The Hidden Leaders

The Hidden Leaders

by Richard Louv
July 2001

The first in a series of essays on leadership from Leadership for a Changing World, a program of the Ford Foundation in partnership with the Advocacy Institute and the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, New York University.

"Leadership is such a gripping subject that once it is given center stage it draws attention away from everything else." --John Gardner

In the 21st Century, the quality of leadership is undermined by how Americans define it.

Too many of us think being a leader is a job for someone else, or that only celebrities qualify for the position. Or, we believe that leaders somehow appear magically -- summoned by fate, endowed with charisma and, usually, good hair.

Media coverage hasn't helped. Consider the familiar story of Rosa Parks, an African-American woman in Montgomery, Ala., who in 1955 stubbornly refused to give up her bus seat to a white man, leading to the Montgomery bus boycott and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. That's how the story is usually told, incompletely.

George Walker Smith, 71, a retired pastor and prominent community leader in San Diego, remembers a more complex tale.

As an obscure college student in the mid-1950s, Smith spent his summers working as a busboy in Montgomery. Every weekday morning, he caught a city bus at Holt Street. Each morning, at Cleveland Ave., quiet, stately Rosa Parks climbed aboard, on her way to the Montgomery Fair department store where she worked as a seamstress.

"Many times, the front of the bus would be practically empty, yet those of us who were black would stand rather than sit in those empty seats, which were reserved for whites," he recalls. In December, 1955, after returning to Knoxville College in Tennessee, Smith picked up the paper and saw Parks' photo "I said, 'I know that woman,'" he recalls. And he knew that Rosa Parks was not, as she was portrayed, simply a woman with tired feet who wasn't going to take it anymore.

Long before he rode the bus with her, Smith was aware of Rosa Parks. When he attended high school, he already knew that she was an important player in the fight for social justice, a force to be reckoned with in the Montgomery Improvement Association. Indeed, she had spent 12 years helping lead the local NAACP chapter. The summer before her sit-down strike and subsequent boycott, Parks had attended a 10-day training session at the Highlander Center, a labor and civil rights organizing school in Tennessee. There was far more to Parks than met the media eye then, and there still is.

The importance of what she did that day cannot be underestimated. But her defiant act "has been taken out of its most important context," says Paul Loeb, author of "Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in a Cynical Time." "The way the story is usually framed, you would think that this woman acted on a whim."

To the contrary, all those years of humble, grassroots work prepared her for "that fabled moment," as Loeb puts it.

When media reduces a story of committed, long-term leadership to a 30-second celebrity moment, more harm than good is done, says Loeb. This reportorial reductionism suggests to the public that social activists "come out of nowhere to suddenly take dramatic stands." Indeed, the overly-condensed, freeze-dried version discounts those people who spend years toiling for a cause without fame.

"It implies that we act with the greatest impact when we act alone," he says. "It reinforces a notion that anyone who takes a committed public stand -- or at least an effective one -- has to be a larger-than-life figure, someone with more time, energy, courage, vision or knowledge than any normal person could ever possess."

Is it any wonder, then, that leadership seems to have lost its flavor?

Today, many scholars and pundits complain that civic leadership is vanishing. In fact, according to the Harris Confidence Index, public faith in leadership in all sectors of society was on a downward spiral throughout the sixties, seventies and eighties, reaching an all-time low of 42 percent in 1997. In 2001, the number looked slightly better, at 55 percent. Relatively few people have a 'great deal of confidence' in those who run law firms (10 percent), the press (13 percent); organized labor (15 percent) or the Congress (18 percent), according to the Harris Index released in February.

Public faith in leadership may be tenuous, but - as in the case of Rosa Parks - there's more going on here than meets the eye.

Earlier this year, the Ford Foundation, partnering with the Washington D.C. - based Advocacy Institute of and the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service at New York University, launched an awards program, "Leadership for a Changing World," to recognize 20 outstanding leaders or leadership groups not yet broadly known beyond their immediate community or field. The goal is to reward leaders, but also to better understand the process of community leadership - where it's been, where it's going.

In the seven months after the program's announcement, the program received only 160 nominations. But then something remarkable occurred. During the next three weeks, nearly 3,000 nominations poured in, according to Mike Pertschuk, co-director of The Advocacy Institute.

"What could explain the disparity between the dismal portrayal by the experts and pundits of the state of American leadership and the outpouring of nominations?" he asks. "Part of the reason could be the pundits' narrow concept of leadership and their failure to look in the right places."

The LCW awardees will be announced on September 13.

Yes, we live in the age of immodesty, when local leadership is too often overshadowed, overlooked or misunderstood; when Hollywood stars are employed to front social causes, because celebrity sells. And yet another, more hopeful truth is waiting to be told; it's the rest of the story.

Richard Louv is the author of several books about community life in America. He is currently researching philosophies, histories and examples of community leadership, as a consultant to Leadership for a Changing World (leadershipforchange.org). He can be reached at www.richardlouv.com.