DEMOCRACY AND TRUST "Democratic institutions awaken and flatter the passion for equality without ever being able to satisfy it entirely.... [People] are excited by the chance and irritated by the uncertainty of success; the excitement is followed by weariness and then by bitterness." Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835 Every culture must strike a balance between skepticism and trust, and democratic cultures tend to strike this balance more on the side of skepticism. One danger is that they tend to take skepticism to an extreme. Democracies encourage skepticism because they put so much emphasis on reason and the use of reason; democracies are the regimes of reason, or science, which is one of the highest forms of reason. Democracy was born of Enlightenment politics first felt in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. This was a time when reason replaced faith as the main guide in deciding who got power, how power could and could not be used, and when it was to be given up. Reason was used to question traditional authority, which is most effective and efficient when it is not questioned. But in regimes of reason, reason is not satisfied to question authority; it questions everything. And the more it questions, the more it wants to question. Over time, everything comes to be doubted, and the skepticism that was originally brought to bear only on religion and matters of faith eventually pervades the culture and is applied indiscriminately. Thus, democracies tend toward a stage in which reason itself becomes unreasonable. The rational pursuit of equality ends up producing ever greater inequality, One result of this process is that more and more people come to have less and less confidence in one another and in their key institutions. They stop trusting, and as trust levels fall, people turn inward, becoming increasingly self-absorbed and self-oriented, and they begin to behave in ways that give others even less reason to trust them. The United States may well be heading in this direction, according to The General Social Surveys of the National Opinion Research Center. These data show that trust levels have dropped in recent years. Between 1984 and 1994, for example, the number of people eighteen years old and over who felt that "most people can be trusted" fell from 47 to 34 percent. Although it is difficult to gauge precisely how low levels of trust affect schools, it seems clear that lack of respect for authority undermines the entire structure of public education. Indeed, lack of respect for authority, coupled with lack of self-discipline, has often topped the Gallup poll on public education as a critical problem facing U.S. teachers. Likewise, relations between teachers and administrators have turned adversarial in many school systems, as each group fails to respect the other. If these signs of skepticism are evidence of reason taken to extremes, there is a solution. The solution is not to abandon reason but to educate it (Siegel, 1988). For leaders interested in more democratic schools, the challenge is to strike a healthy balance between reasoned skepticism and trust. DEMOCRACY AND POWER Democracies have a regressive tendency; power tends to reconcentrate in them. Democracy, by definition, involves the devolution of power, meaning that power is decentered and deconcentrated; decision making done by only a relatively few people is given over to relatively many. But power does not give up its prerogatives easily, and there is always a tendency in a democracy for power to reconstitute and reconcentrate itself. And even if it does not do so in its original place and form, it often does so in different places and forms. Case studies of school restructuring in Chicago, for example, have shown that when power devolved from the central office to the school, local community groups took control, putting in their own people, who, if anything, were more controlling and authoritarian than the central office. Power had only reconcentrated in a different place. Early on in the school restructuring movement, schools found themselves with site-based management committees, which supposedly had authority to make decisions previously made by the central office. But in many instances, this new decision-making power ran up against various state mandates and rules, which effectively negated, or at least radically constrained, any decision made by the new committees. This is an example of power reconstituted in a different form. People in a democracy are always striving to succeed, to get ahead, to distinguish and differentiate themselves from others. To do this, they must focus most of their attention, most of the time, on themselves and their own practical affairs. They have neither the time nor the taste for public business. It is always an effort for such people "to tear themselves away from their private lives and pay attention to those of the community; the natural inclination is to let the only visible and permanent representative of collective interest, that is to say, the state, look after them" (Tocqueville, 1835, p. 671). Put in more familiar terms, democratic organization tends to complicate organizational life. Decision making, once confined to a few people, becomes the prerogative of many. It makes for more deliberation, more meetings, new programs, and the like-all of which must be squeezed into the same eight-hour day already filled with activity. Pressed for time, focused on keeping their own classrooms in order, teachers are naturally inclined to let someone else do the decision