21 Great Leaders: Learn Their Lessons, Improve Your Influence (35 page)

The Seventh Side of Leadership is a serving heart. Many leaders find this the hardest dimension of leadership to grasp. There are a lot of five- and six-sided leaders in the world. They are visionary leaders, and they’re skilled at communicating their vision. They have excellent people skills, and they work hard at building good character traits. They are competent and bold.

But tell them they have to become
servants
to the people they lead, and they look at you with blank incomprehension. We don’t lead to be served. We lead to serve others. Our job as leaders is to put on a servant’s apron every day. If we don’t understand serving, we don’t understand leadership.

More than ever before, in our corporate offices, in our churches, on our campuses, on our military bases, and in our marble-columned halls of power, we need leaders with serving hearts. We’re up to
here
with bosses. We are desperate for authentic seven-sided leaders.

So the leadership example of Gandhi has never been more relevant than it is today.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi led an amazingly successful movement to liberate India from British colonial rule—and he did so entirely through nonviolent civil disobedience. Gandhi’s example inspired such leaders as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela. He is often referred to as Mahatma Gandhi (Mahatma is a Sanskrit title of blessing meaning “great soul” or “venerable”). The Indian people also referred to him as Bapu (“Papa”).

Gandhi was born October 2, 1869, in Porbandar, a coastal town in western India. His father, Karamchand Gandhi, was a local government official and a Hindu, and his mother, Putlibai, was from an offshoot sect of Hinduism, Pranami Vaishnava.

As a boy, Gandhi viewed plays and read stories based on the epic tales of Shravana and King Harishchandra. In his autobiography, Gandhi recalled:

King Harishchandra was a legendary ruler who, it is said, never told a lie and never broke a promise. In the tales of Harishchandra, his virtue is tested again and again by various painful ordeals, yet he always maintains his integrity. Gandhi recalled:

In May 1883, Mohandas was married at the age of thirteen to a bride of fourteen. The marriage was arranged by their parents. He recalled, “I am inclined to pity myself…. I can see no moral argument in support of such a preposterously early marriage.”
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Mohandas was an unexceptional student. It took him several tries to pass the examination to attend Samaldas College in Bhavnagar, Gujarat. His parents urged him to become a barrister (lawyer), so he went to London to study law at the Inner Temple, one of the four Inns of Court for English barristers. At the time, Gandhi was a rather worldly young man, eager to adopt English ways. In “Reflections on Gandhi,” novelist George Orwell observed, “Gandhi started out with the normal ambitions of a young Indian student…. There was a time, it is interesting to learn, when he wore a top-hat, took dancing lessons, studied French and Latin, went up the Eiffel Tower, and even tried to learn the violin—all this with the idea of assimilating European civilization as thoroughly as possible.”
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Gandhi completed his law studies and was called to the bar in June 1891. He returned to India and established a law practice in Bombay. In his first appearance in court, he was unable to cross-examine witnesses due to stage fright. “I stood up,” he recalled, “but my heart sank into my boots. My head was reeling…. I could think of no question to ask…. I sat down and told the [defendant]…that I could not conduct the case.”
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In time, this tongue-tied young lawyer would become one of the greatest leaders on the world stage—and his words would shake the foundations of the British Empire.

In 1893, at age twenty-four, Gandhi accepted an employment contract as a legal representative for an Indian company in Pretoria, South Africa. Though he planned to spend only one year in South Africa, he would ultimately stay twenty-one years. Those years would shape his moral, ethical, and leadership views.

The Indian population in South Africa was divided between Muslims, who were mostly wealthy, and Hindus, who were generally poor and oppressed. In Gandhi’s mind, an Indian was an Indian, regardless of religion or caste.

In South Africa, Gandhi encountered racism and segregation. Once, while traveling by train to Pretoria, he was sitting in a first-class rail compartment. The train stopped to take on passengers. A European passenger entered the compartment, saw that Gandhi was a “colored” man, and left the compartment to find a railway official. He returned with a couple of railway employees, and one of them said, “Come along, you must go to the van compartment”—the luggage compartment at the end of the train.

Gandhi protested, “But I have a first-class ticket.”

The officials insisted he had to go to the van compartment. When Gandhi refused, the railway officials called the constable, who bodily removed Gandhi and his luggage from the train. So Gandhi watched the train chug away, leaving him stranded with a first-class ticket in his hand.
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That was one of many incidents that enabled Gandhi to empathize with poor, oppressed, and marginalized people. On another occasion, while traveling by stagecoach from Charlestown to Johannesburg, he ran afoul of an ill-tempered, racist stagecoach driver. The driver didn’t want Gandhi to sit with the white passengers, so he made Gandhi sit outside on the coach box. To avoid confrontation, Gandhi swallowed his pride and did as the man said.

At one stop, the coachman continued to insult Gandhi and order him around, calling him “Sami” (a term of racial derision). When Gandhi refused to accept any more of the man’s bullying, the driver gave Gandhi a beating. The man only stopped pummeling Gandhi when the white passengers begged him to stop.

As they continued on their way, the driver told Gandhi that when they reached their next stop, “I shall show you what I do.” Gandhi sat speechless and prayed for God to help him.
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Events like these shaped Gandhi’s social and ethical awareness, and caused him to question his place in the British Empire.

In 1894, he helped to establish the Natal Indian Congress, to give the Indian community in South Africa a sense of identity and political power. His efforts to empower the Indian community in South Africa made him unpopular with white settlers. In January 1897, he arrived in Durban—and a crowd gathered around him, shouting “Gandhi, Gandhi!” The crowd swelled—and soon they began pelting him with rocks, sticks, and rotten eggs. It became a full-scale riot, and one of the rioters ripped the turban from his head while others punched and kicked him.

