The Eternal Difficulty of Leadership

The Australian federal election campaign of 2010 was the perfect illustration of the contemporary problem of leadership. And it’s this: we want a leader we can trust, but we aren’t ready to trust anyone. Or to put it another way: we want a leader who is real, but we aren’t prepared to believe anything they say.

The most telling moment was when Julia Gillard, who had followed perfectly the formula for contemporary electioneering by repeating her ‘moving forward’ phrase over and over again like we were idiots, announced that she was throwing away the script and that we were now going to get the ‘real Julia Gillard’ – which chiefly meant speaking without notes and answering questions. Only, anyone could see that this was itself a strategy, a tactic driven by polls and market research, which was saying that we voters want authenticity in our leaders, and even if we are idiots don’t like to be told that we are. We could have no confidence that this was anymore the real Julia than the moving forward Julia. Even if it was the ‘real’ Julia, we had no way of believing that it was – there was the crafted and practiced ‘spontaneity’, but not the unguarded moment that tells us the truth about her real character.

This is not only a problem for Gillard. Modern politics is – and thus modern politicians are - all persona and no person. I think this is why we are fascinated by the private lives of those who lead us – because we want to see if their public pose is authentic, or whether it is just a trick in order to get us to follow them. If we could discover, by combing through their garbage, some piece of authentically human detritus – a leg razor with real hairs in it, a half-eaten burrito, a discarded condom wrapper, some left over antibiotics – we might begin to believe in them as real. What makes it really complex is that having discovered they are real, we might not want them to lead us anymore.

Such are the peculiarities of leadership in the 21st century. Like so many things in contemporary life, our attitude to leaders is paradoxical: on the one hand we are incredibly gullible when it comes to some forms of leadership and some leaders. On the other, we are deeply cynical towards those who lead us. We want to be lead, desperately; but the possibility of a human being fulfilling our expectations is unlikely.

We see this in the cult of celebrity. Fame conveys on people a kind of tacit authority. Bizarrely, expertise or success in one area we feel leads to expertise in another. It conveys a kind of transferrable authority – my ability to play cricket or to sing translates into an ability to choose which brand of cola to drink. That’s why advertisers love celebrity endorsements. It comes because good leadership is so attractive to human beings: we deep down want to believe that there are leaders out there who make a difference and who are worth trusting and are perhaps a cut above the ordinary. We really want there to be leaders who are able and who care for us and are not just drunk on fame or power. That is the attraction of the The West Wing: the fantasy that anyone as intelligent and good as Jed Bartlett could ever get elected.

We like the feeling a good leader gives us, because good leadership can take us further than we thought it was possible to go. As the American author David Foster Wallace said in 2000:

A real leader can somehow get us to do certain things that deep down we think are good and want to be able to do but usually can't get ourselves to do on our own ... A leader's true authority is the power you voluntarily give him, and you grant him this authority not in a resigned or resentful way but happily; it feels right. Deep down, you almost always like how a real leader makes you feel, how you find yourself working harder and pushing yourself and thinking in ways you wouldn't be able to if there weren't this person you respected and believed in and wanted to please.

Being led feels great. You can see the potential danger here: good leadership is so powerful it is almost intoxicating. But we so rarely find this. We want Bartlett, but if there ever was a Bartlett, we wouldn’t believe in him. We always fear that we have a Richard Nixon (the US President who resigned in disgrace over the Watergate scandal in 1974). We are suspicious and cynical about leaders and their spin, especially in the political world. We have been so often bitterly disappointed in leaders and in leadership. The sincerity of politicians is so carefully calculated and practiced that we just don’t believe it any more. Leaders have become such successful actors and manipulators that we just don’t know when we are getting real and when we are getting fake. That’s the Julia Gillard problem. And to be fair, it is hard to know how she (or anyone else) could ever overcome it.

It is a human problem, actually. Human leaders are only human. They are finite. They do not know everything. They cannot do everything. And they are, everyone of them, failures. They fail - sometimes terribly. Even their mundane failures are still failures. However, leadership - built as it is on power and authority – is a concept of such transcendence that it is almost divine. It is not accident that since ancient times leadership has been associated with the sacred – and that some leaders have even pretended to divinity itself. No human being is really worthy of the tasks and responsibilities of leadership.