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Tag: "leaders"

Brexit and the Failure of Leadership

Yet again, the mainstream media has hidden the main for Brexit.  Brexit, or Britain/UK leaving the EU is at its core a massive failure of leadership.  From American president Woodrow Wilson once said,
“The ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people.” If the leaders in the UK had been listening to the people for the last 30 years, perhaps their wouldn’t be a surge in the rise of neo-Nazi, and fascist groups.  The mainstream media has been lashing out saying that those who voted to leave the EU are all just a bunch of racists and bigots.  I won’t argue that some of the are indeed racists and bigots, but you know as well as I do that 52% of the population isn’t comprised of racists.  That’s an overly simplistic thought, and like all overly simplistic thoughts, it’s wrong.

The heart of the Brexit issue can also be found in what’s going on across the pond here in the U.S. The popular movements supporting Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and Presumptive Republican candidate Donald Trump both point to a lack of leaders listening to the people. It’s much easier for the establishment to call Brexit, Sanders and Trump supporters stupid, bigoted or entitled, but the truth lays in the fact that all three of these groups are comprised of disenfranchised people who feel as if the system has turned their backs on them.  Or as the brilliant comedian and philosopher George Carlin once said, “They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin’ years ago.”

Great leaders make sure that everyone on their team is well taken care of.  The unwritten contract between leaders and followers is that each will take care of the other.  So what happens when we put our faith and trust in leaders that we have put into power and then they ignore our needs? A study done by Princeton and Northwestern universities concluded that “The U.S. government does not represent the interests of the majority of the country’s citizens, but is instead ruled by those of the rich and powerful.”

Working-class voters are waking up and realizing that their leaders don’t care about them beyond getting elected or re-elected, hence the dramatic rise in alternative groups.  Brexit would never have happened had the elite thrown down more than just a few crumbs to their followers.  Globalization has eviscerated the middle class.  It didn’t have to be so, but corporate profits became the overarching goal, while the needs and future of the people were tossed into the garbage bin of history.

Now read the following story about Alexander the Great and ask yourself, “would ANY of our leaders today do for his followers what he did?

““Now, however, he marched out against Dareius, expecting to fight another battle; but when he heard that Dareius had been seized by Bessus, he sent his Thessalians home, after distributing among them a largess of two thousand talents over and above their pay. In consequence of the pursuit of Dareius, which was long and arduous (for in eleven days he rode thirty-three hundred furlongs (644km), most of his horsemen gave out, and chiefly for lack of water. At this point some Macedonians met him who were carrying water from the river in skins upon their mules. And when they beheld Alexander, it being now midday, in a wretched plight from thirst, they quickly filled a helmet and brought it to him. To his enquiry for whom they were carrying the water, they replied: ‘For our own sons; but if thou livest, we can get other sons, even if we lose these.’ On hearing this he took the helmet into his hands, but when he looked around and saw the horsemen about him all stretching out their heads and gazing at the water, he handed it back without drinking any, but with praises for the men who had brought it; ‘For,’ said he, ‘if I should drink of it alone, these horsemen of mine will be out of heart.’ But when they beheld his self-control and loftiness of spirit, they shouted out to him to lead them forward boldly, and began to goad their horses on, declaring that they would not regard themselves as weary, or thirsty, or as mortals at all, so long as they had such a king.” -Plutarch, Life of Alexander 42.3-6 (Plutarch. Plutarch’s Lives. with an English Translation by. Bernadotte Perrin. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1919. 7. )

July 1, 2016 | 0 comments | View Post

Hannibal, Leadership and Earning Your Team’s Respect

One of the main ways that a new leader fails is when they are about to become the new leader of a group. Nothing is more important in leadership than setting the right tone for your group. Because many people confuse having a title with having authority, the alienate their team from the first day.  Their attitude is, “I’m the new boss and when I say jump, you say ‘how high?’ are we clear?”  Now compare that approach to how legendary Carthaginian warrior and general Hannibal Barca  took the reins of power and did so with tact, and respect towards his men. Hannibal came close to destroying the Roman Empire between 201 and 218 B.C.E., but that’s a story for another time.

