A Manifesto on Leadership Study and Training and the Role of the Ancient World
My friend and colleague, Mallory Monaco Caterine, asked me to develop a manifesto on leadership study and training, to serve as concluding remarks for the first annual online conference on “Teaching Leaders and Leadership through Classics,” which she was the wonderful program director of. I’m honored by the invitation and share my thoughts below.
The search for an existence that’s not trite and jaded…
Perhaps Dissatisfaction is the mother of all manifestos. At any rate she is the holy mother of this one:
I am dissatisfied with the leadership coming from the highest office in our land, and in many lands. It is the incurious, grandiose, narcissistic, thin-skinned, misogynistic, bigoted, bullying, tribal sort. I am dissatisfied with fellow citizens who seem unable or unwilling to acknowledge that this form of leadership ruins republics. I am dissatisfied with those who do see this form of leadership for the cancer that it is, but somehow feel immune to its admiration for dictators, its avarice, and its disdain for national security, the free press, and the rule of law.
I am dissatisfied with the growing assumption that corporate leadership is the most portable kind of leadership or that it is even leadership at all. I don’t object to corporations per se; I admire their efficiency, discipline, and innovation. But corporate pharaohs are not who we should be looking to for models of good leadership. We have better principals: parents, coaches, teachers, friends, mentors, commanding officers — people who turn us into better people, people who inspire love and admiration. The measure of a leader’s goodness should be whether the leader’s followers — the children, the athletes, the students, and the comrades — actually benefit more than they would without the leader. Are they healthier, happier, safer, more self-sufficient? However much so-called business leaders may care about their employees — however much they may treat their employees like “family” or “citizens” — they measure their success by the viability and health of the corporation. One of the most toxic examples of this metric of success is in higher education today: universities no longer tend to ask, “how can our students thrive as citizens, as leaders, as lovers and friends, as walking temples to the wondrous and wondering mind?” They assume some other institutions will ask this question, if they think about it at all. Instead, they insist that universities are businesses and ask, “what emerging markets can we tap into?” “how can we enhance our brand?” As long as the bodies of corporations can thrive while their members live like zombies, we must look beyond the corporation for good leadership.
I am dissatisfied with the prevailing leadership narrative in Silicon Valley of a man, under the angelic auspices of another man, realizing his Promethean genius in an orgy of ever-better technologies, regardless of who gets burned. Must human civilization always be “disrupted” by the illicit and narcissistic (if arguably benevolent) trickster? Is this somewhere in the nature of things?
I am dissatisfied with the face of leadership. The talents of many creatures of the day lie buried beneath self-doubt, financial hardship, failed institutions, and millennia of false assumptions about gender, race, class, and normalcy. We could expect more leadership, new and wondrous forms of leadership, if other faces came into the picture. Variety is prized in so many areas of human life, from hot sauce to bottled water. Why not in leadership?
I am dissatisfied with the fact that though many people share my dissatisfaction, few know what to do about it. Many organizations sell their services in training leaders; but in fact they are selling the art of dominance in a zero-sum game. Wielding power over others is not leadership.
Many universities use the language of leadership in their promotional literature and mission statements, but how many actually feature leadership in the curriculum, in research, in student life, in regular conversations with the administration? How many think of their would-be leaders as something more than Deresiewicz’ excellent sheep? How many can say with a straight face that truth and the good are the leader’s errand?
From Dissatisfaction to Hope
None of my dissatisfaction comes with an obvious remedy; it is always easier to be dissatisfied than to act wisely. But the great thing about humans is that even a small number with like minds can achieve something akin to paradise. I retain the hope that there’s a lot we can do. At any rate idealists are called to fight for what is best even when victory seems unlikely or impossible: sometimes we have to eat the popsicle that’s fallen in the dirt but we can still share it. I am proud to count myself a member of a global community of those who put the humanities at the center of leadership study and training.
