Leadership and Discipline
Charismatic or Bureaucratic
Several years ago, when I was still on active duty in the Marine Corps, I published a short article about leadership in the Marine Corps Gazette. I proposed then, and still think now, that the best foundation for leadership is friendship—specifically friendship understood as a mutual striving for the same good. A leader worth his salt unites his followers in a voluntary commitment to pursuing the good together.
For example, as Marines, that meant extreme physical fitness and strong moral character so we could rely on one another in difficult circumstances; it meant countless hours honing tactics and individual skills so we could anticipate each other’s actions; it meant sharing a love of country and each other so we could trust one another implicitly. If your supposed subordinates do not share with you a vision and commitment to a particular good, then leadership is not really the name for the relationship.
For those who have genuinely made a commitment and joined this kind of friendship, there is no external discipline that is more effective than one’s own conscience—no consequence for failing that is graver than self-reproach. When it happened that I did have to administer discipline, I was simply holding them accountable for achieving their own goals and commitments.
The principle of friendship is actually at the root of all discipline, including that maintained by parents and teachers. A vocation to teach or to parent is a vocation to lead and the same principles of leadership apply. Adults must offer children a compelling vision of the good along with an invitation to join them in pursuing it. This happens first through the example adults set. A parent’s behavior is the first model a young child has to emulate and will almost inevitably shape what the child considers to be good. This is a mercy because the parent needs no special talent or skill of persuasion to capture the child’s admiration. It is also, for the very same reason, a formidable responsibility.
As the child grows older, adults may come to rely less on the child’s inherent desire to imitate and instead introduce invitations to pursue the good together. This might look like showing a child how to make his bed or doing the chores alongside him. For teachers it will mean modelling the virtues you hope your students will develop and challenging them to grow by striving to do the same yourself. All discipline starts with this leadership by example because there is no friendship unless you’re pursuing the same good together.
One way to think about this approach to leadership and discipline is through the lens of rhetoric, the art of persuasion. Classical rhetoric defines three appeals: the first is logos or the appeal to reason; the second is pathos, the emotional appeal; finally, ethos is an appeal rooted in force of character. Does the person making the appeal command my respect and trust? A good argument will contain all three, but the heart of charismatic leadership and discipline is the appeal of ethos.
Bureaucratic vs Charismatic
It is important to make a distinction between bureaucratic and charismatic discipline. Bureaucratic discipline takes many forms: a proscribed consequence administered by a distant authority; a meaningless activity that embarrasses and demeans; or even an abstraction like adverse paperwork. At its heart, it denies the personal connection between the leader and the follower. It is abstract and impersonal and can never accomplish true discipline. Usually bureaucratic discipline creates resentment and active antagonization.
Charismatic discipline, on the other hand, is rooted in the friendship between two people. It requires the leader to earn the right to discipline the subordinate by first modelling the good, then inviting the subordinate to join in its pursuit. In schools, this begins with the admissions policies. A school must be clear about what it is for. Any environment containing people who do not want to be there will resemble a prison rather than a school. Persuasion is the key. For teachers and students who want to be there, when a young person does something wrong, he or she risks the friendship you have cultivated together. If you’ve done your job well, that friendship is too valuable for them willingly to risk it for long.
With adults, the disciplinary mechanism is the same: we entered into this work or commitment voluntarily. Each one of us serves the mission in a particular capacity. You have failed to live up to your own freely engaged ideals or are otherwise impeding the ability of others to pursue the mission in their proper capacity. The point here is that you use their own ideals to effect the discipline. If you don’t share ideals, you are not friends and probably should not be in a working association together.
The 19th-century Italian priest John Bosco is a prime example of charismatic discipline. In his ministry to orphaned and homeless youth in Turin, he pioneered many of the principles described here. He is said to have convinced the guards of a juvenile detention center to allow him to take every inmate on a daylong excursion in the countryside. He had spent the week giving them a retreat and had established a good rapport with them. Bosco simply impressed upon the young men how important it was that they not run away once they were outside the gates, and that he trusted them not to. At the end of the day, against all expectations, every boy returned with the priest.
Ultimately, approaches to discipline that fail to recognize and appeal in an age-appropriate way to the inherent freedom and dignity of the person being disciplined will not last. And if this charismatic approach sounds too soft to work, remember that in my experience it is the only approach hard enough to galvanize Marines in the most severe circumstances.
This is the kind of discipline our leaders and schools need to develop.
One final illustration: Gen. John A. Lejeune led Marines in Europe at the end of World War I, including in their final charge across the Meuse River just hours before the armistice was announced the morning of Nov. 11, 1918. In his memoir, he described asking a young Marine amputee in a field hospital, “What induced you to cross the bridge in the face of that terrible machine gun and artillery fire when you expected that the war would end in a few hours?” The Marine responded that their commander had called them together just before the attack and said: “Men, I am going across that river, and I expect you to go with me.” The young Marine then told the general, “What could we do but go across, too? Surely we couldn’t let him go by himself; we love him too much for that.”