My conceptual paradise is a 2 x 2 box where two dichotomies are juxtaposed. Are you in this box or that one? Then the game of trying to figure out which box you belong, “Are you in box A or box B?”, “What type of leader are you?” “Are you transformational or transactional?” “Are you inwardly directed or outwardly directed?” “Are you left or right wing?”

Consultants have made a fortune helping people and organizations figure out which box they belong in.

The problem with these dichotomies is that they simplify the world. They give too much credence to clean, conceptual thinking.

Throughout my academic career I’ve taken pride in conceptual thinking and the clarity of constructs, but when you get out in the real world the constructs become a mess and dichotomies become continuums. You’re not one or the other. You are someplace on the continuum. And where you are on the continuum?

It depends on the situation. You may be a transactional leader one day and a transformative leader the next. You may be internally directed one day and externally directed a week from Tuesday.

And then there is what I consider to be the ultimate knee-jerk dichotomy?

Are you a manager or a leader?

I understand how we in academia can afford this luxury. It’s aesthetically pleasing and makes for a clean little world. If nothing else, academia loves cleanliness. But what I’m amazed at is when such a dichotomy is adhered to in the world of practice.

“We’re looking for a leader,” said one HR director in one corporation.

On the same day, in the same corporation, in reference to the same position another HR official told me, “We’re looking for a manager.”

On numerous occasions I’ve heard chief learning officers talk about their training programs and use this distinction, “We don’t need a leadership training program; we need a managerial training program.” Or “We don’t need a managerial training program; we need a leadership training program.”

Nowhere does this occur more than when we deal with high potentials in a corporate setting. They have technical skills, but what do we give them now that they have responsibility for others? Leadership skills or managerial skills?

No, we give them both. We stop with this knee-jerk dichotomy.

The nice thing about being in this point in my career is that I no longer have to indulge in the luxuries of dichotomies. I don’t want to hire managers that can’t lead and leaders that can’t manage.

I want people to both inspire others and implement ideas. I want the movers in organizations to innovate and create, while at the same time be able to figure out how to manage the process of maneuvering from ideas to results.

I want politicians who can inspire during an election, but once elected can manage for results.

Anyone that’s hiring for a responsible position needs someone who can lead and manage.

The very notion of this dichotomy continuing to get knee-jerk recognition in a world demanding agile, flexible, and solution-based companies, and in a world which we want to retain talent and stimulate the commitment of Gen Y this management/leadership distinction is an anachronism.

This dichotomy between leading and managing is an indulgence in simplicity that we can no longer afford. Especially when asking ourselves what core competencies do we need to move in the future?

Train your managers to lead and your leaders to manage.

One doesn’t speak about one’s job; one speaks about ones “team.” One makes a reference to the organization. They say, “we at Goldman,” “we at Merrill,” or “we at Citi.” It’s always “we,” never the “I.”

It’s not a very profound to point this out. The fact that these corporations are no longer organizations, but asylums is nothing new. But it is a wonderful way of recalling the work of who I consider to be one of America’s best sociologists in the latter part of the 20th century.

Whenever I hear my friends at Goldman, my friends at Chase, and my friends who work at large organizations, lament their loss of self, their feelings of alienation, and their sense of entrapment, I have a tendency to grab a copy of Erving Goffman’s book, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates and make them read it.

Published in 1961, Goffman’s Asylums examines the social situation of mental patients in hospitals. For him, hospitals are total institutions, that is, organizations where individuals conduct all their activities in one place. In total institutions the culture is defined, the activities regimented, and life is insular. These are institutions where immersion is complete, where are roles are defined, where relationships are inhibited by the culture, and where we become what the organization needs us to become.

In Asylums Goffman speaks about the mortification of the self. How the self changes, how over time personal identity is replaced by organizational identity to the point that a completely new role emerges–the role of the patient.

After a while everyone within a total institution begins to submit to the definition of self the organization imposes on them, begins speaking the language of the organization, parroting the aspirations of the organization, and accepting the authority and rules of the organization.

In time, the patients become aware that their survival depends on understanding the political, the social-psychosocial, and even the economic nuances of the asylum they are in. They construct a new self and a new intensely vision focused on succeeding within the asylum.

But what happens when patients leave a total institution after they’ve learned how to survive and even thrive within one?

How will the specific skills they have learned serve them outside of the asylum? Will the skills that they’ve learned fail them in the outside world?

Goffman finds that those who’ve stayed too long can never truly move on because they’ve become totally defined by the institution. They’ve become “professional patients.”

The ideal situation for patients is to leave the asylum after having learned from it and before they’ve lost their sense of self. They must leave having reaped the benefits, while not becoming enveloped in the asylum’s culture and values.

So you’ve graduated college, you’ve got a new job, you’re working 18 hours a day learning new skills and discovering what you need to succeed, but somehow you feel that this isn’t quite you.

