Harmony, Not Unity

In the contentious, partisan environment currently swamping our political culture, we hear plaintive calls for calm, compromise, and unity. Unfortunately, we hear at least as many angry calls for total victory by one side over the other.

The current situation here in Wisconsin offers an instructive look at the main outlines of the problem and may hint at solutions. After weeks of bitter dispute over the new governor’s budget and plans to strip bargaining rights from public union members, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published a thoughtful and refreshing column written by two prominent Wisconsin citizens on opposite sides of the dispute.

The column, signed by Kevin Conroy and Jim Connelly, a Democrat and a Republican, concluded that “We need to show individual leadership by calling for a decrease in partisan shouting and by getting directly involved in bipartisan business growth initiatives. One thing is very obvious: We can’t do it divided.”

My only quibble with that column is in the headline: “Wisconsin’s Prosperity Requires Unity.” That headline, of course, was probably written by a headline writer and not by the authors of the column itself. Nonetheless, the issue is worth attention. I would suggest that “unity” is a misleading and elusive goal. I would rather we aim for harmony.

Aiming for unity suggests that we should all agree on most if not all strategies and tactics, which of course also assumes that we agree on goals and objectives. To point a metaphor, people unified on political and economic issues is a lot like a choir singing in unison. Everyone sings the same notes at the same time. That assumes that sopranos can sing bass notes and basses can sing soprano notes.

Harmony, however, requires us to sing different notes in a coordinated effort, as long as we agree to sing the same song in the same key at the same tempo. The concept of harmony respects the integrity of each section – bass, tenor, alto, soprano – in the service of richer, more complex, and ultimately more satisfying music.

Aiming for unity asks us to choose one of the following alternatives: ask or force the other side to give up its integrity, surrender integrity for the sake of unity, or concoct a compromise which both sides can support. The more deeply each side is committed to its own principles, the less likely they are to settle for any of these alternatives.

Aiming for harmony starts with the simple act of listening to the other side and choosing to get to know people on the other side in all their complex humanity. Aiming for harmony asks us to quit demonizing the people on the other side and to quit distorting their arguments. It requires some measure of empathy, the driving force of all moral and ethical behavior. It requires us to look for verifiable information and to quit spouting unverifiable ideology. It is worth noting, by the way, that all ideology is unverifiable. That’s what makes it ideology rather than information, knowledge, or wisdom.

Collaborative leadership always starts with relationship building and agreement on basic principles like democratic process and empirical evidence, which can take a long time. It is, however, worth the effort, since it promotes harmony – coordinated action in pursuit of shared goals while maintaining the integrity of the participants. It helps us avoid the toxic and fruitless condition of “us versus them” and it helps us remember that our political adversaries are also our neighbors and fellow citizens.

What Is Leadership?

The English language has included the word “leader” for a very long time. But the word “leadership” didn’t make it into the dictionary until around the year 1800. The new word reflected the emergence of a new approach to human organization and governance: democracy. Since then all sorts of definitions of leadership have cropped up – some good, some less good, and some downright silly.

Back in the nineteen sixties, a scholar at the Ohio State University program in leadership studies set out to categorize all the supposedly scientific definitions of the term “leadership” that he could find. He found about 130 different kinds of definitions. That’s not 130 different definitions, it’s 130 different kinds of definitions. Some focused on the traits of leaders, some on the power of leaders, and some on the roles and responsibilities that leaders share. One social scientist had the audacity to claim that leadership is whatever social scientists say it is.

