"Bad" Leaders Revisited

Someone on the Learn To Lead network (http://learntolead.ning.com) responded to my blog posting entitled “Are There Bad Leaders?” The posting originally appeared in this blog on October 8, 2007. The responder began his comments by saying there are of course bad leaders and ended arguing that there have to be or how else can we decide who are the “good” leaders. His comments prompted me to elaborate further why I asked the original question.

People seldom get to choose their manager—whether in sports or the workplace. Having a position, however, does not make one a leader. Management is based on position while leadership is founded on relationship. People “obey” a manager and “follow” a leader. The difference between a manager and a leader is also based on perspective and focus. See my blog post entitled “What Leaders Do.”

In true leadership followers choose the leader by deciding to follow someone. When followers withdraw their loyalty, that someone ceases to be the leader. People may still obey the individual but will not be followers. Take Hitler for an extreme example. There were some who followed Hitler as their leader to the end. They never stopped believing in the man, his values, or what he was striving to accomplish. Others, though, became disillusioned. They no longer believed in the man and his cause. They may have continued to obey Hitler, though, out of fear of the consequences of not doing so. This made Hitler their dictator, not their leader.

I don’t perceive people judging a person to be a “bad” leader and then continuing to consider that person to be their leader. They may continue to obey but not to follow. As I have argued in previous blog postings, leadership is a system; it is a relationship. When followers withdraw their loyalty from a leader, they destroy the system. They now judge the lead person from outside the system, outside the leadership relationship. I don’t believe that people choose to follow someone they perceive to be “bad.” That label is applied by those who are outside the leadership system. I judge as “bad” those I do not consider to be my leader.

That leads to the question the responder raised at the end of his comment. How are we to decide who is a “good” leader and who is a “bad” one? The way to answer that is to say that there are those who are leaders and those who are not. A more disturbing question is how do we know we are following a “good” leader? We continue to follow someone because we consider them to be “good.” Others, though, may judge that individual as “bad.” Who is correct? Whose judgment prevails? Are we unknowingly following “bad” leaders? How are we to know? Who is to decide?