Elders are the cradle to develop leaders
Everyone seems to be crying out, “where are the good leaders” amidst the challenges of these unprecedented days. I’m asking a different question. “Where are the elders?” We focus our attention on the outstanding leader, but less on how outstanding leaders are created. Few would argue that Mandela became an outstanding leader of the liberation struggle, of his nation and of his generation. How did he develop his leadership? What Exec Development seminar did he attend? Where did he do his MBA? Mandela was always clear on the answer to those questions.
Elders.
From his birth until his death, he credits the presence of elders in his life as the critical factor in his leadership development. The formation of his character, his wisdom, his values and his personal development were all forged within the context of these relationships. Reuel Khoza summed it up when he said, ‘the importance of elders ….is they are the cradle in which leaders are developed[1]’. Few people seem to talk about this crucial cradle because the West has largely forgotten, or forsaken, its own traditions of elders and has (dare I say), become arrogant that only modern Western leadership models are worth considering as valid for dealing with national and global problems.
So how do elders provide this vital cradle to develop world-equipped leaders, beyond the obvious, necessary skills acquired from ED programmes? I want to suggest that elders develop leaders in four critical ways.
Moving beyond partial personal development.
To develop as a leader requires that we develop as a person. This sounds obvious but it is by no means inevitable. Many people grow (age), without really growing up (emotionally and psychologically and spiritually). You will have heard someone say of a leader, “they are technically great, by my goodness they are so childish when it comes to criticism”. Human development is well researched and involves psychological, emotional, spiritual (meaning) and moral development. Our sense of self, who we uniquely are, develops securely, or insecurely in all of these dimensions in childhood. It is well documented how many high performing leaders ‘suffer’ (and they do suffer) from degrees of narcissism[2] and it affects everything from their motivation, leadership and influencing styles, to their need to succeed and be rewarded or acclaimed. You can be a brilliant strategist who has little moral compass, and little sense of how to move beyond your own tribal thinking. As I write, a friend tells me of the number of staff (including herself) leaving her organisation because the leader, a PhD with a brilliant CV, alienates, manipulates and passively bullies his staff. He keeps his job while the staff vote with their feet to keep their sanity. I’ve also worked with the opposite type of leader, who are terminally ‘nice’ because they cannot bear to make tough decisions that may draw criticism against them.
Elders have, as they say, ‘done the work on themselves’ in the dimensions of personal development, so they can help leaders to confront and navigate that same developmental journey within themselves. Socrates said, “the unexamined life is not worth living” and elders have done a lot of that self-examination, so they can help leaders do the same. Without elders we can end up with ‘grown up’ infants as leaders.
Moving beyond partial character.
Why is character development so important in leadership? It is not an exaggeration to say that many, if not most, real failures in leadership are not for the lack of a good MBA, but issues of character. From the high-profile cases of Enron, Lehman Brothers, VW, Weinstein, Lassiter, to the plethora of less media-worthy stories, the collapses came from character issues, not the lack of IQ, or strategic, or financial thinking. I explored this extensively in my book Doing The Right Thing – getting fit for moral leadership, as have leadership and eldership experts from Jaqueline Novogratz to the Global Elders.
We all have cracks or flaws in our character. No one is immune. No one can throw the first stone. The issue is not whether we have them, but what we do with them. Do we ‘do the work’, on our character to ensure that we let the light in, as Leonard Cohen wisely says, or do we shut up against the light. Nelson Mandela’s was clearly a man with flaws in his character, ranging from his alleged violence, to his anger, but there was one vital difference for him than many others. Elders. Mandela was very clear that his leadership was formed from birth to death in the cradle of elders, who consistently challenged him about his character issues, called him out and made him do the hard work on himself. Speaking from experience, it is not comfortable living with such close accountability, but it is vital. Mandela would have been just another leadership statistic without the elders in his life.
