Phronesis: Practical Wisdom for Leaders with Scott Allen

Ira Chaleff - Followers and Tyrants

March 06, 2022 Scott J. Allen Season 1 Episode 113
Phronesis: Practical Wisdom for Leaders with Scott Allen
Ira Chaleff - Followers and Tyrants
Show Notes Transcript

Ira Chaleff is an author, speaker, workshop presenter, and innovative thinker on the beneficial use of power between those who are leading and those who are following in any given situation. His groundbreaking book, The Courageous Follower: Standing Up To and For Our Leaders, is in its third edition, has been published in multiple languages, and is in use in institutions around the globe including educational, corporate, government, and military organizations. 

He has recently completed two terms of service as a member of the Board of Directors of the International Leadership Association (ILA) and is the founder of its Followership Member Community. He is currently mentoring a community of academics and professionals in the field of courageous followers gathered around the Teaching Followers Courage project. Ira is also the founder and president of Executive Coaching & Consulting Associates, which provides coaching, consulting, and facilitation to companies, associations, and agencies throughout the Washington, DC, area.

He is chairman emeritus of the nonpartisan Congressional Management Foundation and has provided facilitation to nearly one hundred congressional offices to improve their service to constituents. Ira is Adjunct Faculty at the Federal Executive Institute where he teaches a weeklong elective workshop on Courageous Followers, Courageous Leaders in the Leadership in a Democratic Society program, and is a Visiting Leadership Scholar at the University of Cambridge, England.

Ira has been named one of the “100 best minds on leadership” by Leadership Excellence magazine. He was cited in the Harvard Business Review as one of the three pioneers in the growing field of followership studies

Ira Chaleff lives in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains outside of Washington, DC, where bears frequently disobey the No Trespassing signs on the road and help keep his connection strong with the wonders of nature.



A Quote From This Episode

  • "I had to ask myself the question, 'if evolution sorts out the behaviors that don't contribute to a species' survival, why is this strong-man-autocrat, proto-tyrant, still so prevalent? They must be serving some purpose.' That's a very problematic statement."



Resources Mentioned In This Episode


About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

  • The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals with a keen interest in the study, practice, and teaching of leadership. Plan now for ILA's 24th Global Conference Online October 6 & 7, 2022, and/or Onsite in Washington, D.C., October 13-16, 2022.


Connect with Scott Allen


Note: Voice-to-text transcriptions are about 90% accurate

Scott Allen  0:01 
Good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning. Welcome to the Phronesis podcast wherever you are in the world. Today I have a friend, Ira Chaleff. And Ira and I have known each other for I'm guessing almost a decade now, sir, we have served on the board of the ILA together. You are an author, you are a speaker, you conduct and lead workshops and retreats for really, I mean, whether it's US Senators, US Congressman, you are just an incredible thinker. And I'm so excited today I wrote for our guests to get to know you a little bit. And so it's been a while I've tried since the beginning to get Ira. And he's always evaded me. But today, he's with me and Ira, what else do listeners need to know about you?

Ira Chaleff  0:51 
I have been working on followership for 25 years now. And I'd be happy to share the backstory, what drives me on that, and anything else that you think your listeners would like to know?

Scott Allen  1:06 
Well Ira, yes, I think we start there. I was feeling a little bit insecure about the name of my podcast today because you know, it's practical wisdom for leaders. But maybe at the end of this, you have convinced me to say practical wisdom for leaders and followers. How did you get interested in this topic? What's the origin story?

Ira Chaleff  1:24 
Well, first of all, if you changed the name, you would be in the forefront, since it is an actual fact that there are no leaders, zero leaders without followers, you would be on solid ground to change it to leaders and followers.

Scott Allen  1:43 
And I would have the first fan in you! I'm confident in that.

Ira Chaleff  1:46 
You're absolutely right. The backstory is that I grew up in a household where my maternal grandmother lost her entire family in the Holocaust in World War Two, early on, I became aware of what happened. And the question became burning for me. How did this happen? Why did people follow such a destructive leader? And one way or another? That question stayed with me, from early childhood really on? When I was reading a book called People of the Lie by M. Scott Peck. It was an examination of evil. Does it exist? And if so, what is its form? Wow. And one of the case histories he used was the Mi Lai massacre in Vietnam. And his question was, how did several 100 upstanding American soldiers participate in a massacre and a cover-up? And the answer he gave, was it something that seems to happen when people are in the follower role, that they can displace their moral accountability on to the leader? Wow. And at that point, I wrote in the margin of the book, it sounds like a book on a different way of following is needed. And that was the specific moment, I started to work on the book that became the courageous follower.