You feel the process of what Goffman calls, self-mortification. The destruction of your autonomous self. You feel yourself talking a new language and walking a different walk and you feel that you’re not exactly where you want to be. The job is good, the money is great, and the direction defined—but you still know you have different aspirations. Now the haunting question you ask yourself is: “when should I leave?”

Well, maybe never. Maybe life in a total institution is comfortable for you. But if you choose to leave make sure you do before you’re totally defined as a “professional patient.” Make sure you leave while you still know how to survive in the outside.

Be careful of the mortification of self and pick up a copy of Goffman’s Asylum.

Another student even took Washington down a peg and questioned how bright our founding father really was. He asked weather or not Washington’s silence hinted at tactical stoicism or if his quiet demeanor implied that he often missed the point?

Richard S. Tedlow’s book, Giants of Enterprise, is an exercise in demythologizing leadership.

“Look kiddy,” said Charles Revson, president of the Revlon Corporation, “I built this business by being a bastard. I run it by being a bastard. I’ll always be a bastard…don’t try to change me.”

Revson was speaking to a talented brand manager who he had brought to tears after he demolished a pitch she’d spent months working on.

If Revson was so cruel, then how did he manage to bring the Revlon Corporation to such great heights?

Thomas J. Watson Sr., founder of IBM, didn’t know much about computing. He could understand how a cash register worked, but he didn’t know the mechanics behind building one.

If he didn’t have the technical skill, how did Watson turn IBM into a global force?

No one demythologizes leadership better than Richard S. Tedlow in his still enlightening, entertaining, and engrossing book. It’s a work that must be kept on the shelves of all high potential leaders, current leaders, and those who hope to train leaders.

Tedlow, professor at the Harvard Business School, profiles seven American business innovators and explores what made them successful, what made them tick, and what made them work so hard.

With a keen eye Tedlow writes about, Andrew Carnegie, George Eastman, Thomas J. Watson Sr., Henry Ford, Charles Revson, Sam Walton, Sam Noyce and all the periphery  characters that made these men’s businesses so successful.

It’s easy to look at these business titans and assume they are endowed with something special, something rarefied, that the normal person can’t quite put his finger on.

But Tedlow doesn’t portray these giants of enterprise as larger-than-life men who stomp around palatial offices having nothing but brilliant ideas. He presents these leaders as human beings who, more often than not, had to pick themselves off the floor and brush the dirt off their knees.

The underlying lesson in Tedlow’s book is that leaders aren’t figures that descend from the heavens, but rise through the ranks and make just as many mistakes as the next guy.

And it’s not like each of these men had brilliant, ground-breaking, ideas. They were each knee-deep in competition, surrounded my players who were doing exactly what they were—and in some cases, doing it better. Sam Walton wasn’t the only retailer that discounted–he had to compete with Kmart, Woolworths, and Target. Andrew Carnegie had to compete with other rivals in the steel business—and had to work aggressively to buy them out.  The list goes on. The difference maker for the men illustrated by Tedlow was their leadership ability and how they managed teams, campaigns, agendas, and moments of great upheaval and change.

What Tedlow excels in doing is showing the micro-skills of execution these leaders employed. In many ways he is a biographer of tactics. He shows us how each of these leaders succeeded because they knew how to get things done, push agendas, and politically survive. And, yes, even manage.

His research was deemed fraudulent by American herpetologist, G.K. Noble, in the journal, Nature. He charged that Kammerer had injected his mid-wife toad samples with ink so they would appear to have carried on characteristics from their environment.

Soon after the review was published Kammerer killed himself.

But was Kammerer’s work fraudulent? Did his suicide indicate a confession?

In The Case of the Midwife Toad, Arthur Koestler attempts to figure out whether or not Kammerer was telling the truth.

At the time of Kammerer’s research Austria was in political turmoil and the Nazi party was tearing the intellectual community apart.

Koestler discovers that Kammerer’s toads and notes might have been tampered with by a colleague at the University of Vienna who was a Nazi sympathizer. The motive of the suspected sabotage, Koestler reasons, was to discredit Kammerer who was a public pacifist.

If that was the case, Kammerer’s research may not have been fabricated and would have firmly run contrary to the scientific orthodoxy of the time.

Modern science suggests that Kammerer’s work, while running contrary to Neo-Darwinist evolutionists, may explain epigenetics—the study of heritable changes in genes caused by factors other than changes in the underlying DNA sequence. In other words, Kammerer may have found evidence that would suggest some acquired traits can be passed on from generation to generation.

While Koestler artfully tells us the engaging story of Kammerer he lets us decide whether or not Kammerer’s work was falsified.  He gives a fair and critical analysis of Kammerer’s work and also explains it with simplicity.

The Case of the Midwife Toad teaches us the old lesson: people who challenge the status quo might not be entirely crazy. It’s a valuable take-away for leaders who propose new and different ideas.

Even though you may be right and your evidence is strong you will attract critics who play the “got-you” game.

