An example of the genre

This is a long post, occasioned by looking at the lack of progressive influence nationally, and by talks with social change leaders locally.

Can we agree we need more social change leaders today?

We may be the leaders we have been waiting for — it’s a good democratic idea and a challenge to each of us. But if I had no other evidence, just the number of times I have heard that phrase in the last few years tells me that we are all feeling the lack of leaders.

Note: although we progressives may be somewhat OK with the word ‘leaders’ we may not feel so comfortable with the word ‘followers.’ It may sound too much like ‘sheep.’ Perhaps what we can agree on first is that we need our culture (of community, of biophilia and a caring society, restorative justice and interdependence) to become the dominant culture, and that on the road there we first need our communities, organizations and movements to become more powerful in American (and every other) society: more visible, more vocal, more effective in generating electoral and legislative success, more present in schools and universities, prisons and businesses, etc.

If we agree on that, then we can go to the question of how our organizations become more powerful in the wider world, and we can surely agree that it must involve the liberation and nurturing of all our participants’ talents, including talents for the different kinds of leadership that we need – leadership in craft and IT skills, in writing and speaking, in teaching and empathic connectivity, in legislative process, in organizational development and fundraising, in overall strategic planning and decision-making, in childcare and green building and vegetable growing, etc. etc. No one person leads in all areas: we need to find those people who can lead in the ways best suited to them, and who can follow others’ leads as appropriate; and then we need to find ways to knit all these leaders and followers together in maximally productive and powerful groups. Does this sound right?

So what makes a leader and how we generate more of them? How do we become them?

I believe the Left is uneasy with leaders, and until we have a new social contract between followers and leaders, a new sense of agreement about what creates legitimacy in progressive leaders and what creates legitimate kinds of hierarchy, we will never be able to celebrate our leaders, recruit better ones, and thus propel them and us into power (or into more powerful roles in society, if you prefer).

A friend and fellow Tikkun Daily blogger has already described reservations to me about this language of power that I am using. I understand the dangers of power for power’s sake, for ego and status, but the danger of progressives being overly fearful of power is even worse. All of our freedoms and civil rights, all the rule of law and curbs on power we have were gained by responsible use of power: usually power gained at great cost by those who suffered from lack of these rights and curbs. To say nothing has changed, nothing has been gained, the republic is as brutal a playground of the powerful as it ever was, is to spit on the memory of all those heroes who fought for freedom, rights, and curbs on power. The powerful are always escaping the limits we place on them, and we always have to renew those limits, through struggle. I am just talking about how each of us can take more leadership in those struggles and have a better time doing it.

There’s a whole section of the book industry about leadership, much of it written from a conservative angle. But my wife, Debi, tells me there’s also a lot written about leadership and management in nonprofits. So I would be grateful if anyone could wise me up to that body of experience and theory, and tell if what I have to say here is reinventing the wheel.

When I talk with leaders in the social change world, off the record, they seem to be having a hard time. Leaders of my boomer generation who have actually lasted and are still leading (there aren’t so many of them if you think about it) have tales to tell of resentments against them, people who felt they were too full of ego — who gave you the right to lead? — or had sucked too much power to themselves. The critics may have been right that ego was present — when isn’t it? — or that certain leaders took more power than they deserved. But it took a peculiar toughness to keep leading in those circumstances.

The mood among social change activists in my generation’s time has been for universal empowerment and grassroots democracy, and often for consensus. The goal and result was a leveling and sharing of power within social change organizations. Anyone feeling that they lacked power in an organization was likely to complain vociferously, especially if the leader was an inheritor of privilege (white, straight, male etc) and they were not. That’s fair, and many such privileged people have stepped away from leadership, often full of self-doubt, troubled by their own unconscious racism or sexism. That’s inevitable: it is not easy to give up privilege and a period of doubt and of leadership vacuum may be the only way to enable non-privileged leaders to emerge, along with a different style of more collective leadership.

Even when the inheritors of privilege step down from leadership, though, it is not easy for people from traditionally oppressed and marginalized groups to step up. It may be very hard for them to feel their own power, their own right to lead, or to convince others of it. It’s not just personal baggage that may or may not be present from being raised among people who were used to a sense of their own powerlessness. It’s that the very process for becoming a leader is too unknown, too associated with the dreaded ego, with the qualities that made the traditional leaders unacceptable. You may be suspected of trying to raise yourself above the crowd, of ambition to join the power structure.

These two factors together — the self-doubt among progressives who inherited privilege and the lack of clear routes to legitimate leadership among those who did not — have combined to deprive social change movements of the leadership they need to be successful in the wider society. It must be one of the major reasons for the bizarre triumph of the counter revolution of the Right in recent decades.

When empowerment means leveling inside the group, it does not necessarily empower the group. It may in fact disempower or hold back the group, and this is what I think has happened.

