Adolf Hitler was undoubtedly an influencer, but he was emphatically not a leader. He was a manipulator, a coercer, and a consummate extortionist, but he was not a leader. It is high time that we distinguish between tyranny and leadership. To define leadership as mere influence is to emasculate its inherent morality and disrespect the intrinsic willingness of followers.

A leader is a disrupter, a fire-starter, someone who goes around turning things right-side-up. This natural disturbance arises from beneficial internal unrest and anxiety, from an innate need to build purpose and right wrongs in the world.

The notion of leadership is best described in comparison to tyranny. We all struggle against the toxicity of tyranny. We all also participate in the venom of despotism and its many disguises. It started at birth; we are all born tyrants. We are born with an innate desire for unilateral control over everything around us, and if you are a parent, you have witnessed the shadows of tyranny from the front row.

Tyranny takes many forms. Sometimes it is outright forced compliance; sometimes it appears as benevolent dictatorship; sometimes patriarchy; sometimes paternalism; sometimes colonialism. In whatever size or shape it assumes, tyranny is undeniably the manipulative forcible coercion of others’ free will.

Tyranny can be a phone call from the lonely grandmother covertly dripping in guilt, the drill sergeant’s demeaning scream intending to help keep you alive when you face battle, the selling of a human slave to be owned as property by another human, the state government requiring every person to buy health insurance, the boy who buys flowers and dinner hoping to have sex from his date at the end of the night, the business owner who raises commodity prices during a natural catastrophe, the minister using guilt to extort more money from parishioners, or the wife who uses sex with her husband to manipulate his actions or decisions. Regardless of tyranny’s profile, to be an instrument of someone’s will other than your own is dehumanizing. Human exploitation is the hallmark of tyranny.

Leaders are an irritation and an affront to tyrants, representing a more restorative and enduring form of maturation. They stand in strong and subtle opposition to tyranny. Their lives project unforced rhythms of healing and humanization. To be a leader is to be a force of nature, a power to harmonize, a balanced treaty of peace. Hierarchical position, coercion and adoration give a false sense of pseudo-power, and collude together to support the lie that power is a scarce resource to be hoarded. Power comes to those who bring others power. Power comes to those who bring hope. Creating power in others is one of the primary duties of a leader. Power comes not to those to whom others have surrendered. Power comes to those who have surrendered to a greater purpose. At the core, a flawless leader is a living picture of restoration, responsible healing, and lavish service.

The supreme quest of the flawless leader is to surrender to purpose, and worthy purpose is unknowable apart from seeking God on God’s terms. This fact presents a perplexity for many leaders. Searching out a personal God-connection, striving to relate one-on-one with the mystery that is God, appears to fully engage a leader’s deepest, most powerful and most relevant self.

Leadership is foundationally a relationship, not a position. Leadership is more philosophical than scientific, more mysterious than obvious, more complex than simplistic; and unavoidably, yes, leadership is imbued with spiritual aspects. Whether the spiritual is currently culturally acceptable or politically correct is irrelevant regarding its impact in leadership. If the prevailing public opinion dissuades leaders from being spiritually adept, this merely presents additional facets to this perplexity. There will always be times and situations where greater purpose will call leaders to live counter-culturally. The leader who avidly avoids seeking God will most probably and eventually frustrate and denigrate followers into ridicule by giving them, in terms of one of Thomas Paine’s favorite fables, an ass for a lion.

To be sure, just seeking God in no way guarantees purpose. It is the only soil in which the seeds of significance have a chance of growing. Contributing to this conundrum further, there are thousands of shallow religious institutions supporting tyranny, terror, exploitation, and abuse littered across our planet. God in a box is not God at all. When you meet God on God’s terms and no one else’s, the richness of purpose’s soil is enhanced greatly.

History is clear: attempt to bind God to an organization or legislate holiness and you are connected to God no longer. Constrict leadership to an institution’s boundaries or to the confines of one person, and you convulse it to oblivion. Construct leadership in a factory and relationships in a laboratory, and your calculated control mechanisms become your demise. Assemble the god you desire, and you become just another abusive despot plundering possibility and significance with the bile of shallowness. The uncomfortable concrete reality is that leaders “playing god” through extreme command and control are meaningless, toxic tyrants.