The crowd might have lynched him if a woman named Mrs. Alexander hadn’t happened by. She was the wife of the police superintendent, and she knew Gandhi. When she heard the rioters yelling his name, she placed herself between Gandhi and the mob, opened her parasol as a shield, and ordered the mob to disperse. The rioters ordered Mrs. Alexander out of the way.

Meanwhile, an Indian teenager ran to the police station and returned with the police superintendent, Mr. Alexander, and a number of officers. They formed a cordon around Gandhi and led him to the police station, saving his life.

Mr. Alexander offered to let Gandhi take refuge at the station, but Gandhi declined. In his autobiography, Gandhi recalled saying, “They are sure to quiet down when they realize their mistake. I have trust in their sense of fairness.”
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That’s a remarkable statement from a man who is covered in blood and bruises, smelling of rotten eggs.

In 1906, the Transvaal government enacted the Transvaal Asiatic Registration Act, requiring Indian and Chinese residents to register or be deported. Gandhi believed this requirement humiliated and threatened the safety of the Indian community. By this time, Gandhi had been formulating his ideas of nonviolent resistance. He called this methodology
satyagraha
, which means “devotion to the Truth.” He taught the Indian community the principles of satyagraha, and urged his fellow Indians to defy the Registration Act—and to
accept the consequences
of that defiance.

Many nonresisting Indians were beaten, flogged, jailed, or killed. Yet the Indian community believed in Gandhi’s teachings. In the face of violent persecution, many steadfastly refused to register. Others publicly burned their registration cards as a solemn act of defiance.

In time, the government’s abusive treatment of Indian protesters stung the conscience of South African whites. It was hard for South African citizens to see peaceful, unresisting Indians being beaten and arrested. After seven years of peaceful Indian protests, South African leader Jan Christiaan Smuts negotiated a compromise agreement with Gandhi—the Smuts-Gandhi Settlement of 1914. It was the first vindication of Gandhi’s principles of satyagraha.

Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha was heavily influenced by the philosophical and religious writings of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910). Tolstoy had made an intense study of the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, particularly his Sermon on the Mount. While Gandhi waged his nonviolent fight against oppression in South Africa, a “Tolstoyan movement” took hold in Russia, America, and Europe.

In 1910, Gandhi founded Tolstoy Farm, a cooperative agrarian colony outside of Johannesburg. Gandhi’s partner in founding Tolstoy Farm was a wealthy German-born Jewish architect, Hermann Kallenbach, who provided the land and funding for the project. Kallenbach was a devoted follower of Gandhi’s principles of satyagraha. He saw Tolstoy Farm as a pilot project that could lead to greater understanding and equality among all people. Kallenbach designed the main farmhouse and called it Satyagraha House.

People in the Tolstoyan movement put the teachings of Jesus into practice—and they tried to do so as literally as possible. Tolstoyans lived simple lives, practicing vegetarianism, pacifism, and the avoidance of alcohol, tobacco, and sexual sin. They rejected the state (which, in Tolstoy’s view, was built on coercive force). Tolstoy’s definition of following Jesus, based on the Sermon on the Mount, could be summed up in five principles:

1. Love your enemies (Matthew 5:44).

2. Do not be angry (Matthew 5:22).

3. Do not resist an evil person (turn the other cheek; Matthew 5:39)

4. Do not lust (Matthew 5:28).

5. Do not swear an oath (Matthew 5:34–37).

This radical brand of Christian thought merged seamlessly with Gandhi’s brand of Hinduism, which had largely been shaped by the idealism of his childhood heroes, Shravana and King Harishchandra. As a boy he had asked himself, “Why should not all be truthful like Harishchandra?” He later reflected that the notion of following truth and enduring all the trials of Harishchandra was the one ideal that inspired him as a child. The radical Christian message of the Tolstoyans gave Gandhi a way to translate his childhood ideals into a mature plan of action.

Gandhi returned to India in 1915 and began organizing peasants and laborers to protest injustice. His work in South Africa had gained for him an international reputation as a protest organizer. He took over as head of the Indian National Congress in 1921, and his goal was nothing less than swaraj—Indian independence and self-rule. Under Gandhi’s leadership, the Indian National Congress pushed for reforms to ease poverty, build religious and ethnic tolerance, and end the designation of some people as
Dalits
(untouchables).

In 1921, Gandhi adopted the loincloth that became his trademark. Made from homespun khadi cloth, it not only symbolized Gandhi’s identification with the poorest of his people, but it served as a “sign of mourning”—a symbol of Gandhi’s ongoing grief over British colonial oppression. Gandhi didn’t expect his followers to wear the loincloth—he intended it only for his personal expression. The loincloth had the paradoxical effect of elevating him as a saint, a holy man, a Mahatma.
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Gandhi’s loincloth was a shock to the sensibilities of Britons, because his seeming return to “nakedness” made Gandhi seem primitive and uncivilized. He insisted on wearing the loincloth during his audience with King George V at Buckingham Palace. A reporter asked him, “Mr. Gandhi, do you think you are properly dressed to meet the King?” Gandhi replied, “Do not worry about my clothes. The King has enough clothes on for both of us.”

The loincloth became a trademark for Gandhi’s new nonviolent “weapon”—
swadeshi
. This term comes from a conjunction of two Sanskrit words, which together mean “of one’s own country.” The swadeshi policy was composed of two parts: (1) The Indian people were to boycott foreign-made goods, especially cloth goods from Great Britain. (2) The Indian people were to wear homespun khadi instead of imported textiles. Swadeshi quickly became a symbol of pride, and all Indians, both rich and poor, began to spin khadi.