Are you leading from the Green Zone?
I wrote a blog post a couple years ago by that title here after seeing the movie The Green Zone.
The movie The Green Zone was partially inspired by the reporting and the account of Iraq post-war (2nd war) found in the book Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv ChandrasekaranShortly. After seeing the movie I started this book, but put it down for a bit and finally came back to it and finished it. To be clear, the movie is not a movie version of the book.
Chandrasekaran references a quote from T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) as one of the central insights or wisdom of what he’s trying to convey. That quote from August 20th, 1917 is,
“Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is.”
After reading it, I’ve found that so much of it resonates with my observations of American majority culture approaches to leading change among ethnic minority communities. In fact, if I could I would make this book mandatory reading for all white ministers whose decision making or involvement even remotely impacts ethnic minority communities. I hope to post on some of the key points of connection in the near future.
But the essence of the message of this book, the takeaways of what we can learn from the Coalition Provincial Authority in Iraq in the early 2000’s, can be summarized I believe by the following equation:
Ethnocentrism + Paternalism + Power (+ Nationalism in this case) = Really bad leadership with a lot of self-deception (including wasteful spending, poor stewardship, unethical use of power, lack of empowerment, and many more things).
For those not use to those words I’ll briefly describe ethnocentrism as seeing the world only through your own cultural lens and being unable to see from other cultural viewpoints. Paternalism is the dynamic where those in power lead in ways in which they think they know what’s best for another people, but in carrying that out they create and sustain and power disparity and a measure of dependence and control. Power here is having the resources or the clout to execute one’s will even in the face of resistance. Nationalism is basically thinking that your country is the best (or your company, denomination…). A version of this also can include a divine blessing perspective in which God has clear blessed you and therefore you have a measure of authority to exert your will your way in other places.
In my organization and many others I’m aware of there isn’t much overt “Nationalism” per se, but there sure is plenty of the other three and these things are a consistent part of the landscape of a majority culture entity trying to empower people from whom their exists a great distance or gap of understanding or connection.
The Green Zone is one of ultimate examples of ethnocentric paternalistic leadership and I think there’s much to be learned in the ways of what it means to serve people and what it looks like when we don’t and why.
The Green Zone has become part of my permanent leadership vocabulary now. If you want to read a few more thoughts of mine inspired by the movie, go here, but I highly recommend the book as a massive case study of where leadership can go wrong in trying to “serve.”
This may evolve into a series as there are so many great examples of where power driven leadership goes wrong in trying to serve.
