Leader And Subordinate Quotes

Good governance never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.

When a leader takes too much ownership, there is no ownership left for the team or subordinate leaders to take. So the team loses initiative, they lose momentum, they won't make any decision, they just sit around and wait to be told what to do.

Belief in the mission ties in with the fourth Law of Combat: Decentralized Command (chapter 8). The leader must explain not just what to do, but why. It is the responsibility of the subordinate leader to reach out and ask if they do not understand. Only when leaders at all levels understand and believe in the mission can they pass that understanding and belief to their teams so that they can persevere through challenges, execute and win.

The best CEO is the one who combines the qualities of a leader and the ability to listen to subordinates.

A leader who allows their subordinates to suffer as proof of who is the boss likely quenches their thirst with salt water from a rusted canteen.

Submission means that a wife acknowledges her husband’s headship as spiritual leader and guide for the family. It has nothing whatsoever to do with her denying or suppressing her will, her spirit, her intellect, her gifts, or her personality. To submit means to recognize, affirm, and support her husband’s God-given responsibility of overall family leadership. Biblical submission of a wife to her husband is a submission of position, not personhood. It is the free and willing subordination of an equal to an equal for the sake of order, stability, and obedience to God’s design. As a man, a husband will fulfill his destiny and his manhood as he exercises his headship in prayerful and humble submission to Christ and gives himself in sacrificial love to his wife. As a woman, a wife will realize her womanhood as she submits to her husband in honor of the Lord, receiving his love and accepting his leadership. When a proper relationship of mutual submission is present and active, a wife will be released and empowered to become the woman God always intended her to be.

A leader must lead but also be ready to follow. Sometimes, another member of the team—perhaps a subordinate or direct report—might be in a better position to develop a plan, make a decision, or lead through a specific situation.

Accountability is an important tool that leaders must utilize. However, it should not be the primary tool. It must be balanced with other leadership tools, such as making sure people understand the why, empowering subordinates, and trusting they will do the right thing without direct oversight because they fully understand the importance of doing so.

True leaders, even when a subordinate is at fault, will take full responsibility for a mistake. An effective leader will then immediately take action to correct the situation.

Unfortunately, what she had here and now was a nervous and highly principled subordinate to reassure. It wasn’t a leader’s place to cast herself trembling on a junior’s shoulder and confess uncertainty. It wasn’t even a leader’s place to suggest that they might be in an indefensible position and should be grateful for any allies that they could get. It was a leader’s job to project a calm mastery of the situation, while also encouraging subordinates to develop decision-making skills. Assuming that they made the right decisions. A leader’s job was a crock of shit.

People disdain unskilled leaders, loathe unjust leaders, dread ruthless leaders, honor righteous leaders, and cherish enlightened leaders. Leaders disdain idle subordinates, loathe incompetent subordinates, dread disloyal subordinates, honor ethical subordinates, and cherish resourceful subordinates.

Younger managers learn quickly that, whatever the public protestations to the contrary, bosses generally want pliable and agreeable subordinates, especially during periods of crisis. Clique leaders want dependable, loyal allies. Thos who regularly raise objections to what a boss or a clique leader really desires run the risk of being considered problems themselves and of being labeled "outspoken," or "nonconstructive," or "doomsayers," "naysayers," or "crepehangers.

We are told again and again by patriarchal mass media, by sexist leaders, that feminism is dead, that it no longer has meaning. In actuality, females and males of all ages, everywhere, continue to grapple with the issue of gender equality, continue to seek roles for themselves that will liberate rather than restrict and confine; and they continue to turn towards feminism for answers. Visionary feminism offers us hope for the future. By emphasizing an ethics of mutuality and interdependency feminist thinking offers us a way to end domination while simultaneously changing the impact of inequality. In a universe where mutuality is the norm, there may be times when all is not equal, but the consequence of that inequality will not be subordination, colonization, and dehumanization. Feminism

Trust, honesty, and integrity are exceedingly important qualities because they so strongly affect followers. Most individuals need to trust others, especially their boss. Subordinates must perceive their leader as a consistently fair person if they’re to engage in the kind of innovative risk-taking that brings a company rewards.

A great leader must always keep in mind the golden rule: respect for their subordinates. Tribute to Noah Sealth.

Where decisions are decentralized, subordinate-unit-leader discipline must be of a higher level than when decisions are made solely at senior levels.

That’s a mark of superlative subordinates; they make their bosses better leaders.

A leader who focused on their subordinates to the exclusion of the mission did a disservice to both.

Ten Principles for Success Strive to be a leader of character, competence, and courage. Lead from the front. Say, “Follow me!” and then lead the way. Stay in top physical shape—physical stamina is the root of mental toughness. Develop your team. If you know your people, are fair in setting realistic goals and expectations, and lead by example, you will develop teamwork. Delegate responsibility to your subordinates and let them do their jobs. You can’t do a good job if you don’t have a chance to use your imagination or your creativity. Anticipate problems and prepare to overcome obstacles. Don’t wait until you get to the top of the ridge and then make up your mind. Remain humble. Don’t worry about who receives the credit. Never let power or authority go to your head. Take a moment of self-reflection. Look at yourself in the mirror every night and ask yourself if you did your best. True satisfaction comes from getting the job done. The key to a successful leader is to earn respect—not because of rank or position, but because you are a leader of character. Hang Tough!—Never, ever, give up.

...fascism is more plausibly linked to a set of "mobilizing passions" that shape fascist action than to a consistent and fully articulated philosophy. At the bottom is a passionate nationalism. Allied to it is a conspiratorial and Manichean view of history as a battle between the good and evil camps, between the pure and the corrupt, in which one's own community or nation has been the victim. In this Darwinian narrative, the chosen people have been weakened by political parties, social classes, unassimilable minorities, spoiled rentiers, and rationalist thinkers who lack the necessary sense of community. These "mobilizing passions," mostly taken for granted and not always overtly argued as intellectual propositions, form the emotional lava that set fascism's foundations: -a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions; -the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it; -the belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external; -dread of the group's decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences; -the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary; -the need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the groups' destiny; -the superiority of the leader's instincts over abstract and universal reason; -the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group's success; -the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group's prowess within a Darwinian struggle. ...Fascism was an affair of the gut more than the brain, and a study of the roots of fascism that treats only the thinkers and the writers misses the most powerful impulses of all.

In advanced societies it is not the race politicians or the "rights" leaders who create the new ideas and the new images of life and man. That role belongs to the artists and intellectuals of each generation. Let the race politicians, if they will, create political, economic or organizational forms of leadership; but it is the artists and the creative minds who will, and must, furnish the all important content. And in this role, they must not be subordinated to the whims and desires of politicians, race leaders and civil rights entrepreneurs whether they come from the Left, Right, or Center, or whether they are peaceful, reform, violent, non-violent or laissez-faire. Which means to say, in advanced societies the cultural front is a special one that requires special techniques not perceived, understood, or appreciated by political philistines.

It was a leader’s job to project a calm mastery of the situation, while also encouraging subordinates to develop decision-making skills. Assuming that they made the right decisions. A leader’s job was a crock of shit.

Extreme Ownership requires leaders to look at an organization’s problems through the objective lens of reality, without emotional attachments to agendas or plans. It mandates that a leader set ego aside, accept responsibility for failures, attack weaknesses, and consistently work to build a better and more effective team. Such a leader, however, does not take credit for his or her team’s successes but bestows that honor upon his subordinate leaders and team members.

A leader must realize his subordinate leaders will be killed or wounded. He must prepare and train other leaders to step up and take over. He, himself, must train his next-in-line to take command in event he is killed, wounded, or evacuated.

When a bad SEAL leader walked into a debrief and blamed everyone else, that attitude was picked up by subordinates and team members, who then followed suit. They all blamed everyone else, and inevitably the team was ineffective and unable to properly execute a plan.

General Hagenbeck then did something that should provide a salutary lesson for all future leaders in every profession: he changed his mind! He did this based on the reality-correcting context of the guy on the ground. Despite having stated his previous decision over a satellite radio heard by his superiors and subordinates all across the globe, General Hagenbeck pushed aside his ego and did the right thing. It would turn out to be the right decision for the mission, the right decision for his men, and the right decision for General Hagenbeck.

If a subordinate performs a task and the outcome is not what you expected, don’t attack their intelligence or their character. Politely explain the deficiencies and offer an idea for a solution. Subordinates quickly lose respect for any leader who is “all problem and no solution.

It’s natural for anyone in a leadership position to blame subordinate leaders and direct reports when something goes wrong. Our egos don’t like to take blame. But it’s on us as leaders to see where we failed to communicate effectively and help our troops clearly understand what their roles and responsibilities are and how their actions impact the bigger strategic picture. “Remember, it’s not about you,” I continued. “It’s not about the drilling superintendent. It’s about the mission and how best to accomplish it. With that attitude exemplified in you and your key leaders, your team will dominate.

Strong leaders must follow the truth wherever it leads. Nothing is more dangerous than a subordinate who will shade or alter the truth in order to curry favor or impress the boss. Leadership must be built on teamwork, mutual respect, and above all a shared sense of a common objective. Adm. J. Stavridis

Take responsibility for leading everyone in your world, subordinates and superiors alike. • If someone isn’t doing what you want or need them to do, look in the mirror first and determine what you can do to better enable this. • Don’t ask your leader what you should do, tell them what you are going to do.

A leader should surround himself with persons who fit his requirements and standards—and then turn them loose to do their jobs. When you identify a toxic subordinate leader within your ranks, remove them. If you cannot remove them, reassign them to a role where their toxicity can be minimized. Their duty at their level was just as important as my duty at my level. Leaders lead from the front; managers lead from the rear. When the battle is over, there must be plans (made in advance) for follow-on actions. A leader must have clearly defined objectives. He must ensure these objectives are clearly understood by his subordinate leaders.

We can decentralize decision-making and gain relative speed over the enemy, however, only if conditions are set to enable subordinate success. Where decisions are decentralized, subordinate-unit-leader discipline must be of a higher level than when decisions are made solely at senior levels. This is due to the need for aligning independent decisions in a concert of actions. The glue aligning these decisions is the commander’s clearly articulated intent, firmly setting the operation’s aim. The other necessary condition is the education and training of the subordinate leaders to ensure they have the skills necessary to take intelligent initiative.

Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders. —Law and Governance The Spacing Guild Manual

Decentralized Command was a necessity. In such situations, the leaders did not call me and ask me what they should do. Instead, they told me what they were going to do. I trusted them to make adjustments and adapt the plan to unforeseen circumstances while staying within the parameters of the guidance I had given them and our standard operating procedures. I trusted them to lead. My ego took no offense to my subordinate leaders on the frontlines calling the shots. In fact, I was proud to follow their lead and support them. With my leaders running their teams and handling the tactical decisions, it made my job much easier by enabling me to focus on the bigger picture.

The leader must explain not just what to do, but why. It is the responsibility of the subordinate leader to reach out and ask if they do not understand. Only when leaders at all levels understand and believe in the mission can they pass that understanding and belief to their teams so that they can persevere through challenges, execute and win.

The most important action that a leader must take to encourage the building of trust on a team is to demonstrate vulnerability first. This requires that a leader risk losing face in front of the team, so that subordinates will take the same risk themselves. What is more, team leaders must create an environment that does not punish vulnerability.

The historical inequality embedded in our founding—that “all men are created equal”—depends on the subordination of minorities and women. Whenever members of marginalized groups seem to approach equality, antidemocratic leaders can drum up supporters by insisting that they are attacking national principles and reducing white men to subservience.

For hierarchy, according to the anthropologist Christopher Boehm. Boehm studied tribal cultures early in his career, but had also studied chimpanzees with Jane Goodall. He recognized the extraordinary similarities in the ways that humans and chimpanzees display dominance and submission. In his book Hierarchy in the Forest, Boehm concluded that human beings are innately hierarchical, but that at some point during the last million years our ancestors underwent a “political transition” that allowed them to live as egalitarians by banding together to rein in, punish, or kill any would-be alpha males who tried to dominate the group. Alpha male chimps are not truly leaders of their groups. They perform some public services, such as mediating conflicts.28 But most of the time, they are better described as bullies who take what they want. Yet even among chimpanzees, it sometimes happens that subordinates gang up to take down alphas, occasionally going as far as to kill them.29 Alpha male chimps must therefore know their limits and have enough political skill to cultivate a few allies and stave off rebellion.

What distinguishes love-driven leaders from tyrants? "Great affection" coupled with the passion to see others "run at full speed towards perfection." Love-driven leadership is not urging others forward without concern for their aspirations, well-being, or personal needs. Nor is it being the nice-guy manager who overlooks underperformance that could damage a subordinate's long-term prospects. Instead, love-driven leaders hunger to see latent potential blossom and to help it happen. In more prosaic terms, when do children, students, athletes, or employees achieve their full potential? When they're parented, taught, coached, or managed by those who engender trust, provide support and encouragement, uncover potential, and set high standards.

