Politically Controlled Speech Shackles Leadership

Leadership remains, as it always has, basically concerned with communications (Bennis and Nanus 1985). A key leader role is in transferring values, information, facts, opinions, ideas, and their meanings. Leaders are symbol users, whether it is words, songs, diagrams, pictures, artifacts, speech, or something else. Leaders communicate meaning to their work community coworkers mostly via persuasion, not orders, instructions, or policy statements. The days when any leader could order employees to do the work and it got done are over if, indeed, this ever were the case. The interior world of the work community today is one of interdependence, not dependence; of uncertainty, not order; of negotiation, not fiat, of persuasion, not command. This kind of a world demands leaders who can motivate others, who can influence them to act, and to sway their opinions without resort to traditional authoritarian force, punishment, or compulsion (Gareau 1999). They appeal to stakeholders at the character-defining level of spirit. Persuasion, as a form of communication, is different from other forms. It implies equality, caring, and respect for the ideas and logic of the other person. It relies on the relatively bias-free use of language in logical argument. The act of leading asks leaders to communicate to change their coworker’s values, their knowledge base, their logic and, thus, their behavior to conform to the leader’s objectives. This task is made immeasurably more difficult by the current pressure to control and constrain language via politically correct speech.