Joanne B. Ciulla posted this to Washington Post’s blog On Leadership. The topic was how to develop better leaders for Wall Street.
Plato made a simple argument about crafts and wages that sheds light on the failure of some leaders on Wall Street. He write, “Medicine provides health, and wage-earning provides wages; house-building provides a house, and the wage-earning that accompanies it provides a wage.” His argument extends to leadership.
The craft of leadership focuses on producing benefit to others, not the leader. Like medicine and house building, the craft of leading is not about earning wages. Wall Street often equates people who know how to earn high wages with people who know how to lead. It believes that market systems, not value systems, are the best way to choose leaders. The first step towards building new leaders in the financial sector entails searching for competent people who care about the craft of leadership, not the size of their paycheck.