From leadership to citizenship

We so often hear cries for leadership in our community and there is so much written about the topic. People seem to believe that finding leadership is the silver bullet to solve all our problems, but I think this is actually just a “cop out” - a way of escaping from our own responsibility and leaving the real thinking, problem-solving and action to others.

What is equally irritating to me - especially since I run an organisation that develops South Australia’s potential community leaders - is the way that we idealise our leaders and turn them into superstars (and ourselves into sycophants).

This phenomenon, says Margot Cairnes, a leadership consultant and patron of the international humanitarian organisation, Leadership Without Borders, particularly relates to some of our well-known corporate CEOs. Some she says “… hire their own publicists, write books and actively promote their personal philosophies …[and]…they are increasingly seen as the makers and shapers of our public and personal agendas. They advise schools on what kids should learn and lawmakers on how to invest the public’s money. We look to them for thoughts on everything - from the future of e-commerce to hot places to vacation”.

When you really think about it, doesn’t this seem a bit bizarre (and perhaps a bit sad)?

As Cairnes says, what is fascinating is that we so readily buy the hype and PR spin. We are so keen to believe that there are right answers on every issue and that there are clear formulae for success in every pursuit - and we are so willing to believe that these answers and formulae are held by the rich and famous. On the one hand we do have a sense that what we are doing is just part of a fad and yet we are still ready to purchase the next “solution”.

Why do we so willingly equate fame with leadership?

Alain de Botton, in his book Status Anxiety, put the causes of this phenomenon down to the fact that we live in a meritocracy - which is so busy concentrating on identifying who is the best and pushing them up to the front that it shuts down any confidence in the rest of us.

We need to recognise that it is actually the rest of us who make the difference. For example, the author Peter Block says, “The people of South Africa, not Nelson Mandela, brought some freedom to that country, and neighbourhoods, cities, and civic and political associations, are engaged in the process of deciding what that country will become”.

Leaders he says, “… are more products of the culture and its people than creators of it … To keep focusing on the selection, training and definition of leaders is to keep us frozen in the world of monarch, autocrat and entitlement. It postpones the day when we will experience a world of community and accountability.”

So where does citizenship fit into this? It’s vitally important to consider this because, despite the fact leadership and citizenship are rarely linked together, I believe real leadership - good leadership, the leadership of the future - is actually inextricably linked with citizenship. For me, the key to better futures lies in a move from the pursuit of leadership to the pursuit of citizenship - so that we can all begin to take responsibility in our everyday lives for achieving the things we have come to expect our leaders to accomplish. In this way, leadership can be - as it should be - a force for positive change instead of the latest fad.

For me citizenship is global - and it’s about the rights and responsibilities that come with the job. Oxfam has a useful definition of global citizenship which includes acknowledgement of our responsibilities both to each other and to the planet, having an international perspective - an understanding of how the world works economically, politically, socially, culturally, technologically and environmentally, understanding the need to tackle injustice and inequality, and actively working to do so.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that we ignore our responsibilities as a citizen in our local communities, our state or our country - simply that we don’t limit our citizenship to the latter and don’t promote our local interests to the detriment of those in other communities, states or countries. This, in fact, is the essence of a global citizen.

To develop our citizenship Peter Block believes each of us would need to think of ourselves as a positive role model. We need to “… walk our talk, imagine, articulate and act for a better future, offer vision, hope and inspiration.” This is not to argue that we don’t need bosses, structures and rules to live by. However, as Block says, if everyone starts to take their civic responsibilities seriously, then our bosses will become facilitators and conveners. Their job will be to bring people together and engage them in planning and organising the work, making sure the right people are on the team and doing the right job and so on. In some of the best and most successful organisations, this is, of course, what happens already.

In a move to citizenship, we also have to learn to live with uncertainty - without closure on issues. Ambiguity makes us feel insecure and sends us running off to look for the comfort of the “right” answers. However, as Margot Cairnes says, those with wisdom and insight know there is no one way forward. We have to accept that our leaders don’t have all the answers and there are no magic formulas.

I want to explore the concept of citizenship a little more in the light of a recent event - the Asian tsunami.

One of the things that bothers me about our response to this terrible crisis is that so many of us are so quick to see charity as evidence of citizenship, the totality of social responsibility - or its only demand. This rang through clearly in the articles, editorials and letters in newspapers following the tsunami and the out-pouring of donations.