Defending conventions is the refuge of the nervous and unwilling, standing up for new ideas takes daring. Kammerer’s case exhibits all of the pitfalls and highpoints of walking into new territory.

I loved my first boss. She was a native New Yorker who rose in the ranks of our company until she became director of the Belize site and started to oversee our humble staff of four employees and expand our network of community partners. She built strong relationships with other organizations, hospitals, doctors, and traditional healers in the area, slowly gaining their trust and respect so that they, too, could join our initiative to improve access to quality care in rural Belize.

I followed her lead and went out of my way to get to know members of the community, expressing interest in their work and sharing my ideas about how we could expand our health services and make them more sustainable. I got along great with the staff and we worked collaboratively on all of our projects, dividing up the labor so that each person could contribute their own unique take on the project.

Unfortunately, five months after I joined the organization, my boss went through a telenovela-style breakup and had to leave the country. The organization scrambled to replace her with someone who had lots of experience in management and sales, which they assumed was more important for a site leader than someone with a big heart and a lot of great ideas.

They decided to hire my new boss (let’s call him Juan) because of his work experience and talkative demeanor. He had spent the last nine years working his way up from being a floor salesman to becoming the manager of 25 salesmen (before being fired for stealing from the company, although he insisted he was set up so that they wouldn’t have to give him a pension for ten years of employment).

Juan put on a great show for the regional director, who flew in to train him during his first week of employment. But as soon as the regional director left, things started to fall apart. Juan represented everything I wanted to avoid in a leader: he loved the sound of his own voice; delegated instead of getting involved in the projects of his overworked, small staff; antagonized the community partners; made excuses when he failed or forgot to do something; pitted the staff against one another by talking about them behind their back and blaming them for projects gone wrong; and upsetting our volunteers through his cultural insensitivity.

As everything unraveled at the Belize site, where we had over forty volunteers in-country participating in five different projects, all of which had to be overseen by at least one staff member, Juan sat at his desk or disappeared for long periods of time. If someone asked him a question, he directed them to me because he didn’t know the answer. He had absolutely no idea what we were trying to accomplish and had no desire to get involved in the fieldwork that transformed us from a placement agency into an organization that deeply cared about and catered to the needs of the community.

When two groups of volunteers left the country after a harrowing two weeks of mobile clinics, Juan called us in for an emergency staff meeting. Their program evaluations were far below average; they wrote about the tangible tension between staff members, how disorganized everything seemed, the lack of communication…the list went on and on. I had worked twelve hour days trying to hold things together for the group so it was hard not to take the evaluations personally, but to make things worse, Juan’s “staff meeting” consisted of four hours of him chastising each and every staff member (except for his sister, the accountant) for not trying hard enough, not working together, not letting him in on what we were doing, etc. Juan singled out one staff member in particular, berating him for not planning and executing various tasks that were, in fact, Juan’s responsibility. Every time my colleague opened his mouth for a rebuttal, Juan shot him down, silencing him with even louder yelling.

Ultimately, I quit. It was partially for financial reasons, but mostly because I couldn’t stand to work with—much less be led by—such a disrespectful, condescending, callous man who played himself as the victim whenever I confronted him about his role and responsibilities. I had a profound, deeply meaningful experience in Belize and got to work with such amazing people, and I didn’t want my memories of Belize to be sullied by the negative experience of working with him.

In my last weeks there, I hand-picked a replacement who, like me, cared more about serving the community and developing effective health projects than he did about his own ego. I trained him to take the initiative to meet people in the community and make use of our volunteer funds to provide healthcare services to those who needed them most, no matter how often Juan talked about cutting the budget.

So what’s the lesson in this story? To turn it into a positive, it’s a lesson about what makes a good leader. Juan must have been a good manager or he wouldn’t have lasted so long at his old company or risen to such a high managerial position. He was good at delegating, isolating himself from the ho-hum daily tasks while still overseeing them, and trying to cut costs, all of which make more sense for an incentive-driven field like sales.

But what he lacked was empathy—not just for the community we were supposed to serve, but also for the staff that worked so hard to make our lofty goals of accessible healthcare into a reality. He saw himself as a manager instead of an equal partner who, like us, had to put his heart and soul—or at least his time and energy—into the daily work if he wanted the organization to go anywhere. This does not just apply to the nonprofit and social entrepreneur fields. No matter what the context of our hierarchical relationship was, he should have made an effort to care about his staff, clients, and his work.

If there is one thing I learned from Juan, it’s that anyone can be a boss, but not everyone can be a leader. My old boss got me involved in each project, introduced me to our community partners, and asked me what I wanted to get out of the work from day one. When people came into the office asking for money for HIV drugs or help getting a life-saving surgery in Guatemala, she did not turn her back and apologetically respond that we didn’t have room in the budget. Instead, she did what she could to help each person out, even if it took us a year to repay the pharmacy or physician. I am grateful to Juan for helping me recognize that a boss can only be a leader if she truly cares about her employees, her business (or community) partners, her clients, and her actual work. Juan was a big talker and always insisted that he cared about us and the job, but actions are louder than words, and I was never convinced.

