​FOLLOWING THE LEADER

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
Leaders deliver loss.     Marty Linsky
 
Wow, I love this quotation.  It is the most economical yet comprehensive description of anything I have ever encountered.  These three words make a demand on my brain every time I look at them.
 
I had the privilege of learning from Marty Linsky a few times and to read much of what he has written (which is considerably longer).  His biography includes being the recipient of deliveries from leaders any number of times and learning from it.  I am certain that the way I choose to understand this small sentence today – different from many other times – will not capture a single dimension of what he meant.
 
Perhaps it is too obvious to say that we do not live in a perfect world.  But that lack of perfection does not prevent people from feeling satisfied with the world they inhabit.  The perfect may be the enemy of the good, but relinquishing perfection as the goal almost guarantees things will never be significantly better than they are right now.  That’s too sad to contemplate.
 
In order for anything to improve, it must change.  (Change, let’s acknowledge, is not always for the better.  However, it’s unusual for people to set out with the intention of making things worse!)  Once something changes, it disrupts the complacency and satisfaction of people invested in the status quo.  A leader must be able to push people out of their comfort zones at a pace that does not exceed their capacity to adjust.  That’s more than seeing where the crowd is headed and running to the front.  That’s much less than imposing unilateral modifications.
 
And I hope it goes without saying (but I will say it anyway) that popularity is not the same as leadership.  In the United States, we have a tendency to confuse the two.  The President is blithely labeled the “leader of the free world,” but what that means is that he won the most recent election.  Some presidents have been leaders.  Some have merely won elections among the voters who are counted.
 
I can’t believe that after more than a year’s time, countless investigations and fantastical-illogical conspiracy theories, there are still people who believe our last presidential election ended with a fraudulent decision.  By any accepted measure – popular vote or electoral vote – the incumbent was turned out of office by the challenger.  Let’s name names: Joe Biden was the winner, and Donald Trump was the loser.  But popularity is not the same as leadership.  As we learned in 2016, when the accepted measures were not so much in sync, earning a title and thus holding a position is not the same as effectively pursuing a more perfect union.
 
The leader is the person who delivers loss and thus opens the path to forward movement.  We have seen examples of people who have delivered loss to their followers and paved the way to progress – Jimmy Carter and George HW Bush come to mind, as well as countless state and local officials who placed the welfare of the community above their personal aspirations when they had to deliver loss.
 
I know Linsky was not thinking of Donald Trump when he distilled his wisdom into this one pithy saying.  When I heard him say it, no one imagined a Trump candidacy, let alone presidency. 
 
On January 6, 2021, we saw the definitive evidence that President Trump was not our leader.  He may have had deep personal convictions that he should remain in office for a second term, but he could not deliver loss.  The boundaries he broke down were not to necessary progress, but to self-serving regression.  As we now know, even people in his camp – media flacks, political allies, his own family – urged him to deliver loss to the rioters and insurrectionists, and he refused. The result was the most profound threat to our republic since the War of 1812.
 
And we should not be sanguine about the removal of barriers around the Capitol and the investigations being conducted within it.  A huge percentage of Americans still harbor suspicions about the validity of the 2020 election and wish to put the former president back in the Oval Office, even without the reversal of the official, legal, investigated constitutional process that removed him.  The only way for us to move forward into our collective future is through leadership.  And leadership delivers loss.
 
As I said, Linsky did not speak about Trump, and when I collected his words, I was not thinking about Trump.  I have considered this insight every time I have looked at leadership and every time I have looked for leadership.  Loss is hard to accept, especially the loss of what is familiar and comfortable.  But what awaits is not what used to be great, but what has yet to be great.

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