Secrets of Leadership: Hitler and Churchill

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• 1. Questions about leadership
• 2. Using or spurning the tricks of the trade
• 3. Leadership style
• 4. Fundamental similarities and differences
• 5. Find out more
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Questions about leadership

What is leadership? How can one person lead one hundred people? Why do we even feel the need to be led? In this time of international crisis, issues concerning the nature of leadership are particularly stark, with many Britons not approving of what their own government is doing - so this is a useful time to analyse the concept.

For generations, people have allowed themselves to be led through the use of a remarkably unchanging leadership vernacular and vocabulary. The same kind of emotional appeal that was used by Richard I in the Crusades, for example, or by Queen Elizabeth I at the time of the Armada, was also employed by Pitt the Younger during the Napoleonic Wars and by Churchill in 1940.

It was an uplifting rhetoric of nationalist sentiment, mixed up with quasi-religious overtones, with the emphasis on real peril and the chances of untarnishable glory should victory be won. Tony Blair is using a similar rhetoric today, and appealing to all the same emotions (bar the crude nationalism), as crisis in relation to Iraq looms ever closer. So is national leadership just a trick of the trade, something that can be learnt almost by rote?

The desire to follow a leader seems to be a common human instinct - a less common instinct is the ability to take on the leadership role. But even when pure Anarchism has existed in political societies - in Barcelona, for example, for a short period during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s - natural leaders have nonetheless continued to come to the fore.

When the normal social order breaks down - you see it occasionally in the stories of shipwreck survivors - the people who emerge, for better or worse, are the ones who can persuade others to do their bidding through the force of their personality. It seems that some people simply have 'it' and others do not - although those who are ambitious to be leaders, but lack the natural gift for it, can perhaps learn some techniques to lend them the appearance of being in command of a situation.

'... is national leadership just a trick of the trade ...?'

If you analyse four key leaders of the last century - Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King - to discover whether they have any traits in common as leaders, a profound difference emerges between those leaders who were charismatic - Hitler and Kennedy - and those who were genuinely inspirational - Churchill and Martin Luther King. A comparison between Churchill and Hitler, and between true inspiration and mere charisma, gives a useful insight into this difference, and may help in the analysis of what leadership entails.

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Published: 2003-02-26