At
first, I struggled with students in Bulgaria over their definition of leadership.
They defined it as they had seen it in action under communism: Leaders make
decisions, and followers carry them out. Variation and innovation are dangerous
to the system. We were pleased when after our initial training they developed
the following two-part definition: "A. Leadership is the ability to
influence, motivate, organize and coordinate groups of people in order to
achieve specific goals. B. Leadership is the ability to interact and to collaborate
with the people and to direct them in reaching commonly sought goals in an
efficient and effective way." This idea of encouraging input from all
group members appealed to their own need to contribute to creative solutions
to problems.
When my students from American University in Bulgaria took a group of future
leaders from Kosovo to train, they ran into the same problem. Kosovars saw leadership
as a one-way decision-making process. If they made you the leader, you were to
make all major decisions with a minimum of input from the led.
*How do you train a new generation of leaders who don’t take corruption
for granted?
Young people we have trained in these countries are concerned about corruption.
Massive greed on the part of leaders is expected. Bringing riches to family members
is standard, and the necessity of a criminal element running a shadow government
to make the system work is assumed. The young people we have worked with recognize
the damage that corruption does to the entire nation. Because it so often starts
at the top and exists at all levels, they feel helpless to stop it, but they
recognize the damage it does to the overall quality of life in their countries.
As a result, part of the problem will be to get honest potential leaders to go
back to their original countries once they have been trained in the U.S. style
of democratic leadership. Many will prefer to work for multinational companies,
and others who study in the United States will prefer to stay here.
There is pressure from a number of levels for countries to control their internal
corruption: The World Bank and the European Union are putting pressure on the
Balkans to establish market economies that are free from bribes and graft.
Despite these difficulties, U.S. leadership concepts will have a big influence
on the directions these new leaders take. Part of our problem will be exposing
more young people in former communist nations to democratic ideas and the market
economy.
