Australian Prime Minister P.J. Keating wrote in 1994 that:

“One of the great challenges we face as a nation is to generate a deep sense of optimism within our young people. We need to do that because without optimism, without a sense that we do have the wherewithal to build a better future, we will find no reason to build that future. By failing to act, by failing to lead, we are in effect saying that we’re happy for our future to be built by others, and for their benefit not ours.

“I think the main challenge you face as young leaders is to grow your optimism in your friends and peers.

“If you can do that and if, at the same time, you give fully of your love, your labour and your imagination then there is no reason why Australia will not become a model society in the 21st century.

In order to become that model society, Australia desperately needs to identify and nurture its authentic values based leaders.

During this present global financial crisis (which is very much a crisis brought about by a lack of leadership) there is an even greater urgency in selecting and training leaders who not only can manage the complexity of corporate and organisational life - which will grow more complex during the next decade because of aging populations, increased regulation, an increasingly diversified work force, and fewer financial resources - but can also focus the attention of the members of their organisations on a validating vision that will unite individual efforts in the realisation of communal mission.

The most striking deficit among pseudo-leaders is their inability to formulate a strategy to accomplish a purpose or mission.

Successful and authentic leaders focus on the future of the organisation, both its viability and the appropriate use of its resources toward specified ends. An organisation’s mission, stratagem, and structure may of itself affect the sort of leadership needed and the kinds and degrees of competency required of leaders.

Mission orientation is a core competency. It is essential for all leaders of an organisation not only to be heedful of its mission, but also to be proficient in communicating it to internal and external stakeholders. Mission focus is foundational to the leadership role; it is a core competency that all leaders should demonstrate. The authentic leader acts as a concenter: bring into focus or alignment organisations objectives; causing the ideas or emotions of the group to converge.

We don’t talk and focus enough on values. Values, visioning, and planning should be considered in that order. It’s important to remember that planning is the organizational process of creating and maintaining a plan; it is also the psychological process of thinking about the activities required to create a desired goal on some scale.

Pseudo-leaders launch into planning through pseudo-consultation without considering the organisation’s values. “Let’s have this meeting so we can do some planning!” It’s like me trying to shoot clay pigeons. I might hit one (extremely unlikely!) but you never know. Unfortunately, by the time we realise what an unmitigated disaster these pseudo-leaders are, they’ve hopped on a plane with a huge bucket load of our cash and waved “Adios!”

Authentic leaders differentiate themselves from pseudo-leaders in several ways. Authentic leaders focus and continually talk about values and the things that are not negotiable. Authentic leaders are success orientated and proactive, and they focus forward after laying the foundation of the superstructure with the concrete of values-based leadership.

Leaders empathise. Empathy plays a role at several levels. Empathy facilitates the leader appreciate what needs to be attended to in the organisation; it assists leaders construct commitment among the members of an organisation, as they feel attended to and understood; empathy enables the leader to plan for shared action productively because they understand the values of their members.

Leadership is a discrete charism from management. It can exist quite apart from authority. It is more to do with a person’s giftedness (from whence is derived the word “charisma”). It is a charism articulated in special personal qualities which inspire ("stimulating or exalting to the spirit") respect, trust, following, and sometimes enthusiasm. Leadership can also be challenging to the status quo. Most authentic leaders challenge the existing state of affairs.

Whilst leaders are often prophetic, and frequently show the way forward, sometimes leaders and prophets point backwards, and point out that which we have lost sight of, like authentic respect and dignity, honour, duty, a sense of perspective and history.

Emerging trends and markets are important, but also crucial is the interpretation of thousands of years of leadership. Those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it. The core tenants of leadership also require the wisdom to reflect on it and make it alive...it’s like the two sides of the leadership coin.

Since it depends on the traits of a person, leadership is an enduring endowment, not something assumed for a certain time and laid down at the end of a mandate. It is not conferred or restricted by constitutions, and it cannot be legislated. It derives not from external to the circumstances, but from inner sources, and it is associated much more with what a person is than with what he or she does. Leadership is found in many spheres other than government and business.

Pseudo-leaders pay lip-sevice to history and tradition. Authentic leaders look both backwards; understand the importance of corporate memory and culture; and look forwards, re-interpreting the past in new and inspiring ways.

Herman Bryant Maynard, Jr. & Susan E. Mayrtens wrote back in 1993 “The Fourth Wave: Business in the 21st Century.”

