Ideal Leadership in Turbulent Times

Who we admire starts to become part of our ‘ideal self’—that future-orientated component of our self-concept—and we start to become like that ideal role model.

Portrait of Winston Churchill by Yousuf Karsh. LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA, E010751643

Leadership is difficult—to write about and to deliver. One leading theorist, Adrian Furnham, wrote, “The topic of leadership is one of the oldest areas of research in the social sciences, yet one of the most problematic.” Because we experience leadership all the time—in our homes, schools, social institutions, and workplaces—our over-familiarity with the subject tends to lead us to believe we know what it is, just as we think we know what education is because we attended school once upon a time.

However, there is an essential ambiguity about leadership and how it works, and even about which great leaders we should emulate. Make no mistake here: Who we admire starts to become part of our “ideal self”—that future-oriented component of our self-concept—and we start to become like that ideal role model.