Results of Three Leadership Questionnaires With Discussion

¶ … Authentic Leadership Questionnaire measures leadership capacity across four different areas. These are self-awareness, internalized moral perspective, balanced processing, and relational transparency. The first of these is about a person's capacity to know their own strengths and weaknesses but also includes things like "emotional intelligence" in which you know how to understand others and how they react to your leadership style. Internalized moral-perspective is about ethical decision-making and ethical behavior, which seems slightly irrelevant in the context of business leadership. Balanced processing is a more difficult concept because it is about evaluating information during decision-making, and about wise decision-making skills. Finally relational transparency is about being clear about one's own goals and motivations, which again sounds like it may be irrelevant to the concept of business leadership. Relational transparency may be useful for a public high school principal trying to deal with her unionized underlings, but it is hardly a characteristic to which a successful professional poker player would aspire, and needless to say working on Wall Street is a lot more like playing poker professionally than it is like being a high school principal. My results on this inventory were 15 for self-awareness, 12 for internalized moral perspective, 14 balanced processing, and 13 for relational transparency. This is probably pretty accurate as a reflection of my own approach as well as a reflection of my attitude toward the utility of this assessment. The chief reason why I would consider the theory of Authentic Leadership to offer limited utility is its focus on rather traditional and hidebound concepts of integrity, honesty, and so forth. The idea here is that Authentic Leadership establishes a leader's legitimacy through honest dealings with subordinates and "leading by example" in areas like ethics. Are we supposed to believe then that Vladimir Putin is somehow a substandard leader? Putin has managed to hold onto the top leadership position in an extremely competitive capitalist environment for over a decade, and honesty and integrity and "leading by example" presumably have nothing to do with his success. Donald Trump is currently the front-runner in the race for a presidential nomination, and he is most famous for going on television to insult his subordinates and tell them unceremoniously "you're fired." Yet America is full of people who think Trump has what it takes to occupy the highest leadership post the country has to offer. Both Trump and Putin demonstrate that leadership can succeed just as easily with a strict regimen of grandiose self-promotion and ruthless mendacity. Any leadership theory that cannot account for the success of these men is hardly useful in discussing leadership.

B.

Servant leadership is a popular concept, which could indicate the profound truth of the theory of leadership it promotes, or could indicate a profound capacity for self-congratulation and self-deception on the part of those who popularize the theory. Northouse quotes Greenleaf's 1970 discussion of servant leadership to the effect that what distinguishes a servant leader is the desire to serve, putting the focus on others and serving their needs. Somehow this definition allows people to offer up examples like Jesus Christ and Martin Luther King Jr. as exemplary "servant leaders" while ignoring the fact that (1) both of these examples ended up being assassinated fairly early in their careers, which hardly suggests they are appropriate role-models for anyone hoping to have a long-term leadership career, let alone a comfortable retirement, and (2) most people occupying leadership positions in the contemporary world are nothing like either of these examples, suggesting the theory exists not to explain the way things work (as a theory ought) but instead exists to offer people like Carly Fiorina or Martin Shkreli the opportunity to think that their careers as leaders are potentially comparable to Jesus Christ or Martin Luther King Jr. For CEO-type leaders like Fiorina or Shkreli, the importance of the theory comes not when they are actually doing a CEO-type job, but afterwards, when they are going around trying to promote a story about their "legacy" or else fishing for plaudits and flattery in the hope of a philanthropic gift. Northouse's assessment tool for servant leadership measures this concept on seven aggregate categories, which are emotional healing (preposterously enough), creating value for the community, conceptual skills, empowering, helping followers grow and succeed, putting followers first, and behaving ethically. My scores were 12, 14, 14, 13, 14, 15, and 14 respectively. This would indicate that I am on the low end of average in my capacity for servant leadership, but I probably would have scored higher if I were interested in being able to grandiosely compare myself to Gandhi, which is largely what this theory seems to encourage. The trouble with a theory of leadership like this is that, of course, it suggests that L. Ron Hubbard is an excellent role model -- certainly all of his "followers" would argue that Hubbard put emotional healing and the needs of his followers first and foremost, but that is because Hubbard was not only a skilled and energetic profit-making businessman, but also a cult-leader. Worse yet, this theory of leadership puts a potential fig-leaf on what large organizations actually do: we are supposed to admire the fact that a good servant leader at a corporation will inspire his underlings to donate food to a food bank for the homeless, whereas a successful corporate leader will have to be doing all this while turning a regular quarterly profit in order to keep his job. This is not a real theory of leadership but a way for businesspeople and politicians to flatter themselves that what they are doing is not part of an utterly amoral capitalist system that has, over the course of its history, has repeatedly created hordes of homeless people as a result of its basic method of operation. The chief example that comes to my mind in evaluating the concept of servant leadership is a United States President who, at the time of his election, was already renowned worldwide as a great humanitarian -- after a successful career in business, he used his "servant leader" skills in order to create a network of charitable relief organizations to feed tens of millions of starving people in countries that had been devastated by a terrible war. This President was Herbert Hoover, and most Americans do not realize that he was world-famous before becoming President for spearheading the American Relief Administration, which basically provided food relief to Europe in the wake of World War One and the Russian Revolution, when bad weather caused food shortages and the war had devastated Europe's transportation systems. Most Americans do not know that Herbert Hoover was famous in Europe for feeding starving people for one good reason -- he then became President of the United States, and presided over millions of his own citizens becoming homeless and starving as the Great Depression began.

C.