Often a leader is assumed to be all-powerful. As a leader,
we exercise power, authority and influence in the ways that do harm. How? A
leader may or may not hold a formal position of authority; position is not the
point. Rather, it is the leader as protagonist that matters. People in a state
of nature are not, in usual sense of the word “good”. This is not to insist
that people are bad but rather that relied on to behave well. Leaders are like
everyone else. They-we- behave badly for different reasons, and they-we-behave
badly different ways. A city in which corruption has long been tolerated is
more likely to be defrauded by it elected officials and string tradition of
good government.
Why do leaders behave badly then? The leaders’ traits and
character play more important role in their behaviors. Traits once considered
of paramount importance such as intelligence, are viewed as having fuzzy and
imprecise denotations. It is now widely agreed that to emphasize the leaders.
Traits are to emphasize other important variables, such as the situation, the
nature of the task at hand of course the followers. Why people behave the way
they do. Greed-Greedy leaders crave more-more success, more money, more power
or more whatever, such as sex. This is not to say that all leaders who aspire
to have more are bad. In some measure, rewards such as money and power are
simply the benefits expected from hard work. Rather, when leaders’ appetite for
more is excessive, it is likely to intrude on their capacity to exercise leadership
for the common good. When leaders are unwilling or unable to control their
desire for more bad leadership will be the result. Greed is likely to be most
pernicious when in entails a hunger for power.
Unlike traits which are viewed as amenable to change,
character is more permanent condition, fundamental and fixed. Character is
embedded in who we are; it is who we are. As the word is commonly used, we also
presume that to know a person’s character is to know his or her moral compass.
The connection between character and leadership is easiest to make an extreme. Unless
followers are pressured or coerced into going along with bad leaders, they
resist them right? Wrong? We know full well that bad leaders of various kinds
abound that their followers usually follow, even when they know that their
leaders are misguided or malevolent. Why? The answer to this question matters,
because we can’t expect to reduce the number of bad leaders unless, we reduce
the number of bad followers. Followers have their most basic human needs which
attract them to follow bad leaders.
The quest for safety, for
self-preservation, is arguably the strongest of our basic needs.
Before anything else, we seek food, shelter, and protection
from harm. Followers follow bad leaders not only because of their individual
need for safety, simplicity and certainty but also because of the needs of the
group. Group[s go along with bad leaders often provide important benefits.
Followers’ dedications to bad leaders are very bad, as opposed to only somewhat
bad. Followers who knowingly, deliberately commit themselves to bad leaders are
themselves bad. Bad leadership falls into two categories; bad as in ineffective
and bad as an unethical ineffective leadership fails to produce the desired
change. For reasons that include missing traits, weak skills, strategies badly
conceived, and tactics badly employed, ineffective leadership falls shorts of
in intention. Unethical leadership fails to distinguish between right and wrong
including corruption, callous, and evil acts.
This is a very big fact that without followers, nothing
happens, including bad leadership. Together leaders and followers can bring out
the best in people, as in say, the civil rights movement; or they can amplify
what’s worse in people and leaver murder and mayhem in their wake. Obviously
this finding has moral implications. Leaders and follower share responsibility
for leadership, bad as well as good. Finger pointing- “He did it!” – will no
longer wash. None of us is off the hook. We cannot stop or slow bad leadership
by changing human nature. No amount of preaching or sermonizing, no exhortation
to virtuous conduct, uplifting thoughts, are wholesome habits will obviate the
fact that even though our behaviors may change, our nature is constant. Rather,
it is that leaders are likely to change only when they decide it’s in their
interest to do so. Bad leaders will not be good leaders unless they calculate
the cost of bad leadership as greater than the costs of good leadership. Bad
leadership will not, cannot, be stopped or slowed unless followers take
responsibility for rewarding the good leaders and penalizing the bad ones.