Now imagine the scene if you will,  a ferocious army that had been commanded by Hamilcar Barca, Hannibal’s father.  They had been assembled to hear Hannibals first speech to the troops as their new commander.  Hamilcar was deeply respected and beloved by his me, and had taken his death hard.  Sadly, Hamilcar had died during a battle when he essentially sacrificed himself to save his two sons who were also at the battle.  Some time later after Hannibal’s brother-in-law Hasdrubal was assassinated, Hannibal was promoted to commander-in-chief by the army and confirmed in his appointment by the Carthaginian government.

One time before a battle, Hannibal had his army was assembled so he could speak to them.  He said:

“Now as for me, my men, there is not one of you who has not with his own eyes seen me strike a blow in battle; I have watched and witnessed your valor in the field, and your acts of courage I know by heart, with every detail of when and where they took place: and this, surely, is not a thing of small importance. I was your pupil before I was your commander; I shall advance into the line with soldiers I have a thousand times praised and rewarded; and the enemy we shall meet are raw troops with a raw general, neither knowing anything of the other.”

Hannibal acknowledged the past bravery and feats of his men in battle.  He reminded them that he always fought side by side with them, rather than sitting in safety far behind the fighting.  Are you this kind of leader?  Do you have this kind of leadership in your organization?

Hannibal was was the first to enter battle and the last to leave the field.  He ate the same food as his men, and rather than sleeping on a nice soft bed in a tent reserved for officers, he slept on the cold, hard ground alongside his men. Is it any surprise that his men would die for him?  Would any of your team die for you?  Okay, maybe that’s a bit extreme, but to what extent would any member of your team go to protect you? If you haven’t fostered that kind of loyalty among your team, take a step back, pause, reflect and ask yourself, how can you EARN this kind of intense respect from you team?

March 29, 2016 | 0 comments | View Post

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

Hardcore Leadership and How to Manage Knowledge Workers

One of the biggest disconnects regarding leadership has been brought about by our rapidly evolving technology. When I say “leadership,” I define that as someone people follow. And when I say “Hardcore Leadership” I define that as a leader who knows what it takes to get his people to the highest levels of achievement and makes it happen. With the exception of aristocracy, during most of history, leaders were in place because (hopefully) they had many years of experience and could teach and guide their followers on the details of how to do the job right.   The top down model of management, often referred to as Theory X held that a hierarchical model where the guy on “top” made all the rules because he was the boss.  He said jump, and his people asked “how high?” The new model is referred to as  Y Theory, meaning that the organization was flat, more collaborative and less autocratic.

So what happens when the old  leadership model of master craftsman teaching the young apprentice his job no longer applies? The big shift in leadership is this: how do you lead and manage people who know more about their work then you do?  With the explosion of new networking technology (Software Defined Everything and the Internet of Everything for example)  how does a manager who came up learning antiquated programming languages or outdated networking technologies tell a millennial how to do his job? The smart answer is they don’t.  A leader’s new responsibilty is to eliminate any friction in the organization that prevents the knowledge worker from doing their job.  The second duty of a Hardcore Leader to to help his people collaborate effectively.  As technology becomes every more ingrained in our world, helping teams to work effectively together. Thankfully that’s a leadership skill that has always been important and will never become outdated.  Your job as a leader is to empower your knowledge workers.

