Hello family.
I was talking to several of our senior grandmasters and the subject came up about leadership. Most of you know me well enough to understand my concept of leadership. Several things come to mind along those lines. I would like to explore two of those concepts in what I hope will be a brief missive. The first thing I would like to touch on is being able to follow. A good leader has to be a good follower. It’s hard to get people to follow you if you have never humbled yourself enough to be a follower. Everyone should be answerable to someone. Nothing happens in a vacuum. The best officers in a military or paramilitary organization is one who has came up through the ranks. Being a good follower has its own dynamics. It requires one to put their own ideas, plans and philosophies on the back burner to help realize someone else’s vision. Serving makes a leader sensitive to the needs of the common men and women who make up the rank and file of an organization. How important are enlisted men in the military? Keep in mind that there will always be more enlisted men than officers. It’s the privates and non commissioned officers in the military than officers. They are the ones that actually contend with the enemy. Generals or admirals may come up with strategies but it’s the enlisted men that make those strategies work. If you want a total mess get a situation where there are many chiefs and not enough Indians. Wars can not be won given such a scenario.
Therefore taking that into consideration we can see how starting at the bottom and working your way to the top will give us an understanding of the entire process of leadership.
I’m a true believer that all practitioners of the combative arts are martial artists starting with the lowly white belt to the lofty tenth dan. All of us started as beginners. There are no quantum leaps in the martial arts. We achieve our ranks one belt at a time. Having been in the positions represented by those various ranks we should understand the challenges and demands of each step in the process. That should humble us out of the big I’s and little U’s that sometimes plague the higher ranks. All of us are on the same journey. Given that truth we should honor and be true to the people involved and the journey itself.
The second concept I would like to discuss is the advanced areas of servitude or leadership. To explain what I mean allow me to use an analogy. Let’s look at the difference between a king and a president. A monarch expects the servitude of the masses. Every person in his realm is a servant to the king. His word is law and if he is demanding, cruel or unreasonable there’s nothing a subject can do but bear it as best he can. The decisions a king would make are not always designed to benefit the common man.
On the other hand we have a president. Ideally a president is the servant of the people. Every decision he makes should be with that in mind. His position shouldn’t be to accrue personal gain, power or administration. His vision should be for the people he serves.
Being a good leader is synonymous with being a good servant.
It is sometimes the case when an individual gets in a position of authority that he begins to think more of himself than he ought to. Lets those of us of higher rank and with positions of authority remember where we came from and how we got here and let’s keep in mind that we stand on the shoulders of those who have proceeded us. Likewise our lives should be the foundation for those who come after us to build on. Non of us is the definitive conclusion. Each of us is just a step in the process.
Taking the martial arts into consideration the truth of the matter is that every grandmaster is just a white belt who worked like h**l and had too much tenacity to give up.
I’m not so vain as to offer myself as the perfect example to draw on but of my several master’s and grandmaster’s belts that I own is the one given to me by my own organization, the BLMAA. It is a white belt bordered in red with black konji or lettering. It reminds me not only of where I am as well as where I came from. When it’s all said and done I’m nothing more than a white belt with a lot of years of experience. That should be enough to keep anyone humble.
With that being said I am going to end this missive. It wasn’t as brief as I promised but I think it said what I wanted to say. I admonish each of us of advanced rank and in leadership positions to keep in mind that we have been granted the privilege of servitude.
Blessings to you, my brethren.