More than any other major religion, Islam formalizes the subordination of women. Islamic religious law, as codified by the “official” schools of Sunni Islamic law (the Hanbali, Shafi’i, Hanafi, and Maliki schools), insists on male guardianship over women. In Islam, “any woman must have a ‘guardian,’ wali; her closest male relative if she is unmarried, her husband if she is not.”16 This remnant of seventh-century Arab culture—which has spread through Islam to the other parts of the world that are now Muslim majority—has never been revised in official schools of Islamic law.17 Imams and other Islamic religious leaders today continue to chastise women for disobeying the modesty doctrine. They cite passages in the Quran to assign girls a position in the family that requires them to be docile, to depend on male relatives for money, and to submit to their husband’s dominion over their bodies. Marriage is typically arranged, and there is often an exchange of money in the process. Under the religious rule of Islam, it is still common today that a woman’s rights are essentially sold to a man she may not even know.

He gave subordinates input into key decisions, implementing the ideas that made sense, while making it clear that he had the final authority. He wasn’t concerned with getting credit or even with being in charge; he simply assigned work to those who could perform it best. This meant delegating some of his most interesting, meaningful, and important tasks—work that other leaders would have kept for themselves.

A leader must be close with subordinates but not too close. The best leaders understand the motivations of their team members and know their people—their lives and their families. But a leader must never grow so close to subordinates that one member of the team becomes more important than another, or more important than the mission itself. Leaders must never get so close that the team forgets who is in charge.

When subordinates aren’t doing what they should, leaders that exercise Extreme Ownership cannot blame the subordinates. They must first look in the mirror at themselves. The leader bears full responsibility for explaining the strategic mission, developing the tactics, and securing the training and resources to enable the team to properly and successfully execute. If an individual on the team is not performing at the level required for the team to succeed, the leader must train and mentor that underperformer. But if the underperformer continually fails to meet standards, then a leader who exercises Extreme Ownership must be loyal to the team and the mission above any individual. If underperformers cannot improve, the leader must make the tough call to terminate them and hire others who can get the job done. It is all on the leader.

Authority to Abbott was hierarchical. Those at the top exercised power and those at the bottom deferred. As we have seen, Abbott was, to his great cost, largely uninterested in the views of those beneath him. His dismissal of subordinates was partly because as he made his way through Australia’s great institutions, he tended to look to leaders for support rather than peers. This was crucial to understanding the way Abbott learned about politics, and why he ended up being a failed prime minister.

Dr Sarabhai's leadership qualities were such that he could inspire even the junior-most person in an organization with a sense of purpose. In my opinion, there were some basic qualities that made him a great leader. Let me mention them one by one. Firstly, he was always ready to listen. In Indian institutions, what often hinders growth is the reluctance of those at the top to listen to their juniors and subordinates. There is a belief that all decisions and ideas must come in a top-to-down manner.

A leader of an organization can’t simply pay their managers to look out for those in their report. A leader can, however, offer their time and energy to those in their care, and in turn those managers would be more willing to give their time and energy to their subordinates. Then their subordinates would, in turn, be more inclined to give time and energy to their direct reports. And, at the end of the chain, the people with outward-facing jobs are more likely to treat the customer better. It’s just biology.

A low view of ourselves made us vulnerable. We were taught to despise ourselves, so we did not learn to listen to ourselves. Believing ourselves to be untrustworthy, we outsourced our spiritual lives to patriarchal authorities. They told us to "trust the Bible" instead of our intuition, and we took their word for what the Bible meant - even though there is no single objectively correct interpretation of what the Bible meant, and our religious leaders often had harmful theological agenda, such as the exclusion of queer people and the subordination of women.

In agricultural communities, male leadership in the hunt ceased to be of much importance. As the discipline of the hunting band decayed, the political institutions of the earliest village settlements perhaps approximated the anarchism which has remained ever since the ideal of peaceful peasantries all round the earth. Probably religious functionaries, mediators between helpless mankind and the uncertain fertility of the earth, provided an important form of social leadership. The strong hunter and man of prowess, his occupation gone or relegated to the margins of social life, lost the umambiguous primacy which had once been his; while the comparatively tight personal subordination to a leader necessary to the success of a hunting party could be relaxed in proportion as grain fields became the center around which life revolved. Among predominantly pastoral peoples, however, religious-political institutions took a quite different turn. To protect the flocks from animal predators required the same courage and social discipline which hunters had always needed. Among pastoralists, likewise, the principal economic activity- focused, as among the earliest hunters, on a parasitic relation to animals- continued to be the special preserve of menfolk. Hence a system of patrilineal families, united into kinship groups under the authority of a chieftain responsible for daily decisions as to where to seek pasture, best fitted the conditions of pastoral life. In addition, pastoralists were likely to accord importance to the practices and discipline of war. After all, violent seizure of someone else’s animals or pasture grounds was the easiest and speediest way to wealth and might be the only means of survival in a year of scant vegetation. Such warlikeness was entirely alien to communities tilling the soil. Archeological remains from early Neolithic villages suggest remarkably peaceful societies. As long as cultivable land was plentiful, and as long as the labor of a single household could not produce a significant surplus, there can have been little incentive to war. Traditions of violence and hunting-party organization presumably withered in such societies, to be revived only when pastoral conquest superimposed upon peaceable villagers the elements of warlike organization from which civilized political institutions without exception descend.

This experience of partness within a dynamic whole leads to a temporary suspension of individual responsibility-which is replaced by unconditional subordination to the 'controlling centre', the leader of the crowd. It further entails the temporary effacement of all self-assertive tendencies: the total surrender of the individual to the collectivity is manifested in altruistic, heroic, self-sacrificing acts-and at the same time in bestial cruelty towards the enemy or victim of the collective whole. This is a further example of the self-transcending emotions serving as catalysts or triggers for their opponents.

Except now I found myself asking whether those impulses—of violence, greed, corruption, nationalism, racism, and religious intolerance, the all-too-human desire to beat back our own uncertainty and mortality and sense of insignificance by subordinating others—were too strong for any democracy to permanently contain. For they seemed to lie in wait everywhere, ready to resurface whenever growth rates stalled or demographics changed or a charismatic leader chose to ride the wave of people’s fears and resentments. And as much as I might have wished otherwise, there was no Mahatma Gandhi around to tell me what I might do to hold such impulses back.

When confronted with the enormity of operational plans and the intricate microterrain within those plans, it becomes easy to get lost in the details, to become sidetracked or lose focus on the bigger effort. It is crucial, particularly for leaders at the top of the organization, to “pull themselves off the firing line,” step back, and maintain the strategic picture. This is essential to help correctly prioritize for the team. With this perspective, it becomes far easier to determine the highest priority effort and focus all energies toward its execution. Then senior leaders must help subordinate team leaders within their team prioritize their efforts.

Across the United States, there are more than seventeen hundred monuments to the Confederacy, monuments to a breakaway republic whose constitution and leaders were unequivocal in declaring the purpose of their new nation. "Its foundations are laid," "its corner-stone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth... With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye by nature, or by curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system.

Across the United States, there are more than seventeen hundred monuments to the Confederacy, monuments to a breakaway republic whose constitution and leaders were unequivocal in declaring the purpose of their new nation. “Its foundations are laid,” said Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, “its corner-stone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth….With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place.

In its endeavour, science is communism. In science men have learned consciously to subordinate themselves to a common purpose without losing the individuality of their achievements. Each one knows that his work depends on that of his predecessors and colleagues and that it can only reach its fruition through the work of his successors. In science men collaborate not because they are forced to by superior authority or because they blindly follow some chosen leader, but because they realize that only in this willing collaboration can each man find his goal. Not orders, but advice, determine action. Each man knows that only by advice, honestly and disinterestedly given, can his work succeed, because such advice expresses as near as may be the inexorable logic of the material world, stubborn fact.

The Levellers . . . only change and pervert the natural order of things: they load the edifice of society by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground. . . . Far am I from denying in theory, full as far is my heart from withholding in practice (if I were of power to give or to withhold), the real rights of men. In denying their false claims of right, I do not mean to injure those which are real, and are such as their pretended rights would totally destroy. . . . In this partnership all men have equal rights; but not to equal things. . . . Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their passions. Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can only be done by a power out of themselves, and not, in the exercise of its function, subject to that will and to those passions which it is its office to bridle and subdue. In this sense the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights. . . . Society is, indeed, a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure; but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to looked on with other reverence; because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. . . . You would not cure the evil by resolving that there should be no more monarchs, nor ministers of state, nor of the Gospel— no interpreters of law, no general officers, no public councils. You might change the names: the things in some shape must remain. A certain quantum of power must always exist in the community, in some hands, and under some appellation. Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names— to the causes of evil, which are permanent, not to the occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear. Otherwise you will be wise historically, a fool in practice. . . . The effects of the incapacity shown by the popular leaders in all the great members of the commonwealth are to be covered with the 'all-atoning name' of Liberty. . . . But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. Those who know what virtuous liberty is cannot bear to see it disgraced by incapable heads, on account of their having high-sounding words in their mouths. . . . To make a government requires no great prudence. Settle the seat of power, teach obedience, and the work is done. To give freedom is still more easy. It is not necessary to guide; it only requires to let go the rein. But to form a free government, that is to temper together these opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one consistent work, requires much thought, deep reflection, a sagacious, powerful, and combining mind.

All education begins with the exact opposite of what everyone praises so highly today as ‘academic freedom.’ It begins in obedience, subordination, discipline, servitude. And just as great leaders need followers, so too must the led have a leader. A certain reciprocal predisposition prevails in the hierarchy of the spirit: yes, a kind of pre-established harmony. The eternal hierarchy that all things naturally gravitate toward is just what the so-called culture now sitting on the throne of the present aims to overturn and destroy. This ‘culture’ wants to bring leaders down to the level of its compulsory servitude, or kill them off altogether; it waylays foreordained followers searching high and low for the one who is to lead them, while its intoxications deaden even their instinct to seek. If, though, wounded and battle-weary, the two sides destined for each other find a way to come together at last, the result is a deep, thrilling bliss that resounds like the strings of an eternal lyre.

The Saint-Domingue business was a great piece of folly on my part,’ Napoleon later admitted. ‘It was the greatest error that in all my government I ever committed. I ought to have treated with the black leaders, as I would have done the authorities in a province.’71 One lesson he did learn was that blacks could make excellent soldiers, and in November 1809 he set up a unit called the Black Pioneers, made up of men from Egypt and the Caribbean under a black battalion commander, Joseph ‘Hercules’ Domingue, to whom he gave a special award of 3,000 francs. By 1812 Napoleon didn’t believe any colonies could be held in perpetuity, predicting that they would all eventually ‘follow the example of the United States. You grow tired of waiting for orders from five thousand miles away; tired of obeying a government which seems foreign to you because it’s remote, and because of necessity it subordinates you to its own local interest, which it cannot sacrifice to yours.’72 The defeat in Saint-Domingue ended for ever Napoleon’s dreams of a French empire in the West.

Of course, many leaders do ask questions constantly—questions such as these: Why are you behind schedule? Who isn't keeping up? What's the problem with this project? Whose idea was that? Too often, we ask questions that disempower rather than empower our subordinates. These questions cast blame; they are not genuine requests for information. Other sorts of questions are often no more than thinly veiled attempts at manipulation: Don't you agree with me on that? Aren't you a team player? If you tend to ask these sorts of questions, this book is for you. So the point isn't that leaders just don't ask enough questions. Often, we don't ask the right questions. Or we don't ask questions in a way that will lead to honest and informative answers. Many of us don't know how to listen effectively to the answers to questions—and haven't established a climate in which asking questions is encouraged. And that's where this book comes in. The purpose of Leading with Questions is to help you become a stronger leader by learning how to ask the right questions effectively, how to listen effectively, and how to create a climate in which asking questions becomes as natural as breathing.

The fury which destroys an opponent’s character, would stop at nothing, if barriers were thrown down. That which is true of the leaders in politics, is true of subordinates. Political dishonesty in voters runs into general dishonesty, as the rotten speck taints the whole apple. A community whose politics are conducted by a perpetual breach of honesty on both sides, will be tainted by immorality throughout. Men will play the same game in their private affairs, which they have learned to play in public matters. The guile, the crafty vigilance, the dishonest advantage, the cunning sharpness;—the tricks and traps and sly evasions; the equivocal promises, and unequivocal neglect of them, which characterize political action, will equally characterize private action. The mind has no kitchen to do its dirty work in, while the parlor remains clean. Dishonesty is an atmosphere; if it comes into one apartment, it penetrates into every one. Whoever will lie in politics, will lie in traffic. Whoever will slander in politics, will slander in personal squabbles. A professor of religion who is a dishonest politician, is a dishonest Christian. His creed is a perpetual index of his hypocrisy.

