Becoming a Great Leader: Advice from a Zero

I
suppose it is a law of political economy that when a burgeoning and omnivorous
government reaches a certain stage of growth, its champions and beneficiaries and
sinecured, career bureaucrats inaugurate self-congratulatory and appreciation organizations
that "reward" bureaucrats and "public servants" for their
work. These organizations are great for bringing the "recognized"
together for speeches and photo-ops and a dose of "feel-good"
camaraderie. Not to mention a medal and possibly a chunk of cash. Looking at
the Washington Post's "Federal Coach" blog columns, written by Tom
Fox of the Partnership for Public Service, one is amazed by the hubris of an
organization that recognizes the efforts of salaried parasites who happen to be
department heads or supervisors or White House cabinet members.




Scrolling
through the Washington Post's daily grind the other morning – I subscribe to
the Post and the New York Times Internet versions of the papers, just to keep
an eye on them – a teaser caught my attention: "Lead 'em and Reap: Why
self-sacrifice, shared values and reflective listening are the building blocks
of great leadership."



My
immediate mental rebuttal was: Obama isn't sacrificing anything, least of all
himself, I share no values with him, and the building blocks he is fashioning,
which resemble the Mafia's cement shoes, are resting on my head. He is not a
"great" leader by any means, although he is a "leader." He
is a community organizing Führer.



Clicking
on the article, the page comes up with the startling headline: What makes a great federal leader?



The
article is an interview by Fox of E. Allan Lind of Duke University, whose
research "centers on leadership and global management issues." Lind
discusses, with appropriate prompting by Fox, how bureaucrats and presidents
and public servants can become effective Führers and gauleiters in the name of
bureaucratic efficiency and effectiveness.



Most
Americans, however, don’t want efficient bureaucracies. Efficient and effective
bureaucracies are a nemesis. If they must have them, Americans prefer
inefficient ones that allow them a breathing space to mind their own business. Like
me, they don’t want "leaders." But apparently Lind and Fox have not received
this message. Their heads are in the realm of theoretical authoritarianism.



Lind
natters on in sociological and social-metaphysical language, focusing on how a
"leader" can best get along with his underlings and coworkers. His
advice could just as well apply to running a Boy Scout troop or a Chicago
street gang or a Target women's accessories department. It has the nebulous
consistency and mutability of a cloud.



Lind's
chief point, on which the five other points seem to rely, is something called
"reflective listening." This is "listening to what somebody says
and then paraphrasing back to them [sic]
to check understanding." In populist jargon, this means ensuring that the
listener and the speaker are "on the same page," or confirming that
the listener knows where someone is "coming from." You wonder how
much Lind is being paid to play semantic alchemist and turn jargon and
metaphorical patois into effervescent
technicalese. Otherwise known as yadda-yadda.



Fox
asks Lind what he and his colleague, Prof. Simon Sitkin, call the "Six
Domains Leadership Pyramid." And you thought I was kidding about the
technicalese. Lind replies:



The first domain is personal leadership, which is demonstrating vision,
competency, authenticity and dedication — in essence, showing people why they
should follow you. The second domain is relational leadership. You must
understand your people’s interests and their competencies, show concern for
their well-being, and show fairness by behaving in an unbiased way. The third
category is the idea of contextual leadership. This domain is all about how the
leader conveys the essence of the organization to the people he or she is
leading. These three domains form the base of a pyramid. If you adhere to these
three domains, you build up a stock of leadership capital. Once you got this
stock of leadership, then you can exercise inspirational leadership, which is
getting people excited about the mission and getting them to be innovative and
optimistic about the task.


Yes,
this is "cloud speak." And if you follow the logic of it, you, the "great
leader," will be sitting on top of the pyramid, on the pointy end of it,
venerated and deferred to by all your underlings. In politics, there have been
precedents for this kind of social metaphysical people management in pursuit of
a variety of missions. In America, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and JFK. Overseas,  Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, weirdly-coiffed North
Korean tyrants, Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. To name but
a few. Except that when they reached the top of the pyramid, concern for anyone
else's well-being and for fairness and for wanting to solicit others' opinions
so those others won’t feel extraneous, ignored, and left out, all got thrown
out the window.




As
Lord Acton noted: Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Unless
you're already corrupted by power-lust, as President Barack Obama is. He'd just
rather not have to deal with Congress. Just as Hitler did not wish to deal with
the Reichstag.



