I gave a talk on humanistic leadership to a group of teachers a few months ago and one of them asked me, why I mentioned science and critical thinking so often in the context of humanistic leadership. The answer is simple, you can't do good, if you don't know what is true or false.
Being a leader is hard. It's not simply about managing people. It's about inspiring people to do their best. And to be their best, people need good information.
Most people think about humanistic leadership as being about ethics, and it absolutely is. But it's not enough to want to do good. To actually do good in the world, you have to come up with good reality base solutions to the very real problems you and your team face.
And to do that, you need science. A good leader must be scientifically literate. If they are not, they are not a good leader. And yes, I'm being blunt. But it's true.
We humans, are by and large, really lousy thinkers. We take short cuts in our thinking and we don't always reality test our thoughts and ideas. A good leader will reality test their ideas. Why? Because the only thing worse than being wrong, is continuing to be wrong and causing suffering and death as a result.
I am writing this in late November, from the United States of America during the Covid 19 pandemic. The only thing that will get us out of this, is science. The places where the leadership is denying science, are dealing with high numbers of deaths. We are talking hundreds of thousands of people dying because some leaders are rejecting the science.
Not every decision a leader makes is life or death, but if you aren't prepared to make those decisions using the best information you can get, you should not be a position of authority. You shouldn't be allowed to manage anything let alone, lead.
Leading people off a cliff to their deaths, is not good leadership.
But I digress. A good leader, uses science for the big and mundane decisions because knowing what is true and what is false is critical to effective problem solving. If you don't know what is really causing your problem and what will really work to fix it, you will waste time, energy and money not fixing your problem. That isn't good leadership.
Want to be a good leader, become a good critical thinker and dedicate yourself to reality based decision making.
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