In his book Democracy Incorporated, Wolin, who taught political philosophy at Berkeley and at Princeton, uses the phrase inverted totalitarianism to describe our system of power. Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, and the Constitution while manipulating internal levers to subvert and thwart democratic institutions. Political candidates are elected in popular votes by citizens, but candidates must raise staggering amounts of corporate funds to compete. They are beholden to armies of corporate lobbyists in Washington or state capitals who author the legislation and get the legislators to pass it. Corporate media control nearly everything we read, watch, or hear. It imposes a bland uniformity of opinion. It diverts us with trivia and celebrity gossip. In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi fascism or Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to politics. “Under inverted totalitarianism the reverse is true,” Wolin writes. “Economics dominates politics—and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.

As a key example, consider the role of women in the church. Some early Christian leaders saw women as intellectually and ethically inferior to men, and argued that women should be restricted to subordinate roles in society and in the Christian community. These views were reflected in texts like the First Epistle to Timothy. In one of its passages, this text, attributed to Saint Paul, says, “A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety” (2:11–15). But modern scholars as well as some ancient Christian leaders like Marcion have considered this letter a second-century forgery, ascribed to Saint Paul but actually written by someone else.[54] In opposition to 1 Timothy, during the second, third, and fourth centuries CE there were important Christian texts that saw women as equal to men, and even authorized women to occupy leadership roles, like the Gospel of Mary[55] or the Acts of Paul and Thecla. The latter text was written at about the same time as 1 Timothy, and for a time was extremely popular.[56] It narrates the adventures of Saint Paul and his female disciple Thecla, describing how Thecla not only performed numerous miracles but also baptized herself with her own hands and often

The outermost reach of fascist radicalization was the Nazi murder of the Jews. No mere prose can do justice to the Holocaust, but the most convincing accounts have two qualities. For one, they take into account not only Hitler’s obsessive hatred of Jews but also the thousands of subordinates whose participation in the increasingly harsh actions against them that made the mechanism function. Without them, Hitler’s murderous fantasy would have remained only a fantasy. The other quality is the recognition that the Holocaust developed step by step, from lesser acts to more heinous ones. Most scholars accept today that the Nazi assault upon the Jews developed incrementally. It grew neither entirely out of the disorderly local violence of a popular pogrom, nor entirely from the imposition from above of a murderous state policy. Both impulses ratcheted each other up in an ascending spiral, in a way appropriate to a “dual state.” Local eruptions of vigilantism by party militants were encouraged by the language of Nazi leaders and the climate of toleration for violence they established. The Nazi state, in turn, kept channeling the undisciplined initiatives of party militants into official policies applied in an orderly fashion. The first phase was segregation: marking the internal enemies, setting them apart from the nation, and suppressing their rights as citizens. . . .Segregation reached its climax with the marking of the Jewish population. First in occupied Poland in late 1939 and then in the Reich in August 1941, all Jews had to wear a yellow Star of David sewn to the chest of their external garments. By this time, the next phase—expulsion—had already begun. The policy of expulsion germinated in the mixture of challenge and opportunity presented by the annexation of Austria in March 1938. This increased the number of Jews in the Reich, and, at the same time, gave the Nazis more freedom to deal harshly with them. The SS officer Adolf Eichmann worked out in Vienna the system whereby wealthy Jews, terrorized by Nazi thugs, would pay well for exit permits, generating funds that could be applied to the expulsion of the others.

These include: 1.Do the Right Thing—the principle of integrity. We see in George Marshall the endless determination to tell the truth and never to curry favor by thought, word, or deed. Every one of General Marshall’s actions was grounded in the highest sense of integrity, honesty, and fair play. 2.Master the Situation—the principle of action. Here we see the classic “know your stuff and take appropriate action” principle of leadership coupled with a determination to drive events and not be driven by them. Marshall knew that given the enormous challenges of World War II followed by the turbulent postwar era, action would be the heart of his remit. And he was right. 3.Serve the Greater Good—the principle of selflessness. In George Marshall we see a leader who always asked himself, “What is the morally correct course of action that does the greatest good for the greatest number?” as opposed to the careerist leader who asks “What’s in it for me?” and shades recommendations in a way that creates self-benefit. 4.Speak Your Mind—the principle of candor. Always happiest when speaking simple truth to power, General and Secretary Marshall never sugarcoated the message to the global leaders he served so well. 5.Lay the Groundwork—the principle of preparation. As is often said at the nation’s service academies, know the six Ps: Prior Preparation Prevents Particularly Poor Performance. 6.Share Knowledge—the principle of learning and teaching. Like Larry Bird on a basketball court, George Marshall made everyone on his team look better by collaborating and sharing information. 7.Choose and Reward the Right People—the principle of fairness. Unbiased, color- and religion-blind, George Marshall simply picked the very best people. 8.Focus on the Big Picture—the principle of vision. Marshall always kept himself at the strategic level, content to delegate to subordinates when necessary. 9.Support the Troops—the principle of caring. Deeply involved in ensuring that the men and women under his command prospered, General and Secretary Marshall taught that if we are loyal down the chain of command, that loyalty will be repaid not only in kind but in operational outcomes as well.

Americans gear all their living to a constantly challenging world and are prepared to accept the challenge. Japanese reassurances are based rather on a way of life that is planned and charted beforehand and where the greatest threat comes from the unforeseen. The Japanese, more than any other sovereign nation, have been conditioned to a world where the smallest details of conduct are mapped and status is assigned. During two centuries where law and order were maintained in such a world with an iron hand, the Japanese learned to identify this meticulously plotted hierarchy with safety and security. So long as they stayed within known boundaries and so long as they fulfilled known obligations, they could trust their world. The Japanese point of view is that obeying the law is repayment upon their highest indebtedness. In spite of the fact that Japan is one of the great Buddhist nations in the world, her ethics at this point contrast sharply with the teachings of Gautama Buddha and of the holy books of Buddhism. The Japanese do not condemn self-gratification. They are not Puritans. They consider physical pleasures good and worthy of cultivation. Buddhist teachers and modern nationalistic leaders have written and spoken on this theme: human nature in Japan is naturally good and to be trusted. It does not need to flight and evil half of itself. It needs to cleanse the windows of its soul and act with appropriateness on every different occasion. The Japanese define the supreme task of life as fulfilling one's obligations. They fully accept the fact that repaying "on" means sacrificing one's personal desires and pleasures. The idea that the pursuit of happiness is a serious goal of life is to them an amazing and immoral doctrine. Happiness is a relaxation in which one indulges when one can. Zen seeks only the light man can find in himself. if you do this, if you do that, the adults say to the children, the word will laugh at you. The rules are particularistic and situational and a great many of them concern what we should call etiquette. They require subordinating one's own will to the ever-increasing duties to neighbors, to family and country. The child must restrain himself, he must recognize his indebtedness. Training is explicit for every art and skill. It is the habit that is taught, not just the rules. Adults do not consider that children will "pick up" the proper habits when the time to employ them comes around. Great things can only be achieved through self-restraint. Japanese people often keep their thoughts busy with trivial minutiae in order to stave off awareness of their real feelings. They are mechanical in the performance of a disciplined routine which is fundamentally meaningless to them. Japan's real strength which she can use in remaking herself into a peaceful nation lies in her ability to say to a course of action: "that failed" and then to throw her energies into other channels. The Japanese have an ethic of alternatives.

Spellbinders are characterized by pathological egotism. Such a person is forced by some internal causes to make an early choice between two possibilities: the first is forcing other people to think and experience things in a manner similar to his own; the second is a feeling of being lonely and different, a pathological misfit in social life. Sometimes the choice is either snake-charming or suicide. Triumphant repression of selfcritical or unpleasant concepts from the field of consciousness gradually gives rise to the phenomena of conversive thinking (twisted thinking), or paralogistics (twisted logic), paramoralisms (twisted morality), and the use of reversion blockades (Big Lies). They stream so profusely from the mind and mouth of the spellbinder that they flood the average person’s mind. Everything becomes subordinated to the spellbinder’s over-compensatory conviction that they are exceptional, sometimes even messianic. An ideology emerges from this conviction, true in part, whose value is supposedly superior. However, if we analyze the exact functions of such an ideology in the spellbinder’s personality, we perceive that it is nothing other than a means of self-charming, useful for repressing those tormenting selfcritical associations into the subconscious. The ideology’s instrumental role in influencing other people also serves the spellbinder’s needs. The spellbinder believes that he will always find converts to his ideology, and most often, they are right. However, they feel shock (or even paramoral indignation) when it turns out that their influence extends to only a limited minority, while most people’s attitude to their activities remains critical, pained and disturbed. The spellbinder is thus confronted with a choice: either withdraw back into his void or strengthen his position by improving the ef ectiveness of his activities. The spellbinder places on a high moral plane anyone who has succumbed to his influence and incorporated the experiential method he imposes. He showers such people with attention and property, if possible. Critics are met with “moral” outrage. It can even be proclaimed that the compliant minority is in fact the moral majority, since it professes the best ideology and honors a leader whose qualities are above average. Such activity is always necessarily characterized by the inability to foresee its final results, something obvious from the psychological point of view because its substratum contains pathological phenomena, and both spellbinding and self-charming make it impossible to perceive reality accurately enough to foresee results logically. However, spellbinders nurture great optimism and harbor visions of future triumphs similar to those they enjoyed over their own crippled souls. It is also possible for optimism to be a pathological symptom. In a healthy society, the activities of spellbinders meet with criticism effective enough to stifle them quickly. However, when they are preceded by conditions operating destructively upon common sense and social order; such as social injustice, cultural backwardness, or intellectually limited rulers sometimes manifesting pathological traits, spellbinders’ activities have led entire societies into large-scale human tragedy. Such an individual fishes an environment or society for people amenable to his influence, deepening their psychological weaknesses until they finally join together in a ponerogenic union. On the other hand, people who have maintained their healthy critical faculties intact, based upon their own common sense and moral criteria, attempt to counteract the spellbinders’ activities and their results. In the resulting polarization of social attitudes, each side justifies itself by means of moral categories. That is why such commonsense resistance is always accompanied by some feeling of helplessness and deficiency of criteria.

building them is as hierarchies in which those at the top issue commands to those lower down. While quick to build, they are seldom efficient to run: people only obey orders if commanders monitor what subordinates are doing. Gradually, many organizations learned that it was more effective to soften hierarchy, creating interdependent roles that had a clear sense of purpose, and giving people the autonomy and responsibility to perform them. The change from hierarchy run through power, to interdependence run through purpose, implies a corresponding change in leadership. Instead of being the commander-in-chief, the leader became the communicator-in-chief. Carrots and sticks evolved into narratives.

The trainers at Uberversity, where new employees underwent a three-day initiation, began schooling everyone on this scenario: a rival company is launching a carpooling service in four weeks. It’s impossible for Uber to beat them to market with a reliable carpool service of its own. What should the company do? The correct answer at Uberversity—and what Uber actually did when it learned about Lyft Line—was “Rig up a makeshift solution that we pretend is totally ready to go so we can beat the competitor to market.” (Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm where I work, invested in Lyft and I am on its board, so I was keenly aware of the dynamic between the companies—and I am decidedly biased.) Those, including the company’s legal team, who proposed taking the time to come up with a workable product, one far better than Uber Pool 1.0, were told “That’s not the Uber way.” The underlying message was clear: if the choice is integrity or winning, at Uber we do whatever we have to do to win. This competitiveness issue also came up when Uber began to challenge Didi Chuxing, the Chinese market leader in ride-sharing. To counter Uber, Didi employed very aggressive techniques including hacking Uber’s app to send it fake riders. The Chinese law on the tactic wasn’t entirely clear. The Chinese branch of Uber countered by hacking Didi right back. Uber then brought those techniques home to the United States by hacking Lyft with a program known as Hell, which inserted fake riders into Lyft’s system while simultaneously funneling Uber the information it needed to recruit Lyft drivers. Did Kalanick instruct his subordinates to employ these measures, which were at best anticompetitive and at worst arguably illegal? It’s difficult to say, but the point is that he didn’t have to—he had already programmed the culture that engendered those measures.

mobilizing passions": • a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions; • the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it; • the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external; • dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences; • the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary; • the need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s historical destiny; • the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason; • the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success; • the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.

