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Leadership from the Bottom in Tahir Square
Authored by Christiane Montuori on Monday, February 14, 2011 at 4:48 PM | Add the first comment!
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The New York Times completely missed the mark in its coverage of the protests in Egypt when it declared a couple of weeks ago that “In Crowd’s Euphoria, No Clear Leadership Emerges”
The misguided assertion reflects an out-of-date notion that assumes “leadership” comes from people in big jobs with lots of authority. What we witnessed in Tahir Square were thousands of Egyptians exercising leadership from the bottom up. They changed their country without any formal authority to do so, as did Martin Luther King, Jr, Nelson Mandela, and Ghandi before them. They were the face of change, as Wael Ghonim might well be here, but in all of those movements thousands of others without authority exercised leadership as well.
The Times perpetuates the classic mistake of conflating leadership with a position of formal or informal authority. Rather than think of leadership as a person in power or a set of individual traits, leadership is best understood as an activity that some people do some of the time but is open to anyone.
The extraordinary leadership in Egypt involved such activities as using Facebook to build coalitions, engaging in subterfuge, generating pressure on the system, mobilizing media and otherwise seeking and gaining broad global public attention. Those tactics are sometimes similar and sometimes very different from those used by people in authority, but they are no less powerful, as Mubarak’s resignation demonstrated.
-Eric
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