‘That sounds like an act of faith to me,’ commented the young chief executive.
‘It is the faith you will find in a true leader. In Ordway Tead’s The Art of Leadership (1935), a article my father gave me when I was a boy, the author defines a leader’s faith as “an active effort to bring good to pass based on the confirming experience that such activity is and does good.” He continues:
Fundamentally, a deeper kind of faith seems also invaluable if not essential. It may be called a spiritual faith. The words are not popular today because they are so often used as a cloak for lazy thinking and as implying an indiscriminately optimistic feeling about life – one which is grounded in no deep experience or justified by no tested convictions. There is, nevertheless, a permissible even if non-rational belief, by whatever name it is called, that the enterprise of living has a meaning and values which are precious, permanent and not at odds with the larger processes of the universe.
‘It is that strategic hopefulness, that faith in the inevitable victory of the good, that gives leaders their confidence in facing the tactical difficulties of their own time and place.
‘Take Dag Hammarskjöld as an example. As Secretary-General of the United Nations, the second to hold that office, he was the leader in the efforts to maintain peace in a world divided into Western and Eastern blocs. As the vision of a higher form of international society after the trauma of the Second World War, a new order of peace, seemed doomed, Hammarskjöld refused to abandon hope: “Sometimes that hope – the hope for that kind of reaction – is frustrated,” he said, “but it is a hope which is undying.” His tragic death in an air-crash, while on his way to ceasefire talks with President Tshombe of Katanga during the Congo crisis in 1961, caused a sense of shock throughout the world.’
‘Hope that is undying, “hope springs eternal in the human heart”,’ mused the young chief executive. ‘But isn’t it only rational to abandon hope when there are no longer any rational grounds for it?’
‘No, hopes may dwindle from a torrent to a trickle, even a few drops. But when every hope is gone for you personally, you needn’t give up hope. For hope is part of the human spirit, as essential to it as oxygen is to the body. If there is no one around you to love, it doesn’t mean that love cannot live within you. Why give up hope because there is nothing to hope for? It is part of the essential you. G K Chesterton once said that anyone can hope when things look really hopeful. It is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength at all. Like all the spiritual virtues, he added, hope is as unreasonable as it is indispensable.’
Keypoints
- All leaders will be tested, by loneliness if by no greater force. The greatest leaders are those who undergo the most severe trials but do not abandon their values or allow affliction to dim their spirits.
- Leaders are ‘dealers in hope’, but they have to be honest brokers. It is counterproductive to paint unrealistic and rosy pictures about the future, worse to lie about it. A good leader is neither an optimist or a pessimist, more a realist with an unconquerable hope.
- Leadership is about creating and maintaining a climate of hope, one that makes success possible. Wise leaders know that fortunes can change, they know how to wait it out.
- ‘I do accept that I am a worm,’ said Winston Churchill, but, he added with a chuckle, ‘I do believe I am a glow worm.’ Humility is important, not least because we grow by taking on board critical feedback. But each of us has a light for the path, a light to lead by.
- In that dimly sensed conflict between good and evil the only thing we know intuitively for certain is that good is destined to win. That is why hope is underlying in the human spirit.