Perhaps at no other time in recent history has the question of leadership been so acutely relevant and so dramatically posed. The diplomatic struggle at the United Nations over the fate of Iraq, the decision by the United States and Britain to launch a war against Iraq after failing to secure authorization for their project from the United Nations, and the massive anti-war protests around the world all dramatized issues of leadership and governance at the individual, institutional, national, and international levels.

The rapidly proliferating literature on leadership is dominated by the concept of leadership as effective management of private corporations. The much smaller field of leadership studies that focuses on public policy is also concerned with the notion of effectiveness, though usually in a sociopolitical context. The result is usually a catalogue of skills, attitudes, and characteristics of the successful corporate leader, the effective administrator, the efficient policy maker, the decisive commander, and the can-do-mentality governor.

Leadership, however, is different from management and governance. The latter are neutral descriptions of the activities and mechanism of management and administration, and understandably excellence in these areas requires certain skills. Leadership, on the other hand, is—or at least ought to be—normatively apprehended as a set of values with connotations evocative of the higher achievements of the human spirit. Leadership, therefore, is irrevocably tied to morality. Measured by its results, leadership in whatever field should be the vision-driven achievements of those people who are able to transform their environment, morally elevate their followers, and chart new paths of progress and human development. As a concept, leadership should mean a set of values dedicated to promoting human development for the common good of people in a democratic environment, both at the national and international levels.

Leaders and Managers

The literature on leadership as effective management describes the effective manager/leader as a person able to think proactively, strike a balance between task-orientation and people-orientation, have a vision, to inspire commitment to work, invest in trust, and be an effective communicator. The catalogue of skills and characteristics is lengthy. The only definition of a leader is someone who has followers. Alternatively, leadership has been defined as the ability to achieve results, not popularity; the ability to think pro-actively in order to understand first and be understood; the ability to see the periphery, appreciate unconventional ideas, and transform the fear of change into positive turbulence.

But in the rush to catalogue the range of skills, attitudes, and behaviors associated with leadership understood as effective management of private corporations, little attention was paid to the moral dimension of leadership. When corporate scandals erupted in the United States in 2002, there were many questions about accountability and corporate governance. There was hardly any question about the meaning of leadership that was lavishly bestowed upon those powerful corporate leaders of yesterday. Hardly anybody noticed or regretted the absence of a moral dimension from our obsessive association of corporate management with the notion of leadership.

The smaller but growing literature on public policy leadership is less oblivious to this moral dimension than the literature on management leadership. Indeed, cognitive studies stress that good leaders are people who have excellent communication skills, interest in expanding their views, and concern for moral issues. Studies like those done by scholar Warren Bennis distinguish between managers and leaders by arguing that "leaders are people who do the right thing; managers are people who do things right." Leadership has also been associated with the higher values in the human needs hierarchy—a type of leadership that has been described as "transformational leadership," which satisfies the higher needs of self-actualization in followers, and, in the process, transforms them. Leadership has also been described as requiring a sense of responsibility for social progress. Ronald Heifetz has argued that the modern leader is said to be one who is willing to take responsibility without waiting for a request or bureaucratic permission.

Leaders and Rulers

The difficulty with the approach to leadership that focuses on cataloguing characteristics to the detriment of a moral dimension is that these very characteristics can easily apply to fascist and totalitarian rulers who mobilized their followers for causes that wreaked havoc on their people and on humanity. Should Mussolini and Hitler be described as great leaders for having a vision, the ability to mobilize followers, self-confidence, and great oratorical skills? I should think not.

Indeed, there must be a distinction made between a ruler and a leader. The latter contains or should contain normative connotations of higher moral purposes; the former does not. Consider the following example. Writing in The New York Times on March 26, 2003, Neil MacFarquhar described how Middle Eastern elites felt about the war against Iraq. "The Middle East elites," he writes, "recognize that leaders like Mr. [Saddam] Hussein abuse their people, but the suspicion that the United States is embarking on a modern crusade against Islam tends to overwhelm other considerations." I suggest that "leader" and "abuse" are mutually exclusive concepts. Given Saddam Hussein’s record of reliance on brute force to govern, and his palpable failure to promote the progress and human development of his people, he and others like him should not be described as leaders. Ruler is a more appropriate terminology since one can rule by force, intimidation, or dictate. Such a ruler is not a leader in any environment.

It is telling to look at another example of leadership discourse in the context of the crisis that preceded the US-British war against Iraq. In the March 7, 2003, issue of The New York Times, Patrick E. Tyler quoted US Senator Tom Daschle criticizing the policy of US President George Bush, saying that, "In our view they [the Bush administration] are rushing to war without adequate concern for the ramifications of doing so unilaterally or with a very small coalition of nations." Senator Daschle rightly associates leadership with the democratic imperative of seeking and mobilizing the people’s support for specific ideas and moral convictions. By contrast, the war in Iraq offers another darker view of global leadership that evokes notions of imperial rule and domination. For example, discussing the "imperial ambition" of the United States, G. John Ikenberry wrote in the September/October 2002 issue of Foreign Affairs about "a unipolar world in which the United States has no peer competitor" and in which "no state or coalition could ever challenge it as global leader, protector and enforcer." This ambivalence over the nature of leadership reflects the need to distinguish between leaders and rulers.