Humility in Leadership in My

¶ … Humility in Leadership in My Life

I remember being encouraged to be a leader from the time that I was quite young. During earlier parts of my life, I did derive a certain level of personal satisfaction associated with being a leader, both because I had been socialized to look at it that way and also because there is an undeniable satisfaction that comes from being in charge and from having the respect of others as their leader. A few years ago, I might have described leadership as my most satisfying accomplishment. As an unpaid math tutor for my classmates, I had the opportunity to lead math study groups. Admittedly, I did experience the thrill of delivering a lecture and that experience has caused me to consider teaching as a possible future career goal. Similarly, as president and (previously) vice president of the international student club, I experienced the exhilaration of being in the position of leader.

More recently, however, I learned that the interpersonal satisfaction of leadership is largely a superficial pleasure and that people who have a lot of integrity learn to resist the urge to derive purely ego-based satisfaction from the interpersonal dynamics of being in charge or of having any authority over others. The more knowledgeable I become about current events and about human psychology, the more I have questioned the impulse of being drawn to positions of leadership and to distinguish doing so for the right reasons from doing so for the wrong reasons. It seems that the frequency of news reports about powerful and influential leaders in both business and politics suggests a connection between the impulse to be in charge and the potential for egotistical insensitivity or, in many cases, much worse.