Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Ira’s book, To Stop a Tyrant, is available in hardback at https://amzn.to/3W5XDys and on Kindle at https://amzn.to/420Zvwc. An audiobook edition is coming soon.

Learn more about Ira, his other books, and his extensive work at https://irachaleffauthor.com.

Our host, Maureen Metcalf, posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI, or check out the Kindle version at https://amzn.to/44buVz8. The audiobook version is now available at  https://amzn.to/4dTCleZ.

Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Books we’re reading for fun or personal development right now include:

• To Stop a Tyrant by Ira Chaleff, on how leaders become tyrants and their types of followers, is in hardback on Amazon at https://amzn.to/3W5XDys and on Kindle at https://amzn.to/420Zvwc. An audiobook edition is coming soon.
• Take Back Your Power: 10 New Rules for Women at Work by Ancestry CEO Deb Liu, on how to overcome the obstacles women still face in the workplace – especially in tech. It’s in hardback at https://amzn.to/47OUO9E, and audio at https://amzn.to/3Y6EmOQ.
• Covert Cows and Chick-fil-A by Steve Robinson; it’s available in hardback at https://amzn.to/460LnmQ, on Kindle at https://amzn.to/3RVXhZs, and as an audiobook at https://amzn.to/3xPjBgn.
• The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Paperback = https://amzn.to/3VEl7cU, Kindle = https://amzn.to/45JGm1L, and audiobook = https://amzn.to/3RPhC2y

NOTE: As an Amazon partner, we may make a small commission from books you buy through these links.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Ira Chaleff is an author, speaker, and innovative thinker specializing in the dynamics between leaders and followers. He serves as chairman emeritus of the nonpartisan Congressional Management Foundation in Washington, D.C., an organization dedicated to enhancing communication between constituents and their elected representatives.

Chaleff’s groundbreaking work, The Courageous Follower: Standing Up to and for Our Leaders, has been published in multiple languages and is utilized globally across educational, corporate, government, and military institutions. He co-edited The Art of Followership: How Great Followers Create Great Leaders and Organizations, part of the esteemed Warren Bennis Leadership Series. His book Intelligent Disobedience: Doing Right When What You’re Told to Do Is Wrong explores the roots of obedience and provides guidance on resisting inappropriate orders to achieve ethical outcomes.

As the founder of the Followership Learning Community within the International Leadership Association, Chaleff has been recognized as one of the 100 “Best Minds on Leadership” by Leadership Excellence magazine. He has served on the board of the International Leadership Association and was a visiting leadership scholar at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, England. His ideas on leadership and followership have influenced cultures within the U.S. military, civilian agencies, and international institutions, including the European Union and the British Army.

Chaleff holds a degree in Applied Behavioral Science and is a Board Certified Coach from the Center for Credentialing and Education. He continues to contribute to the global followership community through writing and lecturing from his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

Transcript
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Maureen: Welcome to Innovating Leadership, Co [00:01:00] Creating Our Future. I’m your host, Maureen Metcalf, CEO and founder of the Innovative Leadership Institute, where we help leaders be future ready. In today’s show, Ira Chalif, author, speaker, and innovative thinker is going to talk about his book, To Stop a Tyrant, the power of political followers to make or break toxic leadership.

I will make a note that this was not written about our current political election. So for people concerned, we’re not making a political stance. We are recording at the International Leadership Association. So Ira and I are here in person. Ira, first of all, thank you so much for joining me. My pleasure, Maureen.

To stop a tyrant,

Ira: what was the impetus? All right, my personal history is I grew up in a multi generational family. And at an early age, I learned that my grandmother Had lost her entire family in the Holocaust. So at a very early age, the question sort of consumed me. How does that [00:02:00] happen? How do people allow leaders like that to get into power?

Why do they follow them? I didn’t really have the language, I think, to articulate it quite like that, but the question really resided with me for the rest of my journey till now. As you know, we’ve spoken before about my earlier work on courageous followership and on intelligent disobedience. Both of which examine ways that people who are not in the leader role can be full partners with the leader, supporting them robustly as warranted, but also having the courage to speak up when they see the leader going in a direction that is counterproductive for the mission, for the brand value.