The Twelve Behaviors 1.​Focus on customers and growth (serve customers well and aggressively pursue growth). 2.​Lead impactfully (think like a leader and serve as a role model). 3.​Get results (consistently meet any commitments that you make). 4.​Make people better (encourage excellence in peers, subordinates, and/or managers). 5.​Champion change (drive continuous improvement in our operations). 6.​Foster teamwork and diversity (define success in terms of the entire team). 7.​Adopt a global mind-set (view the business from all relevant perspectives, and see the world in terms of integrated value chains). 8.​Take risks intelligently (recognize that we must take greater but smarter risks to generate better returns). 9.​Be self-aware (recognize your behavior and how it affects those around you). 10.​Communicate effectively (provide information to others in a timely, concise, and thoughtful way). 11.​Think in an integrative fashion (make more holistic decisions beyond your own bailiwick by applying intuition, experience, and judgment to the available data). 12.​Develop technical or functional excellence (be capable and effective in your particular area of expertise).

Leaders create leaders. They arm their subordinates with intent. And then step out of the way.

Across the United States, there are more than seventeen hundred monuments to the Confederacy, monuments to a breakaway republic whose constitution and leaders were unequivocal in declaring the purpose of their new nation. “Its foundations are laid,” said Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, “its corner-stone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth….With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system.

Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders. —LAW AND GOVERNANCE THE SPACING GUILD MANUAL

Somehow, I was doubtful. It wasn’t Singh’s fault. He had done his part, following the playbook of liberal democracies across the post–Cold War world: upholding the constitutional order; attending to the quotidian, often technical work of boosting the GDP; and expanding the social safety net. Like me, he had come to believe that this was all any of us could expect from democracy, especially in big, multiethnic, multireligious societies like India and the United States. Not revolutionary leaps or major cultural overhauls; not a fix for every social pathology or lasting answers for those in search of purpose and meaning in their lives. Just the observance of rules that allowed us to sort out or at least tolerate our differences, and government policies that raised living standards and improved education enough to temper humanity’s baser impulses. Except now I found myself asking whether those impulses—of violence, greed, corruption, nationalism, racism, and religious intolerance, the all-too-human desire to beat back our own uncertainty and mortality and sense of insignificance by subordinating others—were too strong for any democracy to permanently contain. For they seemed to lie in wait everywhere, ready to resurface whenever growth rates stalled or demographics changed or a charismatic leader chose to ride the wave of people’s fears and resentments. And as much as I might have wished otherwise, there was no Mahatma Gandhi around to tell me what I might do to hold such impulses back.

Janet, a chemist and a team leader at a pharmaceutical company, received glowing comments from her peers and superiors during her 360-degree review but was surprised by the negative feedback she got from her direct reports. She immediately concluded that the problem was theirs: “I have high standards, and some of them can’t handle that,” she remembers thinking. “They aren’t used to someone holding their feet to the fire.” In this way, she changed the subject from her management style to her subordinates’ competence, preventing her from learning something important about the impact she had on others. Eventually the penny dropped, Janet says. “I came to see that whether it was their performance problem or my leadership problem, those were not mutually exclusive issues, and both were worth solving.” She was able to disentangle the issues and talk to her team about both. Wisely, she began the conversation with their feedback to her, asking, “What am I doing that’s making things tough? What would improve the situation?

In What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, author Marshall Goldsmith notes, as he reflects on coaching leaders throughout his career, that “what’s wrong is that they have no idea how their behavior is coming across to the people who matter—their bosses, colleagues, subordinates, customers and clients . . .

Exemplary followers present a consistent picture to both leaders and coworkers of being independent, innovative, and willing to stand up to superiors. They apply their talents for the benefit of the organization even when confronted with bureaucratic stumbling blocks or passive or pragmatist coworkers. Effective leaders appreciate the value of exemplary followers. When one of the authors was serving in a follower role in a staff position, he was introduced by his leader to a conference as “my favorite subordinate because he’s a loyal ‘No-Man’.” Exemplary followers—high on both critical dimensions of followership—are essential to organizational success.

Exemplary followers present a consistent picture to both leaders and coworkers of being independent, innovative, and willing to stand up to superiors. They apply their talents for the benefit of the organization even when confronted with bureaucratic stumbling blocks or passive or pragmatist coworkers. Effective leaders appreciate the value of exemplary followers. When one of the authors was serving in a follower role in a staff position, he was introduced by his leader to a conference as “my favorite subordinate because he’s a loyal ‘No-Man’.” Exemplary followers—high on both critical dimensions of followership—are essential to organizational success. Leaders, therefore, would be well advised to select people who have these characteristics and, perhaps even more important, create the conditions that encourage these behaviors.

The authorized histories of revolutions, as Milovan Djilas points out, “describe the revolution as if it were the fruit of the previously planned action of its leaders.” No cynicism or mendacity need be involved. It is perfectly natural for leaders and generals to exaggerate their influence on events; that is the way the world looks from where they sit, and it is rarely in the interest of their subordinates to contradict their picture.

A leader does not always have to be the center of attention but they must be present in the thick of the action. Subordinates will always notice a leader’s absence, and it will have severe negative ramifications throughout the force. Not sharing in the hardships is one of the quickest ways to lose the respect and trust of your subordinates.

There’s actually some very persuasive leadership research that supports the idea that asking for support is critical, and that vulnerability and courage are contagious. In a 2011 Harvard Business Review article, Peter Fuda and Richard Badham use a series of metaphors to explore how leaders spark and sustain change. One of the metaphors is the snowball. The snowball starts rolling when a leader is willing to be vulnerable with his or her subordinates. Their research shows that this act of vulnerability is predictably perceived as courageous by team members and inspires others to follow suit.

This dumbing down of the people for ideological reasons is, of course, not new. It is an age-old authoritarian tactic. It happened in China during the Cultural Revolution. It happened in the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, Renaissance Italy, twentieth-century Russia, and Nazi Germany—all of them societies whose leaders turned their backs on science, making it subordinate to an authoritarian ideology, and the societies collapsed.

In all primate groups, members direct attention up the hierarchy rather than down. We humans are a lot like baboons and chimpanzees, who check every twenty or thirty seconds to see what the alpha male in their troop is doing. This lopsided attention is adaptive because more powerful creatures dispense rewards and punishments. Human bosses often don’t realize how closely underlings monitor their every word and deed—and are oblivious of the gyrations that subordinates go through to protect themselves from and please those at the top of the pecking order.

Such leaders yielded to subordinates’ technical and cultural expertise by deferring to their judgment and delegating authority. Like the Brazilian leader who told his Singapore team, “Let’s invert the jobs here, right? You don’t work for me. I work for you.

it’s a poor leader who criticizes his subordinates in public.

The distribution of income in a society is called the 'Gini coefficient,' named after an Italian sociologist named Corrado Gini, who published a paper on the topic in 1912. A society where one person earns all the money and everyone else earns none, effectively has a Gini coefficient of 1.0; and a society where everyone earns the same amount has a coefficient of zero. Neither is desirable. Moderate differences in income motivate people because they have a reasonable chance of bettering their circumstances, and extreme differences discourage people because their efforts look futile. A study of 21 small-scale societies around the world found that hunter-gatherers like the Hadza—who presumably represent the most efficient possible system for survival in a hostile environment—have Gini coefficients as low as .25. In other words, they are far closer to absolute income equality than to absolute monopoly. Because oppression from one's own leaders is as common a threat as oppression from one's enemies, Gini coefficients are one reliable measure of freedom. Hunter-gatherer societies are not democracies—and many hold women in subordinate family roles—but the relationship between those families and their leaders is almost impervious to exploitation. In that sense, they are freer than virtually all modern societies. According to multiple sources, including the Congressional Budget Office, the United States has one of the highest Gini coefficients of the developed world, .42, which puts it at roughly the level of Ancient Rome. (Before taxes, the American Gini coefficient is even higher—almost .6—which is on par with deeply corrupt countries like Haiti, Namibia, and Botswana.) Moreover, the wealth gap between America's richest and poorest families has doubled since 1989. Globally, the situation is even more extreme: several dozen extremely rich people control as much wealth as the bottom half of humanity—3.8 billion people.

But there must be balance. In some organizations, both in the military and in the civilian sector, there are leaders who put too many standard operating procedures in place. They create such strict processes that they actually inhibit their subordinate leaders’ willingness—and ability—to think. This may adversely impact the team’s performance and become a detriment to the mission, preventing effective leadership at every level of the organization.

Not a single nation,” he went on, as though reading it line by line, still gazing menacingly at Stavrogin, “not a single nation has ever been founded on principles of science or reason. There has never been an example of it, except for a brief moment, through folly. Socialism is from its very nature bound to be atheism, seeing that it has from the very first proclaimed that it is an atheistic organisation of society, and that it intends to establish itself exclusively on the elements of science and reason. Science and reason have, from the beginning of time, played a secondary and subordinate part in the life of nations; so it will be till the end of time. Nations are built up and moved by another force which sways and dominates them, the origin of which is unknown and inexplicable: that force is the force of an insatiable desire to go on to the end, though at the same time it denies that end. It is the force of the persistent assertion of one’s own existence, and a denial of death. It’s the spirit of life, as the Scriptures call it, ‘the river of living water,’ the drying up of which is threatened in the Apocalypse. It’s the æsthetic principle, as the philosophers call it, the ethical principle with which they identify it, ‘the seeking for God,’ as I call it more simply. The object of every national movement, in every people and at every period of its existence is only the seeking for its god, who must be its own god, and the faith in Him as the only true one. God is the synthetic personality of the whole people, taken from its beginning to its end. It has never happened that all, or even many, peoples have had one common god, but each has always had its own. It’s a sign of the decay of nations when they begin to have gods in common. When gods begin to be common to several nations the gods are dying and the faith in them, together with the nations themselves. The stronger a people the more individual their God. There never has been a nation without a religion, that is, without an idea of good and evil. Every people has its own conception of good and evil, and its own good and evil. When the same conceptions of good and evil become prevalent in several nations, then these nations are dying, and then the very distinction between good and evil is beginning to disappear. Reason has never had the power to define good and evil, or even to distinguish between good and evil, even approximately; on the contrary, it has always mixed them up in a disgraceful and pitiful way; science has even given the solution by the fist. This is particularly characteristic of the half-truths of science, the most terrible scourge of humanity, unknown till this century, and worse than plague, famine, or war. A half-truth is a despot … such as has never been in the world before. A despot that has its priests and its slaves, a despot to whom all do homage with love and superstition hitherto inconceivable, before which science itself trembles and cringes in a shameful way..." Stavrogin observed cautiously... "The very fact that you reduce God to a simple attribute of nationality …” “I reduce God to the attribute of nationality?” cried Shatov. “On the contrary, I raise the people to God. And has it ever been otherwise? The people is the body of God. Every people is only a people so long as it has its own god and excludes all other gods on earth irreconcilably; so long as it believes that by its god it will conquer and drive out of the world all other gods. Such, from the beginning of time, has been the belief of all great nations, all, anyway, who have been specially remarkable, all who have been leaders of humanity. There is no going against facts. The Jews lived only to await the coming of the true God and left the world the true God. The Greeks deified nature and bequeathed the world their religion, that is, philosophy and art. Rome deified the people in the State, and bequeathed the idea of the State to the nations.

In any chain of command, the leadership must always present a united front to the troops. A public display of discontent or disagreement with the chain of command undermines the authority of leaders at all levels. This is catastrophic to the performance of any organization. As a leader, if you don’t understand why decisions are being made, requests denied, or support allocated elsewhere, you must ask those questions up the chain. Then, once understood, you can pass that understanding down to your team. Leaders in any chain of command will not always agree. But at the end of the day, once the debate on a particular course of action is over and the boss has made a decision—even if that decision is one you argued against—you must execute the plan as if it were your own. When leading up the chain of command, use caution and respect. But remember, if your leader is not giving the support you need, don’t blame him or her. Instead, reexamine what you can do to better clarify, educate, influence, or convince that person to give you what you need in order to win. The major factors to be aware of when leading up and down the chain of command are these: • Take responsibility for leading everyone in your world, subordinates and superiors alike. • If someone isn’t doing what you want or need them to do, look in the mirror first and determine what you can do to better enable this. • Don’t ask your leader what you should do, tell them what you are going to do.