Of
course, if you're just a bureaucratic mediocrity and a cipher in the federal
state of things, you needn't aspire to become a "great leader." You
can settle for being just a comfortably ensconced and well-remunerated
middle-of-the-road bureaucrat who follows all Lind's rules and is rewarded with
"recognition" for not rocking the boat and doing nothing that would
cause a sex scandal or bring charges of malfeasance on your head.



There
really isn't much to report on Tom Fox, other than his association with the
Partnership entities, which seek to make the federal government the
"employer of choice for talented Americans." He's not even on Face
Book, so his career antecedents are unknown. The Partnership for Public Service
entities, however, have their tentacles and fingers everywhere, especially in
universities.



This
is to be expected in a culture that is turning more and more statist and
European. If you're looking for "talented" young people to lord it
over the serfs laboring in the private sector, recruit them straight out of the
classroom. They've been prepared for "public service" in their
studies and social lives. The Partnership entity, a non-profit, was founded by
a former businessman, Samuel J. Heyman, who, fresh from Harvard, worked for
Robert F. Kennedy. Well, that explains the political color of the organization,
which is distinctly Democratic but particularly fascist.



Heyman
made a lot of money in business later, and decided to fund an organization with
it that would promote his own "employer of choice" – the federal
government. It is a rule of thumb that businessmen who fund charities and
organizations that promote the growth of government do so from a sense of
guilt. Look at Bill Gates.



As
for Lind, he has written several papers and is engaged in several projects. Choosing
at random from his many papers and projects, here is a sample of his obfuscating,
insubstantial wisdom, from "Social Conflict and Social Justice," an
address and paper presented to Leiden University in 1995:



Many theories of
social conflict suggest that whenever people try to divide scarce resources,
their egoistic inclinations will push them toward competitive actions that
ultimately result in mutual harm. The temptation to act competitively will
prompt one person to make choices that benefit his or her individual interests
but that harm others in the social group or society….



The consequences
attached to various choices in the fundamental social dilemmas that I have in
mind go to how we define ourselves and how much of our self-identity we are
willing to put in the hands of others. As we move away from dilemmas of
concrete outcomes and toward dilemmas of identity, I would argue, the stakes
become much more important than any material outcome….



One prediction
of the theory I have just described is that justice will be construed largely
in terms of one's personal relationships to salient groups. If people generate
justice judgments in order to have a standard to use in deciding whether they
will be rejected or exploited, then it would make sense for the standard to be
primarily concerned with the individual's own personal relationship with the
group. Justice judgments should be very sensitive to indications that one is
favorably or unfavorably positioned vis-à-vis one's group. …



This suggests
that the question in intergroup conflicts is not how to get people to abandon
their original group identifications in favor of identification with another
group. What is needed instead is a high level of overarching identification regardless
of subgroup identification.


Had
enough? Are your eyes crossed yet? There are pages and pages more. The term
"social justice" should have served as a clue to its leftist
character. How are your "egoistic inclinations" faring? Does wanting
to retain ownership of your guns, or your property, or your life contribute to
the harm of the social group or society? Are your "justice judgments"
attuned to your group's sensitivities? If not, you're in for a boatload of
conflict. Are you ready to submit to a "high level of overarching
identification, regardless of your subgroup identification"? If not,
prepare to be ostracized and shunted aside.


 

Hitler
did that. He appealed to all Germans
in a supreme example of "overarching identification." His "reflective
listening" was to paraphrase right back at them the "unfairness"
of the Versailles Treaty and the burden of the reparations and the demonization
of Germany for having begun a war of conquest. This "overarching identification"
included Catholics and Protestants, the young and old, the middle and lower
classes, the white collar workers and the blue, men, and women and children.
All subgroups.

 

His
"reflective listening" did not solicit the opinions of Jews, gypsies,
and the mentally retarded and permanently disabled. They were all thrown out
the window. They were on pages he wished to rip from the book of great leadership.
They had no place in the "Six Domains of Leadership Pyramid."

 

It
may seem melodramatic using Hitler as an example of the kind of sociological
nonsense and patent medicine statist solutions peddled by Lind and his ilk. After
all, how many federal nonentities who are mere department heads or supervisors
in any federal organization nurture in secret an ambition to become a
"great leader"? Very damned few.

 

But
they should take heart. After all, Hitler was awarded two Iron Crosses for just
pedaling a bike. And he was among the greatest public servants of them all.