What follows I have learned from my own reflections and those of others. This is my best vision to date for how I think leadership study and training should go, in order to address this dissatisfaction. I will follow this with the definition of leadership that I use pretty much whenever I think about it. I will conclude with what I think the ancient world should be contributing to this movement.
Here are some principles I’ve found myself coming back to for years now, every time I think about what leadership should be.
- Leadership should be measured by whether it is good for the followers. Wherever the leader cannot achieve something good, there should not be a leader. All the other trappings of leadership— power, dominance, influence, prestige, charisma, honor, prizes — are secondary, if they matter at all. All leaders, and all students of leadership, must continually ask, “what is good and how do I know?” There can be no study of leadership without the study of ethics and the good life, though we must accept that “what is good” will always be hard to find, maybe even impossible, and that people might never agree on what is good. A large part of leadership may involve working with others to search for the good.
- Leadership is fundamentally collaborative. Leading is getting others involved, whether by educating, coaxing, persuading, commanding, tricking, threatening, or coercing (see above on which methods are actually “good”). Thus both students and practitioners of leadership must continually ask how does the leader get others to pursue goals that are in their best interests? Here rhetoric, or the art of persuasion, is vital. So is human psychology. Through collaboration we may discover that the leadership we thought we needed all along was only a naive fantasy. I find that people often have wildly unrealistic impressions both of their leaders’ efficacy and their villainy. Leaders are human. At least they should be.
- Leadership is an ongoing dialogue between the what is good for the followers and what is good for the leader. In other words, we have to understand what motives, or what personal goals, would cause a leader to shoulder the responsibility, the stress, the scrutiny, the labor of leading? Then we have to ask at what point do the interests of the two parties break down? There are a lot of ways to answer this question because a leader might be driven to lead for any number of reasons: a desire for wealth, prestige, and control, or a basic pleasure in the success of others. We must think carefully about what is good and what is realistic in these situations. One implication of this relationship between the leader and the follower is that the leader must not only understand what are the proper and improper motives, but she must have the self-knowledge to figure out what her motives actually are. (It is likely that there will be more than one.) This third question about reconciling the interests of the leader and the followers often goes unasked in the study of leadership. We say we want an “altruistic” leader instead of a “selfish” one, but this is too simplistic in most cases.
A fourth question that arises from these three is one of process: how does someone become a leader? How do you get good at discovering the good? How do you get good at engaging others and harmonizing your interests with theirs?
Given these three recurring questions — what is good? how does the leader involve others? and how does the leader reconcile his/her interests with those of the followers ?— I have developed the following working definition of leadership:
leadership is the art of significantly or crucially causing another living creature or group to participate in the achievement of a goal that is in the interest of that group, though it may also be in the interest of the leader
In using this definition, I am distinguishing leadership from influence. Convincing your friends to drink Coke instead of Pepsi does not qualify as leadership unless drinking Coke is actually more beneficial.
I am also distinguishing leadership from actions that may be helpful to someone but don’t involve some kind of collaboration between leader and follower. An example would be paying off someone’s student loans or taking a bullet for someone. The impact may be significant but there is little participation from the follower. An interesting case to consider is the judge: is she a leader when she rules on cases and hands down sentences? Obviously, she must have given serious thought about what is good (or what is just). The question is is she “leading” the convicted criminal (=her follower) when she sentences her to prison and the criminal obeys her? Only if prison is conceived of as somehow beneficial to the criminal. Getting someone to do something harmful to themselves is not leadership. It is equally questionable whether a judge is the leader of the victim or plaintiff in a case since, even though the person’s life may improve, it will not improve through any kind of interaction with the judge. The judge does not persuade the victim to accept the sentence, for example. The sentence just is, and it’s delivered not necessarily in a spirit of good will toward the plaintiff but toward the entire community, which also does not participate. Leadership, as I am defining it, is a special form of participatory human benefaction.