Moving beyond partial perspective
I listened recently as a friend told me his interesting story. He works with a high-profile public leader, who recently crashed very publicly on a character challenge. He was left unsure what his personal response should be. Should he resign or wait? He said that every single one of his peers (he is around 30 years old), told him that he should resign without hesitation. Go! But he wisely decided to consult the elders in his life and every one of them said the same thing – but totally different than his peers. They all said he shouldn’t rush, everyone has flaws, pressure on public figures is unbearable, give some room for lessons to be learned, but most of all give himself some space to work out what it is that he really wanted to do next with his life. Act, yes, but don’t react to the noise of media or peers in a knee-jerk reaction.
One of the defining qualities of an elder is wisdom. They are people of immense experience, but they have processed this into the elixir of wisdom. Wisdom brings perspective. Everything in life sits in a context and elders help us find the wider, deeper, longer story behind what seems immediately obvious. I walked down a street this morning in search of a coffee. On the other side of the road, further down, I could a glimpse of a group of five men seemingly sprawled across the pavement, wearing rough clothes and with drinks in hand. It was only 10am. I made an instant judgement about them and it wasn’t a good one. On my way back, coffee in hand, I found myself on their side of the road and looked ahead and at first glance I couldn’t see them there. As I got closer what I actually saw was a totally different scene. The men were all now standing up and I could now see that they were wearing their dirty work overalls to protect them because they were re-plastering the wall adjacent to the path I’d seen them sitting on. Coffee cups against the wall. The building they were repairing I could now see was a Breast Cancer Support shop. With a totally different perspective, I made a totally different judgement. This is what elders do for us. Because of their wisdom, they help leaders see a more complete story and make more complete judgements and decisions.
Moving beyond partial meaning
I hear people talk about needing to develop leaders for the ‘real’ world, but few seem to ask, ‘what is the real world?’ and ‘whose real world’ are you referring to? Having worked across four continents, with people of very vulnerable living standards, it seems that the problem with a lot of leaders’ ‘real’ worlds, is that they aren’t the real world at all. I used to train bankers and lawyers, among other professions, who by definition had a minimum of a Master’s degree, a very substantial salary and lived in secure communities. I frequently challenged them that by definition the world they lived in was the richest, safest 1% (more accurately closer to 0.1%) of the world. Whilst it may be real for them, it wasn’t the real world as most people experienced it. A western, atheistic, consumeristic world view is not the real world for most people. A purely rationalistic world view won’t get you far in Asia, the middle east or Africa.
To build truly sustainable and legacy-leaving leadership we need leaders who have made that spiritual journey. I use ‘spiritual’ to indicate the deeper, existential meaning and realities of life as we experience it – not religion, which can often be a power-dominated system. Viktor Frankl said that a leader who has dug deep into the question of ‘why?’, the meaning of their life, can deal with almost any ‘what’, or difficult circumstance. My practice is to have a minute’s mindful silence with anyone I work with, to make a space within ourselves and between us for something deeper, ‘other’, trans (beyond). I never dictate what that should be, just that I know there is always more to life than I can ever imagine. Even the brightest scientists on the planet say the same thing. They value the agnostic, literally the ‘I don’t know’. When a leader ‘knows’, they have stopped learning. And a leader who isn’t learning is, at best, soon redundant, less relevant and at worst, dangerous.
The essence of Reuel Khoza’s wisdom is that leadership is developed (cradled, nurtured, incubated) in relationship, far, far more than any expensive MBA seminars, or Executive Development (ED) training rooms. Leadership potential, sustainable leadership potential, sustainable leadership potential that outlives you with a legacy, requires a lifetime of being cradled in the presence of elders. We can’t grow to the best of our potential on our own. At best solo, or accidental, leadership development leads to stunted, half baked, one dimensional, short term leadership. You can become an A* at financial modelling and a C- at wisdom on your own, but that is not the kind of leadership the world needs right now. We desperately need the cradle of the elders and we need to talk a lot more about where to find them and how to develop them for the next generation.
[1] Let Africa Lead Reuel Khoza Vezubuntu 2006
[2] Where Ego’s Dare McFarlin & Sweeney Kogan Page 2000; Leaders, Fools & Imposters Kets De Vries Jossey-Bass 1993
Manifesto for a Moral Revolution Jaqueline Novogratz Henry Holt & Co 2020; https://theelders.org