17

When the Master governs, the people
are hardly aware that he exists.

                                                            Next best is a leader who is loved.
                                                                 Next, one who is feared.
                                                                      The worst is one who is despised.

If you don’t trust the people,
you make them untrustworthy.

The Master doesn’t talk, he acts.
When his work is done,
the people say, “Amazing:
we did it, all by ourselves!”

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu, trans. by Stephen Mitchell

This meditation upon leadership implies that leadership of the highest quality employs a light touch, a timely, deft nudge. Next best is the style that evokes praise, adulation by the masses. Loved for what is believed to be true. The unspoken truth that myths are imaginary projections of the mind. A type of love that is expressed by the roar of massed ticket holders at a political rally is fickle, enduring until the myth wears thin. In No. 3 position is the style that exacts obedience from his/her subjects. “My way or the highway.” I understand this style is ascendant now in some American corporations. Today’s New York Times reports on the cosmic realignment of Silicon Valley companies:

“It’s the shut up and grind era,” writes Kate Conger, who has a great dispatch about life inside the big companies. As one recent Google alumna told her, “the level of fear has gone way up” even as offices still offer free food and high salaries. “I suppose it’s better to have lunch and be scared to death than to not have lunch and be scared to death.”

The No. 4, bottom-cellar style of management is that of a heavy handed autocrat, evoking loathing by all who are exposed to his/her whim. 

This short list suggests a diminishing capacity to “let be,” to trust the judgment, to respect the capacity for self care inherent within institutions, subcultures, organizations constituting the zone of leadership’s influence. A maximum of good-will, of trust – is reciprocated in like manner.

As a post script: trust is a involuntary feature of character formation, of self-definition.

I am what I am.