I don’t wish to demean our response to the tsunami: it was obviously fantastic. It may have been, as Tim Costello recently described it, “A profound moral moment in Australian life”. The concern is that the moment is over all too quickly. Rising for a moment from the comfort of our couches to donate money in response to the replacement of scenes from Backyard Blitz on our TV with scenes from the real life blitz created by the tsunami might give us a nice warm feeling and make us feel like we are part of a good community, but that’s not where citizenship ends. We like simple problems with simple answers and the tsunami falls in that category - it was explicit and contained, making it easy for us to respond generously. But real citizenship is harder.

Unlike the effect of the tsunami which was obvious and also a natural disaster - with no one to blame - the causes of things such as third-world poverty, climate change, environmental degradation, human rights abuses and so forth are hidden and complex. For example, how often do we hear extraordinary corporate power questioned for its role in creating these problems - which lie, in part, in the unfair trade arrangements, unfair exercise of political power by rich countries and powerful companies and the treatment of our environment as an expendable part of our economy - instead of the economy as a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment? Even when we do hear these things, how often do we think that there is anything we can do about them - or care enough to do so?

Overturning these problems will be the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. This is pretty overwhelming, so it is perhaps no wonder that so many of us would prefer to act as if this is just the way the world is. It’s so much easier to watch TV, read the newspaper, renovate our houses, make the focus of our world our own home and our own backyard and occasionally give generously to those in need when a natural disaster strikes. Perhaps the inclination to dig deeper is also curtailed by the fear that if we actually make the links then we might have to face the fact our own consumption is partly responsible for these problems.

Yet our consumption is also partly responsible for our own unhappiness.

Research in the late 1990s by Ronald Inglehart and others (World Values Survey) has shown very clearly that at high levels of income per head, social, environmental, cultural and political factors are actually most important for our subjective wellbeing, and yet, according to Clive Hamilton in his latest book, the Western world is in the grip of a consumption binge that is unique in human history and that rates of stress, depression and obesity are up as we struggle with the emptiness and disappointments of consumer life.

Wealth can be quite a burden. As George Monbiot notes, the more we possess, the more we need to defend it against the intrusions of other people by retreating to gated homes, hiring guards and installing security systems. Advertising obviously plays a key role in increasing our discomfort - even when we already possess all the goods and services we need, it successfully creates gaps in our lives. As Monbiot says, “We know that while there is a desperate need for [wealth] redistribution, further growth in the rich world is likely to just make everyone more miserable …” Yet,“… unless we are brave enough to confront this, the world will shop until it drops”.

A recent research study into wasteful consumption - spending money on goods or services that are never or rarely used - reinforces this point. The Australia Institute commissioned Roy Morgan research to look into this and they found overall the amount spent on wasteful consumption in 2004 was over $10.5 billion, or more than $1,200 per household. The largest amount of wasteful spending is on food. Overall, Aussies threw away $5.3 billion in 2004. This is more than 13 times the amount donated by Aussie households to overseas aid agencies in 2003. It doesn’t make us feel good to buy things we don’t need and in fact, there are huge benefits in not doing so, yet we don’t seem to know how to stop.

Being a good citizen is not an easy road - in fact, it’s very demanding and inconvenient. We need to understand the impact of the products we are involved in making or purchasing, and the decisions we make - or that are made on our behalf - beyond the obvious and the immediate, beyond our own backyard, and beyond our corporate bottom line. We need to commit to life-long learning - as human beings in pursuit of a better world for everyone and we have to learn to live with uncertainty and with standing out from the crowd - which can be very uncomfortable. As John Ralston Saul has noted, “In our world, the very idea of making a personal public ethical choice is treated as unprofessional”.

Injustice might be a powerful force but this doesn’t let us off the hook. On the contrary, it makes it even more pressing for us to be part of a force that imagines a different future, takes responsibility for seeing it come to fruition and does not stay silent while bad things continue to happen to others in our name, or as an indirect consequence of our action.

It’s down to us. Just as we don’t avoid playing tennis because there are great tennis players, or avoid cooking because there are great chefs who can do it better than us, we should not leave ethical behaviour, citizenship and leadership to those we believe are leaders or who are more famous, more intelligent, more powerful, or more articulate than us. They don’t have all the answers. We have power as individuals: each of us has choices about how we behave and each of us can change things every day. Doing so requires us all to act as leaders.