I've learned that "leadership" involves ignoring the fact that your staff abided by resrictions that you imposed upon them and then accusing them of making poor decisions based on something that was ultimately your fault. I've learned that "leadership" requires you to forget anything anybody ever told you so that later you can accuse them of doing things behind your back when really, you were informed from the very beginning. I've learned that "leadership" involves yelling and backstabbing and humiliating subordinates in front of their colleagues. I've learned that rather than empowering your employees for success, "leadership" involves lying to them outright, manipulating them into giving you something you want for completely different reasons than you told them, and imposing all sorts of needless rules upon them in an effort to show them you are in control, because ultimately, "leadership" is about control, plain and simple.
I could happily go the rest of my life without experiencing any further lessons on "leadership."
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So now you know how not to do it when your time comes, eh? (Sickly grin goes here but blogspot won't accept my HTML tag.)
I constantly receive junk mail (e- and otherwise) from the department of the University that provides "leadership" classes to the faculty and staff. You can even get a "Foundations of Effective Business Communications" Certificate. (Doesn't that just make your corpuscles race?) I have sometimes fantasized about going to one of those sessions just to see what the highly-paid instructor (oops -- facilitator) would do with the concept of servant leadership. You know -- "Husbands, love your wives as Christ loves the church, and gave himself for her." "He who would be the greatest, let him be the servant of all." "Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant..." Or, as Derek Prince put it succinctly in a study on the life of David: "The way up is down." The blank looks, I think, would be priceless.
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