In any chain of command, the leadership must always present a united front to the troops. A public display of discontent or disagreement with the chain of command undermines the authority of leaders at all levels. This is catastrophic to the performance of any organization. As a leader, if you don’t understand why decisions are being made, requests denied, or support allocated elsewhere, you must ask those questions up the chain. Then, once understood, you can pass that understanding down to your team. Leaders in any chain of command will not always agree. But at the end of the day, once the debate on a particular course of action is over and the boss has made a decision—even if that decision is one you argued against—you must execute the plan as if it were your own. When leading up the chain of command, use caution and respect. But remember, if your leader is not giving the support you need, don’t blame him or her. Instead, reexamine what you can do to better clarify, educate, influence, or convince that person to give you what you need in order to win. The major factors to be aware of when leading up and down the chain of command are these: • Take responsibility for leading everyone in your world, subordinates and superiors alike. • If someone isn’t doing what you want or need them to do, look in the mirror first and determine what you can do to better enable this. • Don’t ask your leader what you should do, tell them what you are going to do. APPLICATION TO BUSINESS “Corporate doesn’t understand what’s going on out here,” said the field manager. “Whatever experience those guys had in the field from years ago, they have long forgotten. They just don’t get what we are dealing with, and their questions and second-guessing prevents me and my team from getting the job done.” The infamous they. I was on a visit to a client company’s field leadership team, the frontline troops that executed the company’s mission. This was where the rubber met the road: all the corporate capital initiatives, strategic planning sessions, and allocated resources were geared to support this team here on the ground. How the frontline troops executed the mission would ultimately mean success or failure for the entire company. The field manager’s team was geographically separated from their corporate headquarters located hundreds of miles away. He was clearly frustrated. The field manager had a job to do, and he was angry at the questions and scrutiny from afar. For every task his team undertook he was required to submit substantial paperwork. In his mind, it made for a lot more work than necessary and detracted from his team’s focus and ability to execute. I listened and allowed him to vent for several minutes. “I’ve been in your shoes,” I said. “I used to get frustrated as hell at my chain of command when we were in Iraq. They

The lectures return again and again to two main points. One is a radical dechronologized conception of history; the other is an insistence on the subordination of the individual to the whole. Emerson begins by deprecating the “battles and leaders” view of history, the “barren and wearisome chronicle” in which “the unity of the story is secured by concentrating attention to the man or woman on the throne.” Emerson now insists that human history can be understood only as the expression of that human nature that is common to all men and women. There is one mind, in which we all share, and “of this one mind, History is the record.

Helmuth von Moltke, whose armies had won the wars that unified Germany, concluded that, “Strategy is a system of ad hoc expedients.”102 Armed with this view of strategy, a few military leaders began to explore alternatives that eventually led to the Blitzkrieg—ways of operating that encouraged initiative on the part of subordinates to flow around lethal threats and search for advantage elsewhere.

A leader must be able to look a subordinate or superior square in the eye and tell him what the problem is and what needs to be done to fix it.

I well knew that Patton delighted to startle his hearers with fantastic statements; many men who believed they knew him well never penetrated past the shell of showmanship in which he constantly and carefully clothed himself. But he was essentially a shrewd battle leader who invariably gained the devotion of his subordinates. From early life his one ambition was to be a successful battlefield commander. Because of this he was an inveterate reader of military history and his heroes were the great captains of past ages.

When a leader fails to discipline his family or subordinates, God disciplines the leader in return.

his or her own senior leaders. As we wrote in Extreme Ownership: “One of the most important jobs of any leader is to support your own boss.” When the debate on a particular course of action ends and the boss makes a decision—even if you disagree with the decision—“you must execute the plan as if it were your own.” Only if the orders coming down from senior leadership are illegal, immoral, unethical, or significantly risky to lives, limbs, or the strategic success of the organization should a subordinate leader hold fast against directives from superiors. Those cases should be rare. Chapter

Supervisors who constantly micromanage, who second-guess every subordinate decision, who gleefully await any and all opportunities to criticize and bully, are a toxic presence in any environment.

Bragg was a good strategist, a competent planner, a solid logistician, and demonstrably capable of turning civilians into first-rate soldiers through training and discipline. He was also a failure as a leader, incapable of inspiring loyalty among his subordinates or forging disparate personalities into a functioning combat command. He could be remarkably inflexible on a field of battle.

During the nineteenth century, corps commander was the highest level of command to still require skills of an operator for success. A corps commander was still able to see a problem develop and to dispatch soldiers or artillery to solve it on the spot. But at the army level of command the dynamics were for the first time different. The army commander was much more distant from the battle and consequently had no ability to act immediately or to control soldiers he could not see. The distance of the army commander from the action slowed responses to orders and created friction such that the commander was obliged to make decisions before the enemy’s actions were observed. Civil War army commanders were now suddenly required to exhibit a different set of skills. For the first time, they had to think in time and to command the formation by inculcating their intent in the minds of subordinates with whom they could not communicate directly. Very few of the generals were able to make the transition from direct to indirect leadership, particularly in the heat of combat. Most were very talented men who simply were never given the opportunity to learn to lead indirectly. Some, like Generals Meade and Burnside, found themselves forced to make the transition in the midst of battle. General Lee succeeded in part because, as military advisor to Jefferson Davis, he had been able to watch the war firsthand and to form his leadership style before he took command. General Grant was particularly fortunate to have the luck of learning his craft in the Western theater, where the press and the politicians were more distant, and their absence allowed him more time to learn from his mistakes. From the battle of Shiloh to that of Vicksburg, Grant as largely left alone to learn the art of indirect leadership through trial and error and periodic failure without getting fired for his mistakes. The implications of this phase of military history for the future development of close-combat leaders are at once simple, and self-evident. As the battlefield of the future expands and the battle becomes more chaotic and complex, the line that divides the indirect leader from the direct leader will continue to shift lower down the levels of command. The circumstances of future wars will demand that much younger and less experienced officers be able to practice indirect command. The space that held two Civil War armies of 200,000 men in 1863 would have been controlled by fewer than 1,000 in Desert Storm, and it may well be only a company or platoon position occupied by fewer than 100 soldiers in a decade or two. This means younger commanders will have to command soldiers they cannot see and make decisions without the senior leader’s hand directly on their shoulders. Distance between all the elements that provide support, such as fires and logistics, will demand that young commanders develop the skill to anticipate and think in time. Tomorrow’s tacticians will have to think at the operational level of war. They will have to make the transition from “doers” to thinkers, from commanders who react to what they see to leaders who anticipate what they will see. To do all this to the exacting standard imposed by future wars, the new leaders must learn the art of commanding by intent very early in their stewardship. The concept of “intent” forms the very essence of decentralized command.

Great leaders have an air of confidence,” he replied. “Subordinates need to look up to somebody who is still standing strong, like an oak, regardless of events around them.

fundamentally, people do not prefer independent thought and the accompanying responsibility, but rather orders, subordination, and the accompanying exemption from responsibility. In a popular democracy, the masses who elect unfit rulers are to blame for bad government, but that is not the case in a monarchy. Rather than reflecting upon their own mistakes, the people are free to enjoy speaking ill of leaders who are even more irresponsible than they.

But she would ask and ask and ask to get to the bottom of something. You would say something to her, she would say it back to you, and that way everyone was 100% clear on what we were talking about. Once she got the information and knew what you were doing, you had to be consistent. She would say, ‘You told me X; why are you doing Y? I’m confused.’” Although she was demanding, she didn’t demand that people do things her way. Her subordinates were committed to the team’s goals because they were empowered, not ordered, to achieve them.

can leaders and managers learn to be humble consultants to their subordinates?

He talked about the trappings of the White House, saying something to the effect of “This is luxury. And I know luxury.” I remember glancing again at the one poor statue I could see over his shoulder with the mantelpiece on its head and thinking that made sense. He went into another explanation—I’d seen many of them on television—about how he hadn’t made fun of a disabled reporter. He said he hadn’t mistreated a long list of women, reviewing each case in detail, as he had in our earlier conversation. There was no way he groped that lady sitting next to him on the airplane, he insisted. And the idea that he grabbed a porn star and offered her money to come to his room was preposterous. His method of speaking was like an oral jigsaw puzzle contest, with a shot clock. He would, in rapid-fire sequence, pick up a piece, put it down, pick up an unrelated piece, put it down, return to the original piece, on and on. But it was always him picking up the pieces and putting them down. None of this behavior, incidentally, was the way a leader could or should build rapport with a subordinate.

The Power of Words The key to your team becoming more proactive rests in the language subordinates and superiors use. Here is a short list of “disempowered phrases” that passive followers use: Request permission to . . . I would like to . . . What should I do about . . . Do you think we should . . . Could we . . . Here is a short list of “empowered phrases” that active doers use: I intend to . . . I plan on . . . I will . . . We will . . .

Pursuing the goal, the leader never looks back or calculates escape strategies if plans turn sour. Nor does a true leader cast blame for failure on subordinates.

The purpose of the ACM is creating leaders who understand and practice adaptability, while encouraging Army senior leaders to nurture this trait in their subordinates. A student that emerges from any leader-centric course that employs the ACM is adaptive and can demonstrate the ability to: •Rapidly distinguish between information that is useful in making decisions and that which is not pertinent; • Avoid the natural temptation to delay their decisions until more information makes the situation clearer, at the risk of losing the initiative; • Avoid the pitfall of thinking that once the mission is underway, more information will clarify the tactical picture; and • Feel the battlefield tempo, discern patterns among the chaos, and make critically important decisions in seconds.

Leaders have to learn the level of comfort individuals and cultures have with direct versus indirect orders and requests and adjust accordingly. There's further variance in how this communication practice relates to a culture's value of power distance. The same culture that values indirect communication may also be a place where senior leaders give explicit and direct commands to subordinates if there's a high level of power distance. But a subordinate would be expected to use extremely indirect communication to make a request of a superior. Peers are expected to use indirect communication with one another lest it seem one is taking on an authoritative role over the other. You need to learn where you're perceived in the hierarchical structure to gage the appropriate level of directness to employ. Suzanne,

Are any of your employees on the brink of going AWOL because they’re overworked and underappreciated? When is it right for the leader to overturn protocol in the effort to rescue a single stressed-out subordinate? What messages do you need to keep repeating in your business to make sure your management team doesn’t take care of themselves first, to the neglect of their teams?

Mormon-black relations. This work’s central thesis was that two factors drove Brigham Young to implement the Church’s black ban by 1852. Most important was a developing sense of Mormon “whiteness” wherein Latter-day Saints identified themselves as a divinely “chosen” people, while conversely labeling blacks a biblically cursed race, given their skin color and alleged descent from the accursed biblical counter-figures of Cain, Ham, and Canaan. Further motivating Young was his embrace of black slavery, which he considered divinely sanctioned. Thus as Utah Territorial Governor he called for its legalization—this occurring in February 1852, shortly following Mormon migration to the Great Basin. Utah became the only western territory to approve slavery. Young in calling for this statute claimed a divinely sanctioned link between black servitude and black priesthood denial—the latter practice made public for the first time in his 1852 statement calling for black slavery. The dissertation also drew a number of conclusions relative to the perpetuation of the black priesthood and temple ban. The ban was firmly established by the time of Brigham Young’s death in 1877, given that the Mormon leader repeatedly affirmed its divine legitimacy over the previous quarter century. Further assuring perpetuation of the ban was official LDS embrace of the historical myth that Joseph Smith established the restriction. Such mythmaking received scriptural justification through canonization of the Pearl of Great Price in 1880, a work consisting of the Books of Moses and Abraham. All such developments made the subordinate status of Mormon blacks virtually “irreversible by 1880,” enabling the ban to continue unchanged into the mid-1970s.13

Control Find the genetic code for control and rewrite it. Act your way to new thinking. Short, early conversations make efficient work. Use “I intend to . . .” to turn passive followers into active leaders. Resist the urge to provide solutions. Eliminate top-down monitoring systems. Think out loud (both superiors and subordinates). Embrace the inspectors. Competence Take deliberate action. We learn (everywhere, all the time). Don’t brief, certify. Continually and consistently repeat the message. Specify goals, not methods. Clarity Achieve excellence, don’t just avoid errors. Build trust and take care of your people. Use your legacy for inspiration. Use guiding principles for decision criteria. Use immediate recognition to reinforce desired behaviors. Begin with the end in mind. Encourage a questioning attitude over blind obedience.

I should have gone back to my book on Alpha Males and their instincts: how a dominant leader, when it has subjugated its subordinate mate to the point of rebellion, will turn back to the ploys it used for its initial sexual courtship.

You’ll also note a chronology to the theories, with later ones tending to supersede earlier ones. It is not, however, an exact timeline; bits and pieces of various theories still hold sway among current thinkers and some older ideas, such as trait theory, have resurfaced with renewed vigour in the light of modern science (genetic studies show that some traits associated with leaders, such as intelligence and extroversion, are highly heritable). One consequence of the chronological approach is that earlier leadership studies tend to focus on political and military figures, whereas the rise of corporate culture in the twentieth century shifts the focus of later theories to leadership in the workplace (which can be termed organisational, management or business psychology). In the corporate sphere, ‘leaders’ and ‘followers’ become ‘managers’ and ‘employees’ or ‘subordinates’.

The story illustrated the extent to which Germans adopted mission-oriented command during Moltke’s tenure, as no less a leader than a Hohenzollern prince informed a subordinate commander that he could disobey orders when the situation called for it.

This new system of command, eventually referred to as Auftragstaktik[3], allowed subordinate leaders independence to interpret the situation and execute actions that fulfilled the commander’s intent rather than the letter of the order.