making. Principals, accustomed to doing so, willingly accommodate. Restructuring becomes little more than an exercise on paper. DEMOCRACY AND FOLLOWERSHIP Another pitfall of democracy is that it tends to overemphasize the role of leadership and underemphasize the role of followership. As a result, over time, people become increasingly reluctant to follow, and democracy's leadership finds it increasingly difficult to lead. When we think of leadership, we tend naturally to think of individual leaders and what they do and what they say. But leadership requires followership; without followers, there can be no leaders. So leadership is not really something that single individuals engage in or exercise but is rather something that emerges out of the interaction between people. It is really a misnomer to speak of the "role of leadership" because leadership is always only one-half of a two-part role, the other part being the role of followership. Disraeli once remarked, "I am their leader, therefore I must follow them," indicating that he, too, recognized this two-sidedness of leadership. And many successful school principals have been heard to remark that their leadership was as much a matter of their following others as it was leading them. Leadership, then, is a matter of striking a balance between leading and following, sometime exercising one and sometimes the other, often blending the two. This point can be put in slightly different and more practical terms by saying that leadership is always a matter of balancing the need to coordinate with the necessity of cooperation, for what may appear from the point of view of leadership as a problem of coordination is from the perspective of the followership always a question of cooperation. Just as leadership is an art, so is followership. But the art of followership in our culture has been much neglected. In no small part, this is because there is little honor attached to it, and this, again, is one of the weaknesses of democracy. It is not possible in the short space of this monograph to address in any satisfactory way the question of why, in a democracy, the thought of being a follower, as opposed to being a leader, is not popular. But we believe it has in large part to do with democracy's marked tendency to emphasize the importance of individuality and being an individual. For present purposes, it is simply sufficient to note that however crucial it may be to the effective exercise of leadership, learning to be a follower is not an honorable pursuit in our democratic culture. Accordingly, followership and following have been given much less attention than leadership, even though one is not possible without the other, and all effective leaders must have managed somehow to teach themselves about followership and are probably expert followers themselves. FOLLOWERSHIP Followership is proactive. Followership is often wrongly supposed to be passive in nature. It is sometimes even presumed to involve a sheep-like response to leadership. But this is a mistaken notion of followership. Just as good leaders are proactive so also are good followers. The idea that followership is passive has its source in the mistaken notion that leadership automatically accompanies positions of leadership, the notion that the organization's hierarchy determines who can exercise leadership and who cannot. From this point of view, supervisors are automatically presumed to be leaders and subordinates are looked upon as followers. But just because someone holds a supervisory position does not mean that he or she can lead anymore than that anyone who occupies a subordinate position means he or she will automatically follow. Organizational position does not guarantee either leadership or followership. Good followership is just as pro]active as good leadership. Followership as a decision to cooperate. Proactive followership begins with a decision to cooperate. The decision to cooperate, to expend one's efforts in concert with others to accomplish some purpose deemed by most, if not all, to be worthy of accomplishment-this decision itself implies further decision-making and problem-solving activity. GOODWILL - Effective cooperation requires, in the first place, a modicum of goodwill, which is itself a kind of decision. Having and showing goodwill toward others is itself part rational decision making and part emotion. Having and showing goodwill is something we deliberatively and rationally choose to do or not to do. It is a state of mind or attitude in which we decide to regard others in terms of their strengths rather than their weaknesses. Goodwill, however, also involves feelings of sympathy outward others. These feelings motivate further decisions about what we must do to act in concert to achieve our common purpose. Acting in concert often requires us to make compromises, which would be unnecessary were we to act alone. Cooperation requires us to do things in ways that would not be our way were we not to take others into consideration. It requires a decision on our part to be supportive of others and to agree, preferably in a cheerful manner, to modify our behavior in light of their interests as well as our own, This is goodwill. It is a balance between being totally self-interested an directed and totally other-directed. MUTUAL ADJUSTMENT - Goodwill necessarily means mutual adjustment. When people crossing a street avoid colliding with one another, they are engaging in mutual adjustment. Each sees the other and tries to adjust his or her speed and direction so as not to collide. This is mutual