A friend of mine just asked me over lunch, “Who are some good leaders?” Having been wrestling on some writing projects involving different categories of leadership, I instantly thought about all the different ways that question could be answered.
Based on what? Achievement, character, integrity, amount of influence, reputation, size of organization, personal relationships?
The lens through which you view the act of leadership determines the examples you hold up as being “good.” I made some singular comment to this effect which must have only confused the question for the guys in the car.
That’s when someone else piped up, “What about Bill Clinton? Was he a good leader?”
Here we go again, I thought. It depends on how you want to define “good.”
A conversation ensued to this effect. Clinton’s charismatic personality, appearance, and manner combined with his stellar intellect, masterful communication ability, and inescapable self-confidence form a potent, effective leadership style whose effects are hard to miss. Without a doubt, Clinton has been successful and has achieved an enormous degree of success in the face of tremendous difficulty. Yet many conservatives point to his moral failures, his liberal social policies, his tendency to shape policy based on public polling. Clinton is, if nothing else, a controversial, polarizing figure in American leadership.
But is he a good leader?
Therein lies the problem for the whole leadership discussion. There is simply no single point of agreement from which to judge such a question. Leadership is so ubiquitous, so diverse, so interwoven into every facet of human life that pulling it out into a neat set of clear categories that can be marked off is simply impossible. In leadership theory, as in so many other avenues of study and application, finding meaning requires an agreed upon set of rules. Yet, the fact is in the leadership arena, you can change the rules simply by changing the subject. And when you change the rules, you change the very understanding and definition of leadership itself.
No wonder there is such an absurd amount of material, much of conflicting and contradictory, on leadership. The mountain of books, resources, conferences, methods, principles, laws, theories, secrets, keys available to the willing practitioner is overwhelming and leaves one with the sense that for all that’s been said about the subject, maybe no one really knows what they are talking about.
There may be some truth in that. What’s more the case, however, is that people know too well what they are talking about and have very little sense of how it fits into what everybody else is talking about. In the end, talk of leadership quickly becomes a very jumbled, garbled, Gordian knot of Alexandrian proportions. What is missing, however, is the bold stroke of the sword to cut through the knot and provide a clear and coherent framework for talking about leadership in its many forms, facets, contexts, and dimensions. This is, in large part, the Holy Grail of leadership studies. Until it’s discovery, though, the first answer to the question, “Who is a good leader?” remains “How do you define good?”