The Philosophy of Leadership
Pericles, maximum leader of the imperial Greece giving a funeral speech to the fallen by the plague during the pelopenese war.
Both societies and leaders themselves are obliged to have their own leadership philosophy, so that the leader is better prepared to exercise an excellent role as ruler and society is better prepared to choose the best leaders and not be deceived by any.
From the origin of the first civilizations when societies began to form, the need to have a leader to guide them created the conditions for leaders to emerge from their midst with the necessary conditions to lead them in the face of war, politics, law and religion.
The leader is born into society with a set of traits, many of which are obtained from his own social environment. Their way of thinking, customs, values, aptitudes, and prejudices are obtained from society, hence the undeniable relationship and interaction between Individual-Society, according to which the individual ultimately ends up being a spokesperson or a reflection of society. It is no coincidence, for example, that Adolf Hitler, guilty of having led Germany to its destruction, was the voice of a society with deep racial prejudice and hatred capitalized on to bring Germans together in hatred of the Versailles Treaty.
When the true leader is fully aware of society with integral values such as responsibility and honesty, that leader has a profound chance of becoming a statesman.
There is a whole historical theory about the nature of great and even the most perverse men. For Plato, in his dialogue, "Georgias", his teacher Socrates, told him:
"The leader must work to improve the soul of the citizens. The greatness of the statesman does not consist in satisfying his own appetites, but in bringing justice, prudence and other virtues into the hearts of citizens.
For Aristotle, the good leader is the one who guarantees full happiness to the citizens of the polis. While we know that charism is a quality that not all leaders have, a leader dedicated to reflection, responsibility and honesty has the conditions to be a leader accepted by an entire society, and not just by bias. The true leader has to be fully accepted by his society.
Societies, when they pass through moments of light or darkness, reap the fruits of their leadership. Pericles, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Caesar Augustus, Louis XIV, Napoleon Bonaparte, George Washington, Simon Bolivar, Mahatma Ghandi, Winston Churchil, and Nelson Mandela are perhaps some of the best examples of leadership in history. Depending on such leaderships, the best or the worst of a society emerges, as Adolf Hitler validated it.
For the sociologist Max Weber, societies went through three stages: theological, charismatic and rational, legal and comprehensive. It seems unbelievable, but many societies are still under the pretext or still looking for a charismatic leader to solve all their problems, hence, it gets complicated when populist leaders, especially in times of crisis, begin to eclipse the masses with beautiful siren calls.
In this last stage, the legal rationale is when the weight of the law and the constitution is the full guide of society. If we look closely, it would be good for each society to learn to build its own philosophy of leadership so as not to be deceived or to be provided with negative leaderships.
Finally, I would like to recall one of the most important leaders in the world, Nelson Mandela. Mandela certainly knew how to unite a nation with strong problems of racism, and to unite it because he knew how to build his own philosophy of leadership. He studied in prison for the 27 years that he imprisoned his oppressor, learning how he thought and acted, including his tastes, emotions and values.
When he was elected President, whites thought they would be fired from their jobs and revenge would be the norm, but that was not the case, his philosophy was based on forgiveness:
"My family is 44 million people including whites and blacks, I just want us to work together to make South Africa a ray of light in the world.
And he did it, through the most beautiful form, the sport, he sent for the captain of the national rugby team, and made him see that the leader should always be above the expectations of the team, asking the coach, What is his philosophy of leadership?, in the face of the series of setbacks that the national team had had on the field. A leader should always have higher expectations to know how to ask for it, but above all he should know how to do it and how to guide them with the pleasure and acceptance of all. And he did it, he did not let the African National Council eliminate the South African National Team because he knew the country would get out of hand; and on the contrary, he supported it, he campaigned for national unification around the team, and in fact behind that campaign, the whole South African nation was hidden, nobody hesitated to support his team and to discover in this way that they were all South Africans.