Maynard and Mayrtens invited readers to consider the following visions of the new corporation:

As an exemplar for other institutions in society. The new leader can teach other business, government, church and the community in which it operates through its example. As a global citizen acting locally, while thinking globally. To me, this is live Mick Yates leadership paradox. We act local, but dream of a better future for everyone.

Maynard and Mayrtens also suggested other possible visions for the new corporation:

As an advocate of the living economy, practicing social and resource accounting.
As an organisation committed to serve, aware of its identity as a producer of moral effects.
As a community of wellness, aware of the full range of its corporate stakeholders.
As a model of environmental concern.
As a pioneer in appropriate technologies, skilled in technology assessment.
As an organisation led by bio-politicians who are fully aware of their responsibility to realise the destiny of modern men and women.

As Maynard and Mayrtens assert, the business of business is not only business. In recent decades, business has emerged as the dominant institution in global culture. The other institutions of society - political, educational, religious, and social - have a decreasing ability to offer effective leadership: their resources limited, their following fragmented, their legitimacy increasingly questioned, politicians, academics, priests, and proselytizers have neither the resources not the flexibility to mount an effective response to the manifold challenges we are facing. Business, by default, must begin to assume responsibility for the whole.

With this hair shirt mantle of leadership, I suggest, comes responsibility. We live and work in societies where everyone is aware of their rights but forget their responsibilities. Rights and responsibilities are two sides of the one coin, like leadership and followership.

As contemporary futurists, social and business analysts, and businesspersons see this challenge, business must begin to identify the needs of the planet and move to fill these needs. In doing so, business will take on a much wider range of activities and, more importantly, come to be redefined in the process.

Resistance to change correlates directly to the level of fear in a given environment. New corporations require new leadership. As leaders, we must mitigate and manage that fear.

Many years before one of John F. Kennedy’s speechwriters put these famous words into his mouth in his inaugural speech, the great Lebanese poet, painter, and philosopher Gibran Khalil Gibran wrote The New Frontier.

Gibran said, “There are in the Middle East today two challenging ideas: old and new.”

“The old ideas will vanish because they are weak and exhausted.

“There is in this Middle East an awakening that defies slumber. This awakening will conquer because the sun is its leader and the dawn is its army.

“In the fields of the Middle East, which have been a large burial ground, stand the youth of spring calling the occupants of the sepulchres to rise and march toward the new frontiers.

“There are today, in the Middle East, two men: one of the past and one of the future. Which one are you?

“Are you a politician asking what your country can do for you or a zealous one asking what you can do for your country?

“If you are the first, then you are a parasite; if the second, then you are an oasis in a desert.

“Or are you a devout and pious man who sees in the piety of the individual the foundation for a progressive nation, and who can see through a profound search in the depths of his own soul a ladder to the eternal soul that directs the world?

“Or are you a companion, taking no action except hand in hand, nor doing anything unless she gives her thoughts and opinions, and sharing with her your happiness and success?

“In the Middle East there are two processions: One procession is of old people walking with bent backs, supported with bent canes; they are out of breath though their path is downhill.

"The other is a procession of young men, running as if on winged feet, and jubilant as with musical strings in their throats, surmounting obstacles as if there were magnets drawing them up the mountainside and magic enchanting their hearts.

“Which are you and in which procession do you move?

“Ask yourself and meditate in the still of the night; find if you are a slave of yesterday or free for the morrow.

“But the children of tomorrow are the ones called by life...They are few in number, but the difference is as between a grain of wheat and a stack of hay. No one knows them but they know each other...They are the seed dropped by the hand of God in the field, breaking through its pod and waving its sapling leaves before the face of the sun.

The authentic leader needs to ask themselves this question, “What kind of leader am I? Do I belong to the past or do I belong the future?”

Justice is one of the four classic cardinal virtues – justice, prudence, fortitude, and temperance. These four are called “cardinal” virtues from the Latin word for “hinge”. All other virtues hinge on these four.

The authentic leader is committed to justice. Without justice, he/she has no credibility. As Robert F. Kennedy said, “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centres of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

Never before have we more needed leaders who can orchestrate these ripples of hope.

Gordon Jackson, convenor of the New Leaders Forum, said once:

“Leadership is of the Spirit...Management is of the mind.”

Not contradictory. Merely Different sides of the same coin. Wisdom is in knowing the difference, and knowing what lever to push!

Leadership – and good management – is a paradox. Yes...leaders know that both are important. Brilliant leaders know how to differentiate. And take appropriate action.

God – and leadership – is a verb, not a noun. Think about it.