The moment we try to answer these three basic questions of what is good, how to you get others involved, and how do you reconcile everyone’s interests, we see that they require an understanding of virtually all fields of human inquiry: the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. For example, someone who seeks to lead others with a great new invention needs to understand the natural world (say, physics and engineering); needs to understand what is good for humans and whether this new technology and its implementation would ultimately help or harm them (ethics); needs the eloquence to explain the value of the technology over other existing technologies (language); and needs an intuitive sense of how people might receive it (psychology, sociology). As human civilization advances, each of these fields must provide more specialized and more complex answers. We are not usually asked to decide whether one scenario is bad and another good. Rather, we are asked to consider whether one scenario is better than another, along dozens of different parameters, with no certainties, only probabilities.
What role should the study of the ancient world play in the contemporary leader’s exploration of our three central questions? Let me begin with a few ways in which I think the ancient world should not be part of leadership study and training today.
Counterproductive Leadership Study and Training
Meditation instead of lessons.
First, despite the claims of many popular books, the ancient world does not offer “lessons” in leadership in any quick or simple way. Yes, there are plenty of accounts of leaders who are “good” and “bad,” and there is a rich vocabulary for thinking about them. But if you want to know whether a leader should, for example, make quick decisions and act on impulse or whether a leader should be more deliberate and cautious, you will find ancient narrative where both approaches “work.” The same is true of tons of questions about leadership. Narratives will give you one apparent cause-and-effect description of how things might go. But it is often impossible to say whether any given narrative is an account of true events. Even if it were a true account, it is hard to say that a particular ancient narrative will be a perfect fit for the present leader’s situation. Instead of lessons, what the ancient world can offer is a meditation, not in the sense of “clearing one’s head of all conscious thought” but of pondering frequently and carefully the countless nuances to very important questions like the leader’s disposition toward decision-making: what are the pros and cons of taking a long versus a short time to decide? what opportunities could be missed? what resources could be lost in a reckless move? should you listen to advisors? which advisors? how many? how do you build trust with advisors? under what conditions should a leader go against his advisors? am I the type of person who’s more comfortable making quick decisions and dealing with the consequences later or taking everything into account in advance?
The study of the ancient world is not able to improve one’s leadership in the time it takes to read a paperback on a flight to London, but it can, through long-term and regular engagement, exercise and hone one’s judgement and thereby make future decisions easier. Meditation is a slow, uncertain process that often feels unsatisfactory to us because the worlds of business, science, and technology have accustomed us to believe that all problems have definitive solutions — even obvious solutions. So, why do something that’s only going to give us uncertain approximations? Well, because that’s how good leadership works: it’s an art — not a science — and anyone who says differently is selling something, Buttercup (like a crappy book on the twelve leadership habits of all successful business people).
Building blocks instead of models of leadership
Secondly, the ancient world does not have a monopoly on “model” leaders and “historic” moments. These may be found all over the world at all times. When I was in graduate school at Florida State, a professor once said to a group of us that the purpose of studying the classics was “to become Caesar.” We all smiled proudly at this, as though it were obviously true, as though any strike against the noble character of Caesar was just a flesh wound. In his heart, we imagined, beat a greatness that we, too, could approximate if we completed our rite of passage. But it is silly to study ancient leadership in hopes of flattering ourselves that we may rise to whatever greatness we imagine from the past. Indeed this is narcissistic fantasy. Some ancient leaders are certainly better than some contemporary ones; but “greatness” is an ancient rhetorical construct that becomes morally fraught the moment we start to unpack it. Many ancient leaders carried with them superstitions, prejudices, and homicidal tendencies many of us would find weird and abhorrent. Nevertheless the ancient world can still teach us about good leadership even without providing models of perfect leaders.
