My Thoughts on Leadership, Political and Otherwise
When I was a teenager, I attended a Presbyterian church in my home town. The summer I was 16 years old, the youth minister/leader of that church recruited a dozen of the church's teenagers to participate in a "Missionary" trip to an Navajo Native American reservation in Arizona. The fee to participate was $100. My parents were skeptical and wouldn't pay that fee, so I paid it myself, out of my earnings at a part time job. I did that, because the leader said that we would be "helping to do God's work" for the "poverty-stricken Indians."
So, we went to Arizona in the church's bus. Twelve teenagers and a couple of adults who were acting as chaperones. For a week, we worked, painting the interior and exterior of a school building on the reservation. I remember observing that the school building did not really need painting, and had many, many coats of paint on it already. Still, we worked hard, and then gathered together in the evenings, eating food cooked outdoors, and singing hymns around a campfire. We slept in the school building.
Never during that week did we see or interact with any Navajo people. That, and the unnecessary painting of that school, made me suspicious. When we returned home, I talked to that youth minister/leader about my concerns. After a long and sometimes heated discussion, he finally admitted to me that the goal of the trip had nothing to do with "helping the Navajo people." The real purpose of the trip was to create a closer bond between the teenagers and the church. He further admitted that the Navajo tribe was given $750 for permission to let us paint the school one more time. It was a money-maker for the reservation. That's why we never saw any Navajo people, nor learned anything about their culture while we were there. The entire thing was based on false pretenses. We were deceived by that church leader. No doubt another church group of teenagers came after us and painted that school yet another time.
That brings me to another belief I have about leadership that I want to share. Leadership, in itself, is neither good nor bad. It is simply about getting others to help you achieve your goals. Whether or not your goals are ethical, leadership skills can help you enlist people to help you accomplish those goals. History offers many examples of effective leadership that had unethical goals. The best-known example is Adolf Hitler, but there are many other similar examples of unethical leadership. Currently, we can look at Donald J. Trump as an example of the same thing. Other populist leaders have also taken advantage of excellent leadership skills to recruit people to achieve unethical goals.
I think that any discussion of leadership has to address ethical concerns. The behavior of that youth minister/leader affected me deeply, and was part of the reason I abandoned religion in my life. It also led to a lifelong skepticism of leadership and convinced me that I needed to fully understand the goals of anything before enlisting in something someone was recruiting me for. Again and again in my own life, I have encountered unethical leadership. That's one of the reasons I have followed my own path, career-wise.
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