It occurred to me today that our leaders are reflections of us.

If that makes you uncomfortable, let me qualify the statement a little bit to put you at ease.

Every leader, in every situation where you find yourself either 1) being lead, or 2) working as a leader alongside other leaders, reflects the character of either 1) someone being lead, or 2) some other leader in the organization.

Did that help?

What should be occurring to you at this moment is that the above, semi-bold statements are both 1) inflammatory, and 2) absolutely true.

Is it that hard for us to come to terms with the fact that our leaders are more like us than they are different than us? It might be, especially in situations where we don’t like those leaders for what they are, or for how they lead (or maybe for what they require us to do).

Additionally, any person that you’ve ever disliked for whatever reason, is more like you than they are different. 99.9% of your DNA is exactly the same as the DNA of anyone that you’ve ever identified as ‘other’ or ‘them’.

Maybe, you’re just uncomfortable with my opening statement about leaders because you want to be able to disassociate yourself from ‘them’.

But, putting aside for a moment the argument of sameness, the fact remains that leaders come up out of the body of us all, as all leaders do. As such, they are similar to the body of us all, having once been a part of that body. Whether or not they are like us as individuals –like you as a person or like me as a person– they certainly do represent a sameness to some part of the whole of us.

I can prove it to you. I happen to be thinking of a leader right now, one that I don’t particularly like much at all, and I know people, among the group of us being lead by this leader, who are very similar to the person that this leader is. And, interestingly enough, I like these people as people; I just don’t like the certain things about them that make them similar to this leader.

Did you hear what I just did? It’s called the benefit of the doubt. I gave it, in the last paragraph, to people that I know, because that’s what you do. When you get to know someone –their qualities and their faults– it’s easier to give them the benefit of the doubt, because you have grounds for believing that they ought to receive some leeway.

How about a challenge? I’ll wait here while you go find an example of a leader, living or dead, famous or not, who wasn’t representative of the group that they lead, in some way.

Any argument that our leaders don’t represent us as followers breaks down when you concur that we are all more the same than we are different.

* * *

Let’s talk about societal leaders, for a moment.

The quality of leadership in a society reflects the quality of the citizens in that society, in the sense that it is not reasonable for anyone to expect that a corrupt society is going to be able to generate, from some “magical leader machine” somewhere, anybody to lead the citizenry who doesn’t have the taint of the corruption of that society. As civilizations have risen and fallen throughout the history of humanity, those societies have been corrupted through different means. In many of those examples, corrupt leaders are also easily identifiable.

If I pull a spoonful of soup out of a bowl of soup, and I taste it, and it is awful, it is not likely that I am going to continue to sample spoonful after spoonful, operating under some assumption that those spoonfuls, each one as awful as the last, are just misrepresenting what remains in the bowl. 

When I was a kid, I was in Cub Scouts, and then Boy Scouts, for a period of about two-and-a-half years. I eventually left Boy Scouts because the man who lead the troop, that I was a part of, was an inconsolable jerk. He was mean to the boys in the troop, he was mean to their parents, he was mean to the other leaders who volunteered alongside him in leading the troop. He cursed to no end, he had zero patience for the boys he was to be mentoring. And so, I left the troop with the permission (and blessing) of my parents.

Or, consider the story that my wife has told me on a number of occasions, about a church leader from her past who ended up divorcing their spouse when that spouse got sick and required more care than the church leader was willing to give.

Or, consider any national leader who might represent themselves in a certain light to get the support of the people, during their rise to power, only to pull off the mask after that power has been grasped, to reveal themselves as truly deplorable people.

Maybe it’s the case that certain leadership positions include a responsibility to which the people in those positions must rise. It’s not okay for those positions to be occupied by people who are unwilling or incapable of being worthy of the office. It’s not okay that they shed the burden of being a proper leader while at the same time taking the privilege that often comes with leadership. It’s not okay that those who are lead by such leaders are subject to the inabilities of people who shouldn’t even be in leadership.

Maybe it’s the case that EVERY leadership position includes a responsibility that good leaders embrace and bad leaders avoid.

That Boy Scout troop leader and that church leader and those national leaders; they are despicable. They are reprehensible, disreputable, and dishonorable.

And they are us.

Because, in big ways and in small ways, we are all leaders. We all have people who are watching us with the intent to follow us, and with that position of power –as inconsequential as it might seem– we all have a responsibility to lead well. The parent must lead well. The office manager must lead well. The site foreman must lead well. The Sunday School teacher must lead well.

Our leaders are reflections of us. If you don’t like my opening statement, don’t look to them to change who they are. As Gandhi once said, “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.”