I wrote a few months back about what I see as our crisis of leadership, and how — in both business and politics — we suffer “leaders” who want only the perks of position, and none of the awesome responsibilities.

I’ve seen two additional regular phenomena as I’ve studied the problem.

The first is that our leaders today have an overwhelming contempt for the people they lead.  Silly me — I’d have thought signing up to be a leader would mean you valued people, and wanted to work for them.  Instead I see a vast majority of leaders who want to dictate to people, “fix” people, and who have nothing but criticism for those they lead.  Instead of understanding that, no matter how smart they personally are, the individual abilities of leaders are always and everywhere eclipsed by the collective brainpower and capabilities of their groups, today’s leaders are smug, elitist asses who are generally taking us all over a cliff with their arrogance.  Good leaders don’t ask their people to do anything they aren’t willing to do themselves.  And their main job is to realize the awesome potential of the team, to set their people up to deliver at their highest level of ability, and to clear the roadblocks that stand in the way of maximum success.  Here’s a book on the matter that spells it out much, much better than I…

Related to this is the seeming inability of today’s leaders to admit failure and chart a new course.  In both government and industry, we’ve long since passed the point where anyone not irretrievably daft can see that what we’ve been doing isn’t working.  Yet our leaders expect us to stay the course, because if reality fails to fit their dogmatic theories of how things ought to work, why, it must be reality that’s wanting!  A real leader in this case has the courage to face his people, admit he’s failed, and set a new direction.  That critical facet of leadership seems almost nonexistent today.