The Good Leader

By Lee Thayer

There have been many thousands of books and seminars on the subject of leaders and leadership over the past few decades. Most make no effort to explain that leadership is amoral. It is a power over others that can be used for good or for ill. People are subjected to all kinds of abuse by their leaders organizationally or politically, and as children, they are being poorly led by their parents and teachers.

The original concept of leadership was that it would be used for good purposesthat those who purported to be leaders would have virtues that would necessarily be good for the people, for their communities, and for the larger culture. This is obviously no longer the case. There has been plenty of talk about successful leaders, but successful leaders are not necessarily good leaders. Merely making the numbers or being successful in some quantitative way does not imply good leadership.

This book, which has already attracted wide attention because it is so outspoken, unpacks the concept of leadership. Once one knows how to do this, identifying the good from the bad becomes much easier. The benefits to all of us as individuals and to the world we all share can be remarkable. It is time to stop idolizing our leaders. It is time to call them to task. It is time to help them become what they should be. The Good Leader can do this for them and for you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984520524

Lee Thayer

Lee Thayer is a scholar and writer known around the world for his many years of research and publications on the human condition. He has taught or lectured at many of the most prestigious universities in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, and China. He has been a Fulbright professor in Finland, a Ford Foundation Fellow at Harvard, and was twice awarded a Danforth Foundation Teacher Award for excellence in his teaching. His background is in music (composing and arranging), the humanities, engineering, and social and clinical psychology. He was one of the founders of the field of communication as a university discipline, and is a Past President of what was at that time the largest association of human communication scholars in the world. He was also the founding editor of the influential journal Communication, which was devoted to pragmatic insights into the human condition by the top thinkers in the world. His early work consisted of 14 books of research on the connection between communication and the human condition. More recently, he has summarized his long life of research into all matters human and social in such books as Communication: A Radically New Approach to Lifes Most Perplexing Problem, two collections of essays, On Communication and Pieces: Toward a Revisioning of Communication/Life. The present Doing Life; A Pragmatist Manifesto is a summary of his innovative perspectives on this subject for past 60 years. There is also his proposed alternative to the reach of biological evolution into the social sciences, Explaining Things: Inventing Ourselves and our Worlds. He lives in Western North Carolina with his artist/wife Kate Thayer. He is also renowned for his current work as a CEO coach of choice.

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Copyright © 2018 by Lee Thayer.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 05/30/2018

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As only he can, Lee Thayer eschews the pop psychology of leadership, and challenges all who espouse to lead to recognize the immense responsibility of becoming a "good leader."

Kevin Pickhardt, CEO

Pharos Systems

Contents

Preface to this Edition

Introduction

The Leaders We Deserve

The Erosion of Prerogative

Being Good for Oneself

Insatiable Curiosity

The Genie of Meanings

History-Mindedness

The Sources of Good Leadership

Intellectual Adequacy

The Courage to Create

The Good Leader’s Legacy

About the Author

Preface to this Edition

There are people who are good for themselves. There are people who are not good for themselves.

There are people who are good for other people. There are people who are not good for other people.

There are people who are good for the relationships and the subcultures and organizations they belong to. There are people who are not.

There are people who are good for the society in which they were born and grow up. There are people who are not.

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Those people who are good for themselves are usually the same people who are good for others and for their society.

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Leadership, as a concept people invented but now strive to understand, can be reduced to influence. Because people talk to themselves, they influence themselves. Because they talk to other people, they influence those other people. Because other people talk to them directly or indirectly (as in books or gossip or commercial advertising), they are influenced by those other people. When people speak or act, others interpret what they said or did. This has consequences. Some people may be influenced by what was said or done. The world swirls all about us. We try to understand what it all means. This is where influence comes in. The result of the influences that have made us who we are is that we impose our meanings on our worlds. We interpret our worlds not according to what they are, but according to who we are.

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People like certain kinds of music but not other kinds of music. Influence.

People like certain kinds of food but not other kinds of food. Influence.

People believe certain kinds of things but not other kinds of things. Influence.

People have certain tastes in politicians and shoes. People have certain tastes in ideas and other take-me-there experiences. Some people like some people but not others. Other people like certain other people but not always the same ones. Influence.

Influences and influencers are rampant in worlds. They take their toll.

Some people are influenced by certain influences but are immune to others. Other people may have been influenced by certain other influences or influencers. We are like billiard balls. Sometimes we get knocked into the pockets we land in on purpose. Often it is merely by accident. Accidental influence is more prevalent than is on-purpose influence.

Leaders are sometimes on-purpose influencers. They try to influence the course of things by what they say or do. Everything is in the process of becoming what it is, people included. We are what our influences and influencers have made of us. We may not be happy with what we have become. But once molded by our influences it is hard to break out of the mold. People are who they are, whether that is good for them or not. As the old saying has it, You cannot confer a benefit on an unwilling person.

An unwilling person is someone who is not open to your influence. Even the most eloquent lover cannot confer the benefit of himself on someone who has a very different agenda in mind. Love is a kind of mutual influence. They are both out of their minds, but open to the direction things are going. Folie a deux, as the French say…the shared madness of two. Anything that is wildly popular is a shared delusion.

Everyone has a personal perspective on things. But it is most likely to be consonant with the people one hangs out with.