For the morale of the personnel. And this is of course, critical because leaders who do not create an environment where people [00:03:00] feel safe to speak up like that, get very big blind spots, but my work on followership says, well, it’s not just up to the leader to create that kind of environment. You’re an adult.

As a follower, you’re a moral agent. You can speak up. Yes, it takes some courage. But if you are really effective at your job, you’re a great contributor, it’s unlikely that you’re going to be written off as a malcontent. And in fact, you may well become even more valued that you have warned the leader of potholes that he or she was able to avoid because of your honest counsel.

So that’s been the basic trajectory of my work. Now, and when I say now, in the last four or five years, I decided to go back to the roots of my interest in follower leader dynamics, which is the political scene. And all around the world, on both the political left and the political right, [00:04:00] History is full of leaders who may not have started out as tyrants, but over the course of their administration became dictatorial or tyrannical.

And there is a distinction I can talk about. And those who supported them early on, whether they were activists or elites who thought that this leader was really good for the country, often come to rue the fact. that they supported that leader and missed the signs, and it’s usually a male, that they were becoming tyrannical and paid some pretty significant prices for that.

The book is an examination of how might we do a better job of interrupting that progression. And Maureen, I’ll just say for those who are listening and not seeing, the subtitle is The Power of Political Followers to Make or Brake – B R A K E – a toxic leader, because we’re not talking about a violent act of breaking: B R E A K.

But instead, how do you slow [00:05:00] down any tendency there is to go in a direction that will not serve anyone well, ultimately?

Maureen: First of all, thank you. I love the framing of where the book came from, that it’s not a reaction to current. But, examining over the course of history, that we have seen tyrants on both sides, and I think many of us have, using Hitler as the example, wondered how the country got from early Hitler to later Hitler.

You talk about proto tyrants, what does that progress look like, and how might followers intervene earlier, before you get to something that’s full

Ira: blown. You’re hitting on the essence of what the book is about. I don’t usually like to coin a new word. P tyrant is a coined word, but everyone seems to intuitively understand it because it’s so close to the word prototype.

And a prototype is an earlier version of a later type. So a [00:06:00] prototyrant will necessarily become a tyrant, but they have some of the hallmarks in their behavior, their language, the images, they. Choose to use the things that they focus on. That is when we can still make a difference because I find that followers can shape their leaders.

I spent several decades in Washington DC working on a nonpartisan basis with members of Congress and their staffs. Their staffs were most often in their twenties, sometimes early thirties. The member of Congress was most often in their thirties, forties, fifties, sixties. And they depended very heavily on their staff.

I would observe that some staff were able to develop relationships where they really could get the member to rethink if they were going in a direction that was not serving their political career well and perhaps was not serving their constituents well either. So it’s not that followers create the leader, the [00:07:00] leader has certain inherent characteristics and drives that get them in a leadership position, but the follower can shape what they do in that leadership position and how they show up.

And that can make a huge difference. So this book is now looking at that in the political realm. You mentioned early on blind

Maureen: spots. We all have them. And I also want to make the note that tyrants aren’t only in the political realm, but also in a corporate realm. And the follower behavior could be similar in helping that leader identify blind spots and maybe reshape some behavior.

Ira: It’s a fair statement. I actually do state that. In the book, but I don’t want to mislead anyone. This book is focused on political leadership and followership. Having said that one of the very senior political figures who then went into corporate America and his endorsement said, this applies as well to corporate America.

So let’s see if I [00:08:00] retain the original question. I think it has to do with what can followers do to detect the early signs. Now, Maureen, what I’ve done in this book, I’ve identified that there are five different positions of followers in the sense that they have different levels of access to the leader.

There are those of us who are in the street, living our lives, maybe we go to a political rally, we watch the news, we may never meet the political leader directly. Then there are the activists, those of us who feel really strongly and decide to work day in, day out, either for the leader or against the leader if they feel they’re not the right leader for the polity.