When I went to Belize, I expected to learn about delivering health care to underserved communities and experience a new culture. But what I took away from the experience was a deep respect for people who do not let their ego or the organizational hierarchy define how they treat and work with others. And that’s a lesson that I’ll draw on for many years to come.

Over the past two days Cornell University’s Nick Salvatore has written about two leaders Amos Webber and Nannie Helen Burroughs—two leaders who deftly fought for equality. In Salvaotre’s final installment he writes about Reverend Clarence LaVaughn Franklin.

Reverend Clarence LaVaughn Franklin, the preacher extraordinaire, began his life in 1915 in the deeply segregated Mississippi Delta. Raised by his mother, Rachel, and step-father, Henry Franklin, C. L. began attending St. Peter’s Rock Baptist in the Delta town of Cleveland, in Bolivar County, as a baby carried by his mother. But a few years later, still a child, found him working long hours in the cotton fields owned by the white planter on whose land the family lived and toiled. Both experiences would prove formative.

The novelist Richard Wright posed the central problem of black Americans growing to maturity in that hostile climate. Born in Natchez, Mississippi in 1908, he asked years later, as a successful novelist living in the North, of his youthful self: “But where had I gotten this notion of doing something in the future?” C.L. asked similar questions, and recalled later in life an experience he had as an 11 year old boy working those cotton fields around Cleveland:

We had a field that ran right up to the railroad tracks. Just across that railroad track was the 61 highway. And it was meaningful to me…to see the trains coming from Memphis enroute to New Orleans and Jackson. The people would be waving  out of the windows at us in the field. And the cars going down the highway with  different license plates….This  was quite an interesting thing to me to see that….It             gave me a deep longing to someday see these places where the cars came from, where the trains came from, and where the people on the trains came from.

Across his life, the church provided C. L. with the central context through which he explored that “deep longing” –what his friend, Reverend Benjamin Hooks, of Memphis, would later call “an intimate kind of commotion”—that fueled his work and his inner search for meaning. In 1929, age 14, C.L. accepted Christ and received baptism in the Sunflower River.  Two years later a powerful dream/vision—and, it must be said, a hatred of farming—led him to accept a call to the pulpit, and he became a circuit preacher, traveling to four churches each month as no one congregation could offer a full salary. His education was limited, and he was, in his own words, a theological fundamentalist during these years: The Bible was the literal word of God and the only issue a pastor should address concerned individual salvation. In 1939, however, that “intimate kind of commotion” led Franklin to his first fulltime pulpit at New Salem Baptist in Memphis, then to Buffalo, and finally, in 1946, Detroit. In less than seven years, Franklin’s understanding of faith and politics, to say nothing of urban life, underwent a sea change.

Twenty-four when he arrived in Memphis, C. L.’s raw skills as a preacher and singer were nonetheless considerable and, before long, his Sunday morning sermon drew standing room only crowds. Hungry for education, he took classes at the city’s historically black Le Moyne College, where he first read Richard Wright. Even more important to his growth was the tutoring and fellowship offered weekly by a group of senior pastors to young preachers like Franklin. They criticized drafts of sermons, discussed points of theology, analyzed biblical selections, talked of politics and the race, and helped the young men learn how to administer a church. In this group, C.L. began to question the fundamentalist strictures he had brought from Mississippi, and found support for the troubling feelings, he recalled, that accompanied his embrace of “Biblical thinking beyond what I’d been exposed to in Mississippi.”  Out of this came a different message from the pulpit and in the weekly radio program, “The Shadow of the Cross,” C.L began in 1942. Religious themes and hymns were important, but C. L. also explored over the air the meaning of those themes for daily social life in a segregated city and country. and he invited  local black leaders, NAACP organizers, and national Baptist officials to join him in these discussions. In 1943 C. L. took the pulpit at Friendship Baptist in Buffalo, a large congregation with a significant trade union presence among the members. These men and women broadened further C.L.’s social vision, and contributed to his sharper integration of God’s word with life as experienced daily. These lessons too he in turn spread to a broader audience over the radio program he began shortly after arriving in Buffalo. In both cities, C. L. led his congregation and increasingly those beyond the church walls. But his leadership was deeply informed by what he learned from others.

Yet, almost as soon as he arrived in Buffalo, it seemed to many in the congregation, he left—to take a position at New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit in 1946 where, until he was incapacitated in 1979, he became a masterful teacher, colleague, and leader in his congregation and well beyond.

