The Rules of Leadership

The first axiom of leadership is to resign. The rest of the axioms appearing below are contingent on someone choosing -- for whatever reason -- not to follow the first axiom.             

The second axiom of leadership is to neither: seek control over others, nor to be controlled by them.

The third axiom of leadership is to always operate in accordance with principles of truth, justice, compassion, integrity, friendship, humility, nobility, honesty, patience,  forgiveness, and charitableness;

The fourth axiom of leadership is to realize that true competence is authoritative not authoritarian;

The fifth axiom of leadership is to understand that actually helping: the poor, the hungry, the sick, the powerless, and the oppressed, tends to be antithetical to remaining a leader.

The sixth axiom of leadership is being willing to sacrifice one’s own self-interests in order to be able to try to satisfy the essential needs of other human beings.

The seventh axiom of leadership is to seek to empower people to have control over their own lives.

The eighth axiom of leadership is to resist believing that: (a) one has the answer to other people’s problems; (2) one has the right to impose such solutions onto people against their wishes or through techniques of undue influence.

 The ninth axiom of leadership is to share with people whatever resources one has control over in order to help facilitate and enable individuals to work toward solving their own problems.

The tenth axiom of leadership is to be willing to assist other would-be leaders to learn, understand, and implement the ten axioms of leadership.

Observing all of the foregoing ten axioms makes one an elder, not a leader. An elder is someone who has no desire to lead people but only seeks to contribute to resolving problems in constructive ways according to one’s abilities and circumstances and without, in any way, trampling upon or undermining the ability of others to have full control over their own essential, existential capacity for moral and intellectual authority.

If one is able to satisfy the last nine axioms outlined above, but has not been successful in relation to the first axiom, this likely means that one is a recovering leadership-aholic who stands in need of further self-purification. If this is one’s existential condition, then the individual needs to learn how to stop ceding one’s moral and intellectual authority to the pathology of the ‘leadership delusion’.