The third, old political leaders. Need very large bureaucracies to implement their policy in the United States. That’s over 2 million employees at the federal level. That doesn’t count state and county employees. They have a very special relationship with [00:09:00] the political leader because they’re not elected.

The political leader is, they by tradition and to some degree by law are responsible for innovating the elected official’s agenda. But what if that agenda actually is ethically problematic? So, you know, there’s a whole series of dynamics that have to be thought through there. The fourth circle of followers I call elites.

And elites aren’t just the wealthy. Elites can be sports stars. You Celebrities, senior members of Congress, political commentators, anyone who can get the attention of a large number of people. And these days, of course, you know, there are some bloggers, podcasters who have millions of followers. So they have more.

Capacity to influence the leader because the leader is paying attention to who do they influence. And lastly, we have the confidants, the inner circle. And this is true, of course, as well in corporate America as it [00:10:00] is in the politics of any country. Who are the inner circle that really influence the leader when he or she is trying to make that final difficult decision.

Each of them have different ways of communicating to the leader. They have different challenges, if you will, about how do they retain their position? What risks are they willing to take? What courage do they need? They’re all actually somewhat different. In the book, I disaggregate these so each of us can figure out where are we in relation to the leader we’re thinking about.

Now, you may be just part of the populace in relation to the presidential candidate. But you may be a confidant of your local mayor or of your CEO. How do the psychodynamics work there? Where are you likely to wind up not being as truthful as that leader actually needs because of fear of position of et cetera.

So the book is very much. [00:11:00] a practical book. I am not an academic. I don’t come from academia. I come from 30 years in Washington D. C. watching and participating on both sides of the political aisle and these are ways to shed light on the psychological pressures and other pressures on band of followers and what their untapped power is that they could use if they find the courage to overcome whatever is inhibiting them.

Maureen: Can you walk us through for each of those five, what is that untapped power?

Ira: Yeah, let’s start with the populace. You know, when you write a book, you You learn things so much, you know that. Here’s something I learned. If you’re a stand up comedian, you try out your material, don’t you? So you get up and you tell some new material, and if the audience laughs a lot, you say, I’m keeping that in.

If they go, Mm, okay, [00:12:00] you take it out and try something else. That’s what happens at political rallies. The candidate tries something out that they think is going to fire up their base, or those they hope to become supporters. And if they robustly say, yeah, cheer,

Maureen: yeah, yeah,

Ira: I’m going to do more of that, and then maybe I’ll even spice it up more.

Well, we have to be very careful because crowd dynamics take over. And we’ve confined ourselves just sort of homeless. mindlessly cheering in support, as if we were at a football game. We’re not at a football game. At a football game, everyone goes home afterwards. The candidate who wins goes to the White House or the Governor’s Mansion.

So we have to be much more self aware and discreet about what are we going to give a robust feedback to the leader on and what are we not. So that’s one example of the power of just any citizen who decides to participate. So does that mean we should also boo at rallies? You know, it’s a great question.

I [00:13:00] don’t actually recommend that in the book, although there may be a place for that. But the iconic photograph I use in the book is of a Nazi Germany rally where 500 people in the photograph are all giving the Nazi salute and one guy has his arms folded. And it’s like, how do you be that guy when you hear something that’s really, you consider truly, you would not want anyone else saying that in your presence.

You would take offense. It’s hard to do. I talk in the book about my own experience with this. When a former vice president of the United States gave a keynote speech at the Naval Academy where I was on a panel and it was supposed to be a speech on followership. Cause that was a theme of the conference.

And I thought this is going to be great. Oh, I have such great stories to tell about followership. He didn’t tell one story about followership. It was all defending his very disastrous [00:14:00] policies. Everybody got up. And gave him a standing applause, except me and the guy sitting next to me, who is also a panelist.

And I wondered if this guy hadn’t stayed seated, would I have had the courage to stay seated? You know, I thought you could applaud politely, but it almost shocked me how the rational mind gets lost in crowd psychology. And that’s one place where we need to be much more aware and almost practice not going along with the herd.