Thus, Moltke believed that the higher the commander’s position, the less prescriptive his orders should be to his subordinates. He argued that a large numbers of orders, or verbose orders, could confuse leaders on the commander’s true intent. This problem could compound itself through every echelon of command making it difficult for a division, or even a brigade commander, to decipher the reason for the mission.[22]

Recent technology might appear to have closed the gap between leaders and subordinates. Armed with unprecedented amounts of data, CEOs, politicians, and bureaucrats can peer into what is happening almost as it occurs. As we discussed, this information can seduce leaders into thinking that they understand and can predict complex situations—that they can see what will happen. But the speed and interdependence of our current environment means that what we cannot know has grown even faster than what we can.

Wisdom gives a leader balance and helps to avoid eccentricity and extravagance. If knowledge comes by study, wisdom comes by Holy Spirit filling. Then a leader can apply knowledge correctly. "Full of wisdom" is one of the requirements for even subordinate leaders in the early church (Acts 6:3).

With practice, you will learn to understand yourself better and increasingly learn what conviction feels like. As you search for it, you will get better at gearing your efforts to work in a way that will help you get to that feeling. Leaders don’t look for excuses for why they can’t act like an owner. Instead, they embrace the challenge of ownership and encourage their teams to do the same. It helps if, as subordinates, they were regularly encouraged and empowered by their bosses to put themselves in the shoes of decision makers. “Superb professionals define their jobs broadly,” one of my former bosses regularly said to me. “They are always thinking several levels up.” This may explain why many business schools, including Harvard, teach using the case method. This approach certainly can be used to teach analytical techniques, but, for me, it is primarily an exercise in learning to get to conviction. After you’ve studied all the facts of the case on your own, and after you’ve debated those facts in study groups before class and again in class, what do you believe? What would you do if you were in the shoes of the protagonist? The case method attempts to simulate what leaders go through every day. Decision makers are confronted with a blizzard of facts: usually incomplete, often contradictory, and certainly confusing. With help from colleagues, they have to sort things out. Through the case method, students learn to put themselves in the shoes of the decision maker, imagine what that might feel like, and then work to figure out what they believe. This mind-set is invaluable in the workplace. It forces you to use your broad range of skills. It guides you as to what additional analysis and work needs to be done to figure out a particular business challenge. Leaders don’t need to always have conviction, but they do need to learn to search for it. This process never ends. It is a way of thinking. Every day, as you are confronted with new and unexpected challenges, you need to search for conviction. You need to ask yourself: What do I believe? What would I do if I were a decision maker? Aspiring leaders need to resist the temptation to make excuses, such as I don’t have enough power, or it’s not my job, or nobody in the company cares what I think, or there just isn’t time. They must let those excuses go and put themselves mentally in the shoes of the decision maker. From that vantage point, they will start to get a better idea how it feels to bear the weight of ownership.

A sure indication of a successful leader is the collective and consistent testimony of subordinates who are grateful for what they learned and how they grew while they worked under that leader.

Netanyahu then explained to me why the stakes were so high. The Iranian leaders, he said, “want to concentrate on completing their nuclear program because once they have that, then they could threaten the West in ways that are unimaginable today. They could take over the Persian Gulf on all its sides and take control of the oil reserves of the world. They could topple Saudi Arabia and Jordan in short order and, of course, Iraq. All your internal debates in America on [the future of] Iraq would be irrelevant because nuclear-armed Iran would subordinate Iraq in two seconds. Then they would threaten to create a second Holocaust in Israel and proceed on their idea of building a global empire, producing twenty-five atomic bombs a year—250 bombs in a decade—with missiles that they are already working on [and that they want to develop] to reach the eastern seaboard of the United States. Everything else pales in comparison to this development. This has to be stopped, for the sake of the world, not only for the sake of Israel.

The German Army, which practiced Maneuver Warfare better than any other Army, sought after most in their leader development the strength of character in its officers. They defined Strength of Character as The ability, even the joy in seeking responsibility, and in making decisions under all circumstances, in the face of peers, superiors, subordinates and most of all in the face of the enemy. It is the ability to do what is right despite the consequences to one’s self or career.2

The United States policing style of dealing with conflict and crisis requires intelligent leaders with a penchant for boldness and initiative down to the lowest levels. Boldness is an essential moral trait in a leader for it generates power beyond the physical means at hand. Initiative, the willingness to act on one’s own judgment, is a prerequisite for boldness. These traits carried to excess can lead to rashness, but we must realize that errors by frontline street cops stemming from over boldness are a necessary part of learning.  We should deal with such errors leniently; there must be no “zero defects” mentality. Abolishing “zero defects” means that we do not stifle boldness or initiative through the threat of punishment. It does not mean that leaders do not council subordinates on mistakes; constructive criticism is an important element of learning. Nor does it give subordinates free license to act stupidly or recklessly. Not only must we not stifle boldness or initiative, but we must continue to encourage both traits in spite of mistakes. On the other hand, we should deal severely with errors of inaction or timidity. We will not accept lack of orders as justification for inaction; it is each police officers duty to take initiative as the situation demands. We must not tolerate the avoidance of responsibility or necessary risk.

In the grim aftermath of World War II and the Stalinist purges, the term “totalitarianism” has become a bad word. But for progressives before the war, Jonah Goldberg points out, it was a good word. “Totalitarianism” was a term used by Mussolini in a positive, descriptive sense. It meant giving total allegiance to the state; it meant a state that took care of people’s physical, emotional, and aspirational needs. Totalitarianism implied an exhilarating unity of thought and action. 19 Totalitarianism, in this sense, was the shared aspiration of fascists, Nazis, and progressives. Schivelbusch writes, “The New Deal Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany all profited from the illusion of the nation as an egalitarian community whose members looked out for one another’s welfare under the watchful eyes of a strong leader.”20 Progressives across Europe and America in the 1930s relished the idea of the totalitarian society in which they could impose this unity, in other words, to supervise and control people’s lives. Does totalitarianism in this sense seem unfamiliar? It shouldn’t be. Recall President Obama’s propagandistic “Julia” videos. Essentially the Obama administration promised this hypothetical young woman cradle-to-grave protection. Absurdly, the package of benefits offered by the government under Obama would be worth more than the wages of a typical forty-hour work week. “Under President Obama” Julia would get education subsidies, minimum wage, food stamps, and free health care. “Under President Obama” Julia even decides to bear a child. To me, it’s a bit unnerving. But this is progressive utopia: citizens are all brought into complete subordination and submission to an all-powerful state.

When leaders help subordinates overcome weaknesses or mistakes, they help the subordinate, they help the organization, and they help themselves become better leaders.

Motivate the Workforce. Have you identified each person’s “hot button” and focused on it? Do you work personal pride and shared purpose into most communications? Are you keeping your powder dry for those urgent moments when you may need it?   8. Embrace the Front Lines. Have you made your intent clear and empowered those around you to act? Do you regularly meet with those in direct contact with customers? Is everybody able to communicate their ideas and concerns to you?   9. Build Leadership in Others. Are all managers expected to build leadership among their subordinates? Does the company culture foster the effective exercise of leadership? Are leadership development opportunities available to most, if not all, managers? 10. Manage Relations. Is the hierarchy reduced to a minimum, and does bad news travel up? Are managers self-aware and empathetic? Are autocratic, egocentric, and irritable behaviors censured? 11.

Motivate the Workforce. Have you identified each person’s “hot button” and focused on it? Do you work personal pride and shared purpose into most communications? Are you keeping your powder dry for those urgent moments when you may need it?   8. Embrace the Front Lines. Have you made your intent clear and empowered those around you to act? Do you regularly meet with those in direct contact with customers? Is everybody able to communicate their ideas and concerns to you?   9. Build Leadership in Others. Are all managers expected to build leadership among their subordinates? Does the company culture foster the effective exercise of leadership? Are leadership development opportunities available to most, if not all, managers? 10. Manage Relations. Is the hierarchy reduced to a minimum, and does bad news travel up? Are managers self-aware and empathetic? Are autocratic, egocentric, and irritable behaviors censured? 11. Identify Personal Implications. Do employees appreciate how the firm’s vision and strategy impact them individually? What private sacrifices will be necessary for achieving the common cause? How will the plan affect people’s personal livelihood and quality of work life? 12. Convey Your Character. Have you communicated your commitment to performance with integrity? Do those in the organization know you as a person, and do they appreciate your aspirations and your agendas? Have you been in the same room or at least on the same call with everybody who works with you during the past year? 13. Dampen Overoptimism and Excessive Pessimism. Have you prepared the organization for unlikely but extremely consequential events? Do you celebrate success but also guard against the by-products of excessive confidence? Have you paved the way not only for quarterly results but for long-term performance?

Vision and Priorities In the press of day-to-day activities, leaders often fail to adequately communicate their vision to the organization, and in particular, they don’t communicate it in a way that helps their subordinates determine where to focus their own efforts. How often do I communicate a vision for my business? Have I identified and communicated three to five key priorities to achieve that vision? If asked, would my employees be able to articulate the vision and priorities?

I called this the paradox of “caring but not caring”—that is, caring intimately about your subordinates and the organization but caring little about the organizational consequences to yourself.

In supportive environments, choice and ownership take center stage. When Kerr handed over the coaching reins, he was doing just that. Letting the team know that they were important and that he trusted them. Research shows that when leaders adopt such a model, their subordinates have better coping skills, are more self-confident, and are rated as more coachable.

This subordination to the collective is the foundation of Plato’s dystopian world, and echoes of it are present today. Consider this quote from his writings: The greatest principle of all is that nobody, whether male or female, should ever be without a leader… he should get up, or move, or wash, or take his meals… only if he has been told to do so… He should teach his soul, by long habit, never to dream of acting independently, and to become utterly incapable of it… in this way the life of all will be spent in total community.34

I am the master and the internet is my slave.

Each time a conversation went down this path I only prayed for a poker face as I silently nodded. But inside I was thinking, “Oh really?” How was that going to work? In the event of war with the Soviet Union, you were not going to execute the War Plan that the president and all your subordinate commands had been so carefully planning? As things got tense, then you were going to dial up the Oval Office and explain you were having second thoughts? But that’s what most of them told me. Except for Admiral Foley and the Atlantic Fleet commander, Adm. Harry Train. And my old boss, Vice Adm. Bud Kauderer, who I now suspect had been in cahoots with Admiral Foley from the beginning and had been instrumental in suckering me into the meeting. He knew me so well. A final question and closing thought. Are you surprised by how such an important issue was disguised by silence? How big a “conspiracy” can be? How few of the supposed leaders were actually leaders? Never, ever let foolishness stand, no matter how high it originates. If something is wrong, it is wrong. Don’t condemn yourself to live the rest of your life with regrets.

An officer may have many subordinates to do these jobs, but a leader must be able to fend for himself or herself. I wholeheartedly agree with this philosophy. It enables an officer to lead from the front if the need arises and helps instil a sense of respect within the rank and file.

What remains of democracy is to be construed as the right to choose among commodities. Business leaders have long explained the need to impose on the population a “philosophy of futility” and “lack of purpose in life,” to “concentrate human attention on the more superficial things that comprise much of fashionable consumption.” Deluged by such propaganda from infancy, people may then accept their meaningless and subordinate lives and forget ridiculous ideas about managing their own affairs.

To see money as subordinate to people and not the other way around is fundamental to creating a culture in which the people naturally pull together to advance the business. And it is the ability to grow one’s people to do what needs to be done that creates stable, lasting success.

the single greatest threat to organizational resilience: the unwillingness or inability of senior leaders to write off their own depreciating intellectual capital. This failing would be less dangerous if subordinates felt empowered to challenge C-suite dogma, but most middle managers are disinclined to bite the hand that feeds them. Thus myopia, like authority, trickles down.

I am no longer a small unit leader. I am someone who takes orders from the command level and withholds information from his subordinates when it’s necessary for the mission. The thought makes me feel unclean somehow.

Leadership selection constitutes another operational test of whether a ranked system exists. The leadership of a subordinate group must be acceptable to the superordinate group, which is usually in a position to reject unacceptable leaders. Influence or prestige within the subordinate group by itself is not enough. Lack of group autonomy in leadership selection is a sure sign of ethnic subordination

Control Find the genetic code for control and rewrite it. Act your way to new thinking. Short, early conversations make efficient work. Use “I intend to . . .” to turn passive followers into active leaders. Resist the urge to provide solutions. Eliminate top-down monitoring systems. Think out loud (both superiors and subordinates). Embrace the inspectors. Competence Take deliberate action. We learn (everywhere, all the time). Don’t brief, certify. Continually and consistently repeat the message. Specify goals, not methods. Clarity Achieve excellence, don’t just avoid errors. Build trust and take care of your people. Use your legacy for inspiration. Use guiding principles for decision criteria. Use immediate recognition to reinforce desired behaviors. Begin with the end in mind. Encourage a questioning attitude over blind obedience. It’s my hope that this organization of the mechanisms in this book will help you put these ideas into action as you adopt the leader-leader philosophy.

