This document discusses the concept of "attuned leadership" from an African humanist perspective. It defines attuned leadership as being connected, compassionate, principled, and focused on serving followers. A key aspect is forming deep relationships with followers and understanding their perspectives. The document also discusses how attuned leaders identify opportunities while staying aligned with followers' desires, respect followers as individuals, and maintain a sense of shared history and future direction. Intellectuals are said to play an important role in providing thoughtful leadership to society by connecting ideas to actions.

1. City of Cape Town
Attuned Leadership:
African Humanism
Leadership Development Proposal
As Compass
Arnold Smit
By Dr Reuel Jethro Khoza
Your partner in world-class Presented by Dr Reuel Jethro
business learning
Khoza
Date: 27/06/2012
We Read For You:
22 June 2012

2. 1. Why The Ubuntu Perspective
“Until lions have their own historians, all stories about
hunting will glorify the hunter” African proverb

3. 2. Attuned Leadership Defined
Connectedness, compassion, integrity, humility,
reasonableness and the determination to be
effective predicated on knowledgeability– what I
call a sense of efficacy – are the keys to attuned
leadership: Leadership which is reflective,
resonant, values-based and vision-led.

4. • A leader who forms deep and durable reciprocal
relationships within the community or organization
can step boldly into an uncertain future with the
certainty that the followers will lend their support
behind. Leadership is about sense and sensing, about
thought and feeling, about insight into and harmony
with the followership. I call this attuned leadership.

5. • The leader cannot stand alone but must stand
with the followers, interpret for them, strive
to fulfil their hopes, and be their champion in
the struggles of life. Leadership is achieved,
not given. The leader’s moral authority is
fashioned in the encounter with community.
The power to lead is the product of support
for a person whose actions bespeak solidarity
with the needs and aspirations of the many.

6. • I have come to use the term “Attuned
Leadership” to describe the quality of leaders
who are attuned to the hopes, expectations,
fears and demands of their followers. An ethic
of service lies at the heart of Attuned
Leadership.

7. 2 (a) Attuned leadership – A Universal Challenge
Leadership, however, is a universal calling. It is a feature
of politics, business, civil society and family matters. It
is everywhere and it involves everyone. Those men and
women who lead us successfully are co-ordinators
rather than controllers. Their moral stature arises from
dedication to our cause. We admire them not because
they are powerful; they are powerful because we make
them so, and they are admirable when they provide
clear vision and positive direction. Cabinets, Boards and
Foundations all need leaders. People need leaders. But
we should never forget that leadership represents a
meeting of the spirit between persons and
communities.

8. 3. Nature – Nurture & Attuned Leadership
Leaders are not just born to the role. They are born,
then made – and sometimes unmade- by their own
actions. A leader who is not in tune with the
followership soon becomes a leader in limbo and
sooner than later withers.
Former President, Nelson Mandela, never fell into
limbo as a leader. I am not likely to cite anything new in
the moments of his life that has not been highlighted
previously in news reports, books and documentaries.
What I seek to do is reconstruct the record to reveal
the inner workings of attuned leadership in the hands
of a master.

9. Throughout his political life, Mandela has
demonstrated Aristotle's principles of practical
wisdom concentrating on the common god and
putting his leadership skills at the service of his
followers.

10. 4. Dimensions of Attunement
The attuned leader ensures that he or she bridges the dualisms
of leader and led, self and community, person and people, I am
and you are, we are:
• Being self –attuned as a leader and emotionally intelligent
• Being attuned to the situation, knowledgeable, capable and
astute.
• Being attuned to the needs and aspiration of followers.
• Being attuned to the needs and moral imperatives of
integrity, efficacy and humility.
• Being attuned to history, the present and destiny.

11. 5.Crucial Personal Qualities
• Insight: seeing the world from the followership’s vantage
point and embracing their world views non- judgementally, ‘to
walk in their moccasins,’ so to speak. Attuned leadership is
thus passionate as it is compassionate.
• Inspiration: Engendering a sense of follower self – worth,
pride in current status and hopefulness in the future. In the
relationship of leader and led, it is vital to strike a balance
between reality and potential.
• Commitment: Ardently pursuing an agreed course of action
but remaining willing to be flexible and respond to changes in
the environment or expectations.
• Probity: Assuring the followers that the leader can be held
accountable. Probity is the ethical imperative to remain
upright and honest in the service of the followership, and
behaving in a manner that is beyond reproach.

