This week’s “Daily Journal” guest columnist is Dr. Karen Palasek, director of educational and academic programs for the John Locke Foundation.
How do you select your heroes? Those people to whom we listen, who we elevate, support, admire, and revere, and whose values resonate most strongly with us, are probably our (acknowledged or unacknowledged) heroes. Almost invariably, they are extremely effective leaders as well. If it is true that everyone you encounter will either reform, deform, or transform you, then it pays to select your role models with care.
In the course of directing the John Locke Foundation’s leadership development program, the E.A. Morris Fellowship for Emerging Leaders, I have had the good fortune to present some outstanding North Carolina leaders to our Fellowship class. For me, the defining characteristic of excellence in positive leadership is someone who, first and foremost, follows a beliefs-into-action principle. These leaders avoid cognitive dissonance. In addition to being highly effective, the influence of this type of leader is often transformative. We are indelibly affected by their presence, their values, and their actions.
Transformative and positive leaders are people whose actions consistently mirror their stated beliefs. Their explicit concerns seem to include: 1) personal integrity, truth, and a rejection of moral relativism; 2) independent thinking, or the willingness and ability to “create new facts” rather than accept the existing ones as invariably given; 3) personal humility; 4) charitableness within a framework of sound judgment; and 5) a clear vision of future possibilities.
The idea that you can simultaneously hold two enduring yet conflicting beliefs, or “truths,” and rationalize them, or the idea that you can say that you believe in one thing, and behave in a contrary manner, exemplifies cognitive dissonance.
It’s true, certainly, that everybody fails at achieving perfection, or is occasionally inconsistent. That’s the nature of human beings. Even a single instance of infidelity in marriage, for example, is a one-time failure (and a very serious one, by most people’s reckoning). Cognitive dissonance arises when we individually, and perhaps collectively, rationalize and excuse the clash between the values and beliefs of monogamous marriage with the notion or even practice of serial infidelity — instead of resolving the problem or, as appropriate, ending the marriage.
Inconsistencies are even more troubling when they appear in political leadership and make their way into policies, mandates, regulations, or (sometimes) permissiveness within our social and economic life. As a matter of policy, then, do we allow graduations for high school students who genuinely cannot read, but continue to speak as though we believe schools are educating students to competency, and not just grade level? And what about justice vs. mercy? Does it mean, “It’s OK for that person to steal from you (me), they are poorer/less educated/more disadvantaged than you are (I am)”? G.K. Chesterton quotes Thomas Aquinas as saying, “It is the fact that falsehood is never so false as when it is very nearly true,” addressing the practice of holding two contradictory beliefs, one offered in apparent “agreement” with the opponent’s position.
And here again, I think, is a reason for choosing our heroes extremely carefully. Trying to hold conflicting beliefs and values, out of a quest for approval, popularity, success, simple ignorance, or some other reason deforms our thinking and our behavior over time. Personal and social norms — regarding education, taxation, individual freedoms, child rearing or even child-bearing, voting, criminal behavior, and other matters — tend to become ad hoc expressions of quite utilitarian values: what is expedient or popular in the moment. Perhaps this kind of leadership is more a matter of technique, then, or “smarts”?
Technique has some merit, but not, I think, by itself. Repeated tales of industries led by the “smartest guys in the room” demonstrate that intelligence and task competence, without character, spell disaster. Once the dictum “deceive for the sake of the task” becomes an operating rule, the consequences can and usually do get ugly.
If positive leadership is at least partly a matter of values, then we really do need to consider how it operates:
Every moral code has to have an answer to the question “Why be good”? How is it that moral choices are not just personal preferences? How can society discuss questions of how we ought to live together if nobody knows where “ought” comes from and everybody thinks that “ought” is an imposition of someone else’s will?
I think that avoiding cognitive dissonance is one part of the answer. And intellectual ability, while essential in a variety of leadership tasks, is not identical with, nor even a substitute for, character. As Leonard Reed argued in Vision (download the book from this link), leadership requires insight to accompany the gift of foresight.