Instead of “lessons” and “models” of leadership in the ancient world, it is better to think in terms of “meditations” and “building blocks.” I mean to include the meditation and building block phase at both the level of studying leadership and practicing it. I have found it endlessly rewarding for my own understanding of leadership and my own practice of it (especially as a teacher) to ponder two-thousand year old traits like the love of humanity (philanthropia), the love of learning (philomatheia), and the love of being honored (philotimia), described with such care by Xenophon in his work on Cyrus “the Great” (written c. 365 BCE). This does not mean, however, that I think Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus should serve as a handbook for how to lead today; this would be to put silly faith in a notion of eternal wisdom. We lose the game the moment we start to recline on the soft bed of imitation instead of propping ourselves against the hard rock of critical thought.
Accidental leadership training
In many ways when we study the ancient world we are already learning leadership skills and behaviors unintentionally. That is simply how the discipline of the humanities works. Those who read stories of ancient leaders or gaze upon ancient art and monuments are directly exposed to techniques of persuasion and self-presentation. Anyone who studies ancient languages finds their own thoughts and expressions clarified almost instantly. The very strangeness of the ancient world forces the mind to wrap itself around characters and realities stranger than any Sci-Fi fantasy world, full of unfamiliar religious and social norms, hard-to-pronounce names, and fragmentary source material. Arguably, it is the ancient world’s strangeness more than its ancientness that makes it worth studying because anyone who tries to make sense of this world gets a crash-course in Emotional Intelligence (e.g., empathy, perspective taking, self-awareness). The relevance of this strangeness today is straightforward: leaders who hope to channel the many diverse talents of their groups must be very good at getting inside the heads of each member to determine who will be good at what. They must also be very good at knowing themselves (their strengths and weaknesses) and their emotional states minute to minute. In short, leaders today and students of the ancient world are never in Kansas anymore and must find ways to rise above the noise and confusion.
Those who study the ancient world must also engage in source criticism constantly. Whether you are looking at a work of literature, an inscription, or a statue, you seek to make sense of it by asking where it came from, who produced it, why, and what happened to it through time. Still, you will never have the full picture. Ancient leadership source material is particularly challenging because historical fact is often thoroughly transformed by the ancient leader’s own efforts at self-presentation, an ancient artist’s biases and prejudices, and our own contemporary biases and interests. Leaders today and also their followers must be equally critical of the vast amounts of information they receive, a skill known technically as media literacy.
Just as the strangeness of the ancient world can hone our emotional intelligence, so does the ancientness of the ancient world hone our sense of tradition and universality, what is natural and what is cultural. Though it can feel like the world was born just yesterday, since so much of it was (the internet, smartphones, GPS, social media, globalization), nevertheless much of our culture and many of our institutions are thousands of years old. Some of this past can feel as familiar and reassuring as a grandparent. The syllables of the words that map our thoughts and shape our experience are thousands of years old, even if their meanings have evolved much more rapidly than genetic mutation. Has the world always been this way? How did it get this way? Does it always have to be this way? Any leader in search of the good must ask these questions, and students of the ancient world have some of the answers.
So, the student of the ancient world is always kind of a leader in training. But like someone who reads books about Mozart but never practices the piano, students of the ancient world don’t usually practice all the leadership skills they acquire, at least not consciously. Like Telemachus waiting near the doorway of Odysseus’ palace, while the suitors consume his father’s household, students of the ancient world must become activated by Athena and reminded to rise up!
Just as the study of the ancient world may be accidentally good for training leaders, it may also be accidentally bad. Most of the stories we read in the ancient world are about men, Greek and Roman ones at that; and often when the stories are about women or others, they are about women behaving badly or behaving like men — and they will almost always have been written by men. These accidents of the source material, as well as our tendency to see leadership as something exercised by “great men” within a political or military office, can easily create an androcentric (or Eurocentric) view of how leadership should go. Even worse, it may confirm long-held racial and cultural prejudices, especially if that is what the student seeks to do.
