JGarland’s reflection on Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural speech provoked some thought for me about how leadership affects us as people. When one thinks about leadership, often it is about developing ourselves to better embrace the position and succeed in our role. However, little is often said about how being in leadership can affect us as individual people. JGarland makes a provocative point in saying about Abraham Lincoln: “the power of his position did not change him as a man” (Garland, 2018). This makes me think about how our experiences as leaders can have a molding affect on our integrity, perspective, emotions, and relationships.
Leadership is two fold in that we can have positional power (being formally assigned to a leadership role), or personal power (power given to a leader by others, based on relationships) (Northouse, 2019, pg. 10,11). Both types of leadership can be given by default at times, and the experience may have either a positive or negative impact on the leader. If either is given prematurely (ie. before a leader is ready to assume responsibility for the role), I wonder if there could be significant damage done to the leader.
Leadership can be a challenging endeavour and in order to make decisions for an organization, a leader may be swayed to change or go against his or her ethics and morality, in an effort to maintain a positive reputation amongst followers. Alternately, in an effort to lead with strong values, hard decisions need to be made, thus alienating the leader as well. How does this affect a person in their true core understanding of self? I wonder if there would be a sense of loneliness, failure, incompetence, and a lack of self confidence. How many times has a leader failed in his/her ethics and decimated their career, their family, and opportunities? When a leader carries these feelings for too long, then they have a choice to either change their foundational values, or leave leadership for a quieter life. I would be interested to know how a leader mitigates against burnout and abandoning one’s values for career advancement?
George Ambler (2012) states that “The power of experiences to shape a leader’s mindset and perspective is huge, in fact experiences are so powerful they can have the opposite effect, just as experiences can make us stronger they can also paralyse us, causing us to cower and retreat from life”. He suggests that as leaders we have two options in how we respond to our experiences. The way we choose our response determines what kind of leader we become. The two options are to either have a poor response or a good response to negative experience; thus creating two types of leaders – one with a shaky foundation, and one with a foundation based on learning and growth. A poor response to experiences creates a leader who has a faulty worldview, leads out of fear, abuses power, and uses position to exert influence. On the other hand, a leader who embraces negative experience as an opportunity for growth will remain open and vulnerable, leading authentically and influencing others through relationship, character, and commitment (Ambler, 2012). It seems we all have a choice every day regarding how we respond to issues around us, and which path we choose to take.
References:
Ambler, G. (2012, July 29). How experiences shape and make leaders [web log comment]. Retrieved from https://www.georgeambler.com/how-experiences-shape-and-make-leaders/.
JGarland (2018, November 4). Light from Many Lamps Week 6 [web log comment]. Retrieved from https://create.twu.ca/jgarland/2018/11/04/light-from-many-lamps-week-6/.
Northouse, P. (2019). Leadership: Theory and practice (8th ed). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.