Mass Movements sums up the rise of Trump in 168 tightly written pages. Below are a few noteworthy quotes from the book:

“Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.”

“The permanent misfits can find salvation only in a complete separation from the self; and they usually find it by losing themselves in the compact collectivity of a mass movement.”

“Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.”

“The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle. The reason that the inferior elements of a nation can exert a marked influence on its course is that they are wholly without reverence toward the present. They see their lives and the present as spoiled beyond remedy and they are ready to waste and wreck both: hence their recklessness and their will to chaos and anarchy.”
If the above quotes seem frighteningly accurate and appropriate to the rise of Trump, keep in mind that Hoffer wrote this book in 1951!
In the book on messianic movements, The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn, he shows a pattern of these movements rising during times of economic instability and social upheavals.  What makes the Trump movement so powerful (and potentially dangerous) is that it mirrors many of these past violent movements.
A good leader helps create a vision of what could be and then points the people in that direction.  He plays the role of the grand conductor. There’s an element in Trump’s followers of wanting him to be a father figure who will “make American great again.” Daddy will fix things once and for all. By appealing to people’s base instincts he has catapulted himself to the front of the GOP pack.
Trump leads by voicing the collective thoughts of his followers. Followers who feel that the system has betrayed them. He positions himself as the one who will fix things and give them the live they had been promised. The life they have always dreamed of.
As Napoleon once said,  “A leader is a dealer of hope.”  And to his followers, that’s what Trump represents, a leader who will reestablish their sense of hope for a life better than the one they have now.
So what are the leadership lessons and take aways from Trump’s rise?
  1. People must believe that you have special powers or abilities. At the very least they must think that you are more talented than they are.
  2. Find or create an enemy for your team/group to rally against. Apple has Microsoft, Redbull has Coke and Pepsi, Harley has the fear of being a boring old man.
  3. Rally your team around a collective vision of something that is better and larger than themselves.
March 18, 2016 | 0 comments | View Post