Leadership “Coaches” on Social Media: Utopian Ideologues

Leadership as a topic in business became popular in the 1980s. It was not enough, however. James Burns distinguishes transformational leadership from the mere transactional leadership in his book, Leadership. Servant leadership raised the ethical bar by applying the ethical model of Jesus in the Gospels to leadership in business. Leadership vision quickly became a buzz word, as was charismatic leadership. All of these renderings can be interpreted as business trying to escape its mundane terms for a loftier enterprise in which ideals are more salient or applicable. As valuable as efficiency is, it is difficult to get excited about it. The problem is that many (or some) leadership consultants on social media have gotten too caught up on their utopian platitudes that leadership becomes a mere subterfuge. Certainly the utopian ideologies do not define leadership or are attributes of it, and yet the "coaches" claim that platitudes are necessary to leadership. In other words, I contend that leadership gurus, or "coaches" (a mis-applied analogy that wrongly dismisses the word "consultant" as too boring), had by 2023 taken to social media to project whatever utopian ideology they value onto leadership. The term has become too vague as a consequence. In fact, the concept of leadership became a near synonym for goodness in human relations and excellence in terms of virtue ethics. As a result, the concept approaches being a tautology whose actual meaning has been rendered vacuous from the a projection of so many subjective, utopian ideologies. Relative to such lofty remakes of leadership, management has become almost a dirty word—certainly not as flashy as visionary leadership. In actuality, the "coaches" are evangelical ideologues. 

I contend that what a CEO says in representing one’s organization to the wider society and characterizing what the business stands for to the employees as a whole is distinct functionally from what a department manager does in coordinating worker schedules, ordering new product and supplies, and “doing the numbers” for accounting purposes. Vision does not apply to both levels; neither does charisma. 

In his book, Charismatic Leadership: The Skills You Can Learn to Motivate High Performance in Others, Kevin Murray dismisses the definition of charisma with disdain. In the book's description paragraphs on Amazon, he writes that charisma is not "widely-applauded magnetism or shallow charm." Apparently, leaders such as Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy, Gandhi and admittedly even Hitler did not have charisma. Murray presumes furthermore to redefine charisma, which literally means gifts of the spirit, as a skill applicable to mundane supervision. Never mind that Ronald Reagan, who had loads of charisma, was terrible in supervising subordinates in the White House; he trusted too much in delegation. From sacred origins, charisma has in Murray's book fallen to a banal skill in business. Spirit and skill represent the sacred and the profane; they are antipodal, as in the spirit of the law versus skill in observing the law. 

Transformational and visionary leadership go with charismatic leadership; charisma has no place in the transactional language of management. One need only consult Max Weber's theory of bureaucracy to understand that charisma and administration are like oil and water. 

Indeed, leadership as a phenomenon is distinct from management. To sketch the latter as the former is intellectually dishonest, even if done to motivate managers. In 1893, the University of Chicago’s law school renamed the undergraduate, for first, law degree, which at the time was the LLB (Bachelors in the Letters of Law), as the Juris Doctor even though a first degree (3 or 4 years) in a field of knowledge does not a doctorate make. Similarly, preaching that a department head in a Target retail store is a visionary leader does nothing to change the manager’s job description and actual tasks. Vision does not apply to coordinating worker schedules and keeping inventory. Nor does charisma. Rather, politeness should apply, as the mundane daily tasks of managing and working in a business characterized by specialization of labor can get boring. Hence the appeal of a leadership guru on the sidelines, who preaches—and it is preaching—that leadership is never giving up, being all one can be, overcoming adversity, looking at solutions rather than problems (yeah, right), being positive (as if negatives are not a part of human existence), and, of course, “success!”

Well, Hitler never gave up. He nearly wiped out European Jewry in being all that he could be. He overcame the adversity of the Communists by exterminating them. He turned his attention to the final solution rather than stayed fixated on problems. He was positive about the future of the Aryan “race,” and thus of a Jew-free and Communist-free Germany. He was successful in getting Germany out of the Great Depression by rearming the country, and freeing it of the shackles of the humiliating treaty that ended World War I. He had charisma; even his enemies admitted that. He had a vision of a blood-pure and economically prosperous Germany.  The self-labeled “leadership coaches” that began springing up on the sidelines of the American business world since the 1980s are too ideologically-bent to admit that their utopian notions of leadership can include Hitler if his value-set of ideals is assumed.