12. 6. Orchestral Music as Attuned Leadership Metaphor
Leadership orchestrates complexity. The metaphor of musical
harmony (including disharmony) is one that I shall pursue
throughout this book. The phrase attuned leadership anyway
contains this metaphor with all that it implies about an ensemble of
separate players all mutually tuned to perform together. Harmony
does not mean unison, by the way. Only a dictator demands total
unison from the subject people, using terror and propaganda to
impose conformity. Instrumentalists in an orchestra rarely harp on a
single note but instead make music from many lines of melody in
counterpoint. In the same way, leadership relies on the
combination of talents in the community to deliver a command
performance. An attuned leader seeks consensus amongst the
followers (harmony), but will settle for sufficient consensus allowing
for some disagreement (disharmony) to be voiced as a healthy sign
of tolerance for differences of opinion.

13. My daughter Munene Khoza, as a student of the arts, helped me to
full appreciation of the metaphor when she wrote:
The basic conventions of music present the ensemble with a
common language and means of cohesion. However, the role of
the conductor extends far beyond donning the cheekily archaic tail-
coat tuxedo and affording his musicians a steady beat to latch on
to. It is the conductor's task to use convention as a point of
departure from which to draw from his orchestra a performance
that is characterised by the notions of favouring the collective over
the individual and the beauty of inimitable interpretation over
uninspired recitation. The invariable potential of the collective and
the journey from page to performance hinges on the conductor's
talent to observe, cultivate and optimise talent in others

14. • Munene puts her finger on the essence of
inspired leadership by contrasting dullness
with “the beauty of inimitable interpretation”:
there has to be something rousing in the
leader’s vision to motivate a strong following.

15. 7. The Attuned Leader and Moral Authority
The moral authority of the attuned leader rests squarely on the
community’s appreciation for the personhood of the leader.
Personhood is the term to describe not just personality but the
achievement of respect in the eyes of others. Those who prove
to be effective leaders are individuals who seek power not for its
own sake but to be of service to their fellows. It is this that gains
them approbation, conferring the moral worth of personhood on
their shoulders. It is this that gives them the confidence to forge
ahead knowing they have won the trust of those who yearn to
be led. It is personhood that lends leadership its being. The
attuned leader takes direction from a deep spiritual bond with
the followers and in placing himself or herself at their service is
bound to be reflective, principled, and dedicated. Moral
authority can never be built on superficiality, opportunism, or
laziness.

16. 8. The attuned Leader and Opportunity Identification.
The attuned leader in today’s world sees opportunities and
solutions that others do not. But he or she also knows that the
direction to be set has to accord with what followers believe,
want and need. Visions of the future ought to be congruent with
the history that has shaped people down to the present – or the
leap from what is, to what could be, is likely to be an ungainly
lurch that falls flat. Failure to make the connection between
hope and achievement, between past, present and future, is also
a failure of value-creation. Leadership can only succeed over the
longer term by sharing the values and aspirations of the
following, and this means being able to distinguish between that
which is expedient and populist, and that which is serviceable
and honest. It takes insight, empathy and discipline to achieve
resonance with followers – and these are the personal and group
qualities that Ubuntu promotes.

17. 9. A Sense of Efficacy and The Attuned Leader
To maintain trust over time, the leader must demonstrate efficacy
– that is, show that the community’s power to change things for
the better is real and that real change can and does occur. The
attuned leader achieves this by:
• plumbing to the heart of one’s own motivations in order to be
emotionally intelligent in dealing with others;
• securing consonance with the followership’s desires and
disappointments, respecting their human worth, and striving to
meet their needs effectively;
• basing every word and act on a principled approach to
problems that is informed by knowledge and study;
• sharing the followership’s sense of where they came from and
where they are going, their history and destiny.