Scott Allen  3:29 
Talk about the courageous follower and has one of the best, one of the best second half of the title of any book ever. What's the second half of that?

Ira Chaleff  3:37 
It's important, thanks for raising its standing up to and for our leaders. Okay. Okay. the combination is very, very important. Take us into that. First of all, let me say that I'm going to come back to the situation with tyrannical leaders when we talk about what I'm working on now. But the courageous follower is focused more on leadership in everyday life at any level of a hierarchical organization. And most people want to be able to influence the leaders above them in the hierarchy. And only do that if you built a relationship of trust. If they know you are supporting them, you're working to make them successful and to achieve their goals. If you establish that relationship, then when you see them doing something that does not have a good chance of success or is morally questionable or hurting morale, then you can speak up to the leader and have a fair chance of them, giving you a serious audience because they know that you're on their team. Now obviously, this will apply to leaders who are generous in doing something beneficial. If they're doing something inherently evil, then we're not talking about following them. And we have to talk very differently about that. But that's not what the courageous follower is focusing on. Good, but imperfect leaders need people to be able to truth tell, so that they see into their blind spots, and can make adjustments for the good of the mission and uphold the values.

Scott Allen  5:33 
So well said so well said. And even as you reflect on that work, I wrote, what are some things that stand out for you, that have really stood the test of time?

Ira Chaleff  5:45 
First of all, Scott, I must say, how deeply grateful I am for how widely the work has been adopted and promulgated? I think it's fair to say there probably hundreds of leadership programs that now factor in followership, when almost none did 25 years ago, when this book first appeared, a few started to based on Robert Kelly's book that had come out a year or two earlier, the power of fellowship. Unfortunately, Robert's book went out of print and remains out of print to this day.  Despite his efforts to regain copyright. So that was a loss. I and others, like Barbara Kellerman, have encouraged Robert to write another book because he's terrific, but he has not done so. So the courageous follower wound up filling a vacuum. And to this day, as of this morning, we held a global online monthly seminar, where one of our community presents their way of teaching, courageous followership. And it's fabulous to just terrific, I know that this is something that will have a lifespan beyond my own. And I could not be more grateful for that.

Scott Allen  7:14 
As you think about that work, what questions do you still have?

Ira Chaleff  7:17 
Now we're going to get into the, you know what I'm working on now. I'll tell you a story. About 10-11 years ago, the University of Wisconsin Graduate School of Public Accounting, had an ethics breach. A significant number of students did something unethical to pass their tests, the university as part of its remediation, instituted a yearly day where the whole graduate public accounting department stands down and does an examination of ethical behavior and leadership. So I was the first presenter on that. And then they invited me back a decade later, when my book, Intelligent Disobedience came out. I told the same story I told this audience this morning about my grandmother and the Holocaust and my passion for changing the way the world could be misled by tyrannical leaders. But all of my work since then, has been in government organizations, military organizations, corporate settings, nonprofits, a very sharp young man in the audience, made that observation and said, "so how was your work affecting the scourge of tyrannical leaders, destroying millions of people's lives?" And I had to say, it wasn't yet. And I still needed to work on that. And that's what I am working on. Now. It's a very, very difficult subject. I will not have you know the answer. But I believe I already am making observations that will help us address this phenomenon, somewhat better than we are doing now.

Scott Allen  9:23 
I reckon you share a couple of your I've seen a preview of maybe six pages. Would you share a couple of highlights of how you're thinking about right now how you're approaching the topic?

Ira Chaleff  9:35 
So my working title is followers and tyrants. Now, I have a spectrum from autocrat, through dictator through tyrant, there is a distinction.

Scott Allen
Talk about those, would you?

Ira Chaleff
Yes. Now, an autocrat is somebody whose leadership style is very much they're the decision-maker. They don't take a lot of input, they might take some, but they will make the decision and if you don't like the decision, you can leave, or if it's a very brutal autocrat, you can leave...

