US President Harry Truman famously had a plaque on his desk that said “The Buck Stops Here” and he meant it.
After the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima, for example, President Truman met with a group of army officers, including Colonel Paul Tibbets, the commander of the Enola Gay, the bomber that delivered the horrific payload that hastened the end of World War II. In discussing US action to end the War, the President asked Col. Tibbets what his thoughts were. The pilot replied that he had simply carried out his orders. It is reported that Mr Truman slapped his hand on the table and said: “You’re damn right you did, and I’m the guy that sent you. If anybody gives you a hard time about it, refer them to me.” The President might even have used earthier language, but there is no doubt that he accepted total responsibility for the controversial action.
Mr Truman, in common with others recognized as genuine leaders, showed that leadership is not only about having the courage of one’s convictions, but also about accepting that one is fully responsible for one’s actions and indeed, the actions of others tasked with carrying out one’s instructions.
As the famed US economic thinker John Kenneth Galbraith wrote: “All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.”
Leadership, particularly in war and times of crisis, is all about having the complete confidence of one’s followers. The ideal leader should, at one and the same time, lead from the front whilst standing firmly behind his or her people, come hell or high water.
Leadership is not about finger-pointing and the blame game. It is not about shifting responsibility to underlings. And it is certainly not about lacking proper answers to the most searching of questions. A leader’s mettle is truly tested when ordinary folk feel most vulnerable. If leaders are found wanting, then they have, frankly, betrayed the trust placed in them.
But leadership is not all about guts and glory. A story from the First World War – most likely apocryphal – is illustrative. A dashing Italian infantry officer stands above the trenches in his best dress uniform and plumed hat, sword in hand, exhorting his men to go over the top and charge the enemy. He cuts so fine a figure that his men are moved to applaud enthusiastically: “Bravo, Teniente, bravissimo!”
The officer might have looked the part and might have been willing to lead from the front, but his men were staying put. In modern terms, it might be said that there was a lack of consensus on how to achieve the objective of that particular mission. In other words, a leader must have the ability to make people believe in where they are heading, why they going in that particular direction and how they will get there.
Clearly, a leader seeking to unite and lead a team, an army, a nation even, needs to build support, starting with his or her most ardent followers and reaching out to those who are more questioning. Or maybe even the other way around.
As a first step towards effective leadership, a leader must be able to choose a good team to stand with him or her, to manage, as it were, the implementation of an overarching policy and to pursue directives for the achievement of strategic objectives.
Leadership is equally about the capacity to pose questions and to guide and elicit responses. A leader must know when to act and when to delegate, both in an atmosphere of managerial consensus. The responsibilities of leadership do not imply that the onus is on a leader to do it all, much less strike authoritarian attitudes.
Indeed, the belief that only the leader has the ability or the vision to get something done or achieve results is a dangerously misguided one, which leads logically to micromanagement. And if micromanagement and authoritarianism are mixed, then they become a heady and dangerously self-deluding brew, leading one to become nothing more than a micro-dictator, to coin a phrase.
Leadership, though, is largely an indefinable art, depending perhaps on ideals of responsibility, duty, respect, compassion, justice and strength of character. As Lewis H. Lapham, the American journalist and author aptly puts it: “Leadership consists not in degrees of technique but in traits of character; it requires moral rather than athletic or intellectual effort, and it imposes on both leader and follower alike, the burdens of self-restraint.”
