"A leader is a
person who has an unusual degree of power to project on other people
his or her shadow or his or her light. A leader is a person who has an
unusual degree of power to create the conditions under which other
people must live and move and have their being-conditions that can
either be as illuminating as heaven or as shadowy as hell. A leader is a
person who must take special responsibility for what's going on inside
him or her self, inside his or her consciousness, lest the act of
leadership create more harm than good.
The
problem is that people rise to leadership in our society by a tendency
towards extroversion, which means a tendency to ignore what is going on
inside themselves. Leaders rise to power in our society by operating
very competently and effectively in the external world, sometimes at the
cost of internal awareness.
I've
looked at some training programs for leaders. I'm discouraged by how
often they focus on the development of skills to manipulate the external
world rather than the skills necessary to go inward and make the inner
journey."
--Parker Palmer