I like to define leadership as a reciprocal process of mobilizing resources and motivating individuals in pursuit of goals shared by leaders and followers alike. My emphasis is on reciprocity between leaders and followers and on shared goals. But I must say I am partial to some of the more interesting statements made by people who have lived with the realities of leadership in important places. Harry Truman’s summation is one of my favorites. Truman said that a leader is a person who gets other people to do what they don’t want to do and like it. But probably the most quoted description of leadership isn’t a definition at all, but a paradoxical statement by an ancient Oriental philosopher and politician named Lao Tsu. The best of all leaders, he said, is the one who helps people so that, eventually, they don’t need him. Then comes the one they love and admire. Then comes the one they fear. The worst is the one who lets people push him around. Where there is no trust, he said, people will act in bad faith. The best leader doesn’t say much, but what he says carries weight. When he is finished with his work, the people say “we did it ourselves.”

Lao’s ideal leader sounds a bit like Harry Truman’s.

The Power of Persistence

Some people are never satisfied unless they’re starting something new. Some people refuse to give up no matter how many times they seem to be down for the count. Some people just don’t take no for an answer. Such a man was Captain David P. Mapes, principal founder of the city in which I live – Ripon, Wisconsin.

After founding the city of Carbondale in Pennsylvania, David Mapes moved on to New York City, where he operated a commercial steamboat and took to calling himself Captain. Before long, his steamboat and worldly fortune sank in New York’s East River.

Undaunted, Mapes packed up and headed west. He didn’t stop until he reached the Valley of Ceresco, ninety miles north of Milwaukee, where a band of utopian socialists led by a visionary named Warren Chase had founded a community the called the Wisconsin Phalanx. Mapes struck a deal with the largest landowner in the area, former Acting Governor of the Michigan Territory John Scott Horner, to sell plots of land to settlers in a brand-new city. They named their city Ripon, after the English cathedral town which was Horner’s ancestral home. Mapes’s primary method of attracting settlers was to flag down passing wagons heading westward and talk up the virtues and advantages of living in Ripon. He was a crackerjack promoter who seldom took no for an answer.

For about two years, a rivalry flourished between Chase, the founder of the Ceresco Commune, and Mapes, the founder of Ripon over the future of their adjacent communities. As the commune faltered around 1850, however, the pioneer spirit of competition gave way to the pioneer spirit of cooperation, and Ceresco was eventually absorbed by Ripon. Mapes soon laid plans to attract responsible settlers by building a college on Ripon’s highest hill. Originally named Brockway College after a man who donated the largest founding gift ($250), the school eventually took its name from the city it lived in – Ripon College. Thus within four years of losing everything he owned, Captain David Mapes had founded a city and a college that have lasted for more than 160 years.

Goals and Goal Setting

If you’ve ever been to a management seminar, you probably heard a great deal about goals and goal-setting. It is certainly true that goal-setting is a crucial activity in any leadership role. If you don’t know where you want to go, you’re likely to wind up somewhere else. Goals serve several different functions for individuals and groups.

A goal is a desired future state. Human beings are, under healthy conditions, naturally goal-oriented, which means that every time a healthy person achieves a goal, he or she normally looks around for a new goal or a new challenge. The first and most general function of goals is to orient behavior in a particular direction. In a group, goals provide legitimacy and group spirit to the extent that all members agree upon and collaborate on the same goals. By orienting behavior in a particular direction, goals provide motivation, since people are more likely to work on targets they can see or imagine. For motivational purposes, leaders should try to make sure that the goals they set are neither too high nor too low – they should be challenging but within reach. Finally, goals serve as measuring rods for performance. They help us determine how well we’re doing or how much progress we’ve made in a given amount of time. In general, purposelessness is one of the hardest things for people to endure, and purpose in life is mostly a matter of setting and achieving goals.

Natural-born Leaders?

Are leaders made or born or both or neither? Are some people destined for leadership while others are destined for followership and still others doomed to watch from the sidelines? Our ideas about these questions have changed over the years.

The study of leadership behavior really got rolling around World War I when psychologists hired by the military set out to discover ways to measure leadership ability so potential military leaders could be singled out and developed. Unfortunately, try as they might, the psychologists could never prove much about the traits they thought leaders should possess. They figured leaders should be intelligent, but then they discovered that real geniuses have trouble in leadership roles because followers can’t understand them. They figured a strong sense of initiative would be useful, but then they discovered that too much initiative resulted in a tendency to do things alone and leave followers behind to fend for themselves.

