The Center Is Re-Forming

Our past understanding of leadership is inadequate to the time we are in.

This Change Was Always Present

The political and governmental status quo has been disrupted like never before. The story is far too extensive to describe here. The history of this time will not be fairly written until a generation of people who have yet to be born can look back and see the whole story.

It didn’t start with Donald Trump. It started with the secrets that people in positions of power held from the people. The mythology that accompanied this strategy was the creation of a mythology of leadership that said some people are born to lead, everyone is born to follow. When I discovered this in the literature of leadership back the 1980s, I immediately rejected it.

What “the few leaders; many followers” myth is intended to create is a separation of the people from their leaders. Don’t take this personally. It is how governments are structured everywhere. They are structured to be authoritarian with weak leaders because weak leaders can be controlled with money and power.

In 2022, I wrote a piece called The Ostrich, The Peacock, and the Sheepdog. I described these leadership behavior archetypes as,

The Ostrich hides.

The Peacock preens.

The Sheepdog watches.

This is how I described each.

The Ostrich has skills and experience that enabled them to rise through the ranks to a position of authority. But, they don’t like to be held accountable. They are afraid of being identified as inadequate, or worse a fraud. So they hide. They hide in their office, isolated from what is happening in the other offices or on the shop floor. They created a climate of control by creating a meeting regimen that does not ever change. It is safe, predictable, and designed to avoid creating thought. They have their head in the ground. Hiding. Letting their competitors outpace them to the forefront of their industry.

The Peacock is a highly visible leader. You can spot them easily. They are the center of attention in any room. They glad-hand everyone. They never reveal their true thoughts because to do so means alienating someone. They too are risk-averse. There is not much to say about them.

The Sheepdog is the watcher. Eyes up, focused on the sheep, looking for wolfs who would invade the herd to harm it. You’ve heard of wolves in sheep’s clothing. The false person. The deceiver. The weaver of dissension. This is who the Sheepdog is looking for.

Patterns of Trustworthy Leadership

We want to trust. But, it doesn’t come automatically. Trust is hard to build and easy to destroy. Sometimes we trust too quickly. Other times, we delay because of our own uncertainty.

Trust is not a transaction between a leader and a group of followers. It is personal and social. It begins with respect, out of which, trust can be built. Once trust is established, then mutual accountability can be practiced.

Another way to look at the character of trust is as an expression of both the head and the heart. With the head, you have confidence that the leader will do what they say they will. With heart, you believe that person has your best interest as their best interest.

The Ostrich desires to be trusted based on the structure of authority.

The Peacock desires to be trusted as an expression of personality.

In each case, the head and heart are not joined. Respect between the leader and the organization’s followers is not present. In this sense, trust is based upon the fulfillment of the transactional requirements of employment.

The Sheepdog is different in every way. The best description of this kind of leadership is found in an analogy that Jesus gives in describing himself as the Good Shepherd of the Sheep. The Shepherd and the Sheepdog function as one, unified in their commitment to the care and protection of the sheep. (John 10:1-18)

Donald Trump has taken on the role of Sheepdog. He has been watching. He knows where the threats are. And as we saw in July, he was willing to give up his life for the nation.

I wrote about this three years ago in a post called Leadership That Is Weak. I’m going to include the whole piece here.

Leadership That Is Weak

The Leader Who Starves The People

Many years ago I worked with a local community organization whose leader had systematically been running off or removing people that he saw as a threat to his authority. This organization operated within a regional network of other community groups like them. The authority structure of this network meant that the regional group could step in to address issues that members brought to them. In this case, members of the board who had not been run off asked the regional group to remove the person in leadership.

I worked with this group for two years following the removal of the organization’s leader. By concentrating power in this one man, the organization had become leadership starved. This means that the creativity of the members had been dampened. Participation, and subsequently, contributions by members had diminished. Recruitment of new members had been relegated to the leader. As a result, the members’ network of relationships within their community had lost focus. And, finally, membership had become for many, what are you doing for me rather than how can I contribute more.

On a Global Scale

The same philosophy of strong authoritarian leadership has grown over the past century. The egregious versions of this kind of leader – Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Idi Amin – have not persuaded others that this course is a bad one for a nation. Quite the opposite. It is a path to power and exploitation of the nation’s resources. There are also scores of companies that have found themselves in trouble because the executive leadership basically said, “We’ll make all the decisions.”

The global governmental response to the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, took this tact. Any question of a government’s approach was met with censorship and cancellation. The anticipated result is that people will step back from criticism for fear of their livelihood or even their life being taken away.

These are signs of weak leadership in practice, not strong leadership. For they point to a strange occurrence in the modern world where governments and business no longer exist for the people or one’s customers, but the people for the organization. It is difficult to see this without a contrasting picture. The following section, taken from my book, Where Has Trust Gone?: Restoring Authority and Accountability in Organizations illustrates a vastly different societal culture.