adjustment. Mutual adjustment requires looking out for others. Mutual adjustment and goodwill require looking out for others in the fullest sense of the phrase, and implies caring. CARING - In addition to goodwill and mutual adjustment, caring is a third ingredient of followership. Mutual adjustment with goodwill means caring about others. In the organizational context, it means, in particular, caring about the implications of one's decisions for the work lives of others. COMMITMENT - In the postmodern world, commitment replaces reason (science) as the primary source of meaning. Modernity - that period that stretched roughly from the late seventeenth century to the twentieth century, that period out of which we are now moving, that period in which reason (science) became the guiding value in society and the primary and most legitimate standard for conduct - is based on a commitment to reason. Everything becomes subject to reason, even commitment itself. As a result, commitment - our capacity to commit - is undermined. For the past decade, organizational culture has become central in the discourse on leadership. Leadership is said to consist of building new organizational cultures and destroying old ones. Leaders have come to recognize that symbol and substance play an important role in organizational effectiveness. All of this interest in organizational culture, ritual, myth, and ceremony is an offshoot and indicator of the movement from modernity to post modernity, the movement in which we now find ourselves. The most important part of a culture is its nonrational part. Culture appeals not only and even primarily to human reason but to human emotions. At its strongest, organizational culture - the things we take for granted about purpose and technique in our work - becomes so familiar to us that we do not even think about it, even though it has a determinate influence in our problem-finding, problem-solving, and decision-making activities. This is why different cultures find coexistence difficult and we talk about "culture wars." If they are strong cultures, each commands loyalty from the organization's membership. But since they contradict one another, the organization's members cannot adhere to both simultaneously. To do so is to generate further contradiction, irrationality, conflict, and, potentially, organizational chaos. Commitment, particularly commitment to a common purpose, is largely a matter of organizational culture, and such commitment is a primary source of meaning. Without a commitment to purpose and goals, action is meaningless. The stronger the culture, the stronger the commitments that people can and do make to organizational goals, and the stronger their commitment to purpose and meaning the whole enterprise has. An ingredient of good followership, commitment, particularly commitment to organizational purpose, is a source of meaning and motivation. To have goodwill, to consider the problems that others must solve in their work lives, to mutually adjust one's behavior in the interest of group unity and achievement of purpose, and to commit one's self and efforts to all of these things are all necessary conditions of effective followership. COMMUNICATIONS - While necessary, however, these four ingredients of good followership are not sufficient. They require frequent and open communication. Without communication, good followership is impossible. Followership requires, in the first place, frequent and open communication between the leadership and follower-ship. Although reason is not the whole of followership, followers must always have good reason to follow. The exercise of followership is hard work, certainly as hard as the work of leadership, probably even more so. Good followership always requires that a balance be struck between respect for authority on the one hand and a disposition to challenge it on the other. Leaders who only hear "Yes" usually end up failing or at least being less effective than they could if they heard dissenting opinions. Decision making is usually better when all sides of an issue are considered. But presenting alternative positions is seldom easy work. It usually means challenging power, and to challenge power, even sympathetically, is usually to put one's formal position and authority at risk. Accordingly, because it entails a delicate balance between dissent and consent, good followership is always hard work. Much of the work of good followership comes down to good communication, communication between followership and leadership and between and among followers themselves. THE LEADERSHIP-FOLLOWERSHIP EQUATION The simple fact of the matter, increasingly reflected in the school restructuring literature, is that for democracy to work, people have to be prepared for it, and being prepared for democracy means learning both sides of the leadership equation: Leadership=Followership One cannot lead unless one is also able to follow, and one cannot follow unless one also can lead. Most effective leaders at least intuitively understand the leadership equation. But in those cases where it is not recognized, the leadership-follower ship equation cannot be obtained, and the interaction becomes imbalanced and transforms itself into either simple coercion, deceit, self-deception, or some combination thereof. References Tocqueville, A. de. (1969). Democracy in America. Mayer, J. P. (Editor); George, L. (translator). Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Anchor Books. Siegel, H. (1988). Educating reason: Rationality, critical thinking, and education. NY: Routeledge.