Leadership – A Lesson From History
- Jul 5, 2023
- 4 min read
Written by: Luca Berni, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
When we talk about Leadership in organizations, we immediately think of techniques, tools, or skills useful for convincing others of the rightness of one's ideas and guiding them to act accordingly. The Leader stereotype is based on the image of someone capable of influencing, leading, and – sometimes – manipulating people. Despite modern theories on Leadership, the idea of the Leader who speaks to the crowds generating a wave of consensus around his vision is still alive in the collective imagination, but in modern organizations, this stereotype no longer works (if it ever really worked).
There are several reasons why this model is no longer effective and to understand them we must start with an important lesson that comes from history. Going back to the past, humanity has experienced periods of alternation between dictatorial regimes and societies open to confrontation. The latter has not always been democracies as we understand them today, but societies in which plurality of thought was admitted and which are closest to the modern concept of a free society.
History has taught us that the periods of greatest cultural, economic, and social development occurred during periods of open societies, while dictatorial regimes have always coincided with backwardness, malaise, and the reduction of human rights. In some cases, there have been significant demographic declines, such as the case of Rome, which during the period of maximum splendor of the Roman Empire had almost 1,200,000 inhabitants, excluding slaves and immigrants. To then drop to less than 300,000 in 500 AD. under the rule of the Ostrogoths. Yet, a dictatorship is the closest thing to that idea of leadership still so present in people's minds. In the dictatorship, there are all the elements that characterize the stereotype of the Leader: a strong figure, who exerts a strong fascination, a person who makes decisions quickly and assigns clear tasks, someone able to guide people through adversity and obtain results never achieved earlier. Everything would be perfect, except that in the long run, things don't work out. Never! If we take the best-known example of dictatorship today, North Korea, we observe a nation that, while promoting the ideas of the great leader of the people, and acting accordingly, has created a closed, oppressed, retrograde, and isolated society from the rest of the world, where human rights are trampled on and where there is only one thought: that of the Leader.
On the contrary, democracies, i.e. the modern version of the open societies of the past, thrive, evolve, and are the areas where the best conditions to live are found. And this is despite the bureaucracy, litigation, complexity, and slowness in decisions. Because beyond all its limits, there are the contributions of many, different ideas that come from inside and outside, a constant contamination that leads society to be in constant motion. Of course, not all contributions take shape, not all ideas are implemented, and even among those that become reality there are some that are wrong, harmful, or retrograde, but in the end, democracies improve the quality of life. This can be seen from social parameters, such as life expectancy, infant mortality, access to school and health care, economic development, unemployment, etc. For some years now, the degree of happiness of nations has also been measured and only democracies rank first. Particularly, in the first 20 positions, there are 15 European countries. In short, in democracies, we live, innovate, grow, and are happier. This should teach us something about leadership models and business organization models. To thrive, an organization should be first an open place, without barriers and with full freedom of expression. Yet, still today, in many companies it does not happen. We act in the sense of homogenization of thought, the one that comes from the upper floors, and we work more to divide than to "share". It is no coincidence that to indicate the various areas of competence we often speak of "division", from the verb divide, that is to keep separate. Hence the phenomenon of "silos", groups of people who work in homogeneous areas who communicate only internally and are poorly integrated with the other parts of the organization. With the result of a slowdown of the flow of information and reduced "contamination".
The lesson that history gives us is to overturn the order of priorities. A strong organization is an organization that evolves and generates profits. But to do this, it must first take care of the well-being of the people who are part of it. Profits are not generated to create well-being, but well-being is created to also generate profits. Sir Richard Branson once said: "Take care of your employees and they will take care of your customers", to highlight that the growth of an organization is a consequence of the well-being of those who make it up and not vice versa.
History has taught us, without exception, that being a Leader means creating the conditions for open and serene discussion, to encourage contamination and inclusion, conditions that generate well-being and prosperity.
Luca Berni, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Luca Berni is an Executive & Team Coach that works with Leaders, Top Managers, Entrepreneurs, Boards of Directors, and Leadership Teams. Before becoming a Coach in 2009, he worked as a Manager in different Multinational companies in different Countries for almost twenty years. Luca also works as a management consultant, he co-founded and runs TheNCS The Neuroscience Coaching School, and he writes articles and books about Coaching and Management.
