Man in the mirror leadership

By Jason Lim

Can it be over 20 years already? I still remember it like yesterday seeing Michael Jackson perform his mega hit, ``Man in the Mirror,” during the 1988 Grammy’s with such power and dynamism that left those watching, including me, alternatively holding their breath and gasping for air.

Therefore, I was glad to see the song brought back into the spotlight recently in Korea by John Park during his impressive second place run in the wildly popular “Superstar K2,” Korea’s version of “American Idol.” Listening to the song again also got me thinking about the lyrics and how powerfully they resonated with me back then and even now because the song spoke about change. More precisely, change within me.

In the last 25 years, leadership studies have become a multibillion dollar industry in the U.S. Books such as “Emotional Intelligence” by Daniel Goleman, “Leadership On the Line” by Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky, “Good to Great” by Jim Collins, among countless others, have become perennial bestsellers not just in the U.S. but across the globe.

Despite the boom in the leadership industry, however, I cannot help sensing a lack of a certain solidity, actually a hollowness, when it comes to leadership studies ― there is a temporary euphoria, followed by a feeling of emptiness after reading all these insightful books and taking all these wonderfully literate leadership courses. Perhaps this comes from the fact that there are as many definitions of leadership as there are authors who write about it. Perhaps this comes from my belief that there is a crucial bridge missing from analyzing leadership to actually becoming a leader.

You see, just because we can examine the lives of past leaders and analyze what worked and what didn’t doesn’t mean that we become that leader. We can even gain deep, intellectual understanding on how his leadership worked in what context, or why he failed miserably in other contexts by studying the lives of past leaders. But we feel certain dissatisfaction in leadership studies today precisely because such exercises don’t really give us a special insight into what made him so effective as a leader. We feel that there is something more fundamental about leadership than just arguments about styles of leadership, definitions of leadership, serendipity of leadership, nature vs. nurture of leadership, etc.

The more I studied leadership, the more I found myself asking this question: Isn’t there something deeper, more fundamental that we all share as human beings that we can tap into to gain a deeper insight ― not just intellectual understanding ― about leadership, something that can illuminate, enlighten, and inspire us to become leaders ourselves, leaders not just in organizational titles, bureaucratic positions, or even military command, but leaders in a more authentic sense, beginning with ourselves? This was the emptiness I was sensing, even while I was being inspired and moved by stories of past heroes and incredible leaders who changed their worlds forever.

In short, leadership studies for me became a search for a deeper understanding about what made me tick, what drove me to do more, to perform better, to become a better person ― leadership studies, I realized, was about self–leadership first and foremost, reflecting my almost instinctive yearning to escape an invisible but supremely suffocating barrier that I felt enclose my innermost sense of myself as a human being; the yearning was almost spiritual in its quest and intensity, propelling me to search out sundry traditions and scholarship on leadership from all cultures and times, trying to glean a clue that would finally allow me to ground the idea of leadership into a sense of who I was.

It was a search that, although not finished, did nevertheless produce an insight that profoundly affected how I viewed leadership. Leadership was fundamentally about change. It was about how you produce change in others and, more importantly, effect change within yourself.

More than 2,000 years ago, Aristotle made an observation about human nature that still stands true today: We are what we repeatedly do. Unfortunately for most of us, we do many things repeatedly that we don’t particularly want to do repeatedly. It logically follows then we often find ourselves becoming what we don’t want to become. In short, we find ourselves not liking the man in the mirror and wanting to change. And change requires leadership.

In the next few days, I will have an opportunity to speak to college students about leadership. In the past, I always found myself muddling my way through when asked to define leadership. Instead of a clear definition, I would lay out a whole list of professional competencies, trying to overwhelm the question with the weight of words.

But this time, when someone asks me the question, ``What is leadership?” I will be ready. I will tell them to ``start with the man in the mirror and ask him to change his ways.”

Jason Lim is a non-resident fellow at the Peace Foundation, a non-partisan think tank researching policy options for peace on the Korean Peninsula. He can be reached at jasonlim@msn.com. You can also follow him on Facebook.