The human brain is also at fault here. We tend to like and remember stories that focus on a single protagonist faced with a series of challenges like a character in a video game. Given this focus, we assume that the protagonist is the primary agent, the “leader” of the story, as it were, even when we concede there are helpers along the way. The advantage to processing the world in this way is obvious. We can cast ourselves in the role of the protagonist and use his/her experiences to plan for, and later commemorate, our own lives. Such stories also have the power of seeming to explain how the protagonist’s fortunes rise and fall according to his/her deeds and character. In the ancient world a lot of history is told in this way, the deeds of the leader (usually male) determining the fate of the community, from city-states to nations. But the relationship between leaders and followers doesn’t usually work like this. There may be many people making a significant difference to the success of a community, they may be taking turns in the leadership role, and they may be influencing one another on many unofficial levels. Anyone familiar with the Harry Potter series can ask themselves which character best exemplifies the definition of leadership I provided above as a guard against the tendency to project simple narratives onto complicated processes.
Deliberate leadership study and training
If Dissatisfaction is the mother of manifestos, Hope should be the father. Or manifestos can have two mothers and two fathers. They just need to come from a family that has the clarity and words to articulate what is wrong, coupled with the passion, creativity, and determination to address it. There is a lot wrong with what is called leadership today. Studying the ancient world will not automatically turn us into good leaders. Study and training needs to be deliberate, and that is why I commend the presenters at this first annual conference for showing us so many ways how to do this. More, please! Here is what (else) I hope we will be doing more of in the future.
- Classicists need to take off our classics hats and ask the big questions about leadership as if the ancient world were completely silent about them. We must allow ourselves to dip more than our toes into the other streams that are asking these questions. This is not only enlightening, but it will give us a clearer sense of what our discipline can contribute to the cause of better leadership. This is a hard and thankless task. We may be seen as amateurs in all fields rather than one of ten experts on such-and-such author no one has read for a hundred years. But if we believe that many fields have something to say about good leadership, we should be engaging with these many fields.
- To this end, we should be partnering with colleagues in the humanities and beyond on collaborative research and pedagogy.
- We should also be pointing to local, national, and international leaders in the present day who we believe approximate our notions of good leadership, even as we insist on “building blocks” from the ancient world. We should be having conversations about who these good leaders are. We should not shy away from doing this even though we will come across as naive and idealistic (I’m talking to you, [insert favorite politician] fans). We probably are naive, and we need to learn from it.
- We should be explaining to good and well-meaning contemporary leaders — not just students and education administrators — what we see as the value of the ancient world for what they are trying to do.
- We should be doing more to merge the advanced study of ancient leadership with the training of contemporary leaders. This should happen at the high school and college levels but well beyond. We need people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s across the globe who have never studied the ancient world but who demonstrably improve their leadership by doing so.
- We should be teaching more courses in ancient leadership at the high school and college level. Courses that are not explicitly about leadership can feature it as a theme. These courses should not be seen as the frontiers of a turf war, but rather opportunities to talk about how other fields can also help us understand leadership.
- Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we should recognize and celebrate the fact that we who study and teach the ancient world are leaders in our own right. We are the trainers of leaders. We have a responsibility to share the good news of how studying the ancient world can promote good leadership.
Thinking with Oedipus
While other fields are just as vital to the quest for good leadership, I don’t know any field with greater potential to contribute more to the contemporary study and training of leadership than the study of the ancient world. I mean this especially in a foundational sense: the exploration of ancient cultures (not only Greek and Roman) can be the introduction to, or a basis for, all other fields of leadership study and training. Here, then, is a summary of what I see as the contribution that this field should be making.
- Studying the ancient world creates opportunities to meditate on problems of leadership.
- The source material on ancient leadership can supply building blocks for good leadership in the future. These blocks are not wholly polished and some of them will turn to rubble. The process could be seen as akin to quarrying marble and fashioning it into something beautiful.
