The Politics of Leadership

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We can not only learn from the sports world, but also from the artistic world, where both orchestras and music groups of different genres are examples of shared work experiences in which individuals merge to achieve a common sound. Politicians often receive specific training on expression or rhetorical techniques for going up on stage to give a speech or going on a television interview. This is based on the premise that a leader goes on stage a few times a day or a week, and then “turns off” the communication mode to continue with their rational tasks. But today, the political leader is in permanent communication mode—always exposed—and for that, he needs to prepare differently.

The crisis of political representation is not a problem of demand—understood as what citizens expect from leaders—but rather a problem stemming from the difficulties of the leaders. That is why we should rethink the leadership model. We need to prepare our politicians not only in ethical and moral values and in management capabilities, but also in understanding the world. We must also help them to fully know themselves; take care of themselves; and prepare mentally, emotionally, and physically for the hyper-demanding task of ruling without losing touch with their humanity, thus reducing the risk of Hubris Syndrome.Studying and learning about the experiences of non-political personalities who have gone through the phenomenon of fame can help to manage this situation and help when processing the emotional, psychological, and practical impact that fame brings. From this point, strategies can be learned to remain in touch with reality, such as preserving intimate spaces at times when it seems necessary to open it all up all the time, as well as working with children and family to help them manage the exposure, among many other necessary tools to manage fame’s impact. In general, the formation of a politician is rational, and he tends to omit his personhood as his career progresses.

In general, the formation of a politician is rational, and he tends to omit his personhood as his career progresses. This omission takes him away from a more comprehensive look at himself, generating potential mental, physical, and emotional health problems that end up amplifying self-reliance and the difficulty of making emotional connections. Thinking about the human dimension of political leadership changes the perspective on what it means to be a leader today. It requires new insight on how this new leadership is built, how it is sustained, and how it is supported. It leads us to analyze the opportunities our democracies have to overcome their crises. In moments of euphoria when they had been doing well in their circumstances, their self-sufficiency increased; in moments of decline and crisis, depression and paralysis were enhanced. But this is not an individual problem; it is more structural in nature. Often, this goes unnoticed because the problem of leadership is not usually looked at from a broader perspective, amplifying the feeling that it is something that only affects one’s own country.If leadership is to be considered a social process, in the basic and generic sense, then it must follow that it is rooted in the political aspect of all social life. That political aspect might be approached by its degree of formality, but the degree of formality cannot determine its existence. There is a certain safety in restricting our study of politics to public government and there may be illusory assurance in studying leadership from a deliberately nonpolitical perspective, but there is too little truth. It would seem therapeutic, at least, to give further consideration to politics in the full generic sense as a universal property of all leadership. And, if politics is ubiquitous and necessary to all organized social life, then we might be able to suggest that leadership also is a necessary process in organized social life. Ralph Stogdill argued that “leadership is an aspect of organization” (Stogdill 1950, 1-4). It should be taken as given that all organized groups (pardon the redundancy!) are political systems. Such logic, however, does not permit us to draw any conclusions ab out what kinds of leadership better serve such groups, only that it helps enact their organization. But even if one assumes that the selection method is effective for choosing the most suitable people to lead, leaders come to power through elections with weak political parties, rules and institutions riddled with political struggles, and a skeptical citizenry with unresolved high demands. They will take their public position with lower salaries than the ones they could have in the private sector, with high personal and family exposure, with the certainty of having legal problems in the future—sometimes even running the risk of going to jail—and with too few tools to meet the demands made upon them. It is natural, then, that in this context the leader does not perform at his best and that defense mechanisms are built to survive.