Sometimes there are those movie scenes that stay with you forever. Now that the Netherlands has to look for new political leaders, including a new prime minister, I keep thinking about the documentary Now things are slowly changing. The film is from 2018, but if you want to know how the elite think about leadership and self-improvement in 2023, it’s best to watch it. I keep thinking of that one student standing next to a large brown horse at a riding school. He wants to get the staff involved in some mission that he wants to propagate. “Hup hoppa”, he calls to the horse, which then starts to trot obediently in circles on a long rope. Every time I describe the scene I burst out laughing. But my business friends often don’t join in the fun. They have also followed the course themselves.
I only know one kind of leadership that I like. And I only know it from newspaper editors. In some cases, the chief of a section is still an old-fashioned primus inter pares. A valued colleague who sees leadership as a kind of conscription, chores. When the leadership is over, they are congratulated by colleagues. Congratulations, it’s done, you can now just tap pieces again.
You also sometimes see this type of leadership in education, and very occasionally in healthcare. But it’s on its way back. The ‘professional’ has broken through everywhere. The professional does not lead because someone has to lead things in the right direction. For the professional, leadership is an end in itself, no matter to whom or what. They all learn to shout ‘hup, hoppa’ to their horses. And when, as in the film, the horse doesn’t play nicely, but starts to buck and prance, they learn to breathe ‘to the toes’. That is always reflected in the film. Modern leaders pay close attention to their breathing.
And they ‘know who they are’. The modern managers go to training institute De Baak, where they can train in personal leadership for 12,000 euros. I heard from a number of former students of this kind of training that they were asked to share family and childhood experiences that would then supposedly shape them as people and as leaders. Bonus points for tears. Everyone is now aware that no scientist has been more overrated and outdated than Sigmund Freud, who for too long has misled our collective that your childhood and your parents would forever play into who you are. But this realization has apparently not yet reached De Baak and the rest of the self-help Netherlands.
Do those kinds of students make better leaders? I doubt it. Every team has such a young ‘professional’, who always passes by, whose leadership you can best sit out for a while. They know how they want to profile themselves and what salary goes with it. They pay attention to how it looks, on social media, or to the upper management, they know how it affects their image. Your team is just a way station. They want to achieve something in a short time, make their mark, enthusiastically start cutting, reorganizing, and everything that brings sadness, creativity and joy is declared a distraction. Hop, hop! Especially those who do not resemble a ruminating herd animal, it is best to keep their heads down for a while and wait for the owner to be promoted because of the results achieved. There’s always a new one coming.
Everyone knows the leaders who are especially adept at implementing any “mission” that descends upon them from above. Instead of protecting the team like a lion against a dozen extra tasks and fewer colleagues who are always involved in the plans, they will ‘roll out’ the boss’s plans over their team as efficiently as possible. Taking the horses into the vision of the future. Hop hoppa! And when their own good people get stress complaints, they have a masseur come for a part of the day, or they offer to pay for a yoga course instead of reducing the workload. You just have to breathe to your toes, that brings peace, they know. They learned that at the riding school.
In the coming months we will have to look for new leaders in the Netherlands. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t want a professional at all costs. There are also plenty of them in The Hague. Who are suspiciously busy with profiling, stamping and how it all looks on social media. I want a leader who does chores, a fellow Dutchman who fulfills his national service, for whom being prime minister is not an end in itself. After all, we are not horses.
Rosanne Hertzberger is a microbiologist.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper on August 26, 2023.