18. 10. Individualism vs. Collectivism & The Attuned Leader
When I was studying corporate governance as a younger man, my lead
mentor – concerned about what he regarded as my woolly African
thinking – advised me that I should reconsider my faith in Ubuntu as
an intellectual framework. It was time to abandon the soft thinking
informed by ‘I am because you are, you are because we are’ and
adopt the ‘intellectually sounder and more useful’ Cartesian ‘I think,
therefore I am’. For my mentor, this was the right starting point for
success in business and in life. Think, young man, think, he insisted.
I did think and it troubled me to deny him. He shook his head kindly,
but despairingly, as I clung stubbornly to my heritage and went on in
my soft and muddled way.
Though I felt he was wrong there was no way for me to counter
the intellectual arrogance that his advice – however well meant
– represented. As an initiate into corporate governance and the
intricacies of company directorships, I was there to learn and absorb
what I could of the disciplines of business. I was not about to launch
into a metaphysical disquisition on the strengths of my African
worldview.

19. I would certainly have been worsted in any debate. Little did my
mentor – or I, for that matter – suspect that years later I would
come to the realisation that Ubuntu could and should be
rigorously defended against doubters and critics, and indeed,
strongly advanced as the basis for a better world and better
business practices. The force of the statement ‘I am because you
are’ may be grasped in a moment by comparing it with what my
mentor wanted me to embrace. Arguably the most famous
statement of being in Western philosophy, ‘I think, therefore I
am’ (Cogito ergo sum) was coined by Rene Descartes in his
Meditations on First Philosophy in 1639.10 Significantly, while no
one knows who coined the term Ubuntu – a fact that in itself
signifies its deep communal roots – it was a single individual, on
a known date, who broached the idea that thoughts in a person’s
mind prove that person’s existence

20. The contrast is striking. Ubuntu posits a collective existence; the
Cartesian worldview rests on individual identity. In Descartes’
view, a person is an entity separate from others. The person may
know Attuned Leadership him- or herself only by means of
conscious thought. This is a far cry from reflecting that one
human life is the product of all other human lives. In African
humanist terms, one’s existence does not depend on what one
thinks in the lone citadel of the mind, but on social ties, common
values and ways-of-seeing, and empathy with others. It is an all-
embracing intellectual, emotional, spiritual and psychological
acknowledgement of commonality.

21. 11. Role of the Intelligentsia
Intellectuals by and large provide the thought-through
leadership of society: connecting ideas with deeds. They
ground morality and political strategy in patterns of
understanding that give meaning and purpose to social
action. They expound principles. They fashion programmes.
They dwell on problems and find concepts and words to
suggest the solutions. Intellectual activity may appear like a
selfish and withdrawn exercise if the intellectual is the retiring
type. In Africa we expect intellectuals to be engaged in
dialogues with their fellow men and women, whether rich or
poor, educated or not. In other words, we regard intellectuals
as the compass-bearers of our day and age, the voices of our
communities, and the standard-bearers of our causes.
They are human like all of us and are not set apart as a kind
of priestly elite to lord their learning over us.

22. Unfortunately the ‘thinking class’ in modern society has become
exactly that: a disconnected elite whose technical and specialist
skills equip them as ideal allies of dominant political and
economic factions. The kind of intellectual engagement we most
often witness takes the form of competition between thinkers
serving those who strive to occupy the commanding heights of
society. Intellectuals who take part in these games are really
serving masters who have their hands on power and resources.
By furthering the interests of these masters they stand to reap
the substantial rewards that accrue to the bright, the
knowledgeable and the witty. They are companions of fortune.
Of course, if fortunes change they will sell their aptitudes
elsewhere.

23. 12. Being and Becoming
• In metaphysical terms Ubuntu is first and foremost a statement of being
– the ‘ I am’ in all of us. It declares that each of us, in our separate lives,
draws existence from the collective and that we are only persons through
other persons. It does not stop there. The divine and everlasting spirit of
the Almighty unites us, while our ancestors, who leave us for the world
beyond the grave, are ever present to remind us of our spiritual bonds
with and duties to the community. We all exist in the light of the Great
Spirit.
• The reach of this metaphysics is enormous. Its repercussion flow through
all subsequent statements about who and what we are.
- Ontologically, how we should see the world.
- Epistemologically, what our knowledge amounts to.
- logically, what is reasonable.
- Ethically, how we should act for the good of all.
- Aesthetically, how beauty can be collectively perceived.
- Politically, how decisions should be made.