A Society Against The State

A half-century ago French anthropologist Pierre Clastres wrote about his fieldwork among the native tribes of the Amazonian rain forest. In these tribes, he found societies quite different than ours. These societies were led by a chief. But the chief had no power. All the power resided with the people as a whole. What then was the chief’s role in this society? It was to be generous and to daily remind the people who they are.

Imagine electing a president, a governor, a mayor, members of Congress, or the state legislature with the understanding that they have no power to tax, to prosecute, to activate the National Guard to quell rioting, or to surveil the population. Imagine if the only power elected leaders had was to influence people to take responsibility for their lives and their communities. How different this would be from our time where our leaders have so little confidence in their ability to influence us that they must operate the government from a stance of disrespect towards those who elected them.

Clastres’ research was controversial because he exposed the fragmented nature of modern states.

“What is a primitive society? It is a stateless society. To speak of a stateless society is necessarily to name the other societies, which is to say societies with a state. … I wonder why stateless societies are stateless, and it seems to me that if primitive societies are stateless it’s because they are societies that reject the state, they are against the state. The absence of the state in primitive societies doesn’t reflect a lack, it isn’t because they are still in the infancy of humankind, and so are incomplete, or because they aren’t big enough, or aren’t fully grown-up, adult, it is truly because they refuse the state in the broadest sense, the state defined by its minimal figure which is the relationship based on power. By the same token, to speak of stateless societies or societies against the state is to talk about those with a state, so there is bound to be practically no transition at all, or one that is immediately possible.”

Clastres distinguished these tribes as primitive, not backward. His research countered the dominant view that civilizations had to have a governmental structure. His view was that a society did not require a state administration in order to be considered a civilization. He concluded that these tribes were not “societies without a state”, but “societies against a state.”

The importance of what Clastres identifies is important to understand for our self-awareness as modern people living in a modern age of institutions.

He writes,

“… each one of us carries within himself, internalized like the believer’s faith, the certitude that society exists for the State. How, then, can one conceive of the very existence of primitive societies if not as the rejects of universal history, anachronistic relics of a remote stage that everywhere else has been transcended? Here one recognizes ethnocentrism’s other face, the complementary conviction that history is a one-way progression, that every society is condemned to enter into that history and pass through the stages which lead to savagery to civilization. … archaic societies are almost always classed negatively, under the heading of lack: societies without a State, societies without writing, societies without history. The classing of these societies on the economic plane appears to be of the same order: societies with a subsistence economy. If one means by this that primitive societies are unacquainted with a market economy to which surplus products flow, strictly speaking one says nothing. One is content to observe an additional lack and continues to use our own world as the reference point: those societies without a State, without writing, without history are also without a market.”

For many of the people with whom I’ve shared Clastres’ perspective, they have a hard time wrapping their head around the idea that a civilization could exist without a state administration. This response is analogous to other perspectives related to organizational structure where the individual cannot grasp the idea of alignment. The situation is one where we are like fish in water, so deeply encompassed and compromised by the organizational structures of our time that we can’t see their impact upon us.

What are we to learn from Clastres’ perspective? Surely it isn’t that we should destroy federal, state, and local governments. These primitive societies are not anarchic. They are governed, just without having a state administrative apparatus to govern the affairs of the tribe.

Clastres’ perspective shows that for accountability to be effective, it requires a relationship with the people. Today, it isn’t just governmental institutions that lack a relationship with the people, but also many organizations. Few of us have a personal relationship with the organizations in our lives. For most of us, our relationships are based upon a contract, an agreement, an implied consent to fulfill certain obligations. We live in a fee-based society. We pay the fee and receive the benefit. For most of us, we are not investing for impact.

If there is a direct application to the organizational structures that we have today, we could look at the mayor of a town, the owner of a business, a corporate CEO, or the president of a nation as responsible for the advancement and preservation of the relationship between authority and accountability. Of course, this means the role of the leader changes. For now, in some clearly defined way, all people within the organization or who are served by it are considered equal.

We should recognize that in these primitive cultures, the people are one. They speak as one. The tribe exists as one. Therefore, the chief is a servant to the whole of the tribe. His job is to tell the story which reminds them why they exist as they do.

It could be said that in these tribal societies, they are centered in their relationships with one another. There is no accountability without a direct relationship between those who govern and those governed. Relationships of accountability validate authority. Without authority, there is no order, only chaos.

From Leadership Starved to Leader-rich

We live in a leadership-starved world where a direct connection between the individual and the organization or the government is missing. Authoritarian leadership structures are weak ones. They are Societies Against The People, borrowing from Clastres perspective. As a result, the people exist in isolation from one another and the institutions of society.

There exists in every organization, every nation, region, or society a fundamental social structure. It exists apart from the organization or the state itself. I call this “a persistent, residual culture of relationships.” As a network, it persists because it resides in a shared culture of values. This culture is a natural outgrowth of human interaction within the social environment of a community or at work. And this is different than what is commonly understood as a corporate culture.

