ACTUAL IMPORTANT PRINCIPLES OF LEADERSHIP!

1. Always, when leaders say that the people are not following, it is the leaders who are lost, not the people.

2. Incidentally, leading is helping people achieve a shared vision, not telling people what to do.

3. Leaders get lost because of isolation, delusion, arrogance, plain stupidity, etc., but above all because they become obsessed with imposing their authority, instead of truly leading.

4. The suggestion that loyalty and a following can be built by simply asking or forcing people to be loyal is not any basis for effective leadership.

5. Prior to expecting anyone to follow, a leader first needs to demonstrate a vision and values worthy of a following.

6. A leadership which screws up in a big way should come clean and admit their errors. People will generally forgive mistakes but they do not tolerate being treated like idiots by leaders.

7. It is not possible for a leader to understand and lead people when their head is high in the clouds or stuck firmly up their own backside.

8. In other words, for people to embrace and follow modern compassionate, honest, ethical, peaceful, and fair principles, they must see these qualities demonstrated by their leadership.

9. That is to say - loyalty to leadership relies on the leader having a connection with and understanding of people's needs and wishes and possibilities.

10. Solutions to challenges do not lie in the leader's needs and wishes. Solutions lie in the needs and wishes of the followers.

11. People are a lot cleverer than most leaders think.

12. People have a much keener sense of truth than most leaders think.

13. People quickly lose faith in a leader who behaves as if points 10 and 11 do not exist.

14. People generally have the answers which elude the leaders - they just have better things to do than help the leader to do their job - like getting on with their own lives.

15. A given type of leadership inevitably attracts the same type of followers. Put another way, a leader cannot behave in any way that it asks its people not to.

16. And on the question of mistakes, a mistake is an opportunity to be better, and to show remorse and a lesson learned. This is how civilisation progresses.

A leader should be brave to talk when lesser people want to fight. Anyone can resort to threats and aggression. Being aggressive is not leading. It might have been a couple of thousand years ago, but it's not now. The nature of humankind and civilisation has become more 'civilised'.