Furthermore, efforts to define leadership ideologically as a virtue or utopian world that goes beyond leadership cannot define the term. For example, to say that leadership is success ignores or leaves out instances of success that do not involve leading an organization (or other people). Leadership is therefore not success per se. Similarly, a person can be tenacious in overcoming adversity without being a leader. A person can be a leader without necessarily overcoming every obstacle, or always being positive rather than negative.

In fact, President Reagan campaigned in 1980 against the stagflation (i.e., inflation and low economic growth) and the federal government, which he labeled as part of the problem rather than the solution. He led with that vision, and enough of the American people followed that he won in a landslide. Hitler, too, included negatives in his vision as he campaigned for his party in 1933. Germany was in an economic quagmire, and so too was its democracy. Hitler did not minimize scapegoats: the Jews and Communists. It is not uncommon for a leader to go negative on the problems that justify the positives in a vision, whether for an organization or a country. To claim that leadership is always being positive is simply incorrect, as is the conflation of leadership with management.

Leadership has been practiced by good and bad people. Of course, just who are the good ones and the bad is to some extent debatable among reasonable people. This is another problem with insisting that a given ideological value is necessary for leadership to be leadership. For example, to claim that leaders appreciate diversity ignores Japan and China, whose populations are more homogenous than those in the U.S., where diversity itself has become an ideological weapon as well as an ideal. Subjecting leadership to a particular definition of the good is overly constraining, and dogmatic in the sense of being arbitrary. To define leadership in terms of the content of an organizational or societal vision conveniently excludes many instances of leadership. Leadership involves convincing people to accept a vision, which we can treat as a black box.

The self-proclaimed leadership “coaches” go even beyond human utopias on social media in telling us about leadership qualities. This is often done by showing videos of other species. In one instance, a large herd animal is racing across a river as an alligator is in pursuit. Just as the predator pounces, the prey reaches the banks and leaps out of the water just in time. Leaders don’t give up. Well, actually, human leaders are not at all like prey running for their lives so not to be killed and eaten. The anthropomorphism here is out of control. Even CEOs in competitive industries, in the proverbial “jungle,” are hardly in anything even remotely like a real jungle. The CEO of a company that buys another company at a great price does not make a killing in any sense like an allegator does in a river. The military language often used in the business world is also far-fetched.

In actuality, leadership “coaches”—and business is not a (blood) sport either—preach their personal ideologies in the hope that even managers who do not actually practice leadership will accept and value the respective ideological utopian ideals. These gurus that preach under the veneer of business leadership are like the business ethicists who use thou shalt not to get managers to behave as the ethicists want. It is a power-grab of a Nietzschean sort wherein those on the sidelines are driven by an instinctual urge to have power over the “players on the field,” whose uses of strength are not necessarily appreciated and may even be resented.[1] The “coaches’” will to power is evinced in using the concept of leadership as a subterfuge by which to tacitly impose an ideological value or ideal concerning human nature and relations on society by beguiling powerful opinion-leaders in the business world. It does not concern these new birds of prey that the concept of leadership is warped, distended, obfuscated, or rendered vacuous as a utopian tautology in the process.  “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” the Wizard says as Toto pulls the it back to reveal an old man manipulating Dorothy and her friends by fire and brimstone in the film classic, The Wizard of Oz (1939). People are not always what they lead on.

See also: The Essence of Leadership

---

[1] Skip Worden, “A Genealogy of Business Ethics: A Nietzschean Perspective,” Journal of Business Ethics 84 (2008): 427-56.