C. L.’s most influential method of teaching and leading was, of course, the sermon. He could take four verses of a Psalm, for example, as he did in his masterful sermon, “Without A Song” with the 137^th Psalm, and develop the complex meaning in its plaintiff cry of the Israelites into a potent lesson of faith and politics for the present. “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land,” the Israelites asked as the refused to sing. For New Bethel and for black America, however, the burden of his message was that we had to sing for, some things “you can’t say you can sing, isn’t that so?” And he told the story of Mary, a slave on an 18^th century plantation in Georgia who, converted during a revival by a white Baptist minister, went to take her place on the mourners’ bench—only to be turned away. As she walked back down the aisle, tears streaming down her face, Mary mumbled: “I’m going to tell God one of these days how you treat me.” Her fellow slaves, watching through the open windows, at that moment raised the hymn that carried, even centuries later, one of the deepest exressions of hope in African American culture: “Oh Mary, don’t weep, don’t mourn;/Pharaoh’s army got drownded;/Mary, don’t weep, and then don’t mourn.”

It is important to note that the sermons of this masterful preacher who “whooped,” or chanted, the final third or so of his sermons while remaining on message, reached audiences far beyond New Bethel’s capacity of 2500. In Detroit, the 10:00 P.M. Sunday sermon was broadcast live, and from 1953 on, his sermons were recorded live by a local recording studio and sold regionally throughout the Midwest. In 1956, Chess records, the great Chicago blues label, took over for a national audience and some 75 of C. L.’s sermons would be distributed, and many became best sellers in the black community. As a result WLAC in Nashville, Tennessee, a radio station with a national reach, began airing a sermon every Sunday night at 10:00 to an enormous audience. Not surprisingly, C.L. quickly became the star attraction on the gospel circuit across the nation.

Franklin’s leadership in the community emerged in other ways as well. Much like what Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. would do in Montgomery, Alabama in 1954, C. L. established a Political Action Committee at New Bethel to encourage discussion of issues and to get out the vote during elections. In addition, he brought in such guest preachers as Reverends King, Adam Clayton Powell and, to give talks, various politicians, both local and national. What was most important about Franklin’s approach to leadership in his community was that he did not require that others necessarily agree with him. In 1954, for example, he gave the church over to two local Communists, James and Grace Lee Boggs, to discuss the struggle in Kenya against British colonialism and its meaning for African Americans. C. L. was openly anti-Communist, but thought the Boggs’ had ideas and information valuable for black Detroit. This pattern would be repeated throughout the 1960s, as Franklin, the committed if skeptical integrationist, worked with and disagreed with black nationalist advocates such as Reverend Albert Cleage, the brothers Richard and Milton Henry, and such groups as the Black Arts Movement and the Republic of New Africa. It was not that he was self-effacing, a man without ego—definitely not! Rather, Franklin understood that, for all his considerable talents, he held no monopoly on wisdom and that the problems confronting the African American community were complex. Given that, he would offer support, if not necessarily an endorsement, to any group whom he thought had the best interests of his people at heart. As a result, his prominence as a preacher was less of a barrier than it might have been for other well-known people, for Franklin never forgot where he came from, the people who had passed him along, and the lessons he had learned.

Amos Webber (LINK), Nannie Helen Burroughs, (LINK) C. L. Franklin—three very different personalities, three approaches to leadership, three distinct eras in which they operated. Yet they shared two core characteristics. They were willing to take risks, to raise issues they thought important, in an effort to raise awareness and broaden engagement. But at their best, none of them forgot that they were in and of their communities, and that their very leadership depended on the lessons they learned from others. Each in their own way understood that effective leadership emerged not from isolated individuals but from the shared experience and involvement of many in the proverbial village where they, and now we, reside.

Nick Salvatore is the Maurice and Hinda Neufeld Founders Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations. You can learn more about Salvatore here. (link)

On Friday, Nick Salvatore wrote about Amos Webber—a leader who wasn’t a president or a businessman, but a janitor. The lesson: leadership can happen anywhere.  Continuing the series, Salvatore writes about Nannie Helen Burroughs—another leader who doesn’t exactly fit the mold.

Nannie Helen Burroughs differed from Amos Webber in background, in personality, and in her approach to leadership; but she was no less insistent in claiming democratic rights for, and in conjunction with, local black communities. Born in Orange County, Virginia in 1879, her mother moved the family to Washington, D.C. following her husband’s death in 1884. Raised a Baptist, and well educated (in 1896 she graduated from Washington’s Colored High School, now Dunbar High), Burroughs moved to Louisville, Kentucky the following year to work for the Foreign Mission Board of the National Baptist Convention (known as the NBC), then as now the largest organization of black church members in the nation.  At the Richmond meeting of the NBC in 1900, Burroughs, at the ripe old age of 21, helped win the five year struggle within the organization over whether to establish a Woman’s Convention. In a speech she entitled, “How the Sisters are Hindered from Helping,” Burroughs said, in part: “For a number of years there has been a righteous discontent, a burning zeal to go forward in [Christ’s] name among the Baptist women of our churches and it will be the dynamic force in the religious campaign at the opening of the 20^th century.” Her analysis of women’s role in local church communities and the importance of their own organization within the NBC finally carried the day and the  Woman’s Convention, Auxiliary to the National Baptist Convention, was established. Nannie Helen Burroughs would lead that group from 1900 until she stepped down in 1960. [Higgenbotham, ch. 6]