In that instance, relatively low

Maureen: consequence.

Ira: Yes. You know, there’s social peer pressure, which we can’t underestimate. In the worst case scenario, there could be some violence, but generally speaking, you’re right. It’s a relatively low level risk, and one that

Maureen: I will hearken to our recently passed election.

Right behind the presidential candidates, you see the crowd behind them. And occasionally there is a [00:15:00] crowd member who is clearly disapproving. Then they get called out and show up on talk shows and such after. Your disapproval could be

Ira: visible. If we weren’t in such a highly polarized society in the U. S.

right now, it would be very interesting to take this person out of the crowd and ask him, you clearly were here, assumedly, because you had some support or hope for this leader, and then something that was said or that happened caused you to rethink it. Can you tell us what that was? That would be very helpful.

Unfortunately, what will happen is the other side will take this individual. and weaponize them. And so this is where I call out the media as well in this book that we know that it’s eyeballs and developing audience and all of this. So they’re fanning the flames as well, rather than sort of being authentically curious in a productive way, why What made you change your mind?

Help us understand that. Or did you [00:16:00] go

Maureen: to the rally starting as a disapprover?

Ira: Oh yeah, so why were you there? That would be an interesting question. And by the way, these rallies, if you didn’t pay attention to the content, you just paid attention to the energy and the back and forth of the crowd, you probably couldn’t tell the difference between a Bernie Sanders and a Donald Trump rally.

You see, the energy is there because generating energy is an important part of this. So then, what I’m doing in the book is saying, you still have to keep part of your rational mind, your ethical mind, tuned in to say, no, I’m not going to cheer for that. I don’t agree with that. Maybe I’m not going to boo.

Maybe that’s a step too far for me, but at least I’m not going to approve. Maybe I will cross my arms. And symbolically show my disapproval. That’s the fifth of the circles. Yes. So next level. The fourth are the activists. And again, activists have a lot of agency. You know, they’re [00:17:00] very committed on one or another side of an issue, or one for or against a candidate.

There’s a well known toolkit that again, activists on both sides tend to use. What I have found the courage that’s needed is for an activist who starts to hear something in their candidate that makes them uncomfortable. Instead of screening it out, those of us who know about cognitive dissonance know that when something doesn’t match with our beliefs, we tend to say, well, you know, I don’t want to hear that or that’s not important, or he didn’t mean that or whatever.

But rather than do that, let it in and have the courage to say, what is going on here? If this leader candidate continues in this vein, Am I willing to still support them? And if not, how do I voice that to the campaign manager or whomever to let them know and give them a chance to correct themselves?

Because we can’t discard people just because we don’t like [00:18:00] everything they say. You know, we’ll discard everyone. But how do we try to use our voice and still be even loyal to the candidate to say, you know, that’s going too far. Please stop doing that. Or, I won’t be able to support you. However one can effectively do that, I’m being simplistic here.

That takes a lot of courage to actually do that, because you have to admit that you may have been wrong. Not that they’re wrong, that you may have been wrong, do you see?

Maureen: Oh yeah. Well, and at least I find in my own situation, when I have the strongest reaction, I need to examine myself first. Because if I voice that strong opinion, often I have incomplete

Ira: information.

Well, that’s great and beautifully framed, and it’s a very high standard, because of course you’re in a field where you have really done the work you need to learn these things. Some people come by that naturally. Some people have been raised in families which say, you know, don’t speak until, you know, you’ve really thought about it.

Again, if your [00:19:00] peers are going rah, rah, rah, that’s where it takes the courage to say, hey, folks. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but here’s what I’m kind of not comfortable with. Are you comfortable with that? Tell me why. Help me

Maureen: understand that. I love the phrase, help me understand. I respect you. I appreciate you.

I see it differently. Help

Ira: me see what you’re seeing. You know what someone just taught me today? He said what they do is they say, that doesn’t sound right. Help me understand it. Beautiful. Easy.

Maureen: Yeah. Easy. So then the third, is that bureaucrats?