Scott Allen  10:14 
...you can leave this earth.

Ira Chaleff  10:17 
...Although now we're not quite there yet with autocrats. Okay. autocrats will more likely shut you down, shut down your printing presses or shut down your ability to stand against them in an election, etc., they're not, they're not yet wiping out populations, there is a then progression to the dictator. Okay. Now, interestingly, in our current language, we can confuse dictator and tyrant. But in Roman history, the dictator was actually a role that the Senate would confer on an individual in times of great national, if you will, crisis, whether it was a military or great disruption to the population due to disease, they would give that individual carte blanche to do whatever they thought was necessary to solve the situation. But they only had a six-month tenure, unless it was renewed. And then the power went back to the Senate and you know, the other bodies. Now, if you think about it, we kind of mimic that in a very light way, when we call somebody, the drugs are, you see what I mean? Czar, the same word as a dictator, in Russian. So a dictator could be benign. Unfortunately, they're not usually so because we know that power tends to distort and corrupt. So it's dangerous giving somebody that power. But sometimes, it may be necessary to save the Republic, the distinction between dictator and Tyrant is that a tyrant now is using that power brutally, with no regard whatsoever for any rules, norms, communal values, and will do whatever key and it usually as he believes is necessary to keep himself in power. And if that means brutally destroying hundreds or 1000s of people, that's the way it goes. tyrants are the real scourge of human social existence. Unfortunately, they exist throughout history may exist today in dozens of countries. Therefore, I had to ask myself the question, if evolutions sort out the behaviors that don't contribute to a species' survival, why is this strong man autocrat? Proto tyrant, still so prevalent? They must be serving some purpose. That's a very problematic statement. But what I found in my research, is that people who study natural ecology find that in every ecological system, there is a top species, and they often are a predator. Wow. And yet, they keep the system in balance. And they've done very clever experiments to show if you remove the top predator or top species, within a few years, the system collapses. So how do we deal with this? This isn't what we want to hear. But you know, what we learned from history is you have to deal not with how you wish humanity was, but how we are. And so the question I'm asking is, how do we take this profile? Which, you know, look, in our own country, millions of people at times will vote for a strong man? How do we take that profile, perhaps get what's needed from it at that moment in history, but avoid them, consolidating their power and moving to dictator and tyrant? That's the crucial question I'm now exploring, and how can followers potentially do that?

Scott Allen  14:32 
Take us through some examples that each of those three stages throughout history that you've come across, maybe well-known or not so well-known individuals? That could be prototypes, at least for us to hang on to for right now.

Ira Chaleff  14:46 
They're almost ubiquitous. You see, you know, you get someone like, in Nicaragua at the moment, Daniel Ortega. He starts out as a freedom fighter. He starts out with great democratic values. he gets some power. He even allows himself to be defeated in a democratic election. And he learned some kind of lesson there, that democracy isn't really his friend. And he wins power again. And now, he ruthlessly eliminates all opposition. Now, this, this is almost a prototype of what we've seen, you know, we forget that Adolf Hitler was elected. I mean, this is sobering. Now there are others who weren't elected, but who didn't necessarily start off as tyrants, but then, as they evolved, became brutal tyrants, and in fact, created whole philosophies that said, that anything less than brutal execution of the mission to change the world is weak and unacceptable. We are experiencing this today. And we need to find other paths to counteract this historical and contemporary trend.

Scott Allen  16:12 
Have you seen any contextual factors that are similarities that create space for some of these individuals to emerge?

Ira Chaleff  16:21 
Yes, we know that it's generally in times of economic distress, great social distress, great military threat, that society, even though people deeply value freedom, ultimately if their lives and safety are at stake, they will go with the strong man, if they feel they can be protected. So anytime there's this great social disturbance is a fertile field. This isn't new information. I mean, I'm not making a new observation here. The question that I'm asking that's new, is what do we know about followers? And how can followers? Why do followers do this? And how can we potentially make a difference in that tendency?

Scott Allen  17:12 
I'm curious now, have you come across stories, where followers were instrumental in disrupting the progression? Have you come across examples?