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Our collective belief in leaders may be one of those delusions. The early historians discovered that a story about how things came to be is more appealing to people if things were caused by certain people – leaders. We like our stories and are entertained and sometimes learn from them. We like our heroes and our villains. But even more so we like to believe that things are caused some leader, not by chance. But the perplexity is that happenstance accounts for more than does any leader. Leaders may influence things. But happenstance probably influences more things. If you were to ask people, Why did you choose to live where you do? you will get either a blank stare or a ready explanation.

So a good question is: Why is it, if people can’t lead themselves, they do sometimes influence the course of things? Hitler (or Marx) may have been a nut-case. But that didn’t prevent them from incidentally changing the course of things in this world. Caesar may have changed the course of history when his (smaller) army defeated the superior (in numbers) army of Queen Boudica. Or did the outcome hinge upon the terrain of the battlefield, on which army arrived first, or on the weather (as in the WWII landings?)

We always identify our leaders after the fact. This means that leaders are a part of the story that is being told. They are therefore always a character in that story. And this means, in turn, that they are at least in part fictional characters. Don Quixote, like Sherlock Holmes, still lives for the people who read the books. And for the people who refer to such mythical characters as Santa Claus in casual conversations. Those depictions may be based on some actual person. But as characters in the stories that are told, they can be more mythical (fictional) than real.

Leaders are said to be the ones most responsible for the way things turn out in our world. But it is likely that causation in a world like ours is a concatenation of many causes. Eisenhower did not win the war. The thousands who lived or died in battle did. We seem to need to demonize the leader who lost, and to canonize the leader who won. Which side wins, in war or business or marital disputes, depends on the consequences, not on the storied leader.

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If we are determined to have what we call leaders, who are those we credit with the flow of history in every field, then it seemed to me that we ought to be able to distinguish bad leaders from good leaders by looking at the consequences for the people who are said to be influenced by their presence on earth. It may be relatively harmless to believe in Santa Claus. But it may be dangerous to belong to a cult whose leader calls for their suicide as salvation. It doesn’t have to be that extreme. Every organization has what we call its leader. Every avenue of human enterprise has its thought leaders or its performance leaders. Fosse may have changed the domain of professional dancing. Certain religious leaders may have changed the way their believers think about things.

But as ever was and is the case, it takes at least two people to create a human truth: one to utter it, another to believe it. But leaders don’t deal in truth. They deal in influence. The only pertinent issue is not what their intentions were, but how efficaciously things turned out for the rest of us. Was Montezuma II right? The Aztec Empire no longer exists. Or was Cortes right to do him in? Was Custer right in his decision to dominate the Sioux? Were they right to decimate Custer’s army? They all died, along with many Sioux warriors. Was Sitting Bull the better leader? The Sioux nation that once existed no longer exists. Custer’s army no longer exists. In our own civil war, the bloodiest in American history, was Lincoln right to halt any succession, at such a cost? If you and your spouse get adversarial, who’s right (which presumes that the other is wrong)? If you are the leader of your own life on earth, but you are not entirely happy with the way it is turning out, have you failed as a leader?

If an organization fails and fifteen thousand are out of work, was it on the right path or a wrong one? If their products are lousy, which of their leaders should get the credit for that? Were any of the leaders of the Vietnam War to blame for losing that war? What were the names of the leaders on the other side who won? Was Cleopatra good for Egypt?

If a parent creates a sociopath, where is the GOOD leadership in that? If your freedom is freedom to choose the wrong influencers in your life, who or what is responsible? We are led by ideas, we are led by words, we are led by our influencers. You can buy advice, but it seldom comes with any kind of guarantee. There appears to be no advantage if you buy it rather than get it free, although the free advice is quick to jumble. If you look at the evolution of organizations in our culture, it will be evident that what increases is their complexity, not generally their performance. Whatever the impetus behind this, the result is to cloak accountability. The popularity of teams makes individual responsibility a vague and archaic idea. As in the society at large, we seem to want our rights but without any responsibilities. This makes it seem that there are only good leaders, not bad ones. If the consequences are bad for people, then we need some way of distinguishing the one from the other. The more influence a person has, the more important it is to measure his or her contribution by the consequences, not any brain chemistry.

In The Good Leader, I have tried to provide a blueprint for determining the good from the bad. Of course no leader can be any better than the people he or she influences, intentionally or inadvertently. If the concept of the leader is just to provide the illusion that we people after all control everything, it is merely misleading. To the extent that people see their leaders as their salvation (from themselves), it becomes deleterious to the destiny of the society. If people can be enabled to be more aware of the goodness or the badness of their influencers, and of their good or bad influence on others, given in either case the longer-term consequences, this could be a far better society than we now have.

If this can be done in our organizations, it could be done in the larger society. It is an immediate and a long-term problematic. Such revelations as follow will make no more than a small contribution to the solution of the extremely complex problem we face at the cultural level. But if my readers do a better job of discerning the good from the bad in their own lives, the seed might be planted. We can begin by being skeptical of the term leader. That is not the issue. The terms we use or misuse weave their own magic in our lives. It is the consequences of our blind faith in what we call our leaders that is at stake. Those consequences are ours – for good or for ill.

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In our modern business world, the people who occupy the seats of power are most likely to have been appointed. One or more people who may know them put them there. They have position power. They are leaders by right of their power position in the organization. They may live like royalty. But they influence the course of their organizations and thus of the larger society. All of those who report to them are subject to their influences and the influence of the culture that has evolved in that particular organization. As leaders, they may be toxic. But they may have a certain immunity to being removed for that reason. If it is the top executive who is toxic, he or she is immune unless removed by a governing