Tough and Tender

​It is amazing how some things seem to dove-tail together.  Yesterday I read an article I really enjoyed.  This morning I was thinking about it, and how the person I willingly follow needs to be tough and tender.  I picked up a book and what I read said a leader needed to have a tough hide and a tender heart.
I personally reckon all leaders need to be tough.  Some show it to the extreme.  They are virtually unapproachable, and woe betide anyone who makes an error.  Good-bye and good riddance.
The article was saying how many leaders see themselves as CEO’s interested only in numbers and prestige.  People do not matter.  Self-promotion does.  Others are a necessary evil.  If they could be done without, so much the better.
There is no doubt in my mind toughness is needed.  Hard decisions need to be made.  The buck stops with the decision maker, and what ever decision is made it will be seen to be wrong in the eyes of some.
But if a leader wants followers rather than just adherents there must come tenderness.  I remember Merril and I were looking for gifts to distribute at an event we were holding.  Time after time we were rejected.  If ever there was a time we needed to be tough it was then.  A person can only take so much rejection.
I went elsewhere and a business we were happy to promote, gave Merril a trolley full of items.  Merril just about cried.  She had proved she was tough.  That proved she was tender.
History is littered with figures who were tough.  People for whom others were only a means to an end.  Those for whom the end justified the means.  That is not a philosophy I agree with.  Results can be good.  But allegiance is to the cause only, rather than the cause and the person.
Yet history also is also full of leaders who were both tough and tender.  Martin Luther King Jnr, Mandela, Jesus, King Hussein of Jordan.  They cared about those with them.  They saw victory as a shared experience rather than one that was just their own.  Time and again those with their own families and interests rallied willingly to something that could, and sometimes did, cost them everything.
Not superheroes.  But someone who can be related to.  Someone who believes in both a cause, and the dignity of man.  Someone who will not abide fools but does not pretend to not understand human weaknesses.  Someone for whom failure is an ever-present possibility.  In other words someone like me.  Someone I happily aspire to be like.
Personally, that is the sort of person I want to follow.  I am not interested in someone who sees me as a number to add to the numbers they already have.  I will follow someone who believes in the same things I do and does not just say it but lives it in both toughness and tenderness.