How we view people matters. Our relationship to God impacts our view of people. The tyrant views people as a means to their ends. The leader views people as ends in and of themselves. If human equality is holy, the elitist exploitation of other people as less than equal is evil.

In addition to leading others as equals, relating to God enables leaders to love more effectively. In their book, Encouraging the Heart, Kouzes and Posner interviewed Major-General John H. Stanford on his secrets to developing leaders and he said, “The secret to success is to stay in love. Staying in love gives you the fire to really ignite other people, to see inside other people…I don’t know of any other fire, any other thing in life that is more exhilarating and is more positive a feeling than love is.”

This type of love is key to leadership relationships. The mature know this instinctively. More importantly, love that is enduring and significant is not a mere feeling; it is an act of the will that just happens to be accompanied by occasionally enjoyable feelings. M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled, brilliantly defined love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” So mature love is simply a spiritual commitment to yourself or another.

The fruition of the focused commitment to love is a spiritual manifestation of flawlessly leading. Furthermore, love, seeking God, and submission to worthy purpose are inextricably linked to leadership and each other at many levels. Leaders who struggle in these areas struggle proportionately in their leadership. Navigating this perplexity successfully is principally dependent on a personal, healthy relationship with God, as the utmost source of meaningful love and significant purpose.

Even the healthiest of organizations produces toxicity and is debilitated and damaged by a lack of compassion. In general, most organizations and communities are suffering from a lack of leadership, a scarcity of love, and lackluster purpose and meaning. Flawless leaders are unquenchably called to stand in this gap. As Henri Nouwen said, “Beneath all the great accomplishments of our time there is a deep current of despair. While efficiency and control are the great aspirations of our society, the loneliness, lack of friendship and intimacy, broken relationships, boredom, feelings of emptiness and depression, and a deep sense of uselessness fill the hearts of millions of people in our success-oriented world.” In this dark milieu, flawless leaders shine brightly.

Seeking God, worthy purpose, and love is a level of human maturity that creates challenging conundrums and perplexities for leaders. Do it anyway. Don’t ask how; just dive in. You won’t drown. When you feel as though you are drowning, dive deeper. It will take time: fruit matures throughout an entire season, not overnight. It takes a lifetime to mature fully, and only a moment to restart the continual process. Emotional and spiritual maturity are lifetime processes of replacing lies with truths, hate with love, doubt with faith, disingenuousness with authenticity, and closed-off self-protection with trust and vulnerability. Only the strong mature. The weak use their highchair as a platform to whine and blame.

My company works with groups of all shapes, flavors and sizes. Human behavior in groups fascinates us greatly; we stay up at night thinking about it; we find it intriguing and enlightening. We’re considered experts of sorts regarding group behavior. It was Margaret Mead that said, “Never doubt that a small group of citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” We would agree. We also think that Margaret’s wisdom applies to organizations as well as societies.

In organizations, there are times when leaders find themselves in a group, feel compelled to accomplish something collaboratively, but struggle and stagnate because for some reason no there is no clearly appointed leader. This situation is often fraught with frustration and bountiful harvests of learning. We can learn a great deal about each other and ourselves from observing “leaderless” groups. Some organizations have even had us design leaderless group interviewing scenarios to be used in junior executive hiring forums.

One of the first things we typically see from an average leaderless group that is tasked to accomplish something, is that they waste the first 50% of their allotted time jockeying for position and obsessing over how they are going to work together. It seems that hens in a barnyard are more adept at establishing pecking order than humans. This is probably because humans function better collectively without too much pecking order involved, so we instinctively fight it. However, we also fear the absence of hierarchy because the lack of its clarity requires trust and relationship. The onset jockeying/obsessing usually stems from personal insecurities, illogical assumptions, and discomfort in the ambiguity of dynamic boundary negotiation. When leaders view power as a scarce resource, they move to hoard it quickly. When leaders have strong habits from operating in firmly established parameters, they sometimes flounder in the land of uncertainty and moving targets where the rapid, lucid articulation of normally “unsaid” stuff is required to succeed or stay alive. When leaders are unable to retain their personal power and are too used to giving it willingly to their appointed superior, they usually either jump for the “power position” in a leaderless group or they freeze in paralyzing hope for someone to collect their forfeited freedom. This usually stems from too much unconscious experience in metastasized patriarchies – hierarchies held together by tyrannical coercion.

