ABSTRACT
Previous chapters have sought to break leadership into its component parts and show how these parts work and why they are important. But in this and the next chapter we shift from an analytic to a synthetic approach. Having taken the process of leadership apart to discover its component parts we now seek to put them back together again. To do this, we examine the question of what leaders should do reactively. More specifically, we seek to learn lessons by looking at examples of good and bad leadership—and, in the two parts of this chapter, we address ‘good’ and ‘bad’ from a pragmatic perspective (focusing on what makes leadership more or less effective) and from a political perspective (focusing on what makes leadership more or less toxic). We conclude by examining the most striking and concerning political developments of the last decade: the rise of authoritarian and xenophobic populists around the world. Here our aim here is not to discuss populism per se but rather to examine the nature of the leadership performance—the constructions of social identity and the modalities through which these are performed—that serve to buttress a politics which is authoritarian, anti-establishment and xenophobic. This, we argue, rests on a particular construction of identities—a ‘twisted Jeremiad’—in which external enemies are presented as having brought a noble ingroup low so that only through the elimination of that enemy, as orchestrated by the leader, can we resume our rightful place in the world.
