Leadership

Leadership is an aspect of your life, in almost every way.   It is important for yourself, in your family, your business, in your city, state and country.  Leadership is critical and crucial in sustaining and promoting a proper social world.  Personal leadership is important for animals of all kinds - us included.  In this brief post, let’s look at just four types of leadership.  These cover more than you might think.

·         Leadership of oneself.  You must first and foremost lead yourself by making frequent life’s decisions.  You must be in charge of what you do, how you look, how you behave, and how you project yourself to others.  Most of us can do this.  Some cannot.  Some cannot make even simple decisions about the regulation of their lives, daily, weekly, annually.  Prisons are full of people that cannot make even the simplest personal decisions; the prison provides needed personal regulation.  Please do not underestimate or dismiss this, the most basic type of leadership. 

·         Leadership of family.  There are great single parents that carry the burden of raising children and providing for their needs, of providing discipline and a happy environment.  Often it takes two parents to manage this.  History has shown that a well led family generates a happy and productive unit.  A totally permissive family often faces unhappy consequences and outcomes.  We are not advocating leadership as a reduction to family dictatorship – also an unhappy environment.

·         Tribal leadership.  This is the first type of leadership of a greater-than-family type.  Every tribe has a chief.  Someone has to provide guidance, to sift through multiple options and to guide the tribe to a stable existence.  Sometimes the tribe has a talisman, e.g. witch doctor, to provide needed spirituality, to answer epistemological questions, to give tribe members reassurance, and to handle death.   Not me, you might say, but tribal leadership is all around your world.  Examples of tribal leadership is present in churches, often with a minister (ecclesiastical leadership) and a lay assembly (business leadership).  This is a bicameral type of leadership.   Department managers and floor managers, small businesses can also be classified within this tribal category.  City governments often function as tribes.  Here the mayor serves as the tribal leader with the city’s operations headed by select personnel - schools, sanitation, roads, repair, etc.  These sub-chiefs have little recourse but to obey the mayor, as there is no “up” for them.  If removed from their office, there is nothing.  They are locked to the tribe and must be rather compliant lieutenants to the mayor.

·         State leadership.  This is about leadership of a multi-celled organization, one too large to be managed as a tribe, and requiring a leader best described as a manager, politician, and philosopher all in one.  Here there are sub-units as well particular agencies.  The sub-units often act as independent agents with individual constituencies. The leader of the state (e.g. governor, director, president, CEOs) must manage often conflicting desires and goals.  This leader must be a master at compromise to be successful.  Extreme forms are monarchies, dictatorships, and democracies.   State leadership is rather vulnerable as often there is serious competition and able competitors for the position.

Remarkably, the scale of time expended on these is not linear, as one might expect. Some folks expend vast amounts of time on their family or on personal leadership, while some governors spend an occasional hour or two per day on their leadership responsibilities.  One could also conclude that family leadership is extremely time-intensive.  In absence of family leadership, it has been said, "Some children merely grow up, having never been raised."  [http://usednotes.blogspot.com/2013/05/comments-part-iii.html]

Still to come: military leadership, charismatic leadership, both rather complex in their nature, one permanent, the other ephemeral. Group leadership is another type, usually specific to a given task.