Real and genuine leadership is context-free. It is possible to talk about leadership anywhere. Leaders are and have been politicians, entrepreneurs, businessmen mystics, people of faith, generals. Every generation has at least one in every field.
Whenever we talk about leadership, we need to consider context as an incidental factor. Environment offers the scenario for leadership to be manifested, the runway from which ideas take off. Real leadership always has one important characteristic: its direction.
Real leadership is always directed towards a final point, constantly concentrated and targeted on it. To use the language of NLP, leadership has a “towards” metaprogramming structure.
Embodied in its natural figure, that of the leader, leadership always aims towards its intended goal. No leader has ever acted “away from”. Not even Moses, who did not escape from Egypt; rather, he proceeded towards the Promised Land.
This strong and essential element emerges with all its strength in every speech, in every authentic expression of leadership.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” is one of its most authentic expressions: “(And) there will be neither rest nor tranquillity in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights.” These words deeply reveal the constant striving towards the final goal, a goal that emerges with its own deep ecology: “Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred” and firm intent: “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”
This is authentic leadership, a real leadership that not even death was able to stop. As in a relay, leadership is a baton that gets passed onward, always ahead, towards the final goal, never allowing anything to stand in its way.
The basis of real leadership lies in its striving, in its constant convergence towards the goal. It can be found in any field, any environment that can serve as a support. Let’s take, for instance, John XXIII’s speech at the opening of the Second Vatican Council: “(Therefore) let us go on loving each other, loving each other this way; looking at each other in the meeting: we have to pick up what unifies us and leave aside the rest.” Once again we find this element, indeed a leitmotif which, as you can see, is cross-contextual. It reappears right after in the same speech: “And then all together we live [...] and let us continue to walk.”
This is further reaffirmed in the words of Henry Ford: “I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.” This powerfully emerging strength can also be found when Ford turns an “away from” logic into a striving towards the goal: “Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.”
For this reason, all real and genuine leadership has to aim towards a goal, a destination point on which to constantly and intensely converge. Whenever we follow projects, ideas or pathways that, rather than turning us to a certain point, move us away from their main objective, we are not in the presence of real and genuine leadership. We are actually riding a wave not knowing where it will lead us.
Let’s always aim towards a goal, towards its construction, each one of us bringing his/her own brick.
This is real leadership.
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