The Coronation of King Charles III: A Case of Elitist Leadership

Is elitism ethical when it seeks to portray itself as favoring racial diversity after having been accused from within of being racist against black people—and even a multiracial member of the leadership cadre? Moreover, can elitism itself be ethical? Furthermore, can it be Christian? By elitist, I have in mind the motive to exclude. In attending Yale University, I was surprised when I discovered that exclusion was practiced within the university among and by the students. It was not enough to have been selected to attend the highly-selective university; some students felt the instinctual urge once within to exclude other students. I discovered this when the chairman of the political party in the Yale Political Union that I had joined lied to me that if I would come to a Friday night party held in the Yale clock tower that I would be tapped to join the secret society owned by the party. That chairman and his surrounding inner cadre misled party members into coming. After all, what good is tapping friends if there are not other people watching and thus to be excluded? Regarding the coronation of King Charles (Winsor) in Britain in 2023, I contend that at the very least, the royal planners can be charted with multiple levels of exclusion in Westminster Abbey. Furthermore, I strongly believe that “the Palace” employed a public relations firm, a significant part of whose strategy it was to combat Prince Harry’s charges of racism. This can be inferred from extent of “photo ops” highlighting good “product placement.” Specifically, people of the “Black” race were, intentionally, I submit, situated around the royal family both in the coronation itself and at the related concert in the royal box. This tactic played off the commonly mistaken inference that if someone is seen next to people of a given group, he or she could not possibly harbor ill-feelings toward that group. Although beyond the argument covered here, I suspect that this cognitive fallacy is commonly taken advantage of by public-relations firms the world over.  As applied to leadership, the tactic is geared to softening the hard corners of elitism as evinced in leadership roles. I turn first to the blatant, yet strangely unspoken layers of exclusion permitted and exasperated in the coronation itself, then I shall turn to the matter of ideological product placement, which, by the way, can be distinguished from the ethic of diversity in terms of participation. Claims of encouraging diversity can easily be used as a subterfuge to cover the real motive—that of product placement used to redress any hits to a person’s or institution’s reputation (i.e., reputational capital). I come to the conclusion beyond the ethical dimension that the passive aggression of exclusion is antithetical to Christian leadership, such as could be expected from the titular head of the Anglican Church. 

Regarding the coronation itself at Westminster Abbey, the sources of exclusion can be distinguished between structural and decisional (even if unconsciously taken). In this case, the structural variety is architectural. Looking towards the front of the church from the altar, the choir is located half-way with a “screen” or wall between the singers and the pews along the sides in the front area (the altar being in the back). 

The front half of the church. The invited guests seated here had to make do with mounted television screens to see the rituals happening on the other side of the golden "border wall." Foreign dignitaries and royals as well as other invited guests were on the other side, and thus had not been invited to an event in which they would not be able to see any of the action. Aside from the dignitaries and royals from around the world, were the invited guests on the "inside" of the golden wall different in kind (i.e., qualitatively superior) from the invited guests who were relegated to seeing procession in and out of the church? 

The invited guests who were seated in the front half of the church could see in person only the coming and going of the king and queen. Presumably among those guests were aristocrats, who got a taste of what it was like to occupy the commoner station of the coronation. 

The gold wall prevents the people, in this case, some of the “invited guests,” from seeing what is going on in the back of the church, where the king was crowned and enthroned. The architectural structure of the church—in particular, situating a wall between one area of seating and that of the liturgical or ritual activities—institutes exclusion that does not depend on any intentions of an event’s planners.

The back half of the church, consisting of the choir area, two side areas of seating, and the area directly in front of the altar. The people seated on the two outward sides could see the enthroning chairs from the sides, but not the king's crowning, which was done at wooden chair in the center of the photo. Harry would have been just able to see his father's crowning from the third row. The foreign dignitaries and royals and most of the other invited guests seated in the sections going out on the sides would not have been able to see the key moment. They would have been able to see it had the wooden chair been situated between the two thrones on the yellow carpet.  

In contrast, the placement of Edward’s wooden chair, in which the king was crowned, is predicated on intention, whether the person who had made the decision was or was not aware of the implications regarding exclusion. The chair was positioned too close to the altar to be visible to all but the first few rows of the pews extending sideways to the main corridor in the church (i.e., the "horizontal" sides that render the shape of the church as a cross).  To be sure, the “invited guests” sitting in those sides could see the king and queen being enthroned, whereas the “invited guests” sitting in the front half of the church on the other side of the golden “screen” were essentially cut off. Invited and cut off. Nice manners for any host. 

Narrowing the inclusion even further, the placement of the seats in which the king and queen in waiting sat was along a side wall near the altar, and thus only visible to the royal family in the first two rows (hence not to Harry in the third row) on the same side of the church and but admittedly to a few more rows on the other side section. Charles took his oaths and Camilla was anointed and even crowned along that side wall near the altar. 