To make a long and frustrating story short, the attempt to study leadership by studying individual character traits was eventually abandoned. The more recent and more practical approach is to study the functions or roles of leadership – such as motivating, communicating, making decisions, organizing tasks, and setting standards. Some people are good at some leadership roles but not others, so the best leader for any particular job depends on the situation, the task at hand, the way the group is organized, the kinds of followers involved, and the nature of the surrounding environment.

Talents are inborn, but skills have to be learned and developed. A successful senator may be a lousy corporation president and vice versa. A born leader in one situation may turn to be a born loser in another.

Democracy in Egypt

Yesterday a bottom-up movement for democracy in Egypt claimed victory over the regime of Hosni Mubarak, who came to power immediately after the assassination of Anwar Sadat and never relinquished the state of martial law under which he ruled for 30 years. Thus one of the world’s oldest civilizations is now poised to enter the circle of modern democracy. Let’s hope Egyptians can create a democratic government as effectively as they toppled Mubarak.

As sudden and surprising as this event seems, it is really part of a protracted revolution that has been sweeping the globe for more than two centuries. After two or three centuries of intellectual ferment, the American Revolution and the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century really got the democratic ball rolling. Since then dozens of nations have moved from aristocratic and dictatorial regimes to democratic forms of governance.

The connection between this large-scale historical trend and the practice of collaborative leadership is manifest. The word “leadership” itself did not exist in our language until the era of the democratic revolutions. It emerged because we needed a new word and a new language to describe a new thing in the world: a system of governance that required, as Thomas Jefferson put it, “the consent of the governed.”

Modern democracies can only exist in a modern world where most people are reasonably well educated, reasonably well informed, and willing to act freely up to the point where their freedom interferes with the freedom of others. All real leadership is inherently democratic, since leaders and followers work together for shared goals. If the goals of the so-called leader conflict with the goals of so-called followers, then the process is really about naked power and dictatorship, not leadership. If that process goes on too long, so-called followers will become revolutionaries and so-called leaders will become ex-dictators just like Hosni Mubarak.

We can consider collaborative leadership to be hyperdemocratic because it doubles down on the concept of shared goals and collaborative behavior. Collaborative leadership generally takes a long time to develop because it depends so heavily on established relationships, which must precede any attempt to achieve specific goals. But when those relationships take root, collaborative leadership can work its magic very quickly, as we witnessed in the case of Egypt and Mr. Mubarak. Egyptians formed bonds of empathy with each other as they struggled for years under bonds of oppression. But when the opportunity to overthrow the oppressor emerged, they were able to organize and claim victory in just a few weeks.

John Hancock's John Hancock

Leadership generally begins by attracting attention. This week we celebrate the birthday of a man whose flair for calling attention to himself is immortalized on our Declaration of Independence. John Hancock, who drew the first signature on the Declaration so big, he said, that the King of England could read it without his glasses, is our subject this week. Ever since then, people often refer to any signature on any document as their "John Hancock."

John Hancock’s father died when John was just a boy, and he was adopted by his uncle, the wealthiest merchant in Boston. After graduating from Harvard and taking over his uncle’s business, Hancock began using his influence for political purposes. In 1768, the crew of a Hancock ship locked the British customs official in the ship’s hold and unloaded the cargo without paying duties. From that point, the British considered Hancock a dangerous man and American patriots considered him a leader.

In the 1770s, he worked with Sam Adams for American independence, and on the night of Paul Revere’s famous ride the British were hoping to find and arrest John Hancock first and foremost. He served as president of the Continental Congress from 1775 to 1777 and as the first governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

The only job he really wanted but didn’t get was commander of the revolutionary armies. That job, of course, went to an even greater leader – George Washington.