- Much of ancient literature and art is rhetorical in nature. It not only made viewers and listeners feel in a certain way, but it made them act and behave in a certain way. Getting people to participate in a goal for their benefit is central to what leaders do.
- Much of the source material from the ancient world is encrypted in countless languages, the study of which makes the leader more articulate and careful.
- The strangeness of the ancient world fosters Emotional Intelligence. Specifically, it forces us to take new perspectives, feel new feelings, and reflect on who we are and how we are different. This strangeness, or foreignness, is something that leaders must embrace because every other human being they encounter is like foreign country in some way or another.
- The ancient world’s ancientness gives a leader a sense of how culture, tradition, institutions have worked over time, their genesis, their inertia, and their momentum.
- Ancient sources do not provide clear, truthful answers to our questions. We must always consider context and bias. So must leaders.
- The beauty of many of our ancient sources is that they give us the opportunity to study leadership and become leaders in a very condensed, entertaining, and rich environment.
Consider just the first three lines of a play many have read for generations, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (or Rex or Tyrannos). The citizens of Thebes have come to Oedipus, their new king, entreating him like a god (or someone very close to a god), in hopes that he will rid them of the plague that is ravaging their city. In the course of the play Oedipus will discover that he is not to be the savior of the city but rather the cause of its plague because he had unknowingly killed his father and sired children by his mother. Here, though, in a scene steeped with dramatic irony, Oedipus expects he will be a good leader and receives his people thusly:
ὦ τέκνα, Κάδμου τοῦ πάλαι νέα τροφή,
τίνας ποθ᾽ ἕδρας τάσδε μοι θοάζετε
ἱκτηρίοις κλάδοισιν ἐξεστεμμένοι;O children, new offspring of ancient Cadmus, whatever are these positions you sit in before me, crowned with the branches of a suppliant?
I picked this passage off the top of my head because I thought it was interesting and would be familiar to many. There thousands of others I could have picked. What I want to illustrate is that there are dozens of leadership questions that the curious mind could ask about this seemingly straightforward passage (and many questions I won’t have thought of myself):
Why does Oedipus refer to the Thebans as his children(τέκνα)? Is he being reassuring, presumptuous, domineering, or all three? Is he trying to forge a closer tie to his followers because he is not (so he thinks) their hereditary king (τέκνα can imply biological parentage)? Is this how all kings talk in Athenian tragedy? Why is Oedipus addressing his followers as descendants of their founder, Cadmus? What does this form of address reveal about how his followers see themselves as a group (or how Oedipus sees them)? How do the groups that we lead and belong to identify themselves? What are the pros and cons of seeing the leader as a parent and the followers as children? In what way should a leader be like a parent and what way not? Is there a difference between the mother-parent as leader and the father-parent as leader? What are the pros and cons of treating a leader like a god, or at least someone with a special connection to a god? Do we do this in contemporary life? Why, for example, do we expect an American president to conclude important speeches with, “May God bless the United States of America?” What are our rituals for approaching our leaders with an appeal? Do we need to dress a certain way? Speak a certain way? How do we show deference? Is this a helpful relationship to have with a leader? Or should leadership be less hierarchical? Why does hierarchy arise in leadership situations, culturally and historically? Is such hierarchy particular to humans or do other primates do it? Do the leaders in our own lives expect to be regarded as parents and/or gods? What does it reveal about them if they do? Do we ourselves treat our own followers in this way? What was going on in democratic 5th-century BCE Athens when Sophocles wrote this play? Is this how contemporary leaders were treated? If not, why was Sophocles presenting such a form of monarchical leadership to his Athenian audience? Is there anything we could appreciate in Oedipus’ address to his people? Or should we avoid enacting all pieces of his leadership? Would you want Oedipus for a leader?
As we progress through Sophocles’ brilliant, shocking, and wondrous play, we see that sometimes it will be silent on these questions and other times strikingly vocal. And so goes our shambling quest for the best leadership.