Ira Chaleff  17:23 
It's very difficult. Wow. Because there are many examples of people taking to the street in opposition to a strong man who's becoming tyrannical. Sometimes overthrowing that strong man. But in 90% of the cases, that strong man gets replaced by a worse strong man. And you see, at or by chaos. We're watching that, you know, watching that in Iraq, we've lived through that. You see, I mean, Saddam Hussein was absolutely brutal. Yet, as a top predator, he was somehow holding things together. And then you remove him, and you get all of these would-be predators, civil war, and massive disruption. Now, does that mean we condone Saddam Hussein? No. But how do we get more conscious more aware, smarter on how and when to try to intervene in a situation like that?

Scott Allen  18:30 
Well, you have like this window of interrupting progression. Of that doesn't sound like a very fun window Ira, but an important window.

Ira Chaleff  18:44 
Right, it's not Scott, because, you know, if there were simple answers, we wouldn't be having this conversation. No. You see, one of the challenges is this. A strong leader is not necessarily someone who becomes a tyrant. But you take someone, let's say, like a Lyndon Johnson, who was a very strong leader, and since some ways an autocrat, actually, I think he's overly painted that way if you listen to his tapes, he was always consulting, cajoling, coaxing other members in the power structure, but many people would view him as somebody who could have become autocratic, dictatorial, that would be very dangerous to eliminate a Lyndon Johnson, Lyndon Johnson, you know, the most important social legislation of his era, you say, so we have to get better at discerning,

Scott Allen  19:45 
which by the way, may have occurred because of his strong approach to leadership. Correct?

Ira Chaleff  19:51 
Exactly. Exactly. So we have to get better at discerning between productive and strong man or Women, and those who the context, as you correctly said, and whatever something is within them, will tend to leave them more and more into a path of the destructive use of power. where I'm going with the new book is ground that I have not covered before. It's all good and well to say that the tyrant couldn't exist without followers. You know, Barbara Kelemen makes this very provocative. As is a very provocative question. She asks, How many people did Adolf Hitler kill? And the answer is none. You know, there's no evidence that he personally killed anyone yet you see what I mean? Yes. Off Hitler killed its 60 million people. So we, you know, we have to think about followers, I think now, a bit more disaggregating them. So where I'm going with this. Now, if we had a visual, you would see the leader in the middle of a circle. Yep. And then you would see five concentric circles around the leader. And these are different classes of followers. Yes. In the outer circle, we have the populace. So these are followers who show up rallies for or against, you know, some very strong leader, and they are getting their information in certain ways. And they have certain dynamics that vivify them if you will. And certain dangers and certain potential positive powers. The next inward circle are activists, they're still pretty distant from the leader. But they are more committed, they have different sources of information. They're almost professionalizing their role in either support of the leader or against the leader.

For a dictatorial leader, they become very important proponents, because they're really mobilizing the masses for the leader. And if they're opposition activists, they're very dangerous to the leader, because they're the ones that look at what's happening in Hong Kong right now. These are the folks that you lock up first because they're truth-tellers. Their courage is incredible to stand up despite, you know, the threats to themselves, their family, their profession, etc. The third circle is the bureaucrats, no leader of any government of any size, who can lead and establish policy and enforce policy without a large number of bureaucrats, okay? And bureaucrats have a different dynamic. The dynamics are both the incentives to support the leader, even when they are moving into very problematic territory are very strong. And the disincentives against thwarting the leader are strong. So the bureaucrats become a very important and unique set of followers that need a different way of being addressed to think about their role in intervening. The second circle is the second closest to the leader or the elites. These are people with, you know, the very wealthy, the top of news organizations, the celebrities, people who could command large audiences, or you know, fund huge movements. They usually have a vested interest in, usually in keeping the establishment intact, and they usually look on the strong man as being able to protect their interests, history shows that they often get it wrong. And then once the strong man consolidates power, they turned on the elites because the elites can threaten their position. Look at what Putin did, you know, making a case of the richest billionaire in Russia to make sure everybody else didn't even dream of opposing him. So the elites need to think differently about their role. And then the closest circle to the leader are the confidants These are typically family members of people who've known the leader their whole life, people who somehow have ingratiated themselves with the leader, and these are the most inner circle that whispers in their ear. puts, you know, ideas, which are often very bad ideas into their minds, and they often can be more problematic, then the dictator, I'm calling them proto tyrant, how we deal with those is going to be very, very difficult. Because what happens is, the Tyrant is very clever and knows that if he can involve the confidants in the crimes, he's committed, you know...they cannot afford to let him fail. So, you know, he basically winds upholding, you know, blackmail over them, how do we get them to see that, and to perhaps choose a different course, these are really complex issues. I'm going to take a bite at this apple in this new book, Scott?

