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At the university where I teach there are not one but two institutes for the study of leadership, and the training of young leaders. When I asked one of my students why he was taking so many courses in leadership, he said it is because he did not want to be a follower. Are these really the only choices? Is it possible that the more we study leadership, the less we know about it? More likely it is a question of how we study leadership, and what we hope to learn.
I am going to make a simple argument about leadership. Most of the attributes that people associate with leadership, such as possessing a vision of the future, inspiring followers, and motivating laggards, gain their significance only within the framework of interpretation. Good leadership is interpretive leadership, a point that is frequently ignored, as we lack the categories to appreciate it. These categories look more like what Winnicott called holding and interpretation than they do grand strategizing and master-planning.
Good leadership interprets the hopes and fears of followers to them, so that they will not despair, or be overcome with anxiety. Winston Churchill's greatness, according to Franz Neumann (406-407), stemmed from his ability to transform an unknown danger “into a danger known in kind and extent. He fulfilled those functions of leadership that can be compared to those fulfilled in the life of the individual by the organization of the ego.” I will not be using the language of ego psychology, as Neumann does, but my conclusion is similar. Leadership is about interpreting anxiety, above all what Melanie Klein (“Mourning”) calls depressive anxiety: the fear that one is not good enough, mature enough, strong enough, and self-controlled enough to make good on the badness in the world, badness to which one has contributed by malevolence or neglect. Good leadership is about helping followers to face this anxiety, and thus put together the parts of themselves they keep separate so as not to know what