There is a peculiar tragedy that plays out in the corridors of power, in boardrooms, in political offices, in institutions of every kind; and it is this: the person who sits in the chair of authority is often not entirely the person your plain eyes see. Behind the grey hair, aged temples, the measured speech, the decades of experience, there is sometimes a much younger soul still keeping score. When encountering or confronting a person whom the leader had a difference of opinion or was in loggerhead with long ago, the old scores and scoreboards return. It is as psychologists admit, “When an old wound gets triggered, you don't act your age, you act the age you were hurt.”
Leadership, by its very nature, arrives late in ones lice. It is the harvest of a long life, of learning, of failure, of persistence, of accumulating wisdom through seasons of struggle. A person becomes a leader at fifty, at sixty, sometimes later, carrying with them what feels like the full weight of everything they have lived and learned. They seem, from the outside, complete and seasoned; much above the petty calculations of younger and rawer years. And yet, the moment a subordinate walks in, one who once doubted them, who once belonged to the opposing camp, who once did not extend their hand when it was most needed, something strange and quietly devastating happens, the sixty-year-old disappears. In their place sits the thirty-year-old who was passed over; the twenty-five-year-old who was humiliated in a meeting; the teenager who was told they would never amount to much; or the child who was not chosen. As though the wound does not age and remained raw. It looks like the wound never got the memo about the promotion. When you become a leader your past life must get a notice, and be informed.
The central paradox is that leadership is given according to one's present stature, but it is sometimes exercised according to one's oldest wounds. A leader can write policy with the wisdom of decades and simultaneously withhold opportunity from a perceived old rival with the spite of a wounded adolescent; and not even fully recognise the contradiction. The mind is extraordinarily skilled at dressing old vengeance in the language of present-day reason. "He is simply not the right fit." "She never really understood the vision." The rationale sounds institutional. The root is personal. The root is old. The wound is bleeding still.
True magnanimity; that great, spacious quality we associate with the finest leaders in history, is not merely a personality trait. It is a spiritual achievement. It requires that a leader be able to look at the person who once stood against them and see them freshly; not through the amber of old grievance, but through the clear light of the present moment. It requires the extraordinary discipline of separating what happened then from what is needed now. Lincoln pulling his former opponents into his cabinet; and Mandela inviting his jailers to his inauguration were not acts of forgetting. They were acts of refusing to govern from the past.
Most leaders are not Lincoln or Mandela; but are leaders, when the old wound is pressed; even lightly, even unintentionally, find themselves making decisions from a place their followers cannot see and would not recognise. The follower thinks they are being evaluated. They are actually being remembered. Though they stand before a leader, actually they are standing, without knowing it, before a moment that happened twenty years ago.
In often cases in organisations, when leaders are elected it must not be just the question of capability and talents, the question of bigger and darker consequence is How old are they, when they are threatened? How old am I when I see the face of someone who once didn't believe in me? Because a leader's subjects, whether they are citizens, employees, students, or followers of any kind, deserve to be governed by the person who is their leader here and now, and not by wounded they had in the past. To punish the present for the crimes of the past is a quiet but real form of injustice — and it is one of the most common forms of injustice that power often enables.
Leaders, remember that Growing old is automatic, but growing up; truly, emotionally growing up, is the work of a lifetime that some never completes. Titles changes, offices changes; but the wound, unexamined, does not. It needs a conscious willingness to look inward and initiate processes of healing, credentials and healing are not the same thing.
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