Scott Allen  25:57 
Well, and it would seem to me that once those inner circle confidants have implicated themselves, then that strength of stay the course increases, right? Yes. And now there's a core of individuals staying the course. Because we're all in quote-unquote. What would you say? I mean, have you studied Putin? To any great depth Ira? How did how does that work? I mean, my impression, my image, and it's a very uneducated image, is that you have, it's him? What is actually going on there? I mean, obviously, it can't just be him.

Ira Chaleff  26:37 
Right? So first of all, I have to be clear, I'm a generalist, yes, you're, you know, many more educated people on any aspect of specifically what I'm talking about, what I'm trying to do is, you know, bring a picture together, and come up with some principles, that Phronesis, perhaps we can act on you see, now, with Putin, he, I was always struck, you know, if you watch an inauguration of the President of the United States, you know, they come into the, into the Capitol, and there are hundreds of people around them, everyone shaking their hands, and, you know, all this backslash, slapping some, when Putin was inaugurated, I don't remember where I was, but I watched, he walked by himself down this very long corridor, there wasn't a single of the person there and took the oath of office. And I thought, There, look at that, look at the difference there. Now, what we do know about strong men, who become dictators, and you know, either proto tyrants or full tyrants, is that they become paranoid. And actually, not without cause. So in a sense, are not paranoid, they become distrustful of virtually everyone around them because they know that the way that they are treating different people, they make huge numbers of enemies. And, you know, and some, even though their confidants can say, this guy is going to take us over a cliff, if we don't stop it. So then you get into the palace politics, it gets really complex. I'm going to try to find a few principles that can be, you know, guideposts and hope that an army of researchers and scholars, we search and work out the details,

Scott Allen  28:46 
That window for interrupting progression. Any insights there on that window?

Ira Chaleff  28:52 
Yeah, I'm trying to codify that, you know, what are the signs that really can't be ignored? I've got a rough template, but I'd rather hold off on expounding on that. And, you know, until we look at that more clearly, there are, there's also, you know, research out there on this that I need to look at more closely.

Scott Allen  29:14 
But I read so much fun to hear about where your mind is now because it's always in a very interesting and cool place. And I want to I don't want us to kind of wind down the conversation before we get to this latest publication, which is a celebration of followership. And as you said, you have been engaged in this dialogue from the very early days. And as you said, I mean, your work has been, it's been foundational in how we think about the role of followers. I mean, you, Kelly, Barbara Kellerman, I think, just laying that groundwork for individuals helping us see that It's not just about a leader, it's co-creation, right? There's no leadership without anyone behind them. So the celebration of followership is what I was struck by in this volume. It's just so much fun to see inside, in some ways your world of what you've been living for the last couple of decades, your experience. So what was it like, what was it? Like? I mean, you'd alluded to this in a conversation that we had maybe a couple of years ago that you were working on something like this, but I didn't imagine it to be of this scope.

Ira Chaleff  30:35 
Yeah, let me say a few things about it. It was a COVID project. I had been collecting documents for 25 years. And during COVID, you know, as we all do, we organize all our closets and stuff, and I organized all these beautiful shelves full of these 12 volumes with maybe 1500 documents in them. And I said "that's gorgeous. Nobody can ever see it."

Scott Allen  31:02 
I can resonate with your COVID project! We're talking right now, because of a COVID project. It was a podcast!

Ira Chaleff  31:09 
Right! So so I decided to curate these 12 volumes, and I took about 300 documents. And I let them tell the story of how followership and particularly courageous followership because, you know, obviously I was paying attention to where my work was being used, but it soon expanded and the book is filled with documents from all over the world of people working on followership, quoting followership teaching followership, and by extension, it also covers Intelligent Disobedience, which is an extension of courageous followership, then the last part of the book is an examination of the ILA's relationship to followership, which is a richer history than anyone knew.

Scott Allen  32:04 
You go back to some foundational spaces in ILA, which I didn't know, that was really interesting.