In fact, for the queen's anointing, several of the clergy stood surrounding Camilla so no one else could see the ritual (even though the Palace claimed that that anointing would be open to viewing). The anointing of Charles was, as if in the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s ancient temple in Jerusalem, in a temporary three-sided “room” constructed by temporary screens. The almost total exclusion was the most transparent, as the screens were so apparent, especially on television.

Does the sacrality of a ritual diminish unless it is kept from view? Does the element of sacredness depend on being hidden from view? If merely diminished, at what cost to those who might otherwise experience the sacred, albeit with less intensity than the person being anointed? To my knowledge, these are open questions in need of intelligent answers. Whether the anointing of a king or queen should be shielded depends on the phenomenon of sacrality in a communal context from both social psychological and theological standpoints. 

Unlike the other levels of exclusion, the screening off of the anointing of the king has a substantive rationale grounded in religion generally and the divine right of kings doctrine in particular. The doctrine is solely between the sovereign and God (unlike the oaths or social contract that the royal makes with his or her subjects, which obviously were not made from behind a screen—except to the invited guests seated on the other side of the choir-screen). It can be argued, however, that the premise that the sacred, as evinced in the anointing, is of such a nature that it must or should be held apart from being viewed is tenuous. Bracketing the sacred behind a screen inhibits the potential viewers from experiencing the sacred. Extending the experience of transcendence to viewers may be one reason why the anointing ritual in the Confirmation ritual in Christianity is not screened off. In the case of the coronation, however, the placement of the Edwards chair, in which King Charles was anointed with holy oil, was so close to the altar that the vast majority of “invited guests” seated on the sides would not have been able to see (not to mention the “invited guests” situated in front of the choir’s wall). The best argument for the anointing screens is that they largely kept the television audience from viewing, assuming that the experience of the sacred must be “in person” rather than electronically (though Christians, for example, could experience “church” electronically from home, especially during the coronavirus pandemic of 2020-2022 when many churches limited or cancelled “in person” worship).

The privacy argument, which maintains that the anointing on the king’s chest involves bodily privacy, is questionable, as men go topless on virtually any public beach the world over. The argument would have more currency in the case of queens being anointed. If Camilla’s anointing included her chest, the screens should have been used for her, given the privateness associated with women’s breasts in Western culture. Even being surrounded by male clerics as Camilla was could be considered as violating her bodily privacy. If, on the other hand, her anointing did not include her chest, which would be consistent with the Palace’s false announcement that her anointing would be viewable because she was not the sovereign, the de facto blocking of the view (for the few “invited guests” and admittedly the large television audience who would have been able to see her) is difficult to justify. In other words, the rationale that the king’s anointing was screened off because of his unique position, or situs, as the sovereign carries with it the implication that the queen’s anointing could be open rather than blocked from view—and indeed, the Palace made this point prior to the coronation even though the clergy and television editors felt the need to block the view of her anyway. This use of discretion, I submit, suggests that another, hidden, motive was actually at work in depriving people from viewing the ritual. At the very least, the “invited guests” who swore allegiance to the king had a justification in being privy to divine blessing on the king as the king. The nature of the hidden motive could have been exclusion, pure and simple. That motive was by then so deeply engrained in, or supported by, the culture of the elite in Britain that even the very architecture of the church (and others in that country) saw to it that the motive would be enforced without having to be intended event by event.

I contend that the ethic of fairness is violated in the architectural blocking off of one area of pews—only some of the “invited guests.” This ethical principle is also violated in the decision to place the Edwards chair (i.e., the crowning) out of view of most of the other “invited guests” on the side sections of the church (i.e., the horizonal of the cross shape of the church). Generally speaking, to invite people to an event knowing that they won’t be able to see it (i.e., the “invited guests” in front of the choir area) and actively situating chairs so that most of the remaining guests won’t be able to see is not only impolite, but also passive aggressive.

For the coronation, Harry was relegated to the third row, where he had to contend with the tall, feathered hat of his aunt, Anne. 

Such tacit aggression may apply to Anne Winsor, the king’s sister, whose decision not to take her feathered hat off so obviously blocked Harry’s view, as he was sitting in the third row just behind his aunt. Politeness and garden-variety common sense would dictate taking the tall hat off. Passive aggression, or “payback,” was likely behind the decision not to invite Harry, one of the king’s sons after all, to join the royal family (minus the disgraced Andrew, who had lied about having sex with underage women) on the Buckingham Palace balcony. 

