The Kansas Statehouse dome soars into the Topeka sky on Sept. 9, 2024. (Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)
We’re getting leadership all wrong.
My epiphany came during one of those group classes that have become fashionable in the last few years, where your employer sends you and some of your colleagues off to a training that is supposed to teach you effective leadership. In my case the employer was a state university here in Kansas and my colleagues were faculty members and an administrator or two.
The course was taught by people who believed they were doing good. I thought so too, at least at first.
The training program had been spawned at an Ivy League college and required trainees to undergo a series of exercises with their team. Some of these — such as a self-evaluation of strengths and weaknesses — seemed helpful, but others just seemed cruel.
In one exercise, a colleague was required to stand facing a corner while the others talked critically about them literally behind their backs. I participated in this a few times, but with growing unease. I stood in the corner myself. When it was time for a particularly sensitive colleague to face the corner, I finally had enough. I refused to participate and said the exercise was demeaning for everyone.
I was told I was just being difficult.
Questioning the training was discouraged, and instead we were told to trust the process. I soon found myself pondering whether the time and money would have better been spent in helping the poor rather than making people unquestioningly stand in corners.
The leadership style being taught was more akin to game theory than anything else. There was a lot of energy spent on identifying challenges and workshopping solutions, of developing strategies to overcome resistance to change, and of workers and citizens accepting responsibility for outcomes. Everybody was a leader! As hard as the instructors tried to persuade us they were teaching paradigm-shifting strategies, it all seemed rather conventional.
And there’s the flaw.
Instead of recognizing leadership as the political courage to do what’s right, most people talk about leadership as the ability to motivate others to do what you want. What you want people to do may or may not be good for them, but if it serves your political or economic purpose — winning an election or getting a bigger market share — then that’s leadership, right?
Some will be inclined to write blistering comments about my misunderstanding of the definition of leadership. But hear me out. Leadership should not be about the administration of influence or the management of consensus. It’s not even about politics. It’s about the courage to act selflessly.
That’s difficult to do if your vote or your personhood has been disenfranchised by others. Think of the history of Kansas and you’ll likely come up with a few names of influential politicians, but those who have moved the state — and the country — in the direction of justice have often been ordinary citizens.
I will name two: Susanna Salter and Oliver Brown.
Salter was a wife and mother in Argonia, a south central Kansas town. In 1887, as a joke, her name was put on the ballot for mayor by a group of anti-temperance men who didn’t like her activism. Kansas had granted women the right to vote in municipal elections that year. Surprisingly, she won. Even more surprisingly, she took office — at a time when women could still not vote in state or national elections — and served admirably as the first woman mayor in Kansas and perhaps the country.
You may not recognize Oliver Brown’s name, but you’ll know the U.S. Supreme Court case associated with him: Brown v. Board of Education. Brown was the father of Linda, who was denied admission to a white elementary school in Topeka. Brown, a welder with the Santa Fe railroad, was a member of the local chapter of the NAACP. Along with 12 other parents, Brown challenged the 1879 Kansas law that permitted segregation. The case, along with several similar actions across the country, would eventually go to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1954 declared the “separate but equal” doctrine unconstitutional.
To be a leader, you must be willing to take a principled stand at some personal risk, as did Salter and Brown. Others may be inspired to do the same, but there’s no guarantee anybody will ever come to your aid. We have a leadership vacuum in Kansas because too few are willing to risk too little on behalf of others.
We have plenty of politicians, but damned few leaders.
I cringed when Gov. Laura Kelly, at the close of her 2024 State of the State address , referenced “that great Kansan, Ted Lasso” and urged her constituents to be like goldfish: “You know what the happiest animal on earth is? It’s a goldfish. You know why? It’s got a 10-second memory. So be a goldfish.”
Kelly’s point was to avoid the “divisions of the past,” but couldn’t she have urged cooperation in a better way than quoting a fictional television character?
