One of the key tasks of leadership is to bring forth the best of what those who follow the leader are capable of being. By this, I don’t just mean the development of their professional competencies, though this is no doubt important, but more fundamentally, the formation of their character that will provide them with a firm foundation for leading themselves and others as they progress along their life journey. This quality in the leader can be characterised as ‘ennobling’, which is a term that in my opinion isn’t used enough in modern leadership discourse. Perhaps why this is the case is because in more recent times, we have become more sensitive to and cynical of the power that leaders have in relation to those who follow them. The term also sounds rather highfalutin, as if reference was being made to a monarchy or the nobility.
Regardless of this, I don’t think we should let it scare us off expecting our current leaders to embody this quality. The other day I came across a term that I have never heard before, being ‘leanability’, which was used to denote a leader who fosters the dependence of their followers in order to fortify the power inherent in their position. So rather than making their followers more self-reliant and competent people who will grow their own leadership capacity, these individuals tend to encourage their people to lean on them as they go about the process of performing their work, with the effect that they aren’t forced to grow beyond their current levels of capability or comfort. Whether such leaders do this consciously or subconsciously is up for debate, but no doubt, leading in such a way furthers the leader’s personal interest in entrenching themselves as the central node in the network from where they derive their authority.
I suspect that in a good many cases, it is the ego of the leader that is reflexively driving their practice of this leadership style. What makes this all the more insidious is that this way of leading to the untrained eye can take the guise of benevolent care or even love for those being led, when those who are meant to be cared for or loved are essentially just being smothered, or actively prevented from flourishing in the way they would desire to if they were allowed to spread their wings and taste how enriching it is to their sense of autonomy and confidence to move beyond the boundaries of their coddling. In one of its most malevolent forms, we see this dysfunctional leadership style being practiced by cult leaders who claim to be the point of salvation for their devotees against the evils of the world that lurk behind the walls of their commune. While they may profess to their followers that they desire to be a channel only for their followers’ enlightenment or connection to the divine, in reality, this is the last thing they want because were their followers to achieve that state/connection, they would become redundant as that bridge, and with that would come the loss of power to manipulate and exploit those who are so frequently abused in these sects.
Taking this back to an organisational context, whatever shortcomings or deficits in ability that followers may have are effectively enabled in such a system of operating, which is highly problematic because an entity cannot logically be expected to grow if those who work within it are being stifled as they go about the process of making their contributions to its functioning. Instead of enabling in this sense, leaders should be equipping and empowering their people to make the contributions that they genuinely desire to make, but for this to be discovered, the focus has to become those others rather than the leader and their ego.
When I was doing my research about individuals living their calling or life purpose and how that shaped their leadership behaviour, it was very noticeable how they took steps to ennoble the people who worked with them. While they may not have described it that way, it was clear in its effect that this is what they were doing. Being more evolved in their self and spiritual awareness than the leaders described above who are more egocentric, they practiced in their own way a form of subsidiarity that distributed their power in a decentralised manner to uplift and enhance those who they felt they had a stewardship responsibility to help grow into their fullness. Bringing us back full circle to our premise of ennobling those who we lead, those who understand the idea recognise as an orienting principle that the role of a leader is to create other leaders who can succeed them and expand the horizons of what is possible, not to entrench as followers those who would seek to actualise their innate potential for leadership.
Dr. L. Christian Duperouzel 