Today the subject of “leadership” is generally reduced to that myriad of questions framed as tips on how to manage groups of people within some organisation. In reality the theme is far broader and certainly deserves greater attention, precisely because until a few decades ago it was fundamentally tied to the great popular movements and to the capacity of certain men to draw considerable numbers of individuals in the direction of their own goals. In this sense the leader asserted himself through two fundamental attributes: the possession of a personal vision and the ability to involve the masses.
In reality, “leader” is a notion that emerges from the analysis of a lived experience. That is why – as I shall try to make clear below – the claim to point out a way of “becoming” a leader is without foundation. Leadership is essentially the expression of an environment and a culture; it is the very fruit of that environment, which brings about the emergence of a figure of reference that, in turn, defines itself as both object and acting subject. Consider political leaders: in the overwhelming majority of cases their appearance on the historical stage is the product of a time and a condition. With the election of Obama there was talk of a cultural change, one that suggests to us that it is precisely in the dialectic between culture and subject that the conditions for the emergence of a leader are created. Thus it becomes almost impossible to say with certainty whether Obama is the subject or the object of a change. Without a cultural pre-condition (the drawing together of the various ethnic groups; greater tolerance; the active participation of African Americans in public life, etc.) Obama could not even have aspired to stand as the guide of a people; now that conditions allow it, he emerges, and with him the personal qualities that support his rise.
This happens at more or less every level and in various spheres of social and productive life, and it helps us to trace the phenomenology of a concept to which we no longer attach any particular meaning; since it is enough to be prominent and to enjoy the support – even one built through artful manipulation – of a sizeable number of citizens in order to be labelled a “leader”, it is clear that the term has been emptied of the further meanings generally drawn upon in the past, which had to do with considerations of a moral or political kind, or both together. More “natural”, by contrast, is the development of leadership within sporting or generally competitive groups, because relational conditions internal to the group arise that favour the emergence of what at first asserts itself as an informal leader and then turns into a legitimated one. This kind of group is essentially limited in number, and all its members have – unlike in the political context – a relationship with one another. The leader of a football team is close to those who elect him as such; the leader of a political party is distant from those who ascribe to him – implicitly or explicitly – the function of leadership.
These considerations lead us to weigh a series of elements – historical and substantive – that have brought about a shift in meaning and that today make up a complex set of questions deserving of attention. With the passing of time and the gradual segmentation of societies, the question of leadership has come to the fore at several levels and for different domains (political, corporate, sporting, trade-union, etc.). Until the 1980s the idea was tacitly shared that the leader belonged to that first species of individuals who, precisely on the basis of a personal vision of the world, were able to marshal great numbers of people into the project of realising “that world”. In most cases it was a matter of the assertion of one Weltanschauung over others. The sphere in which all this came about was almost exclusively the political one, and little heed was paid to the conduct of the men of power who operated in other sectors such as Industry or Enterprise in general.
This interpretive model of leadership presupposes an inseparable relationship between the project and the communicative strategies for achieving it. In this way the fundamental function of leadership seems to reside precisely in the particular powers of persuasion that the leader employs to the advantage of his project. Nonetheless, having a vision of the world (Weltanschauung) meant possessing the fundamental element for setting in motion any project of involvement whatsoever. Without an “idea” the process was not triggered, and without personal “qualities” the goal was not reached.
Today much of the literature on the matter seems to underestimate the question of “ideas” and to favour instead that of “qualities”, inevitably shifting the analysis from the plane of content to that of morality. In truth this is a rather controversial point, because qualities prove contingent and not foundational. In most cases, indeed, the distinction between types of leader also entails the distinction between the respective qualities he must or should possess, producing a view of values that is specular and, precisely, contingent. Depending on whether we are speaking of a political leader, an important manager or a football champion, the expectations, in terms of personal qualities, vary, also as a function of the specific reality upon which he must act. Thus, in all likelihood, the communication skills required of the political leader become marginal in the case of the footballer, for whom carrying the team along will depend in large measure on example and on sporting performance, so that technical qualities are favoured over persuasive ones. If we then turn our attention to great managers, we discover, more often than not, that their leadership is the result of a particular coherence between their dispositions and the entrepreneurial project they take on. Thus, from case to case, the driving “value” may be unscrupulousness or far-sightedness, audacity or moderation, loyalty or arrogance. Everything depends on the system of values that the organisation expresses or is ready to pursue for the sake of some market result. Once these criteria are accepted, all reasoning about leadership and its characteristics is reduced to a matter of congruence between subject and context, thereby eluding the attempt to identify and describe the leader’s distinctive features starting not from the narrow context of action but from the range of abilities and competences that, independently of actions, he must or should possess. To do this it is necessary to reverse the order of reasoning and to start from the man rather than from the organised context. The principle that moves certain men towards the realisation of great projects is certainly to be traced back to a set of factors of a psychological and social order that, on meeting a favourable situation, bring about an apparently oversized commitment. In these contexts leadership asserts itself as an act of collective persuasion in which the “personality” of the leader emerges, generally heedless of the objections it meets in the first phase of its exposure.
So the secret of leadership would seem to reside precisely in the notion of “personality”. This is certainly an unavoidable aspect of the subject at hand and compels us to a further reflection. Genghis Khan and Gandhi, Hitler and Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill, Fidel Castro and Napoleon were all great leaders. What makes leaders of these people so different from one another? Certainly not the “quality” of their actions; some of them are responsible for repugnant atrocities. Nor does an after-the-fact assessment in terms of the historical scope of their actions hold, because in that case we should have to count among the leaders Galileo, Leonardo or Einstein as well. In reality we know that the difference we are speaking of is the one between the leader and the “genius”, which requires us to place the emphasis, in the first case, on personality and, in the second, on results.