There’s a place for forgiveness, for reconciliation, for compromise.
But progress should not be about a lack of memory. To forget the folly of the past is an invitation to repeat it. Political amnesia is not the antidote for division.
Kelly has been described as having “rock star” appeal, no small accomplishment for a Democratic governor in a red state. She relates well one-on-one with Kansans. But I wish she could better articulate her vision for the state.
Americans treat our political leaders as we would the captains of a sports team (and perhaps that’s why Kelly referenced “Ted Lasso” ) and judge their worth by whether they can get the ball past the other team’s uprights. Even though the game is played on the public pitch, the result is reckoned not by what is in the common good or the will of the people but in goals and accumulated yardage.
If it were otherwise, marijuana would be decriminalized in Kansas, the “intractable” problem of homelessness would have been long solved, and school librarians wouldn’t be living in fear of having the “wrong” books on their shelves. We also wouldn’t have the blankety-blank electoral college nullifying 42% of the presidential votes cast in Kansas. We must change the system, just as we changed in 1913 the way U.S. senators are chosen. They are now elected, not appointed by state legislatures.
You can take classes in leadership, or even major in it or obtain an advanced degree, but theory may not do much good in the places where it counts the most. The “common good” might be found in small-scale civic projects, but it evaporates like morning mist in the harsh daylight of electoral politics. I say this not to malign academics and politicians who sincerely use their abilities for the benefit of others — Elizabeth Warren, who is both an academic and a politician, comes first to mind — but to acknowledge the difficulty of transforming the pitch on which political ball is played.
We have always had a few conscientious and moral political leaders, but they are chiefly remembered only after their passing. Time has a way of knocking the rough edges off history and of making us forget the anxiety of uncertain outcomes. Abraham Lincoln is regarded today as our greatest president, but at the time he was disparaged by his own commanders as an idiot and worse — an “original gorilla.”
Leaders such as Lincoln have guided us from the precipice of disaster not because they were excellent politicians but because they were individuals who had the character to meet the challenges of their times. Lincoln was a masterful politician who placed the moral duty to the country and his fellow human beings first.
Our most courageous Kansas senator, according to “Profiles in Courage,” a 1956 Pulitzer Prize-winning book by John F. Kennedy (and ghostwritten by Ted Sorensen), was Edmund G. Ross. Voting for acquittal in the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson in defiance of his own party, Ross saved Johnson’s presidency — and ended his own political career. The principle involved? That Congress should not impeach a president simply because it disagreed with him over policy.
Although “Profiles” is about the U.S. Senate, Kennedy and Sorensen repeatedly urged ordinary citizens to adopt the examples of political bravery.
“In whatever arena of life one may meet the challenge of courage, whatever may be the sacrifices he faces if he follows his conscience — the loss of his friends, his fortune, his contentment, even the esteem of his fellow men — each man must decide for himself the course he will follow,” they write. “… For this each man must look into his own soul.”
Despite the male pronouns there, which was common for the era, the point remains valid.
Elsewhere in the book, they write:
“In a democracy, every citizen, regardless of his interest in politics, ‘holds office’; every one of us is in a position of responsibility; and, in the final analysis, the kind of government we get depends on how we fulfill those responsibilities. … We will get the kind of political leadership, be it good or bad, that we demand and deserve.”
Today, some may be inclined to take for granted the right of women to vote and serve in elected office or the Constitutional prohibition against racial segregation. The right to free speech, to marry the person we love, and to expect equal justice under the law might seem old hat by now. But it would be a mistake to take these freedoms for granted. Our hard-won rights are endangered by the politics of extremism, where in chambers like the GOP-controlled Kansas Statehouse moderates are punished and self-interest rules.
Leadership shouldn’t only be about winning, or about party affiliation or the lack of it, or the ability to get people to like you. But real leadership is about the courage to lose and keep fighting. And refusing to be a goldfish.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here .
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