Camilla's sister, grandsons, and friend are pictured to the Queen's immediate right. 

The Palace’s usual rationale for omitting Harry was that only “working royals” can be on the balcony. This rationale doesn’t work in the case of the post-coronation occasion, for non-working royals and even non-royals who had roles in the coronation could take part. In addition to the non-royal pages, which includes Camilla’s grandsons, Camilla’s sister and a friend were on the balcony. 

Camilla's relatives and even a friend pose for a royal picture, whereas Harry was omitted from the official photo of the King's family. 

To be sure, Harry was neither a working royal nor did he have a role in the coronation, but the Palace’s rationale that only working royals could be on the balcony was torn asunder. The subterranean operative motive can be inferred from an observation made by Kate Williams, a royal historian: clearly damage had been done.

Exclusion as a weapon can hurt even more than being slapped on the face. The feckless means of hurting someone is less apparent prime facie, but this should not fool anyone into supposing that the motive is any less egregious. Passive aggression is not borne of a weak motive but, rather, a weak character. I have borne the brunt of such aggression personally, when everyone in my family of origin (i.e. parents, siblings) except for me were to wear formal wear for a wedding. That the familial beneficiaries went along with the arrangement can also be counted as passive aggressive toward me. Had I gone along with it, I would have been inflicting passive aggression on myself (i.e., as if I believed I deserved to be hurt). Rejecting the status quo highly unfair arrangement—the tilted landskip—I left the ceremony before it began. I drove a family-friend’s jeep to a bon-fire party on a beach, where a newly wed stunningly barely hid her interest in me as her new husband strummed on a guitar on the other side of the fire. I was uncomfortable, especially when she offered me tastes of the food on her plate in her lap. The family friend jokingly called me a homewrecker the next day (I had not encouraged the woman’s flirts) because the newlyweds were fighting. Although Harry did not leave before the coronation ceremony began, he headed immediately afterward to the airport to fly from Britain to California. He naturally (and psychologically healthily) went from his hostile family of origin to the family that he and Megan had created in which he was valued rather than disvalued. To be sure, Harry had inflicted emotional damage on his brother and step-mother and perhaps even his father, the king, whereas I had not intentionally offended the wedding couple. However, this does not excuse the Palace from serving up a new round of tit-for-tat retributions, especially if William, Camilla, and Charles had provoked Harry’s very public reaction.

Ironically, King Charles swore an oath during the coronation to protect the Christian Anglican Church—a denomination presumably in favor of Jesus’ commandment to love one’s enemies, including people level insults. In the New Testament, Jesus says his mission is to preach the mysteries of the Kingdom of God. In other words, he wants hearts to be transformed so they can participate in the divine nature as much as finite, fallible humans can. Christian leadership can thus be reckoned as going beyond ethical leadership (i.e., what is fair or just) to the sort of leadership that transforms hearts into the salvation of peace (i.e., being saved from a continued life of conflict and even interpersonal tension). This is accomplished by serving rather than hurting adversaries, detractors, and even people who are just plain rude or insulting. “Love thy enemy” is too formal, and misses cases of less stark adversarial relations. In other words, such leaders, both in modelling and speaking, go beyond ethics to behold a vision of a world of peace. Such a world goes beyond the cessation of overt and passive aggression, such as war and fearmongering, to include actively befriending and serving “enemies,” adversaries, and even those holding ideologies with which the person disagrees, for the Kingdom of God is antithetical to ideology as an idol.

Charles and his son William missed an opportunity. Not only that; the newly-minted and next-in-line head of the Church of England opened themselves to the charge of hypocrisy. It could even be said that the exclusion of an ill-favored outsider de facto nullifies the insiders from a Christian standpoint. In the Gospel of Mark, it is the outsiders who understand Jesus’s message whereas his disciples do not understand. Moreover, the theme of reaching out to people presumed culturally to be impure or otherwise outside of Jewish society (e.g., tax-collectors, such as Matthew) is salient in the New Testament. Had Charles have held this value, he might have carried the Edwards chair to the front of the church so those excluded by the choir screen would have had the best view; the royal family’s view would have been blocked by the self-same screen! Even the very architectural layout of the church can be said to be anti-Christian!

