There has never been a more difficult time to lead anything — whether a publicly traded corporation or a nonprofit nongovernmental organization; whether a global university or a local, public school or classroom.
Indeed, many of the best would-be leaders I know are asking, why would I even want to be a leader?
As I prepare to step down from the Ford Foundation, having served through the years on more than a dozen boards of directors across sectors and industries, I see a gathering crisis of leadership.
The consequences for our shared democratic values and institutions are clear and present. The cycle that causes America’s leadership crisis ought to be, as well.
Hardly a day passes without a fellow leader lamenting — in sidebar, or green room, or private-lunch conversations — the myriad ways in which our culture actively discourages the courage that is essential to effective leadership.
Leadership is an action, not a title. And many of our leaders are paralyzed by broken, perverse incentives that impair their abilities to fulfill institutional missions and mandates. Paradoxically, many leaders feel that any reduction in their visibility brings with it a promise of reward.
Increasingly, I worry that well-intentioned boards of directors are selecting rising leaders for safety, appointing executives who have assiduously avoided controversy rather than those most adept at managing it. Then, they counsel toward caution, not conscience.
Around too many board tables, trustees and directors tell their executives: Just keep your head down. The prevailing attitude says: Speaking out will cost you more than it buys. Better to say as little as possible, to protect yourself and your reputation, to exhibit neutrality for the purpose of self-preservation.
Those in positions of leadership fear they will say the wrong thing, or what they believe to be the right thing in the wrong way. They fear risk, recrimination and reprisal. They fear a coarsening culture — our collective instinct to shame and shun, our collective intolerance for nuance and complexity — that squeezes them from all sides, corralling them toward the straightest, narrowest path.
To be sure, some argue that leaders should stay in their respective lanes: better not to risk offending one constituency or another, especially with a policy or perspective that might be construed as political. Sometimes, discretion is well advised and appropriate.
But courageous, moral leadership demands more. Because it challenges us to recognize that bringing light is often worth enduring the heat, especially in moments of profound challenge for our democracy, our communities and our world.
We penalize bold leadership when we should be rewarding it. Inequalities of all kinds have eroded the very foundation of our American community — because inequality has created the conditions in which the American people are both desperate for leadership and programmed for corrosive cynicism about seemingly anyone who offers it.
Many millions of people feel completely out of control — as if the world has turned against them — and they respond with distrust, and resentment, and grievance, and vitriol, reflections of deep hopelessness.
We have become, simply put, antisocialized. As the political scientist Robert Putnam has demonstrated, we engage less in community activities and organizations, and as the journalist Bill Bishop has documented, we self-sort into homogenous geographic clusters more. The U.S. surgeon general has even declared an epidemic of loneliness. Leadership — a communal exercise by definition — is relentlessly undermined.
At the same time, in a divided and often lonely nation, our society’s forces of narrow self-interest prey on disaffected, disillusioned people and communities, for their own gain, with impunity, and they do so in part through our distorted media system.
Polarizing content drives engagement and profit: Hour after hour, post after post, content is monetized to further degrade our discourse and democracy. This has an effect on our leaders, in turn.
This formula may provide a healthy return on capital, but it does so at the cost of an information cancer.
Only a generation ago, leaders used the commons as the place in which to negotiate diversity and difference — to find common ground — sometimes more effectively than others. But now, we treat the public square as merely another platform on which to take a side and to prove our piety to it. And all of this renders us, in a word, ungovernable.
One indispensable solution is the thing contemporary culture deters and disparages: bold, undaunted, audacious leaders.
Fearless leaders have been essential to the survival of America’s grand experiment from the very beginning. On scales large and small, the vision of our leaders has always changed the ways we see ourselves and one another.
Heroes of each successive generation attended to our ancestors through adversity — against reactionary resistance — not only from the top down, but also from the bottom up; from the community, civic and civil-society organizations that give shape and structure to our lives; from the people we respect and admire, who call on us to be and do better.
To be clear, I do not claim any special moral principles; far from it. I do believe, however, that we need leaders focused on something bigger than the next earnings call or living in fear of the next journalist to call.
We need leaders who manifest a moral capacity to embrace the nuance and complexity to which we’ve become allergic, come what may — to take a stand for progress, even if incremental or imperfect.
Indeed, effective leadership requires managing nuance and complexity, seeing all sides of an issue from the perspective of every stakeholder, and then setting a course, and communicating with clarity, consistent with common values.
After all, no courage? No leadership. We cannot move forward, however unevenly, without courageous visionaries blazing new paths that illuminate the way for all of us to follow.
The responsibility rests on all of our shoulders—in the ways we lead, in the ways we choose our leaders, and in the ways we allow ourselves to be led.
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