“The Power of Leadership”

We would like to thank our Thought of the Day readers for the ideas and material you continue to send in. Please keep it coming and we will get around to using your Thoughts when we can.

The next few Thoughts come to us from Ari van der Steenhoven, Vapro International, a reader from Shanghai, China. (Source: TIME)

No Charisma? Don’t Worry, You Can Still Be A Leader!

Leadership, to Americans, is a familiar concept. Go into any bookstore, and the number of tomes with the word in the title – Total Leadership. The Leadership Code, Leadership for Dummies (of course) – can make you think it has replaced dieting as a way to move merchandise. Listen to politicians’ stump speeches, and it will be seconds before you hear them extol their unique leadership qualities.

But leadership, at least in the way that it’s understood in the U.S., is not an idea – or even a word – that travels very well. It’s remarkably hard to convey in French, while Germans routinely go through linguistic contortions to avoid reminding themselves that the natural translation of leader is Fuhrer.

A century ago, Max Weber, the great German sociologist, famously divided sources of authority into three types: the traditional, the charismatic and the legal-bureaucratic. Americans like their leaders to be charismatic – a world derived from the Greek that means a person has a gift of grace. Political parties routinely look for presidential candidates with charisma (Barack Obama, naturally) and regret it when they don’t find one (think Michael Dukakis).

Charismatic leaders, Weber argued, inspire devotion; they are change agents. But not every society wants or needs charismatic leaders, and some have reason to shun them. The Big Men of Africa and the caudillos of Latin America have often been charismatic, and their gift to their people was not grace but authoritarianism. So can you be a leader without charisma?

Sure … more tomorrow!

“There was an old owl lived in an oak. The more he heard, the less he spoke; The less he spoke, the more he heard. O, if men were like that wise old bird.” … Punch

Have A Good Day!

Russ

Performance Institute – A Global Leader in Human Capital Development

Russ M. Miller, LLIF
Sunny Hong Zhang, Managing Partner – China
Shawn M. Miller, Managing Partner – USA