A Hardcore Leader working with knowledge workers is going to have to create an environment that crackles with the energy of compelling sense of purpose. Say what you will about Steve Jobs, but you can’t deny that he brought out the very best in his people.  Was he hard on them? Hell yes he was, and look what he created.  Many years ago when I was in the Navy, I attempted to become a Navy SEAL, sadly I was injured and  didn’t finish the program (that’s a story best shared over a drink). One of the things that struck me about being at BUD/S (Basic Under Water Demolition/SEAL) was how one of the classes that had recently graduated had a saying, “A day without a hammer is like a day with out sunshine.”  That always stuck with me, because it was a clear acknowledgement that in order to become the best, you needed someone to push you harder than you thought you could go. And that is what a Hardcore Leader needs to understand; that part of your job is to clear the path for your team, and push them to achieve heights they didn’t think possible.

If technology has become so complex that a manager can’t offer any feedback or help to solve a complex problem, then his job becomes obsolete if he doesn’t bring anything else to the table.

February 25, 2016 | 0 comments | View Post

Do Most Leaders Suck…and Where are the Great Leaders?

Declaration_independence

Chances are, if you’re over the age of eighteen and have worked a few jobs it probably occurred to you that most of the people you worked for were horrible leaders.  Did you ever stop to ask yourself why that was?

We have over 7 Billion people on the this planet, so why are aren’t we brimming full with amazing leaders?  Where are the Alexander the Great’s, the Winston Churchill’s, the Julius Caesars, the Asoka’s, the Franklin D. Roosevelt’s, the Thomas Jefferson’s and Napoleon Bonarparte’s, and the George Washington’s? Where are the Nelson Mandela’s,  the Mahatma Gandhi’s, and Joan of Arcs, the Ataturk’s, the Hamurabi’s and the Leonidas’? Where are the 21st Century’s versions of Marcus Aurelius, Catherine the Great, the Simon Bolivars?  Our world history is replete with tremendous leaders, who left their mark on the societies that they lived it.

Just here in the United States of America alone we had John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Jay, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton just to name a few.  The original thirteen colonies had a population of approximately 3 million people.  Let that sink in for a moment. A fledgling country with a population of 3 million people had six brilliant leaders.  The US population is now well over 350 million people.  That means that we should have over seven hundred leaders at the caliber of the US founding fathers.  But we don’t, why? In three words we can sum up why, education and role models. You see, these men all were educated not what to think, but how to think. Equally importantly they had role models.  At a young age, Alexander  was exposed to Achilles from a poem called The Illiad. was a heroic Greek warrior from a famous ancient poem called the Iliad. Achilles became the model of the noble warrior for Alexander, and he modeled himself after this hero.

Alexander was first educated by  Leonidas, who was a relative of Alexander’s mother Olympia. Alexander’s father King Phillip asked Leonidas to teach Alexander math, horsemanship and archery. Alexander’s next tutor was Lysimachus, who used role playing as a way to engage and make the lessons stick. Alexander was enthralled by the warrior hero Achilles in the epic poem, the Illiad.  Alexander’s fascination with the Illiad lasted throughout his life and he was said to always have a copy with him on his military campaigns.   Eventually King Philip hired the philosopher Aristotle to teach  Alexander. For three years, Aristotle taught Alexander philosophy, poetry, drama, science and politics.

America’s Founding Fathers were immersed in what was called a “classic education.”  From the article The Classical Education of the Founding Fathers
“The typical education of the time began in what we would call the 3rd Grade—at about age eight. Students who actually went to school were required to learn Latin and Greek grammar and, later, to read the Latin historians Tacitus and Livy, the Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides, and to translate the Latin poetry of Virgil and Horace. They were expected to know the language well enough to translate from the original into English and back again to the original in another grammatical tense. Classical Education also stressed the seven liberal arts: Latin, logic, rhetoric (the “trivium”), as well as arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (the “quadrivium”).”

By now you have probably already come to the same conclusion as I did, “Why weren’t we educated in this manner?”  Can you imagine what America would be like today if we had, as opposed to the intentional dumbing down of this country’s citizens?

And my dear reader is what Hardcore Leadership is all about, educating the next generation of leaders. And as Patrick Henry once said, “I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past.”

February 15, 2016 | 0 comments | View Post