Ira: Yes. Now, in our culture, bureaucrats have a pretty pejorative connotation.

But I assure you, you know, I’ve worked with thousands of civil servants. So many of them are real experts in their field and actually doing a lot to protect our interests in one way or another. And I’m not saying there aren’t those who It’s game the [00:20:00] system and it’s hard to fire them and all of that is true.

But it’s a minority. The majority are very credible people who are trying to do their best. And they’re you and me. They go home at night and they take care of the family and the kids and the lawn and their car or whatever they do. and come back to work. In our culture, we’ve demonized bureaucrats. I don’t like the term the deep state, but I do acknowledge that bureaucracies do tend to become self protective and self important.

And there’s actually a early sociopolitical theory that says sometimes you need a charismatic leader to come along and kind of get the bureaucrats sort of back into their appropriate boundaries. So again, I don’t dismiss when people have some critiques of bureaucracy, but [00:21:00] I do know that they’re often unaware of how much those bureaucrats are contributing to their welfare.

Now what about bureaucrats themselves? They’re bound to follow the political appointees policies. That’s their job. But what happens? If those orders that they get actually violate ethics, values, or even the law. You know, they can’t just say, I was following orders. We know that is not okay. But we also know that there aren’t as much protection for them saying no, as sometimes people think there is.

So it takes a lot of courage, but it also takes political savvy. And I devote a whole chapter in here, and this is what could apply to corporations anywhere in the world as well. All organizations are somewhat political. If you’re overly political, people don’t trust you. But if you’re underpolitical, you often can’t get things done, because you’re not recognizing the self interest of the different power centers.

So [00:22:00] there’s a very good roadmap in this book on how you can become more politically aware and politically effective. And that’s going to be absolutely necessary if you’re going to try to influence higher ups who actually may have access to the top leader who is displaying proto tyrannical tendencies.

Or outright tyrannical tendencies. You see, there it gets tricky, Maureen. So let me take a moment to elucidate that. What I learned in writing this book is that an autocratic leader can become a dictator, and a dictator is different than a tyrant. Tch. Wow, that’s not something linguistically we tend to differentiate.

What’s the difference? A dictator was a position that the Roman Senate conferred on one individual in a moment of crisis, external or internal crisis, where they had the power to do anything necessary to resolve the existential threat. But it was a time bounded role. It was for six [00:23:00] months. Maybe that could be extended for another six months if it was deemed necessary.

It was an acknowledgement that sometimes in severe crisis, you need some very autocratic style of leadership. What happened, of course, in Rome and elsewhere, is that sometimes the dictator didn’t want to give up power. And now they became a tyrant. And what’s the difference? A tyrant is someone who nothing is creating a check on them.

They’re using their power arbitrarily. Abusively, cruelly. So you get a Saddam Hussein who, when his minister, and this is, I’m going to the point you say that with the tyrant, you know, speaking up when the United States, before we invaded one of his ministers at a meeting suggested maybe he takes a few week leave of absence to cool things down.

The next day, his dismembered body was sent to his family in a bag. Because now you had a full blown tyrant. You can’t use a [00:24:00] political process with a full blown tyrant. But, with a proto tyrant, you can. So, we have another interesting example that’s fascinating to me right now. In El Salvador. So El Salvador had this massive criminal gang problem.

And this fairly new elected president decided enough’s enough. Some 80 people were killed in one weekend and he ordered mass arrests and he arrested 63, 000 young men who were. probably involved with gangs. Now, he knew that some of them might not be involved. He wasn’t killing them like Duterte did in the Philippines.

So this was reversible injustice, if there was an injustice. But he took 63 or 73, 000 off the street in one fell swoop. The crime rate dropped to nearly zero. His popularity became 94%. That’s incredible. Now he was being a dictator, but he wasn’t being a [00:25:00] tyrant. You see? So there’s a maturity needed in how we think about the acts of political leaders.

