[April 19 2017] Leadership is about people; young, old, male, female, your competitors, your family, the boss’s boss, etc. It’s about us all … and that is yet so simple of a concept that it’s often overlooked by leaders. But, the greatest leaders have never forgotten that it is about, and will always be about, all people.
If you want to be successful in this world, then learn the fact that people and leadership go together inextricably. This is why respect should be the standard operating principle wherever we go and attitude is the notion that drives respect. Only in this way do we recognize the value of humans, all humans, not just some of them. For those who believe that some humans are more valuable than others threaten to us all.
“Human greatness does not lie in wealth or power, but in character and goodness. People are just people, and all people have faults and shortcomings, but all of us are born with a basic goodness.” Anne Frank, one of the most discussed victims of the Holocaust
Wars are fought over the idea that some people are more important than others. Adolf Hitler propagated the idea that the Aryan race was superior; we know how that turned out. Joseph Stalin said that those who believe in Communism were better than everyone else; tens of millions of deaths later, we know better. Thus a privileged or degraded status is a threat to the very idea of effective leadership. Sadly, I see it all the time.
For example, most recently in the U.S., we’ve seen the rise of the Black Lives Matter group that was hailed by U.S. President Obama as a great and deserving movement. Obama was wrong. BLM group leaders have made it clear that black lives matter more and that those who oppose such a thought are to be openly degraded as “racists.”
This idea that some people are better than others, and thus more (or less) deserving, is a formula for moral failure and seeds of this have been an unfortunate part of human history and continue to be. When confronted by it, and we will be confronted by it, those who do not stand against it are corrupt in the moral and ethical sense and failures in the leadership sense.
“You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make a dream a reality.” Walt Disney
Leadership must never be about acquiescence or appeasement but about strength, honor, respect, and the courage to do good things in the face of threats against us, malevolent political ideologies, and evil in its many forms. A lesson we should all heed.
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