Burroughs was a human dynamo. In her first year in office she traveled over 22,000 miles, delivered 215 speeches, organized 12 local branches of the Convention, wrote over 9,000 letters and received almost 5,000 in return. Young, single (as she would remain throughout her life), and burning with that “righteous discontent” to spread her faith and her social vision, Burroughs sought to expand the Women’s Convention in two important ways: by encouraging a democratic inclusion at the annual meeting, always held in conjunction with the NBC convention; and by integrating into her faith a potent social and political analysis of the problems and potential of American democracy. At a time when many religious people, black and white, held their faith as a guide solely to the condition of the inner soul and its salvation, and considered women’s role as limited to the  sphere of family, this approach made Burroughs a force, at times a contentious one, within black America.

Burroughs knew, for example, that many of black women in the organization came from middle-and upper middle-class families. How else could they afford the travel expenses, membership fees, and magazine subscription costs? Burroughs wanted a more democratic sisterhood at the Convention meetings, and urged local branches to raise funds collectively, from within their church communities, to send different delegates each year to the annual meetings. This could mean difficult discussions with the pastor, who may not have been supportive of such activism by women, or of revenue sharing, but the goal of organizing more women to engage their world was worth the tension. Her own social vision also proved attractive to the growing membership. Burroughs was very much in a Social Gospel tradition and saw the very depth of her faith as demanding interaction with the world as found. Questions of democracy, inequality, poverty, and education—to say nothing of segregation, racism, and lynching—were as much a part of her faith vision as her Christian’s belief in Christ’s saving power. Given her long tenure as the Convention’s leader, her influence touched at least three generations of black religious women. How did she use that influence?

Consider for a moment some of her early messages. In 1904, but eight years following the Plessy decision which declared separate but equal constitutional,  Burroughs urged her audience of women church activists to protest such conditions when they returned home, following the example of the black community of Richmond, Virginia which was then six months into what would be a two year boycott of the city’s segregated public transportation.  A decade later, two years before the appearance of W. D. Griffith’s widely applauded racist movie depicting Black Reconstruction, “Birth of a Nation,” Burroughs proposed a joint task force of the Women’s Committee and the NAACP to counter negative images of blacks in film, literature, newspapers, and the popular stage. In 1919, she again focused on segregation in public facilities and in the same message stressed the need for an anti-lynching law. Nor were these concerns merely a phase in her life. Nearly a quarter of a century later, in the aftermath of race riots by white mobs against the black community in both New York and Detroit, Burroughs reminded her delegates of the meaning of their American traditions.  The “righteous discontent” expressed by African Americans about such atrocities, she explained, echoed a similar discontent that motivated the revolutionary generation of the 1770s.  “Christianity and democracy must meet and answer the question of color, squarely and justly,” she insisted, “or both are done for as progressive, enduring world forces.”

The yearly programs at the Convention were quite rich. Sessions on religious themes, on building local church organizations, on inter-faith outreach were plentiful, and there was always a powerful preacher—a J. Pius Barber, a Martin Luther King, Sr. & later Jr. as well, a C. L. Franklin—to deliver the message, but other themes were also prominent. As early as 1907, one long afternoon program began with devotionals, and then proceeded series of short talks, followed by discussion, on such topics as needed social reforms, the press and racial attitudes, developments in “race sentiments” nationally, and on the relation of labor and immigration policies to the condition of African Americans. What was important in this was, of course, the themes raised, but there was another element as well. Black women gave these talks, to audiences of black women of widely varying social, economic, and educational backgrounds. The underlying message in all the panels was really quite direct: Consider what you have heard, discuss it with fellow delegates, bring it back to your church committees at home, become active in spreading awareness and creating a response to these problems. Burroughs was not alone in this effort among African Americans—for example, Carter G. Woodson and his army of book salesman with the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History did important work as well. But Burroughs’ focus on church women and her long tenure as a national leader, point both to her part in challenging the ministerial male prerogative within the NBC and, in the process, encourage the emergence of a broader mass movement for social justice that provided the essential platform upon which many a more well-known leader would eventually stand.