So it can be very counterproductive for someone to say, uh, well, Trump’s a tyrant. Well, Trump might become a tyrant, somebody else might become a tyrant, but he doesn’t have all the power at this point to act like that. No, people can be afraid that he could acquire that power. I understand and that’s, you know, the book is about whomever you feel has the autocratic style that could become tyrannical.

Yes. From your position, you need to act. So we’re back into the bureaucratic position. And there are a lot of things that I suggest bureaucrats pay attention to in relation to whomever they are serving. It is again, explicitly not aimed at this president elect.

Maureen: So then after the bureaucrats, what’s the next, this is our fourth circle.

Yes.

Ira: And the elites and elites obviously have a lot of [00:26:00] influence in society either because they have vast amounts of money. They own media, they have huge amounts of followers. They can be a spiritual elite. They can be a social media elite. The primary error that history shows they make is if they think the person, the leader with autocratic tendencies can support their agenda, particularly their business agenda, frankly, but they’re generally their agenda, they will discount.

the things they’re uncomfortable with, and throw their weight, not just their vote, but the weight of their elite platform. What has happened all too often in history is that once that autocrat consolidates power, they turn on an elite or two and make an example of them to show that nobody better question their power, no matter who you think you are.

Now that you’re in office. And so elites need to not fall into that trap. And I give various ways [00:27:00] that they can still try to protect their self interests as business people or whatever, but not wind up inadvertently colluding. With someone who will become tyrannical.

Maureen: And then the last one is the confidant.

Ira: Yes, exactly. And this is the inner circle. Of course, there’s family involved. There’s often childhood friends. There’s often young people that have sort of been their golf caddy or their secretary, whomever that they’ve learned to trust. And these are the people, the followers who see what the leader is like.

In private time, not just their public face. And they can see if they’re starting to succumb to illness or some sort of, uh, overly stressed derangement or what have you. There’s a long history of presidents in the United States who hide their disabilities. Roosevelt, you know, hid his disability. Kennedy hid his over reliance on a medication for his back.

Recently [00:28:00] Biden’s inner circle hid his disability. decreasing acuity. So it’s very, very challenging for confidants to do the right thing. But the right thing I’m arguing is for the country, not for the individual. Now they can do it in a way that honors their relationship with the individual, that takes care of that person, but doesn’t wind up again colluding with them to the great detriment of the rest of the country.

Maureen: Thank you. This has been such an insightful journey. I have one role as a confidant to some executives. I have a different role. And how do I leverage that power to the benefit of that organization accomplishing its mission? And as you’ve said, we’re about serving the mission, not serving the individual.

Ira: Yes, and that doesn’t mean we’re not loyal to the individual as well. But we don’t place that loyalty so high that we put the rest of everything at risk. Instead, we work out a way, maybe it could be a soft landing, [00:29:00] an exit ramp, a way of taking care of their needs. Without sacrificing the rest of the organization or the country.

Any points you want our listeners to walk away with? In this post election time of our country, there’s a window for healing. And I don’t know a single family who doesn’t tell me that there are people in their family who think opposite of me. to them politically, and they can’t talk about politics. We need to change that.

We need to find ways to do that. I have had strong MAGA supporters read this book. I have had progressives read this book. No one takes offense. I think that it can provide a common vocabulary for people to start having respectful conversations. Not to persuade each other to their respective viewpoints.

But to help understand where there is commonality and to reduce the toxic polarization that we’re currently experiencing.

Maureen: Thank you. What a beautiful way to wrap up because we are seeing toxic [00:30:00]polarization and real fear. Thank you for that invitation for us to step in irrespective of our political point of view.

I also want to thank the International Leadership Association for hosting us. Ira, how would people learn more about your book and about your other

Ira: work? It’s irachalifauthor. com. Now the spelling is what’s tricky. I’ll spell out my name with no spaces or hyphens or dots or anything. I R A C H A L E R.

Two F’s author. com and there are videos there and there’s work about my earlier books that I think can be quite helpful. There’s also some free downloads for parents on how to use this material to keep their children safe in many different situations.

Maureen: Thank you, Ira. It’s a delight to get to talk to you again.

Ira: Thank you, [00:31:00] Maureen.