ROW Episode 42

In this episode we discuss the challenge before us of reconceptualizing and reframing our concepts of power, authority, and leadership so that we can equip ourselves to elect leaders fit to address the pressing needs and challenges of our turbulent times.

Transcript

Sovaida: 0:08

Hello and welcome to Reimagining Our World, a podcast dedicated to envisioning a better world and to infusing hope that we can make the principled choices to build that world. In this episode, we discuss the challenge before us of reconceptualizing and reframing our concepts of power, authority, and leadership so that we can equip ourselves to elect leaders fit to address the pressing needs and challenges of our turbulent times. Welcome to the year 2024. 2024 is a big year for the world for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that we are going to have seventy, 7 0 that is, national elections around the world this year. When we think about the fact that there are 193 nation states, 70 of them are going to have elections. The outcome of these elections will determine to a large extent what the social fabric of our world looks like in the years to come. Now, our current reality is that our world's leaders have by and large failed us. They have abdicated their responsibility for our well being. They seem incapable of meeting the needs of our day. Starting with the ability to end wars and to build countries where the ruling principles of truth and justice reign. They have failed to give us equitable access in many countries to health care, education, shelter, safety, opportunity to make meaningful contribution and maintain dignity through work opportunities. They seem incapable of addressing the greatest challenges of our day, including climate change and things like pandemics and the nuclear threat that hovers over our head, the destructive wars, the human rights atrocities, the genocides. They seem unwilling to be truthful and transparent about the dangers that humanity faces, including, again, climate change, the slow rolling or speeding up disasters. They're unwilling to be truthful about the true opportunities we have, the various courses of action that are open to us, and the real life consequences of the various decisions we make. One thing that leaps to mind is Brexit, that the leaders on all sides were not open and transparent with the people of Britain about the actual consequences of Brexit; so they were not capable of making an informed decision when they voted in the referendum to leave Europe. Our leaders also seem incapable of creating unity of thought or a shared vision around shared values, followed by unity of action. So again, we've been unable to come up with an effective system to combat climate change that is effective, as opposed to a voluntary system where countries make pledges and even those pledges are insufficient and besides which they're unenforceable. Once these leaders of ours are in power, we have tended to be distrustful of them, for good reason, making it even harder to unify around a shared vision, which ultimately leaves us fractured, fragmented, disunified, and unable to get anything constructive done. Now it's time for us to assume responsibility as a people. The onus This lies on us to elect fit leaders. One of the cardinal failures of all our leaders, and something we really need to fix by electing ones that get it, is their failure to recognize the spirit of the age and recognize the oneness of peoples and nations. This spirit of oneness, this awareness of our oneness as human beings and as nations is akin in the world of social infrastructure, if you like, to the law of gravity in the physical realm. Just as the law of gravity operates on us and has an effect whether we recognize it or not, so too the law of oneness has to be taken in into account when we build our systems of governance and the way we organize our societies. What can we do What we can do is to take responsibility. What does this mean? What do we practically need to do? We need to adopt a new habit, a new habit of electing fit leaders. But before we can adopt a habit, we first have to figure out what the outworn mindset is, what the outworn assumptions and concepts are that have underlied our behavior in the past, which is electing unfit leaders. Once we've brought those outworn concepts to the light of consciousness, then we can choose to replace them with new, more empowering, ways of thinking about the notions of power, authority and leadership. And once that shift in thinking has taken place, then it becomes a lot easier to move into new habits of electing fit leaders. So what I'd like to do today is to spend some time really examining these concepts and developing new concepts, reimagining new concepts, ways of thinking about power, authority, and leadership. Let's quickly look at three old concepts. We tend to have this idea that those in power seek to dominate and control us and appropriate our precious resources for their own selfish ends. This is something most of us have in the back of our minds when we think of people in authority. We also have a second outworn assumption, which is that those in authority are solely driven by ego and motivated by self interest. And we've basically just come to accept this as part of the furniture. This is what leaders do. And when we go to elections, it's often the case of trying to choose between the lesser of two or three or five evils in which all of them are driven by ego in our minds and motivated by self interest. And the third old concept is that those in authority somehow occupy a higher status or station than the rest of us mere mortals. They're somehow superior to us. You can see that these are not very empowering ways of thinking about power, authority, and leadership. It's no wonder that we feel the way we do about our leaders. We expect them to lie and cheat in order to maintain power and influence and dominate and control us. We rail against them. Once they come to power, we distrust them. Very often we're apathetic and don't even show up for elections. The percentage of people showing up is declining. Trust in public institutions is declining. We need to do something because this is untenable. So I want to propose a few new concepts to replace these outworn concepts that clearly don't serve us. So here we go. I'd be very curious to hear your thoughts and see your comments on these. The first is that power and authority are not means for dominating and controlling us. Imagine if instead we viewed them as being necessary elements of organizing any society and that the role of those in power is to create the necessary conditions that allow each of us and allow us collectively to fulfill our potential. That's actually a really empowering concept of power and the role of leaders. To create the environment in which we can actualize our potential. Now that's the kind of person I would want to go vote for, right? I'd be very incentivized to go vote if I thought that there were people I could vote for who believed in this concept of power. The second concept that I wanted to share with you is that power is not a finite identity, which is to be seized and jealously guarded. Rather, it constitutes a limitless capacity to transform that resides in the human race as a whole. This notion was introduced by the governing council of the Baha'is in the year 2013. They suggested that we start to associate power with words such as release, encourage, channel, guide, and enable. Those are not words that we tend to generally associate with the word power, right? At this point, I want to share with you my favorite definition of a good leader that we can keep in the back of our minds as we continue exploring some of the other newly imagined concepts of what power, authority, and leadership constitute. My favorite definition by Jim Rohn, who was an American entrepreneur and a motivational speaker. He said that a leader is someone who helps some others change their thoughts, their beliefs and actions for the better. So again, he starts with the root, what we think and what we believe. What we can conceive and believe we can achieve. Everything starts with thought. Everything starts with the power of imagining and the power of thought, and perception. And then from it flows behavior, which are habits that then eventually when repeated over a long enough period of time by enough people become our culture, become the social fabric of our society. The third new concept is that a leader's responsibility includes to create unity of thought and action. Ken Blanchard famously said that the greatest leaders mobilize others by coalescing people around a shared vision. It's the ability to mold public sentiment. And I love this quote from Abraham Lincoln in which he said,"In this age, in this country, public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail. Against it, nothing can succeed. Whoever molds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statues or pronounces judicial decisions." And one of the greatest peacemakers of the 20th century talked about the necessity of having a, quote,"unified public opinion and the importance of"rightly focusing public opinion." The fourth concept that I'd like to introduce is that leaders merely have the duty and privilege of serving. That's all they're there to do. An analogy I like to use is that of a waterfall. For all the sound and fury of water crashing down at the top of the waterfall, the most powerful place is actually the reservoir, which is all the way at the bottom, because it's where the water actually gathers. And that's where the life giving waters reside. The station of humility, the station of service, is really the highest form of power, but this is a newly conceptualized framework of what power is. Very different from what we reach for. And again, to quote Andre Malraux, he said,"To command is to serve, nothing more and nothing less." The fifth concept of power I wanted to share is that there is a difference, and we need to be smart and learn to distinguish between, function or rank and station. We often conflate the two and it's a huge mistake. We become a cause of test to the people, who have power because they somehow think they're very special and they have a very high station in life, which they don't. They're merely there to fulfill a function, because they happen to be, hopefully, the people most suited to fulfill that function for a given period of time. And that's all it is. And when that period passes, other people may then have the skills, unique abilities, competencies, qualities of person that are necessary to fulfill this function. We could save ourselves a lot of hassle if we stopped conflating these two ideas and were able to distinguish. When we die, who knows who has the highest station in terms, say, the highest spiritual station, or who is truly the greater human being who has impacted people's lives and transformed them. They may never have held any office. They may never have had any status as we think of it. They may never have had labels like partner or, I don't know, Chief Executive Officer or whatever, and yet they may have been incredible leaders in the sense that Jim Rohn spoke about it, in that they helped many people change their thoughts, beliefs, and actions for the better. It may be some person who resides in a village in a far flung corner of the planet that you and I have never heard of and will never hear about. We can detach our egos from this concept of power and authority and the role of leadership when we start to truly understand what matters in life and what the role of leaders is. New concept number six is that a leader has to have the ability to take the long view and be proactive. In other words, have the ability to address problems before they become emergencies. Can you imagine if we had heeded the warnings of scientists before COVID, over years, that we were due for a pandemic that would be caused by an airborne virus that traveled from animals to humans, and they had called for the creation of a global virus surveillance network. These calls were ignored, and the excuse was that it was too expensive. Nobody wanted to fund it. And yet the cost would have been approximately fraction of what it ultimately ended up costing us. We're still spending on the pandemic, which is still with us, even though we've chosen to turn a blind eye to it. We just pretend it doesn't exist. It's now become an endemic disease. The next concept, actually concept number seven, is"the ability to take people where they don't necessarily want to go, but ought to be." I love this quote. It's from a woman, Rosalind Carter. And it's so true. Think about climate change. Our leaders should have been able to bring humanity along, to change our habits, to stop burning fossil fuels, to step up radically the creation of renewed systems of energy, clean energy, and we should have been far further along than we are, but they, as I started off saying, that our leaders have really spectacularly failed us in many critical respects. It is important to direct public opinion to whatever is important and meets the needs and challenges of the day, including by using proper arguments and addressing clear, comprehensive and conclusive proofs. This is the business our leaders should be engaged in. They should be able to persuade us by engaging our hearts and our minds. Examples are in the