Another common phenomenon we observe is what we call “shoot the first leader.” In a leaderless group, typically within the first few minutes, one of the most over-aggressive/control-oriented ones moves to condescendingly take leadership of the group. The group politely tolerates/tests it for a while and then somehow finds some way to shoot them down. That leader almost never makes it back into a position of relative strength or meaningful influence in the group. Sometimes the group marginalizes them completely. If the group remains together long enough, a second leader, usually more democratically-oriented and facilitative, emerges. This second leader almost always retains their power and influence indefinitely, without appointment or position.

The lesson for leaders here is this: 1) don’t be so quick to take that which is not yours, 2) take the time to build relationships and trust so that your leadership emerges in response to the needs of those around you, and 3) followers are loyal to leaders who respect and honor them. Flawless leaders know that you’re not leading unless you have followers, and that a follower choosing to follow a leader is so much more important that a leader choosing a follower to be on their team. Followers do not follow simply because they are there; following is never a foregone conclusion.

Would your followers choose you if they were not in any way constrained to do so?

Leaders that create an elite aura disserve followers. The elitist attitude in leadership says to all followers that “I am better than you, hence I should lead you.” It is a mental state of ascendency that leads to domination, control, tyranny, extortion, and abuse of the community and society. History has clearly shown us numerous times that the elite leader has great capacity for tyranny and dehumanizing leadership. Elitism is obsolete and must be eliminated in order for authentic leadership to flourish.

After more than two centuries, the US has created a somewhat free and equal society that is fairly distinct in the world, although still infected with aristocratic domination and elitism in areas and pockets throughout. When America declared its independence from the British Empire and won its liberty and status through war, it separated from a monarchy and would for years strive to live distinctly different from monarchy, ensuring free speech, freedom of religion, right for all citizens to bear arms, etc.

Over two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson, one of the founders of the United States of America said, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take away everything you have…I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.” Jefferson was a liberal, secular humanist, however, today, this thinking would be considered fairly right wing.

Through only 200 years, a few generations, Americans have allowed elitism to creep back into leadership and now our free speech has been limited to certain “free speech zones”: areas set aside in public places for the exercise of free speech in the US. The US Constitution states that “Congress shall make no law… abridging… the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” The US Constitution was circumvented by the US Courts: the existence of free speech zones is based on U.S. court decisions stipulating that the government may regulate the time, place, and manner—but not content—of expression. These free speech zones stem from decisions within the last fifty years, but were not extensively utilized and enforced until the last 2 decades, coincidently and arguably with a noticeably higher rise in elitism in Governmental leadership.

Over the last fifty years Americans have also seen limitations on their religious freedom: mandatory teaching of evolution theory in public schools and the elimination and denigration of creation, elimination of prayer in public schools, and the shift in mindset that the US Constitution guarantees the freedom from religion, where it was always only originally intended to guarantee the freedom to be religious.

The last several decades in America have seen numerous challenges to individual’s rights to own firearms. Rights for Americans in this area have been severely limited by state and local governments and are yet another symptom in a long line of the sickness called elitism in leadership.

Elitism is paternalistic, coercive, extortive, and monarchical. It says, “let me control your life because you are not wise enough to do so.” It is not democratic. If human equality is holy, elitism is evil. Elitism is definitely not an American original. It says that all are not equal. It is the harbinger of tyranny and slavery and human abuse. And after only two centuries, the American congress looks more elite than the British parliament that it rebelled against. The extreme debates and diatribes in which the British parliament and its Prime Minister currently engage make the American congress and President look like the elite, polished puppets that they are. Congressmen cannot even challenge the President out loud when the President lies in a public speech without receiving censure. Thomas Jefferson and his arguing, impolite, brilliant compatriots are reeling in their graves. Freedom no longer rings in America, the elite have silenced the bell. If these comments from an American Democrat irritate you, you have probably been infected with the disease of elitism.