While Burroughs did not always specifically underscore the need to study the past, it was  implicit in all she did. A race-proud woman, she propelled her black audiences to discover for themselves an honest historical past as an alternative to the demeaning version projected by the dominant society. In her 1926 program for women, Burroughs specified the need to struggle actively against segregation and lynching, and for political rights and inter-racial understanding in compliance with God’s will. Her closing point offered an even broader vision for discussion in local church circles over the coming year. The goal, she suggested, was “The awakening of race consciousness and the stimulation of race pride through the Study of Race History.” It is important to note that many of these women, and some men, responded to Burroughs’ messages over the decades. Letters poured into her office from church women in large urban areas as well as small, rural crossroad communities, from all sections of the nation, soliciting her opinion on the writer’s local political efforts against segregation, attempts at interracial activities, and, chapter building in local church communities. From the depths of Mississippi in 1948 came a request for her photo to adorn the walls of the Nannie H. Burroughs Mission Club as it held its annual program during Negro History Week.[i] It was not that every Baptist woman responded similarly. Yet we will never appreciate the full impact of Nannie Helen Burroughs’ appeal to history as well as faith in pursuit of a more assertive concept of democracy until we can know more about what actually occurred in those church meetings and discussions across the black Baptist world where Burroughs’ messages, pamphlets, and pageant materials encouraged new visions and more complete self-definitions.

Burroughs, who died in 1961, a year after stepping down from her position as president of the Woman’s Convention, operated on a different scale than Amos Webber (LINK). Hers was a national stage, not one local community, and her task as a leader was to teach, to urge, and to support her members in their local work. But she and Webber shared a common understanding of the necessity for local communities themselves to work to find solutions to the varied common problems black Americans faced.

Tomorrow, Nick Salvatore will discuss another community organize and leader.

Nick Salvatore is the Maurice and Hinda Neufeld Founders Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations. You can learn more about Salvatore here. (link)

In celebration of the The Village at Ithaca’s 10^th anniversary Cornell University’s Professor Nick Salvatore spoke about leaders who defy conventional notions of leadership and get things down through community organization and engagement.

The following three part series has been adapted from Salvatore’s talk entitled, “Leadership in the Community.”

When we think of leaders, we usually think of famous people.  Major business leaders, powerful politicians, dominant religious figures—it is often people in these categories to whom we refer, and often defer to one degree or another. For many of us, especially those of us over 40, the unspoken lesson of those grade school textbooks taught that leaders were male, and white. There were occasional exceptions to this, but the consistent ethical and political meaning conveyed was that they led, and the task of the rest of us was support. In this we may have required tasks to complete, but in terms of articulating aims and goals, most of us were portrayed as the passive recipients of their wisdom and direction.

The African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child,” suggests, however, a much more complex reality. A village may have a leader, but the proverb suggests that all in the community have both the responsibility and the opportunity, through their engagement, intelligence, and caring, to create the social framework for those children to emerge as informed, self-confident adults.

In the following series I’d like to briefly look at three individuals from the American past who were never leaders in that first, textbook definition, but who made significant contributions to raising the village itself to a greater awareness of its responsibilities and its possibilities.

The first person I want to discuss was neither a president nor a businessman, but rather a janitor and a messenger in a 19^th-century iron and steel mill.

Born on April 25, 1826, in Attleborough, Pennsylvania, some 20 miles outside Philadelphia, to parents who were free people of color, Amos Webber grew to maturity in that small black community. While there is little record of Webber’s first twenty years, we do know that his family worshipped at the Bethlehem Colored Methodist Church which was a center for a wide variety of community activities beyond the worship service. Young Amos probably attended the church-based school, and certainly witnessed the parades and public celebrations of black fraternal groups. As a young adult, he probably knew of the extensive activities of the Attleborough black community in shepherding fugitive slaves along the Underground Railroad.  In the late 1840s, Amos moved to Philadelphia. Over the next decade he worked for a series of white employers in various unskilled positions, seemingly got along well with white co-workers, and in March 1852 married Lizzie Sterling Douglass, a mulatto woman from New Jersey. Beyond work and family, his involvements centered in two areas.

As in Attleborough, Webber was deeply grounded in black social organizations. His church was now Lombard Street Central Presbyterian; but as with Bethlehem Colored, it was also so much else. As a mature man in his thirties, it was here he met Robert Jones, an elder of the church and leader of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows, the black fraternal organization Webber joined. He also joined the Prince Hall Masons. Like other free black northern churches, Lombard Street instilled in its members a stern moral code and, recognizing the hostility of most neighboring whites, established church-run court system to settle disputes among blacks fairly. Webber himself gave testimony in one such trial. Even more, Lombard Street was one center of black Philadelphia’s Underground Railroad. Webber himself was involved in the Jane Johnson rescue in 1855, and a similar case involving the fugitive, Daniel Dangerfield, in 1859. It was shortly after this that Webber made an 11 day roundtrip to Canada, most probably accompanying fugitive slaves to safety. Tutored by older members of the black community as a youth, and as a recent migrant unfamiliar with urban manners and customs, Amos Webber had become a tutor and example to others, passing on moral guidance and political insights as he began to help raise the next generation.

