This week, NPR reporters introducing California Governor Jerry Brown's 2012 "State of the State" message were at a loss for words. "The Governor wrote his own speech," they said. There was no advance notice, no executive summary. Like the rest of us, they had to wait to hear what he had to say.
Professional speech writers have become so common for politicians that Brown's speech was an anomaly. He wrote it himself, a speech that reflected his vision of California's current challenges and future promise.
Whatever you think of his politics, by the very act of communicating his vision, Jerry Brown is a leader, a rarity these days when politicians are presented as slick, well-packaged products. Most of them read prepared remarks, like actors speaking from a script. Speech writers give them clever anecdotes, homey phrases, and campaign promises designed to appeal to their audience--a practice closer to advertising than leadership. Small wonder that after an election we often find we've voted for the package, not the person or complain about a crisis in leadership.
True leadership is not a product, but a process. Leaders listen to their people, hear their concerns, their dreams and aspirations, then develop a collective vision: a pathway to a better future.
While politicians can get polarized by problems, bogged down in acrid accusations, leaders have what Rollo May called the greatest kind of courage (1975). Turning problems into possibilities, they are pathfinders who show us where we've been, where we're going, and point to a better future. Franklin Delano Roosevelt led this country through the Depression and World War II, Winston Churchill rallied the British people in what he called their "finest hour," and Nelson Mandela held out a vision of unity that transformed South Africa.
As I've written in The Tao of Personal Leadership, leaders "have the courage to follow their vision, to believe in the invisible, to work for something that's only a possibility while others wring their hands in despair" (Dreher, 1996, p. 139). Leaders offer us a vision of hope for our collective future.
What do you expect from your leaders?
References
Dreher, D. E. (1996) The Tao of Personal Leadership. New York, NY: HarperCollins.
May, R. (1975). The Courage to Create. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.
