Author: jciulla

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.

Joanne B. Ciulla penned this timely essay for the Washington Post’s blog “On Leadership.” She, and others wrote in response to this question on the so-called vacation conundrum: “Everyone understands leaders should make time to recharge, yet there are also expectations these days that they remain available, informed and plugged in while on vacation. How should they strike that balance?

The word “vacation” comes from the Latin root vacare, which means, “to be unoccupied.” When leaders go on vacation they should “vacate” their job and title. If properly undertaken, vacations are more than therapeutic – they are constructive.

Leaders need to get away because it iseasy for them to lose perspective on themselves and their work. This loss of perspective sometimes results in unethical and/or ineffective behavior. Vacations offer leaders a different place to stand – an observation point for looking at who they are and what they do.

The British essayist and self-confessed workaholic, G.K. Chesterton, suggested in his 1928 essay, “On Leisure,” that three ways to properly enjoy one’s leisure:

The first is being allowed to do something. The second is being allowed to do anything and the third (and perhaps most rare and precious) is being allowed to do nothing.

Leaders should try hard to heed Chesterton’s advice even if they have a duty to be reachable at all times. There are few leaders who have to be as on call much as the president, but even he can steal some time to do something, anything, or nothing.

Leaders who are unable to take vacations or unplug while on vacation may not be very good leaders because they have failed to develop a staff that they trust to run things or make good judgments on when to call them if there is a problem, or they are insecure in their position. A good leader should be able to vacate the office with the instructions: “I will not check-in, call, email, text, or tweet you, but you can reach me at this number if there is a problem.”