Ira Chaleff  32:11 
I don't even think the ILA knew it when I sort of forgot about it. You know, I went to the archivist at the Kellogg Leadership Project, and they sent me these documents. And you know, it shows, for example, Barbara Kellerman, saying leaders are important, followers are as important context is important. Well, that's what she's saying, Now, 25 years later, she forgot that she actually created that framework.

Scott Allen  32:42 
I didn't know that.

Ira Chaleff  32:44 
Yeah. And these were, this was the forerunner of the ILA. And you know, the thinkers that put together the vision for the ILA. So to some degree, I've been taking the ILA to task for not keeping followership as elevated as it was in the genesis of the ILA in the prototype of the ILA. But let me just step back one moment and say, Why is this book valuable and important? It's this, nobody has the picture of how far and wide followership has gone. These are the documents, these aren't, you know, me blowing smoke. This isn't citations. These are 300 images of documents, you know, some with the full documents, some with the first pages. And the reason that's important is that scholars who want to, they often say, where should I go, I see the book with ideas of where further research is needed. Professors who want followership to take a greater place in their curriculum, or even in their program, can now take this documentation to their department chairs and say, This is no longer peripheral. You know, this is core. And we're, you know, we're behind the curve, if we're not giving this subject, much more voice alongside an interwoven with leadership. So, you know, this isn't a nice project, I think this is a really important resource for anyone involved in an institution that doesn't yet have a copy of it, hope they go online, and get a copy for their institution.

Scott Allen  34:28 
It is nice, because you do I mean, obviously, there's a lot of documents, but then you do provide some narrative. Also, your perspectives, your experiences, your thoughts are woven throughout the text, right?

Ira Chaleff  34:41 
That's absolutely right. I put a lot of context into them which would otherwise be unknown and lost. And by the way, since I'm encouraging people to get the book, I should say the title again. It's a celebration of followership, a celebration of followers. The story is in documents of courageous followership and the followership movement.

Scott Allen  35:07 
Ira, what else has been catching your eye? What have you been listening to reading streaming, watching lately, it may have to do with followership and what we've just discussed. But maybe it has nothing to do with that just something else that's caught your eye, what's kept your mind cooking?

Ira Chaleff  35:23 
When I'm working on a book, all of my antennae go out to both history and current events that provide the fodder for my thinking, creating patterns and distilling lessons. So that's really largely been the domain in which I'm paying attention. But what's excites me so much is, you know, I view myself in the legacy stage of my career, I am just thrilled at how strong the followership community is how many people are doing fine work in it. And I would encourage those who are also doing work and need that companionship, to also look at the website, www.teachingfollowerscourage.com, or go to my website, www.irachaleff.com and find your way there. So, you know, in a couple of weeks, I've been asked to do a courageous follower online training for the British Army, you know, this is really significant level work now. And I encourage everyone who's drawn to it, to not look at it, Small-bore. Not look at it, you know, you may have to look at a small board to get through your dissertation committee, but then figure out how to look at it large bore on how to make a difference in the world. That's, that's what excites me.

Scott Allen  36:58 
I think it's incredibly exciting. It's so so fun, Ira to get you at this stage of your writing, that you've kind of given us a little bit of a sense of where you're headed in a general sense with the most recent work that you're actually working on right now. I just have so much respect because your mind is always thinking about some variation, some version of this topic. And I think it's such an incredible contribution to the work because you're exactly right. Leaders,  followers, context. Barbara's calling that the leadership system now and I think it's it's an equal an important piece of the conversation. Because without that faction of individuals without their energy, the individual Well, you know, Michael Bloomberg, he spent a billion dollars trying to get followers, and then they didn't come...surprisingly, right!?

Ira Chaleff  38:00 
Refreshingly, you know, yes, yeah, money doesn't buy everything. It buys a lot, but not everything.

Scott Allen  38:12  
No offense, Michael Bloomberg, if you're listening. I right. I'm excited for you to return when the book is published, and we'll go a little bit more in-depth but for now, thank you so much for stopping by. I can't thank you enough for the good work that you do. And thank you for your friendship, sir.

Ira Chaleff  38:30  
Thank you, Scott. Always a pleasure. Take care.

Scott Allen  38:33  
Be well. 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai