S02E20: The Leadership Beyond Morality: Othering Others for Othering Episode

Check-In:

• If you had the whole world's attention for 30 seconds, what would you say or do?

Big Ideas:

• Hypocrisy and leadership
• Immorality in leadership
• Do leaders have to be good people?
• We think of leadership as for the good of the people
• What tactics are immoral leaders using to get people to follow them?
• Leadership as a pipeline - a relationship between people
• How you position yourself in respect to other people
• Leadership can be about how you hook and attract them
• Charisma as a tool to attract people
• "Othering" of people - politicians using this tactic to gain followers
• Commonality and the group to bring people together
• Using fear with your own people to hold them
• Totalitarianism versus Populism
• The leadership purpose is different from the tools
• Inverse charisma - how you draw people in based on how you listen to them, not how you talk
• Charisma as a source of power - do people give you charisma?
• Shifting leadership depending on our audience - some people need to be listened to, some people need to be inspired
• Adaptive or situational leadership
• Leading from the front, not the back
• Cultural aspects of leadership
• Open and closed ways of leadership
• Our own biases shift how we perceive a leader as good/bad
• Leaders who are reassuring and are perceived as "strong" - people looking to leaders for strength
• Leaders are leaders because they help other people not feel afraid
• Idea that leadership starts from within
• People wanting to be told what to do and how to think
• Power over versus power with/power to
• What do you do when you want to offer people power, and they don't want it?
• Freedom is hard. Ignorance is bliss.
• Do people really want autonomy?
• Are we participants in the creation of immoral leadership?
• Amoral leadership - leadership without morality
• Immorality creates an us/them 
• Should leadership be moral?
• Trust is a psychological mechanism, value is what you think is important
• Can we try NOT to use the moral lens when talking about leadership?
• Pragmatism versus morality
• Take morality off the table and listen for their values
• How we embody values can look different
• How stay on debate without arguing
• Power in having a structured debate with a strong moderator
• Debating from the opposite side of your beliefs
• Constructive conflict that leads to innovation and creativity
• Disagreement isn't the same as conflict
• Leadership is when you stay outside of our "animal self" - you stay above the fray
• "People are hard to hate close up. Move in." 
• Easy for us to form opinions about other people without really knowing them
• Change the conditions by which you measure people and you can say anyone is anything
• Does a leader need to go beyond morality?
• Easy to other people for othering others
• Values as a factor in conflict because of it's rigidity
• Globalization has led to value conflict

Resources Mentioned:

• The Human Library

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