Authentic humility will always be the bedrock essence of a flawless leader. However strenuously we strive for relevance, we are rarely really relevant. It is high time leaders not only accept this but also embrace it. Embracing irrelevance is a holy reverence for the equality of all humans. Most leaders are constantly in search of their own relevance and thus are chained to illogical and unarticulated fantasies of being God. They think they should lead because they are “the best choice for the job;” because they have been “appointed.” When we embody the paradigm of constant relevance we repel followers because they sense our need to be dominant, however covert our condescension may be. Our past accomplishments and accolades shallowly support our self-pertinence. Leading and following are intensely “present-time” sensitive. Followers disregard past track records once they are with you in the moment’s current affliction. In our present anxiety, our past triumphs melt feverishly into triviality. Flawless leaders reject continuous relevance because they have chosen a lifelong submission to authentic service and meaningful purpose.

Immature children think of themselves; mature adults think of others. A tyrant views other people as beneath him; a community member views others as equals; a servant views other people as more esteemed than her. Pretentiousness repels; authenticity attracts. Only the strong become servants because they have mastered the illogical instability of self-supremacy. The servant is merely the mature, periodic and loving master of the ever-present inner-tyrant. Psychologists tell us that we carry with us our inner child. It is the manner in which we carry that child that makes all the difference. It is the flawless leaders that lovingly accept their inner instabilities, yet still guide themselves to a life of significance through surrendering to worthy purpose. Flawless leaders do not major on the minor issues. Flawless leaders are able to create strong bonds with followers through appropriate vulnerability. These relationships of deep strength and connectedness form the invisible infrastructure that propels the flawless leader’s organization toward meaningful success. There are correlations between leadership ability and organization outcomes. The extreme organizational power that is released from leaders’ embracing their irrelevance is another symptom of the necessary and deep work that occurs on the path of the flawless leader.

In what ways does your undercover elitism limit possibilities within the organization you serve?

embedded by Embedded Video

YouTube Link to 

In what ruts are you stuck? What choices would set you free?

To fully engage followers a leader must be fully whole. Unfortunately, we too often and unknowingly choose to fragment our lives, meticulously shattering our wholeness into secret collections of sharp chards. We often speak as though we are comprised of several liquid compounds, which cannot be combined, like salad dressing of oil and water and vinegar. “This is my personal life”, “this is my work life”, “this is my spiritual life”, “this is my family life”, “this is my public life”, “and this is my private life”. This is not organization; this is separation. To separate something out from the whole is to call it “sacred.” Leaders often fail by sacrilegiously creating sacred splinters from their inherent wholeness. We incrementally destruct our lives through sacredness. This habit of segregation and compartmentalization is rampant and pervasive in our societies. Some societies pride themselves on the separation of church and state while others feel honorable in the separation of a specific day or time as sacred and holy. But when we choose separation within one life, we usually cause harm.

When we separate out portions of our lives, we give away our rightful authority and make unconscious assumptions that control us. For instance, we assume that we are in charge of our personal life; our dark-side is in charge of our private life; either the boss, the board, the customer, the profits, or the shareholder is in charge of our work life; the family’s needs take over in our family life; and if we have a spiritual life than maybe God can have a say in that. By portioning out our lives we dilute our power as we defend against unity. It is no wonder so many feel less than whole.

Through our deconstructions we diminish. By dissection and separation, we relinquish wholeness, strength, freedom, and choice. In battle, effective strategists bisect their opponent’s forces, fragmenting their potential capacity. Weakness is the natural side effect of separation and isolation. Some battles are won just by severing the opponent’s ability to communicate between separated battalions. Similarly, through self-fragmentation we self-weaken. Through self-severing we self-diminish. Through our sacred separations we become our own silent saboteur; we embody our own worst enemy. We sacrifice fully living our wholeness. We dishonor others and ourselves by living less-than-whole and less-than-fully-present. We choose the slow suicide of self-shrinking. We choose to slice out a portion of life as sacred and unintentionally commit sacrilege. This pervasive sacrilege creates scattered splinters from what was a full oak of a life.

The immoveable reality is that we all have but one life and every minute occurs on holy ground. Every second is sacred; every moment a miracle. The awe and wonder that a unified, aligned life brings is wholly sacred and defies diminishment. Flawless leaders have no room for diminishing any life. For when one life is diminished, we are all diminished. Flawless leaders speak health into an ill and fractioned world by creating wholeness in their own lives: through living both contentment and submission to unique purpose. In what ways are you less than whole?