A leader-rich environment is one where the people freely participate in the life of the community and contribute in ways to make it a better, more harmonious, a more prosperous one. As a result, genuine leadership is not measured by the ego-satisfaction of the person in charge, but rather by the extent that leadership has been developed in others.

Donald Trump has taken on the role of a Clastres-like primitive chief. Everyday he is telling us what the DOGE is discovering. I hope it will mean a return of financial responsibility to all levels of government.

As The Center Does Not Hold …

My book, Where Has Trust Gone?: Restoring Authority and Accountability in Organizations, was written during the summer of 2020. The post, Leadership That Is Weak was written in March 2022. A month later I published, As The Center Does Not Hold, the Periphery Grows. In that post, I wrote the following.

“Society is a fluid reality that moves between integration and disintegration all the time. It is a cyclical process. So, as we are dividing into smaller and smaller enclaves of ideological passion, the point will come when we can divide no further. Society will not go away, but reform itself.

Sixty years ago, Edward Shils wrote an essay called Center and Periphery that described the integrated social fabric of society.

“Society has a center. There is a central zone in the structure of society. This central zone impinges in various ways on those who live within the ecological domain in which the society exists. Membership in the society … is constituted by relationship to this central zone.

The central zone is not, as such, a spatially located phenomenon. … The center, or the central zone, is a phenomenon of the realm of values and beliefs. It is the center of the order of symbols, of values and beliefs, which govern society. It is the center because it is the ultimate and irreducible; and it is felt by many who cannot give explicit articulation to its irreducibility. The central zone partakes of the nature of the sacred. In this sense, every society has an ‘official’ religion … The center is also a phenomenon of the realm of action. It is a structure of activities, of roles and persons, within the network of institutions. It is in these roles that the values and beliefs which are central are embodied and propounded.”

This is how societies form and function. Even primitive societies function this way. Pierre Clastres describes these as societies against the state. They organize around the values that define society. Leadership in primitive societies has a different role than what we see in modern Western states. Borrowing from Robert Lowie, Clastres describes the chief of the primitive tribe as needing three skills. The chief serves as a peacemaker. The chief is generous in securing wealth to distribute to the tribe. And the chief is a good orator speaking daily to the tribe to remind them who they are and the values that define their society. The principal distinction between primitive and modern leadership is that the primitive chief has no power or authority over the tribe. The tribe makes decisions as a whole.

Miguel Abensour describes Clastres view of a society with a state.

“For there to be power, the society must be divided on the basis of a commanding-obedience relationship. Society must be divided into the top – the dominant – and the bottom – the dominated, who obey. A power that is not exerted is not power. Power is brought to bear by the fact that those on top force those on the bottom to pay a tribute … Clastres professes a restrictive view of power in that it is specifically political and in that power relationship takes the form of division. Once the political division exists there is an obligation to pay one’s debt to the chief … “But what’s the use of the tribute? First of all, it is a marker of power, it’s the sign of power! … The tribute is the sign of power and at the same time it’s means for maintaining it, the means of ensuring the permanency of the sphere of power…”

In other words, there is political power that divides and social power that can unify based on shared values. This is the picture that I see having taken place over the past half-century. Political power has grown while the social power of shared values has diminished. The result is a growing gap between the center and the periphery, between those who lead and those who are meant to follow.”

It remains to be seen whether Donald Trump can unify the nation and heal the breach between the Center and the Periphery.

Reforming the Center

Donald Trump is one man. Love him or hate him, it does not matter at this point.

What does matter is what we do. How are we accountable to the healing of the nation?

I do not believe that we can look elsewhere for leadership. I believe it resides with us.

When I started on this journey of a full-time leadership person, my purpose was

“to encourage and equip people to take personal initiative to create impact in their local communities.”

My purpose has not changed because I see in people everything they need to make a difference with their lives.

Maybe you have been an Ostrich, hiding away from responsibility and accountability. How’s your life? Are you fulfilled? Are you creating a legacy of impact that will be spoke of after you are gone from this world?

Or, maybe you see yourself as the Peacock, posing as a person of influence with you personal brand and a YouTube plaque on your shelve. What do you have to show for all your time influencing. What lasting difference have you made?

Quite possibly, you are a Sheepdog and you have been watching and caring for your community. And you have suffered for the defense of your community.

If you have been a follower all your life or what some call a rule follower, you probably have never fully realized what your potential for making a difference can mean.

My hope is not in Donald Trump or Elon Musk. As it is, they are performing a thankless job. Strong leadership often requires going against a strong head wind. I believe they are doing what is needed. I have seen the effects of the lack of accountability and corruption. It not only affects the institutions of society, but more significantly, the emotional state of the people.

We have our part to play. I hope you will look at your community and go make a difference by healing the Center and the Periphery that is directly related to you. This is where I place my hope for the future.