field of climate change, nuclear proliferation. We need to eliminate our nuclear weapons. There are compelling reasons why we need to do this. The risk of nuclear war is at its highest since the Cuban Missile Crisis. This is something, unfortunately, we're not even talking about and not even aware of for the large part. And this does not bode well. The last thing in terms of new ideas of thinking about is that a good leader should be able, yes, to get results. I've been hearing a lot in elections speak around the world, some people saying,"Oh. A good leader is just somebody who gets things done." That's not enough, because the way they get things done is as important as what they get done. The means they use should be as worthy as the ends. This is a really critical point, that the ends do not justify the means. Ever. This is how we get ourselves into a lot of hot water. The means should be as worthy as the ends. Imagine us adopting this set of eight new ways of thinking, reconceptualizing what power, authority, and leadership are really about. Then we would find ourselves, if we did that, wanting to elect very different kinds of leaders from the kinds that we have been used to electing. We would seek leaders who had a certain set of qualities of character. And the second criterion we would demand are certain motivations. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this latter part, but I just wanted to highlight examples of some of the qualities, I think, if we were to adopt these concepts that I've shared. These are some of the qualities that we would be demanding, not just looking for, but demanding in our leaders. Honesty that is displayed in all aspects of their lives and how they treat their families and how they treat their business partners and how they treat the electorate. Secondly, freedom from prejudice. People who are not interested in sowing this division, but rather are unifiers. It's easy to find out people's records on this front thanks to the internet. It's not hard to figure out what people's records have been. Courage is another one. The willingness to do what is right for the collective whole, regardless of what's in their best interest. Also the courage to speak the truth about the difficulties that we're going to face with climate change, for instance, and the steps that we need to take. Freedom from corruption. That is another quality of character that we need to be looking for. And leaders who are willing to sacrifice and give of themselves and who are content, for instance, with modest incomes and are not out to gouge us all and treat our national resources as though they are their own private resources. Leaders who have basic competence. You can be a lovely human being with beautiful qualities of honesty and lack of prejudice and yet not really be competent to govern. There must be some skills there, some governance skills. Willingness to listen in a spirit of humility. That is a key characteristic of a good leader. Someone who is fair minded and wise, who is compassionate and empathetic. We found during COVID that leaders who were more willing to listen, be compassionate and empathetic,--and by the way, all of-them were women leaders-- their nations did better during COVID. So it's not just a soft skill. This is a critical skill in a dangerous world. Leaders who are interested in seeking ends through means that are equally worthy and who seek the broadest diversity of input possible before making decisions and who are willing to evince transparency. So they're not being secretive of what about what's going on because they're there in service to their people. So bringing the people along. I would mention that One pitfall I think we fall into is that we tend to elect people on the basis of platforms rather than qualities of character. I would highly recommend that we flip this, that we guard against putting the cart before the horse. In other words, focus on character and skills and competence. Then, trust to their goodwill, skill, conscience, and ability to consult. Give them the opportunity to be agile and adapt to realities. Abraham Lincoln famously said,"I never had a policy. I have just tried to do my best each and every day." Find that very interesting. When we look at it, we see that the reality on the ground is that despite all the promises made by candidates and the platforms, reality kicks in once they get elected. Famously, a former British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, was once asked what was likely to throw a government off course. And his response, in typically English fashion, was,"Events, dear boy, events." Think about Boris Johnson's tenure as Prime Minister. The guy was elected to get Brexit done, right? That was the platform on which he ran. That was the mandate that the people of Britain gave him. Nobody expected that what he would have to primarily deal with was a pandemic, an economic recession of great magnitude, and answering for historical racism. It just goes to show that electing people just on the basis of platforms and promises may not be the best approach. And the second criterion, the thing we must demand, is pure motives and motivation. We should be smart about assessing the motivations of people who run for office, asking ourselves, Are they interested in money, status, influence, and power? Or do they desire to take into account the collective interest not only of their own nation, but of all nations, because we live in a world that is so interdependent and interconnected and has become a single organism. The last point I want to throw in--that we're not going to explore, but I'm going to refer you back to episodes 16 and 17 of this Reimagining Our World series-- is that another skill we all have to hone in order to elect fit leaders is this essential skill of the independent and unbiased investigation of the truth. Covered this in great detail in two episodes, so again 16 and 17. Go back and take a listen. If you'd like more to delve further into the topic today and some of the concepts I've raised, check out the chapter called Leadership Shift and in the latest book I published called The Alchemy of Peace: Six Essential Shifts in Mindsets and Habits to Achieve World Peace that's available on Amazon. Okay, that's it for now. It's delightful to be back with you all and I look forward to seeing you in March, next month. That's all for this episode of Reimagining Our World. I'll see you back here next month. If you liked this episode, please help us to get the word out by rating us and subscribing to the program on your favorite podcast platform. This series is also available in video on the YouTube channel of the Center for Peace and Global Governance, CPGG.