Putting the royal family in the last rather than first viewpoint could be justified to the extent that Harry and his wife Megan spoke out only after active and passive aggression (including racism) by members of the royal family (and their employees at the Palace). If so, Charles really missed an opportunity, and the renewed passive aggression under his watch suffers a severe lack of justification.

Harry’s claim that a senior member of the royal family had made racist statements regarding the likely color of his first child while his multi-racial wife, Megan, was pregnant likely fueled the passive aggression toward him at the coronation; Harry’s statement that his brother William had hit him when they were arguing about Megan also likely played a role. Rather than behaving as Christians, the Palace doubtlessly used a public-relations firm to beguile the public.

Placing Black people directly behind members of the royal family does not mean that the royals are not racist. After all, good-breeding is a rationale for a royalty based on inherited genes. Apparently, good breeding can get away with inviting guests to a coronation knowing that their views will be totally or partially blocked. Furthermore, and again sarcastically, maybe the invited guests situated in the front of the church were the products of worse breeding than the invited guests who were able to see the enthronements that took place in the back half of the church. Perhaps bad upbringing thwarts even good breeding, at least at the royal level in Britain, or perhaps, as the madness of King George III demonstrates, the breeding isn't as good as the world has been led to believe.

It is no accident, I submit, that William was quite visible being friendly to people waiting along the route the day before the coronation, and, even more obviously, that Black people were placed in photo-range of the royals as they watched the coronation concert and a Black group of gospel singers took part in the coronation even though gospel music rather unlike the Anglican style (this can be seen from the expressions of the clerics during the performance). 

Tellingly, none of the clergy behind the singers even breached a smile even though the song was upbeat. Apparently the public-relations firm didn't coach the clergy to at least show the  appearance of approval of the very different worship style so viewers would assume that the royals (and the clergy) were not racist. 

The Palace justified the gospel singers on the basis of diversity in the coronation program (and presumably on the stage during the concert), but this rationale does not pertain to having Black people sit near the royals in the royal box, for diversity pertains to participation. That King Charles was sitting next to and in front of Black people does not mean that he would have welcomed a grandchild of a darker skin color. Moreover, product placement does not necessarily mean or connote approval of that product. Product placement itself is abhorrent as an advertising tactic because people are not products. Good upbringing would have told the royals that. But the Palace had sunk to the base instinctual urge to discredit the claims that Harry and Megan had made rather than apologize for having ostracized rather than protected Megan even when she felt like committing suicide due to harassment from various racists in British society. It takes character to own up to one mistakes; it is much more convenient to seek to portray a shielding image by means of the mirage of association. 

Ethically, the product-placement tactic violates Kant’s imperative that rational beings should be treated not just as means, but also as ends in themselves. This applies not only to different races, but also to invited guests and even a king’s son. It is significant that this version of Kant’s categorical imperative is akin to the Golden Rule in Christianity: Treat others as you would be treated. What often goes unnoticed is that this applies to how a person treats others who are rude, insulting, and even worse, even if such people are familial relations. 

In fact, it is not enough to forgive; one must help, especially when the adversary is in trouble, and ultimately love. This does not mean that the insults are accepted (and least of all encouraged as if they were deserved); rather, it means relativizing the adversity into oblivion. Such a feat is accomplished once adversarial relations have been turned on their heads as a habit, such peace coming after the person has struggled against what one had hitherto assumed to be its very nature—that of interpersonal struggle. Although this can only happen on the individual level, Christian leadership even by heads of the major sects of Christianity can facilitate rather than thwart the transformations of the human heart, which must occur heart by heart rather than by conquering a country militarily or otherwise changing political or economic structures to be more just. 

Kant held that perpetual peace even in a world federation oriented to obviating war is only possible rather than probable. Something more—something deeper—is needed. Something on the individual level that becomes collective only when enough hearts have transformed themselves. The Christian message is that peace of such depth that it is felt to partake of divine nature transcends even justice. Active or passive aggression, especially in retribution, is antipodal to this message, and thus has no place in even official, institutional Christian leadership.

For more on ethical leadership: "Ethical Leadership"

For more on Christian leadership: "Christianized Ethical Leadership"

For more on spiritual leadership: "Spiritual Leadership in Business"