When we speak of a leader we give more importance to personality than to the product, whereas when we speak of a genius we place the emphasis on results, holding individual characteristics to be marginal. It is no accident that the term “genius” (from the Latin geno, “I produce”) made its appearance, in the sense in which it is commonly understood, in the Renaissance, and denoted an innate talent, referable to a specific discipline. There is, however, a further aspect that in some way marks the sharpest difference: the leader is someone who manages to do something extraordinary always and only by involving others, whereas the genius is one who manages to do or conceive something extraordinary almost always in solitude. The leader always needs others in order to reach the goals he has set himself but, since “others” constitute a necessary yet not sufficient condition, the leader is distinguished precisely by the quality and quantity of the involvement he is able to generate.

If, then, for the leader others (the working group, the political party, the team being coached, etc.) take shape as a “necessary condition”, when and where do we find the “sufficient condition”?
We may sketch a first answer and say that the necessary condition is being a person set within a group context and holding a role of responsibility over the group itself. The sufficient condition is that a person set within a group, over which he holds responsibilities, possess certain “personality” traits. “Personality” is a concept with a recent history – unlike that of “person”, whose etymology can be traced back to the language of the Etruscans and reflection on whose meaning has engaged philosophers such as Aquinas, Locke, Kant and Hegel – one in which the major contributions come from psychology and psychoanalysis; we may briefly define personality as the irreducibility of a person with respect to his psychological, behavioural and cultural characteristics, which, by integrating, determine the distinctive traits of his character. We may thus say that the leader is a person who will tend, with care and tenacity, to certain fundamental personality traits bearing on the domain of knowledge, of inclinations and of aptitudes. To this, were we to follow a more Aristotelian orientation, we should add the “virtues”.
While holding firm to the irreducibility of the individual, every person, in taking on a role, confronts the difficult and controversial operation of uniqueness and imitation. If on the one hand one seeks to assert a precise way of being, on the other one seeks out the necessary resemblances, those that people occupying the same position share and in which they recognise themselves. One must bear in mind that the art of leadership is not only that of command but also that of involvement, of which “commanding” becomes a natural subordinate. Commanding through authoritativeness, in fact, is very different from commanding through authority, and while the former calls for an aptitude, for the latter the role suffices. It is no accident that bosses are rarely recognised leaders.
If it is results that constitute a unit of measure of the effect of leadership, their attainment will surely be directly proportional to the effort the leader will expend, first of all, on himself. Having a personality is not like being granted the attribute of person; the construction of personality, in fact, is an individual and complex path. Today, far more than in the past, temperament is assigned the task of demonstrating the actual existence of a precise personality structure, confusing this with drive or rigour, all the more so when it expresses itself in harshness, in severity and in discipline.
“A man appears full of character far more often because he always follows his temperament than because he follows his principles”, Nietzsche asserted. The German philosopher introduces us to the last aspect of this work, the one concerning, precisely, the interpretation given of character and the framework of cultural determinations that lends it some meaning. The character to which Nietzsche refers is emptied of meanings; it stands for disposition, the behaviours – more or less structured – by which a person is identified. It is a behavioural model that has no need to be sustained by principles. It is reactive and dialectical action, taking shape in the face of events in a contextual and relative way. Character guided by temperament has no orientations; it is embodied in determination or tenacity but, for this very reason, does not answer for itself, because it has nothing else to refer to. Nietzsche fully grasped the sense of a widespread and distorted interpretation of character, and he did so in the tone of an admonition. The philosopher hits the mark and points to an interpretive model that over time supplants all the others. What Nietzsche refers to is a tendency of our time and, above all, of the Western world. A tendency that establishes the primacy of manifest behaviour over thought, separating them in the name of an exasperated pragmatism that tends to defend what is done and to undervalue the orientations of thought.
The contemporary leader is chiefly a child of this vision; he speaks of the “result” and conjugates the verb “to do” in the most improbable ways. In most cases leadership is the result of a position of power, mainly determined by money, by the ability to accumulate it or to procure it with ease. Naturally this aspect would call for further examination, because it leads us, inevitably, to have to distinguish the areas within which leadership is generated. Nevertheless the element of profit may be regarded as cross-cutting, the child of a mentality more than of a condition. Nailed to profit are the football coach and the manager, the politician and the entrepreneur, albeit with different criteria and objectives.
The contemporary leader is called upon to exercise not his virtues but his power (of persuasion, of control or of direction), in the name and on behalf of provisional and momentary objectives, and for this reason unstable and interchangeable. With a function of social or market engineering, the leader is changeable and devoid of distinctive features of his own, so that, rather than offering himself to a cause, he exploits the cause to bring himself to the fore. In this scenario the notion remains but the man disappears who, on behalf of some social segment (the market, politics, finance, etc.), exercises his function but rarely his principles, thus leaving open the doubt as to what kind of man a leader ought to be. Perhaps a sketch of an answer had been given by Bergson when he said: “Think as a man of action and act as a man of thought.”

Marcello Marino has taught Ethics of Communication at the University for Foreigners of Perugia and General and Social Pedagogy at the University of Perugia and the University of Siena. He has published essays in various journals and monographs for Franco Angeli, Rizzoli and Morlacchi University Press.