Is the lack of leadership one of the reasons why the social change activism of the last thirty years has not made more headway in the dominant society, often by default ceding mainstream politics and religion to the Right?

The boldest leaders who have emerged on the left have in fact been mostly women or minorities. It’s no accident that the Democrats in the last three presidential elections have put up two ineffectual white guys (Gore and Kerry) and then last time a woman and a black man. The last time a white male Democrat won he was a man who had come from poverty, and had a talent for showing empathy (Clinton). I have a sense that the only place progressive straight white men have really been able to lead and shine has been in socially oriented business, because the business world culture is still more old fashioned and traditional than the nonprofit and activist cultures.

But talking with some nontraditional leaders, I am struck by the burdens they carry. If they spoke their minds about the difficulties, would a young person who admires them want to follow in their tracks and become a leader?

One of the things that seems to happen is that the resentment of straight white male leaders can rather easily get transferred to straight white female leaders, and then to gay white female leaders, and then to lesbian women of color who are leaders. It appears to me that the various people on the left who are most dedicated to opposing the empire, the profit-economy, the human species’ exploitation and ruination of “inferior” species, have a real problem with leadership itself. Not just with leadership by inheritors of privilege, but leadership by anyone.

So what would a new social contract between followers and leaders look like?

Leaders don’t make themselves, they are made by their followers. (A fun novel by Terry Pratchett called Small Gods makes the point: the small gods are the ones hardly anyone believes in any more, and when the last person stops believing, the small god will die. Big Gods are made big by having a large number of followers).

To be clear, I’m talking leaders, not appointees. So called “leaders” appointed by an existing power structure are not made by their followers. Appointees can learn how to lead, but they only become leaders when people follow them down paths they would not otherwise have taken.

So when real leaders abuse their followers — say, when cult leaders sexually molest their disciples, or run off with their money or otherwise abuse their trust, or when a popularly elected, supposedly progressive president kowtows to the big money establishment — it’s likely not just the leaders’ fault: it also probably says something about what their followers expected of them and built into the relationship with them. Followers confer legitimacy. If they confer it too easily, they are likely in for trouble. If they build in expectations, hurdles the leader has to jump to continue earning legitimacy, then the leader may behave better. Too many hurdles deter people from ever taking leadership. Too few hurdles put all the onus on the leader to be a person of exceptional character, whom we then blame when she or he turns out to be only average.

It’s time for what Andrew Samuels wrote about in a brilliant article in Tikkun about the “good enough leader.” But I don’t see us deserving or getting leaders who are good enough (instead of having to be angels) until we are good enough followers.

Of course if followers don’t have a way of conferring legitimacy at all, which seems to happen all too much on the Left, then no real leaders can emerge.

Followers may not know consciously that they confer legitimacy. They may not know what basis they are conferring it on. When the tall handsome man with the deep sonorous voice gets the following instead of the short plain woman with the highpitched voice, it may be that he deserved it more or worked harder for it but it may just be the unconscious cultural assumptions of the flock who did the following.

So while there is a good deal of talk about leadership training and the qualities needed for leadership, I am really more interested in the followership training and the qualities needed for followership.

What would followership training include?

This is something I haven’t developed much in my mind yet. You may have much better ideas.

One of my background concerns has always been cultism: not just religious cults, but also political cults and what we might call everyday cultic experiences: like ceding too much power over one’s life to one’s doctor, manager or teacher. A better word than cultism might be tribalism. Our human origin is one of small tribal groupings where young people learn deference, there is some kind of status hierarchy, a chief or group of elders, a mistrust of outsiders: all things that can develop into full blown cults today, marked by excessive deference to a charismatic leader, group think, demonization of outsiders and so on. All of this is easy to blame on the leader, but again, it is the followers’ psychology that is critical.

Much of what one might call pathological or at least dysfunctional following no doubt goes back to unconscious desires, arising from our long childhoods, for wise and loving parents to run things and make decisions for us (whether our own parents lived up to that or not).

So one thing followers need to know is about how their own desire for loving mom or dad substitutes may generate illusions about authority figures; and the reverse, how their own adolescent rebellion against mom and dad may generate undeserved mistrust of authority figures. Followers need self knowledge but of perhaps a different kind from the typical thing you get in therapy: they need knowledge of what happens when individual tendencies agglomerate in movements and organizations, creating the kinds of cultism that can arise, including us-them prejudice, and excessive veneration or demonization of leaders.

Then the training needs to move on to what we need from leaders, assuming we are just looking for good enough ones, not saints. Let’s imagine that leaders are just ordinary people like ourselves, not usually worthy of either pedestals or gallows. An organization needs to know what it needs to be powerful in the world. Then let’s work out how we can specify these abilities, qualities and skills precisely enough to be able to recruit for them, and then to nourish them in our team, through training, encouragement, practice, feedback and reward. Consideration of what rewards we want to use is important. But first we need to be clear about what it is that we want, collectively, to reward.