In a previous chapter, I gave a broad overview of the Christian history of witch-hunting. Although this extreme type of scapegoating no longer occurs in its fatal form, it continues today in more subtle ways. We have gotten much better at hiding the scapegoat mechanism at work in our midst. At the heart of the church’s persecution of witches was the maintenance of its patriarchal theology and practice. Acute situations like plagues or storms provided the catalyst for Christians to scapegoat “witches,” but the hand that pointed the finger was able to do so because it kept a tight rein on women, reinforcing their subordinate position. The way to end the scapegoating of women, then, is to raise them onto equal ground with men. Although some Christian traditions have worked to lift the position of women over the centuries, the majority of church history has shown that when women begin to gain influence and power in society, Christian leaders respond by starting the scapegoating process.

As a leader, you must choose wisely with whom you will socialize. Friendship with a subordinate or congregant can be a blessing or a trap fraught with dangers.

Remember that in our business we are always teaching, and a commander’s job is to develop his subordinates and teach them all he knows about the subject at hand.

PRINCIPLE: LEADING UP THE CHAIN If your boss isn’t making a decision in a timely manner or providing necessary support for you and your team, don’t blame the boss. First, blame yourself. Examine what you can do to better convey the critical information for decisions to be made and support allocated. Leading up the chain of command requires tactful engagement with the immediate boss (or in military terms, higher headquarters) to obtain the decisions and support necessary to enable your team to accomplish its mission and ultimately win. To do this, a leader must push situational awareness up the chain of command. Leading up the chain takes much more savvy and skill than leading down the chain. Leading up, the leader cannot fall back on his or her positional authority. Instead, the subordinate leader must use influence, experience, knowledge, communication, and maintain the highest professionalism. While pushing to make your superior understand what you need, you must also realize that your boss must allocate limited assets and make decisions with the bigger picture in mind. You and your team may not represent the priority effort at that particular time. Or perhaps the senior leadership has chosen a different direction. Have the humility to understand and accept this. One of the most important jobs of any leader is to support your own boss—your immediate leadership. In any chain of command, the leadership must always present a united front to the troops. A public display of discontent or disagreement with the chain of command undermines the authority of leaders at all levels. This is catastrophic to the performance of any organization. As a leader, if you don’t understand why decisions are being made, requests denied, or support allocated elsewhere, you must ask those questions up the chain. Then, once understood, you can pass that understanding down to your team. Leaders in any chain of command will not always agree. But at the end of the day, once the debate on a particular course of action is over and the boss has made a decision—even if that decision is one you argued against—you must execute the plan as if it were your own. When leading up the chain of command, use caution and respect. But remember, if your leader is not giving the support you need, don’t blame him or her. Instead, reexamine what you can do to better clarify, educate, influence, or convince that person to give you what you need in order to win. The major factors to be aware of when leading up and down the chain of command are these:

Page 143: There is no use either in cherishing illusions as to the practical consequences of a system in which political power and control of economic production and distribution are irrevocably delegated to, or conferred upon, the same persons. In so far s the state absorbs and distributes a larger and larger portion of the public wealth, the leaders of the ruling class come to possess greater and greater facilities for influencing and commanding their subordinates, and more and more easily evade control by anybody.

On the whole, notwithstanding the seeming liberty, or rather licentiousness, of the Anglo-Saxons, the great body even of the free citizens, in those ages, really enjoyed much less true liberty, than where the execution of the laws is the most severe, and where subjects are reduced to the strictest subordination and dependence on the civil magistrate. The reason is derived from the excess itself of that liberty. Men must guard themselves at any price against insults and injuries; and where they receive not protection from the laws and magistrate, they will seek it by submission to superiors, and by herding in some private confederacy which acts under the direction of a powerful leader. And thus all anarchy is the immediate cause of tyranny, if not over the state, at least over many of the individuals.

Scipio and Wellington both held for many years commands of high importance, but distant from the main theatres of warfare. The same country was the scene of the principal military career of each. It was in Spain that Scipio, like Wellington, successively encountered and overthrew nearly all the subordinate generals of the enemy before being opposed to the chief champion and conqueror himself. Both Scipio and Wellington restored their countrymen's confidence in arms when shaken by a series of reverses, and each of them closed a long and perilous war by a complete and overwhelming defeat of the chosen leader and the chosen veterans of the foe.

These “mobilizing passions," mostly taken for granted and not always overtly argued as intellectual propositions, form the emotional lava that set fascism’s foundations: • a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions; • the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it; • the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;60 • dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences; • the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary; • the need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s destiny; • the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason; • the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success; • the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.

In any type of institution whatsoever, when a self-directed, imaginative, energetic, or creative member is being consistently frustrated and sabotaged rather than encouraged and supported, what will turn out to be true one hundred percent of the time, regardless of whether the disrupters are supervisors, subordinates, or peers, is that the person at the very top of that institution is a peace-monger.2 For Friedman the “peace-monger” is the leader whose own high degree of anxiety leads him to prefer harmony to health, to appease complainers just to quiet them, but who will not actually demand that they take responsibility for their own part in the organizational problem. Throughout this book, we have repeatedly

we always have team members go back to their direct reports and share their profile information. This serves three purposes. First, it provides a great opportunity for demonstrating vulnerability with their subordinates. Second, it gives those subordinates real insights into their leaders, so that they’ll feel more comfortable providing feedback and interpreting behavior correctly. Third, it helps the executives develop a better understanding of their own profiles, because teaching is one of the best ways of learning.

Except now I found myself asking whether those impulses - of violence, greed, corruption, nationalism, racism, and religious intolerance, the all-too-human desire to beat back our own uncertainty and morality and sense of insignificance by subordinating others - were too strong for any democracy to permanently contain. For they seemed to lie in wait everywhere, ready to resurface whenever growth rates stalled or demographics changed or a charismatic leader chose to ride the wave of people's fears and resentments.

Good managers execute as well as motivate. Not all leaders need to be managers, but all managers need to be good leaders. While managing is an art; leadership is a skill that needs to be inculcated and enforced while executing assignments through subordinates

A CEO is royalty when at home, enjoying hierarchical deference within the internal ecosystem of their organization. But a CEO courting other CEOs to join a coalition is a monarch visiting a different kingdom. Within their own organization, a CEO who embraces a servant-leader approach motivates subordinates by the demonstration of care and humility. But this servant-leadership only counts when you have authority to sacrifice. A stranger has no such power in a foreign land. It should therefore come as no surprise that successful corporate leaders struggle to align nascent ecosystems, where their authority does not exist. The guiding rulebook here must shift from that of authority to that of diplomacy.

good managers execute as well as motivate. Not all leaders need to be managers, but all managers need to be good leaders. While managing is an art; leadership is a skill that needs to be inculcated, imbibed and enforced while executing assignments through subordinates

Always what the Navy calls a “deck plate leader,” someone who is highly visible and close to his subordinates, Zumwalt as CNO continued to listen widely and well to sailors and officers throughout the service in the belief that they knew best what changes needed to be made.

The historical inequality embedded in our founding--that all men ae created equal--depends on the subordination of minorities and women. Whenever members of marginalized groups seem to approach equality, antidemocratic leaders can drum up supporters by insisting that they are attacking national principles and reducing white men to subservience. Those leaders reject the idea of equality, but paradoxically, they root that rejection in our founding. Their version of America depends on keeping political power and economic opportunity away from Black and Brown Americans and keeping women in roles as wives, mothers, or sexual objects, as they were in the founding era. To justify that exclusion, it also requires defining the powerless as inferiors, either criminals or weak-minded people unable to think and act for themselves.

. Trade minds with the people you want to influence. It’s easy to get others to do what you want them to do if you’ll see things through their eyes. Ask yourself this question before you act: “What would I think of this if I exchanged places with the other person?” 2. Apply the “Be-Human” rule in your dealings with others. Ask, “What is the human way to handle this?” In everything you do, show that you put other people first. Just give other people the kind of treatment you like to receive. You’ll be rewarded. 3. Think progress, believe in progress, push for progress. Think improvement in everything you do. Think high standards in everything you do. Over a period of time subordinates tend to become carbon copies of their chief. Be sure the master copy is worth duplicating. Make this a personal resolution: “At home, at work, in community life, if it’s progress I’m for it.” 4. Take time out to confer with yourself and tap your supreme thinking power. Managed solitude pays off. Use it to release your creative power. Use it to find solutions to personal and business problems. So spend some time alone every day just for thinking. Use the thinking technique all great leaders use: confer with yourself.

Destructive inborn traits of social life can be viewed as a parallel of the physical presence of parasitic organisms, and the cultural diminishment of their impact as the lessening of a tolerable dogma load. One obvious example of the latter is blind faith in supernatural creation stories. Of course in most parts of the world today, moderating the dogma load would be difficult, even dangerous. The stories are harnessed to both tribal rule by means of subordination of the faithful and their assumption of religious superiority over believers of rival creation stories. To examine each of the stories in detail objectively and to spell out their known historical origins would be a good start, and one that has begun (albeit slowly and carefully) in many scholarly disciplines. A second step, granted an unrealistic one, would be to ask the leaders of each religion and sect, assisted by theologians, to publicly defend the supernatural details of their faiths in competition with other faiths and aided by natural-cause and historical analysis.

Capt. Sobers’ character strengths separated him from the other leaders within as well as outside the section. The most important of these for me was that he cared for his subordinates. Let me emphasize: he TRULY cared for his subordinates. From a militaristically accepted leadership perspective, that was a rarity.

While some commanders took full responsibility for blue-on-blue, others blamed their subordinates for simulated fratricide incidents in training. These weaker commanders would get a solid explanation about the burden of command and the deep meaning of responsibility: the leader is truly and ultimately responsible for everything.

When a bad SEAL leader walked into a debrief and blamed everyone else, that attitude was picked up by subordinates and team members, who then followed suit. They all blamed everyone else, and inevitably the team was ineffective and unable to properly execute a plan. Continuing, I told the VP, “In those situations, you ended up with a unit that never felt they were to blame for anything. All they did was make excuses and ultimately never made the adjustments necessary to fix problems. Now, compare that to the commander who came in and took the blame. He said, ‘My subordinate leaders made bad calls; I must not have explained the overall intent well enough.’ Or, ‘The assault force didn’t execute the way I envisioned; I need to make sure they better understand my intent and rehearse more thoroughly.’ The good leaders took ownership of the mistakes and shortfalls. That’s the key difference.

When you identify a toxic subordinate leader, remove them. If you cannot remove them, reassign them to a role where their toxicity can be minimized.

It’s counterintuitive,” I said. “It’s natural for anyone in a leadership position to blame subordinate leaders and direct reports when something goes wrong. Our egos don’t like to take blame. But it’s on us as leaders to see where we failed to communicate effectively and help our troops clearly understand what their roles and responsibilities are and how their actions impact the bigger strategic picture. “Remember, it’s not about you,” I continued. “It’s not about the drilling superintendent. It’s about the mission and how best to accomplish it. With that attitude exemplified in you and your key leaders, your team will dominate.

People disdain unskilled leaders, loathe unjust leaders, dread ruthless leaders, honor righteous leaders, and cherish enlightened leaders. Leaders disdain incompetent subordinates, loathe biased subordinates, dread mean subordinates, honor ethical subordinates, and cherish resourceful subordinates.

Cowardly leaders often show their true colors whenever they discipline their subordinates. All too often, cowardly leaders dole out discipline that may be too harsh, too light, or wildly inconsistent. They rarely get it right. And instead of being consistently fair, cowardly leaders typically discipline according to their own agenda, whatever that happens to be at any given moment. And speaking of agendas, the discipline they prescribe often has more to do with their emotional reactions and fears, than providing helpful correction and guidance for future behavior, which is what discipline should do.

A leader expresses loyalty to his subordinates by supporting their needs and ensuring their welfare in a number of ways. Subordinates express loyalty to that sort of caring leadership by positively and efficiently carrying out the leader’s orders or instructions.

Leaders have many tools at their disposal to increase loyalty, such as backing up their people when they are right, correcting them in private when they are wrong, and publically criticizing neither superiors nor subordinates.

Thus, a leader’s task is to develop their subordinates’ will along with their skill. This begins with realistic training with consistent standards.

The more frequently you intrude, implicitly reminding them it is your change, the less they will believe it is theirs. Successful implementation, in short, depends upon them. The leader cannot hold individuals accountable for driving change if he refuses to let go of the steering wheel. He must trust his subordinates, replace them if necessary. But he mustn’t micromanage them.

Any leader who is afraid of his own superiors should immediately resign, for he certainly cannot win the respect of his subordinates.

