Can a leader both act and be real?
This is a question with no easy answers. But the feeling of not being up to the job, the belief that the role is too big, is something every leader has felt. It is evidence that the role is greater than the individual--and thus worth taking on. Accepting the risk of failure is the first step in becoming a leader.
That adaptive capacity is the most important attribute in determining who will become a leader. It's also the defining trait of the best actors. Inhabiting roles other than the one most of us think of as self is essential to both. So is the empathy need to project yourself into someone else's skin. During World War II, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) and Winston Churchill seem to have known our fears better than we did and addressed them before we had articulated them.
Most leaders acquire greatness when a role requiring it is thrust upon them. Look at the stature and number of leaders forged in the American Revolution: Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Madison, and Hamilton spring to mind.
Like great actors, great leaders create and sell an alternative vision of the world, a better one in which we are an essential part. Philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote that Churchill idealized his countrymen with such intensity that in the end they rose to his ideal. Washington and the other Founding Fathers shared that great leader's gift of making people believe they could be part of a great nation. Martin Luther King Jr. had that same genius.
Source: Excerpted from The Essential Bennis by Warren Bennis with Patricia Ward Biederman. Bennis is Distinguished Professor of Management at the University of Southern California and founding chairman of the Leadership Institute.