The second involvement that occupied his attention was, for its duration and its depth, simply astounding for any non-elite American in the 19^th century, regardless of race or ethnicity. Beginning on December 8, 1854, Webber began what he called the “Amos Webber Thermometer Book,” a chronicle he would maintained until his death fifty years later. The term, thermometer,  refers to his twice daily entries of weather conditions; but the essence of this book, actually 9 large business ledgers, was in the handwritten entries he made across these decades.  He recorded events from newspapers, at times described activities he himself was part of, and commented on political issues broadly, and those affecting black America particularly. The chronicle is also something else: It is the record of a man who deeply felt that his life, and the life of his community, had meaning and value beyond the racism that abounded, and therefore was worth preserving.

Amos and Lizzie Webber moved to Worcester, MA in 1860, where they both quickly reestablished their religious and fraternal activities. He found employment at Washburn & Moen, a prominent iron and later steel plant owned by a white abolitionist family. In 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, Webber joined the 5^th Massachusetts Calvary, served as a guard at a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp in Maryland, saw action at Petersburg, VA in 1864, and occupied Texas to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation during early Reconstruction. He rose to become a Quarter-Master Sergeant, the highest rank most black troops could gain, and a number of the men he commanded resettled with him in Worcester. In these postwar decades Webber emerged as a leader of that community of some 800 blacks. He integrated the local lodge of the Grand Army of the Republic, the veterans’ group; founded and led the Worcester lodge of the black Odd Fellows; and was active in the Masons as well. He was a strong Republican Party enthusiast, leading meetings in support of national legislation for civil rights and enforcement of the 14^th and 15^th Amendments. Two moments capture well his role as a leader, and the communal nature of that leadership.

In October 1885, Webber issued a call to a number of black veterans throughout the Northeast to convene in Worcester where they formed the Colored Veterans Association. Many GAR lodges refused black veterans and those that did admit some, such as the Worcester lodge, kept black membership limited. The following  May, some 125 veterans, most wearing their twenty year old dress blues, gathered in Worcester for the first convention and to hear an address from the white Colonel, Norwood P. Hallowell, who had won their respect as a leader of black soldiers during the War. Webber presided over the meeting, led the public parade through the city’s streets, and organized the dinner and social that followed—all with the active support of Worcester’s black churches and the Ladies Auxiliaries of the fraternal groups, including his wife, Lizzie. In 1887, an even larger gathering met in Boston, and Amos again was active in its organization. Beyond specific veterans issues—pensions, for example—these activities were fundamentally, explicitly political. Even as they gathered for the first meeting in 1885, these black veterans and the communities they were part of well knew their exclusion from the growing popular myth of reunion between North and South, a reunion the majority would praise without reference either to the record of these veterans, the substance of the war itself, the issue of slavery, or the fate of free black Americans since. This exclusion literally whitewashed history—but Amos Webber, his comrades-in-arms, and the community in which he lived would not accept that nor allow their young men and women to grow to adulthood thinking that myth was reality.

On August 13, 1896, Amos Webber proudly led nine black veterans into Worcester’s GAR post. Throughout the prior 29 years, the post never asked black veterans to tell their stories in the “campfires” held regularly across the decades. Unfortunately, there is no record of either Webber’s address or the stories of the individual veterans. But the manner in which these black veterans entered the hall that evening spoke volumes. Those nine men were accompanied by a local black pastor, the church choir, family members, and numerous others from the community. It may have taken you 30 years to invite us, the black presence that evening might have said, but do not ever for a moment think that we waited on your recognition to validate our reality.

It is through events like this, I would suggest, that we today can see that, for all its quiet firmness and unspectacular valor, Amos Webber’s life reveals more sharply than the lives of many more famous people how the web of daily interaction, association, and commitment bound individuals one to another in that community of principled men and women.

On Monday Nick Salvatore will showcase another leader that fought hard for democratic rights in black communities.

Nick Salvatore is the Maurice and Hinda Neufeld Founders Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations. You can learn more about Salvatore here. (link)

“[At] Software Advice, we’re hiring like mad, or at least trying to. You might think a growing company with interesting jobs, great pay, top-notch benefits and a cool office would find hiring to be a breeze in a recession like this. Nope.

The problem is Fornes can’t find candidates that take the time to write a decent cover letter and personalize their resumes. He admits that he gets about 150 resumes for any given job, but only about ten of those deserve a call back.

His biggest pet peeve is when applicants name their resume, ‘resume.’ He’s got a million resume files and not a single clue which one is which.

It’s a must read if you are looking for a job and if you are an employer it will be fun to relate to Fornes’ suffering.

She talks about generating good ideas, recognition, resolving disputes, and reading people. But the most enlightening part of the interview revolved around her hiring practices.

Ms. Credle admits that she prefers to hire the oddballs, weirdos, and misfits.

It’s not because she has a soft spot for losers, it’s because she feels new, fresh, perspectives are more important than in-the-box thinking.

She quotes Phil Dusenberry’s saying, “Make room for the crazy ones.”

Leaders take note. People who are passionate and inspired may be difficult to work with, but their energy can produce creative work.