There is the concept of capacity-based leadership, so that within a team or organization, different people lead in different areas, and all are ready to follow them in their area of expertise once they have proved their trustworthiness. How does a leader prove their trustworthiness? That’s the same as how do we followers confer legitimacy? These are the things we need to spell out. There is a level of self-knowledge that both followers and leaders need, a level of humility and clarity about their abilities and inadequacies and ways to build on the former and remedy the latter. You can trust a leader who will tell the truth, serve the group, and resist peer pressure in order to do both (many groups do not like to hear any person’s truth that contradicts the consensus and self-image of the group). You can trust a leader who has practiced and mastered a level of empathic communication with others without losing their own passion and creativity.

A friend in a nonprofit told me that some people in her organization appear more concerned with how well they are treated and respected inside the organization than with how well the organization is fulfilling its mission in a devastated community. She sometimes longs for the corporate world’s lack of patience with people’s need for reassurance and therapy on the job, and its focus on getting things achieved. She wants to say “oh suck it up” when, say, someone is feeling miffed that they weren’t included at a meeting with some local powerbroker, because, frankly, they weren’t the best at presenting the community’s needs. She feels ready to suck it up herself when someone else gets a prestigious role she would like, if that person is better at doing it: in fact she finds it not that hard to suck it up because her real passion is to achieve what the team can achieve when each person is doing the things they are best at. Teamwork requires knowing what is needed and who can do it best, and who can be trained into doing it better.

Hierarchies vs. Flat Organizations

At times it seems that a truly flat, nonhierarchical organization of the kind many progressives dream about, is only possible with very mature personalities: people who can put ego aside and work unselfishly together for the common goal. But even then, informal leadership emerges as mature people cede leadership to the ones best able to lead in their area. Formalizing this informal structure of leaders and followers may actually make it easier to work with: it becomes visible, and can be governed by conventions and agreements that are visible and therefore can be changed as circumstances and personnel change.

What we end up with may be hierarchies that are designed for particular purposes, not frozen by power but changed by the followers as well as the leaders (and every person is part one, part the other) to better achieve the group’s goals as circumstances change. This is not so uncommon in the corporate world, which has much to teach.

Hierarchies too need these mature personalities if they are to work well.

The more we can clarify what makes a good leader and a good follower, the more anyone can aspire to and qualify for the leadership roles. Even someone from a traditionally privileged group! Even someone who is “rising above” their traditionally oppressed colleagues to take a leadership role!

Back to the issue of Power

It’s about that the whole group needs, and the humility of the leader is as important as their unhumble reveling in their own and the group’s power to do good. How do we describe this mix of humility (which must include the humility to be the frontperson, the figurehead, the strategist, if that is what the group needs of you, as well as to take out the garbage or dig the garden if that is what is needed) with a vast sense of possibility, of realistically unrealistic imagining and planning and achieving, of glorying in success and power with, power to. Power with is the critical idea here, as opposed to power over.

The idea that we are all underestimating our own actual and potential power (surplus powerlessness in Michael Lerner’s phrase) is a central concept. There is something valuable about being raised in a ruling class: the sense that relatively few players really make a difference and you can approach them, influence them, make things happen: you have an inbred sense of your own worth, agency and power. Not knowing how humble your place in society is, is an advantage. Because actually, small groups and talented people can make a difference, and not just for themselves individually but for the whole collective society. We are all potentially more powerful than we know.

Can this kind of chutzpah be taught to people whose parents told them by word or deed that they were ‘humble’ – of ‘humble origins’ as the history books say. It needs to be part not just of leadership training, but of followership training, because the followers need to know that this is a quality they are looking for and want to nourish and reward in their leaders. I once heard that mother chimps teach their daughters to be savvy diplomats, able to insinuate themselves into neighboring chimp clans because girls marry out; but they teach their sons to brash egomaniacs, because boys have to join the gang and rise or fall in it. We have to train our leaders to be both savvy empathic diplomats and bold expressive carriers of the new culture.

We need to understand how to claim and celebrate our power with, and our power to do: power to speak convincingly to crowds and on TV, power to saw a straight line and build a straight roof, power to empower our colleagues with our love and celebration of their power. The more talents are developed, and the more the group can give leaders room to express their own brilliance, then the more the group can be powerful together.

We need to build ourselves and our leaders into bold, well-supported, well-loved, highly-skilled people, who feel they know how to deserve that love and support, and have got themselves to the point where they do deserve it, and so can go up against any corporate or establishment figure or power structure, leading the team with panache.

That’s what I have right now. You can tell why this is a blog post rather than an article: it needs cutting, it rambles. Sorry, but this is how I test ideas out and I invite you to do the same in the comments.