Any good leader is immersed in the planning and execution of tasks, projects, and operations to move the team toward a strategic goal. Such leaders possess insight into the bigger picture and why specific tasks need to be accomplished. This information does not automatically translate to subordinate leaders and the frontline troops. Junior members of the team—the tactical level operators—are rightly focused on their specific jobs. They must be in order to accomplish the tactical mission. They do not need the full knowledge and insight of their senior leaders, nor do the senior leaders need the intricate understanding of the tactical level operators’ jobs. Still, it is critical that each have an understanding of the other’s role. And it is paramount that senior leaders explain to their junior leaders and troops executing the mission how their role contributes to big picture success.

To be effectively empowered to make decisions, it is imperative that frontline leaders execute with confidence. Tactical leaders must be confident that they clearly understand the strategic mission and Commander’s Intent. They must have implicit trust that their senior leaders will back their decisions. Without this trust, junior leaders cannot confidently execute, which means they cannot exercise effective Decentralized Command. To ensure this is the case, senior leaders must constantly communicate and push information—what we call in the military “situational awareness”—to their subordinate leaders. Likewise, junior leaders must push situational awareness up the chain to their senior leaders to keep them informed, particularly of crucial information that affects strategic decision making.

Not every decision will be a good one: all leaders make mistakes. No leader, no matter how competent and experienced, is immune from this. For any leader, handling those mistakes with humility is the key. Subordinates or direct reports don’t expect their bosses to be perfect. When the boss makes a mistake but then owns up to that mistake, it doesn’t decrease respect. Instead, it increases respect for that leader, proving he or she possesses the humility to admit and own mistakes and, most important, to learn from them.

There are times to teach and train and times not to teach. When relationships are strained and charged with emotion, attempts to teach or train are often perceived as a form of judgment and rejection. A better approach is to be alone with the person and to discuss the principle privately. But again, this requires patience and internal control—in short, emotional maturity. BORROWING STRENGTH BUILDS WEAKNESS In addition to parents, many employers, leaders, and others in positions of authority may be competent, knowledgeable, and skillful (at day six) but are emotionally and spiritually immature (at day two). They, too, may attempt to compensate for this deficiency, or gap, by borrowing strength from their position or their authority. How do immature people react to pressure? How does the boss react when subordinates don’t do things his way? The teacher when the students challenge her viewpoint? How would an immature parent treat a teenage daughter when she interrupts with her problems? How does this parent discipline a bothersome younger child? How does this person handle a difference with a spouse on an emotionally explosive matter? How does the person handle challenges at work? An emotionally immature person will tend to borrow strength from position, size, strength, experience, intellect, or emotions to make up for a character imbalance. And what are the consequences? Eventually this person will build weakness in three places: First, he builds weakness in himself. Borrowing strength from position or authority reinforces his own dependence upon external factors to get things done in the future. Second, he builds weakness in the other people. Others learn to act or react in terms of fear or conformity, thus stunting their own reasoning, freedom, growth, and internal discipline. Third, he builds weakness in the relationship. It becomes strained. Fear replaces cooperation. Each person involved becomes a little more arbitrary, a little more agitated, a little more defensive. To win an argument or a contest, an emotionally immature person may use his strengths and abilities to back people into a corner. Even though he wins the argument, he loses. Everyone loses. His

The authority in such a clan-society is of a peculiar sort, it is here, it is there, it is everywhere, and it never sleeps. But there is no absolutely dominant power. The circle may perhaps have its leader in chief, but he cannot force anyone to his will. In Iceland, this lack of subordination appears in the crudest light. Iceland had men who gladly paid out of their own purse for the extravagances of their restless kinsmen, if only they could maintain peace and prevent futile bloodshed; but their peacemaking was an everlasting patchwork. There was no power over those who did not seek the right. To take firm action against them was a thing even the most resolute of their kin could never do, for it was out of the question for the clan to disown its unruly members and leave them to the mercy of their enemies. When Chrodin, a man of noble stock, was chosen, for his cleverness and god-fearing ways, to be majordomo in Austria, he declined with these significant words: “I cannot bring about peace in Austria, chiefly because all the great men in the country are my kinsmen. I cannot overawe them and cannot have any one executed. Nay, because of their very kinship they will rise up and act in defiance.

on a night after which Number 40 gave a particularly ferocious mauling to Wolf 42, the tide turned for this aggressive leader. The badly mauled wolf, along with several other subordinate wolves, ganged up on the matriarch and killed her. Wolf 42 then stepped into the role of alpha female, but with one crucial difference: Her personality was the antithesis of her predecessor’s.

These “mobilizing passions," mostly taken for granted and not always overtly argued as intellectual propositions, form the emotional lava that set fascism’s foundations: • a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions; • the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it; • the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;60 • dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences; • the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary; • the need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s destiny; • the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason; • the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success; • the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.

The best leaders checked their egos, accepted blame, sought out constructive criticism, and took detailed notes for improvement. They exhibited Extreme Ownership, and as a result, their SEAL platoons and task units dominated. When a bad SEAL leader walked into a debrief and blamed everyone else, that attitude was picked up by subordinates and team members, who then followed suit. They all blamed everyone else,

The major factors to be aware of when leading up and down the chain of command are these: • Take responsibility for leading everyone in your world, subordinates and superiors alike. • If someone isn’t doing what you want or need them to do, look in the mirror first and determine what you can do to better enable this. • Don’t ask your leader what you should do, tell them what you are going to do.

Specifically, women elicit more respect and pride from their followers, communicate their vision more effectively, better empower and mentor their subordinates, approach problem solving in a more flexible and creative way; and are fairer and more objective in their evaluation of direct reports.

The true measure of your ability to be a good subordinate: is not when you agree with the leader when everything is going your way, but when you can agree with the leader when things are not in your favor.

SUMMARY To be a more effective leader, put these four leadership principles to work 1. Trade minds with the people you want to influence. It’s easy to get others to do what you want them to do if you’ll see things through their eyes. Ask yourself this question before you act: “What would I think of this if I exchanged places with the other person?” 2. Apply the “Be-Human” rule in your dealings with others. Ask, “What is the human way to handle this?” In everything you do, show that you put other people first. Just give other people the kind of treatment you like to receive. You’ll be rewarded. 3. Think progress, believe in progress, push for progress. Think improvement in everything you do. Think high standards in everything you do. Over a period of time subordinates tend to become carbon copies of their chief. Be sure the master copy is worth duplicating. Make this a personal resolution: “At home, at work, in community life, if it’s progress I’m for it.” 4. Take time out to confer with yourself and tap your supreme thinking power. Managed solitude pays off. Use it to release your creative power. Use it to find solutions to personal and business problems. So spend some time alone every day just for thinking. Use the thinking technique all great leaders use: confer with yourself.

fascism is more plausibly linked to a set of “mobilizing passions" that shape fascist action than to a consistent and fully articulated philosophy. At bottom is a passionate nationalism. Allied to it is a conspiratorial and Manichean view of history as a battle between the good and evil camps, between the pure and the corrupt, in which one’s own community or nation has been the victim. In this Darwinian narrative, the chosen people have been weakened by political parties, social classes, unassimilable minorities, spoiled rentiers, and rationalist thinkers who lack the necessary sense of community. These “mobilizing passions," mostly taken for granted and not always overtly argued as intellectual propositions, form the emotional lava that set fascism’s foundations: • a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions; • the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it; • the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;60 • dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences; • the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary; • the need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s destiny; • the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason; • the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success; • the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle. The “mobilizing passions" of fascism are hard to treat historically, for many of them are as old as Cain. It seems incontestable, however, that the fevers of increased nationalism before World War I and the passions aroused by that war sharpened them. Fascism was an affair of the gut more than of the brain, and a study of the roots of fascism that treats only the thinkers and the writers misses the most powerful impulses of all.

GOEBBELS AND HITLER had a conference about the Grynzspan agitation. “He decides: Let the demonstrations continue,” Goebbels wrote. “Pull back the police. The Jews should for once feel the anger of the people.” Party leaders called their subordinates, and the Gestapo sent out, by Teletype, rules to guide the rioting throughout Germany that was to be the consequence of Ernst vom Rath’s assassination. It was to be savage but orderly. The burning of synagogues was permitted “only if there is no danger of fires for the neighborhood.” Jewish homes and businesses “may be destroyed but not looted.” And foreigners “may not be molested even if they are Jews.” It began at 1:00 in the morning on November 10, 1938. Otto Tolischus reported on it for The New York Times. “There was scarcely a Jewish shop, cafe, office or synagogue that was not either wrecked, burned severely, or destroyed,” he said. “Before synagogues, demonstrators stood with prayer books from which they tore leaves.” The wealthy synagogue on Fasanenstrasse “was a furnace.” Twenty-five thousand people were sent as hostages to concentration camps. It was called Kristallnacht, Crystal Night, because it happened at night and a lot of plate glass was broken, and because the word “crystal” simultaneously distracted from, and raised a toast to, the ferociousness of the rioting—and perhaps finally also because the word echoed the title of one of Goebbels’s favorite books on propaganda technique, Edward Bernays’s Crystallizing Public Opinion. Goebbels had successfully used vom Rath’s assassination to crystallize German anti-Semitism.

In a seminal article from 1985, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, psychologist Sara Snodgrass sought to test the validity of the idea of "women's intuition." Snodgrass grouped men and women into pairs and randomly assigned one person the "leader" position and the other the "subordinate" position. The study found that those designated as "subordinate"- whether male or female - were consistently more attentive and perceptive to the feelings of leaders, and that once given either a subordinate or a leader role gender stopped having any effect. The paper concludes that women's intuition might be better described as "subordinates' intuition.

Practically speaking, being a positive person can impact your chances of earning a leadership position. While some experience may be necessary, a leader would much rather hire a person who they see as “constructive, optimistic, and confident” rather than one who is not. They know through experience that positive employees will be resourceful and hard-working, both key elements of success. More than that: Subordinates can be inspired to greater, more creative levels of effort if they have positive managers and leaders.

The United States is excellent at breeding psychopaths—a country where we reward the individual with a hyperfocus on success at any cost. We reward narcissism—with our social networks and hideous reality television programs. We laud business leaders, even as they abuse workers, rape the environment. In other cultures, where the individual subordinates himself more freely to the needs of family and society, we see fewer psychopaths. So

People couldn’t believe that I suddenly made myself a subordinate partner to Warren. But there are people that it’s okay to be a subordinate partner to. I didn’t have the kind of ego that prevented it. There always are people who will be better at something than you are. You have to learn to be a follower before you become a leader. People should learn to play all roles. —Charlie Munger

Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.

By their own actions, not their words, do leaders establish the morale, integrity and sense of justice of their subordinate commanders. They cannot say one thing and do another.

The criticisms made of Gorbachev-that he was indecisive, spineless, lily-livered, half-hearted, evasive-were all true. Just as it was true that he earned them all in his opposition to the radical democrats, whom I idolized at the time. The camp of those who hated Gorbachev was divided between those who did not like the reforms and those who did not like the fact that he was introducing them too slowly. The latter, to whom I belonged, hated him much more fervently: we had a goal we could see elsewhere-complete freedom of speech, capitalism, and democracy-and that made us active critics hammering away. We also deprived Gorbachev of support from the only section of society he could count on. So when, in his own good time, having missed every opportunity, he ceased to be afraid and ran for office (before that, he had been elected only by collegial bodies like congresses and supreme soviets whose subordinate status removed the risk of losing), he gained a derisory 0.51 percent of the vote. The older I grew, the more intolerant I became of Gorbachev, but now I view him positively, if only because he proved completely incorruptible. In that he was unique. Everyone who had power during the transition from socialism to capitalism tried to grab as big a slice of the pie as they could. The Communist leaders of the central Asian republics of the U.S.S.R. became owners of entire countries and promptly turned them into totalitarian states. Ministers scooped up whole industries for which they had responsibility. Directors of factories found ingenious ways of becoming their owners. Nimble-footed members of the Young Communist League, whose resonant voices had vowed their preparedness to give their lives for the party, now employed their influence and connections to become oligarchs. When Gorbachev stepped down as president, he took nothing with him, though there had been colossal opportunities for him to get rich. No one would have blinked an eye if a couple of major factories had somehow been transferred to offshore companies under the guise of "joint ventures." He could have helped himself to state property abroad. It would have been so easy to siphon party money into personal accounts. He did none of that. People can argue as much as they like that it was because he did not have the opportunity, but the fact remains that he made no attempt to do so. In my view, that was because he was a different kind of person. Not avaricious.

This is harder than in the leader-follower approach because it requires you to anticipate decisions and alert your team to the need for an upcoming one. In a top-down hierarchy, subordinates don’t need to be thinking ahead because the boss will make a decision when needed.