Ethical Leaders vs Tyrannical Leaders

In a government, a company, a sports team, a family or any institution, the key, defining feature of ethical leadership is that it enriches every member of the team, including the leader. It also benefits the institution, helping it to fulfill its mission, thereby benefiting society.

Ethical leadership is oriented towards personal good and the common good. It is the only leadership that is worth exercising and supporting, the only one that is in our best interest, regardless of what morals, trends or fashions might say.

There is a mistaken belief that the key to good leadership is its effectiveness and success, while everything else is naivety, outmoded idealism or moralism.

In politics, in business, and unfortunately also in families, there are too many examples of effective leadership, which is extremely harmful for those who exercise it and for those who endure it as subordinates or as part of the institution or society where the impact of this type of leadership is felt.

Someone who produces results without caring about ethics — without caring whether the objectives sought are good or bad and how people are treated in order to achieve them — is an operator, not a genuine leader.

Mafias and organizations that operate secretly, pursuing illicit and illegal ends, sometimes have highly efficient operators. The fact that this word has become common in Mexico’s political language is yet another symptom of the malaise that afflicts our democracy.

A simple operator who manages to weave a network of subordinate operators, and who manages to become deeply embedded in an institutional hierarchy, having institutional resources at his or her disposal, turns into a leader ... but a tyrannical, not an ethical, leader.

Regardless of what they say, how they present themselves to others, even how they see themselves, operators and tyrannical leaders pursue exclusive assets: assets that, if attained, cannot be shared, assets such as individual enrichment, excessive pleasures, power as domination and fame, that frivolous, yet perverse, stepsister of honor.

Operators and tyrants couldn’t care less about the benefit of subordinates, institutions and society. The benefit of, for example, the company and its key actors - shareholders, collaborators, customers, suppliers - will be sought by a tyrannical leader only insofar as it helps him or her attain the much-desired exclusive assets. The benefit would be accidental, and may or may not accompany the quest for a perverse ideal of selfish success, which is pursued at the expense of others, mainly at the expense of subordinates; not thanks to them. This “success” implies the degradation and gradual corruption of subordinates and, very often, contempt for people, institutions and laws.

That is why tyrannical leaders surrounds themselves with naive enthusiasts (“useful fools”), numerous opportunists, flatterers and sycophants (informers paid to slander).

The tyrannical leader manipulates and coaxes through fear and threats; or seduces through charisma and handouts. These leaders encourage loyalty to themselves, rather than to the project or the company.

In contrast, ethical leadership has the power to bring people together and foster enthusiasm with the wealth and ambition of the project; with the possibility of growing as a person, of growing within the institution. It offers the opportunity to improve, to do good, and to earn money honorably.

Ethical leadership demands through example and convinces with the humility of recognizing that it needs and asks for our participation to carry out a noble undertaking. It permits continuity over time because it is committed to people’s development and the completion of the project, and not to the worship of the leader's personality and the satisfaction of his or her his whims. It has no need for the fickle and eternally pale light of fame, but nor for the shadows that operators and tyrants require to conceal their unscrupulous, shameful actions.

A tyrannical leader can only have employees or accomplices, never collaborators or partners; followers, but never colleagues, let alone friends.

Article originally published in Alto Nivel.