Leadership Substance, Style and Shadow 41Likewise a steward who forgets that he guards in service of
renewal and development becomes a jailer, holding onto the
past, blinded to the present and the future by the ghosts of
antiquity. A steward makes you a guest; a jailer makes you a
prisoner of their prejudice, rooted in the past.
A designer is a leader through the skill and knowledge
that they put at the service of their public. They will have ap-
prentices who study their work and gain skills to design in
their own way. A designer who forgets that their success de-
pends on pleasing others and ignores the wider community
becomes a prima donna. They may indulge themselves and
forget that they are only leaders because of the value they
create for others. Such a designer loses touch with their pub-
lic and needs an uncritical audience who will follow their
whims regardless and imitators who will copy the designs
rather than learn the design skills and then use them to
create something that expresses their own personal vision.
Then there is the role model who suffers from delusions
of grandeur and acts as if they are specially favoured and
above those who admire them. Paradoxically, as soon as they
do that, they lose their value as a role model. We pick role
models for who they are and what they can teach us, not who
they believe they are. A person cannot be a role model on
their own, they can only be chosen as a role model. So once
they think of themselves as role models irrespective of their
followers, they lose touch with reality and create an artificial
self that they then have to maintain at any price. Although
this is a false self, in a final ironic twist they may then depend
on it for self-esteem. So they want worshippers or clones who
can feed their image, rather than real self-knowledge.
The shadows fall and the dark side of leadership creeps in
when leaders lose touch with themselves and those qualities
that made them leaders in the first place. First they demand
their followers be blind to their weaknesses and then blind
to their blindness. They become more concerned with keep-
ing their power than with developing others. They may still
influence others, but a leader who loses themselves will
surely lose others as well.