Towards the end of the 19th century, a young man was expelled from school after only a short time. Known for playing practical jokes, his mischievous streak got him into trouble again when he was expelled from the University of Vermont. He then attended the prestigious Princeton University but never completed his studies there. He did eventually graduate from another leading university, but by his own
admission, the best part of his academic experience came from the friendships he formed with other students.
Now, this short biography doesn’t sound like the preface to a great life, but the man it
describes is none other than Paul Harris, Rotary’s founder. If Paul had focused solely on his studies, he may never have thought of bringing three friends together for the first meeting of what became Rotary.
When explaining his motivation for that first meeting, he said, “I was sure that there must be many other young men who had come … to establish themselves in Chicago … Why not bring them together? If others were longing for fellowship as I was, something would come of it.”
Something indeed did come of that idea, and by the time of his death in 1947, Rotary had grown from one group of four people to 6,000 clubs in over 70 countries with 300,000 members.
Paul Harris was not blessed with the talents you might find only once in a lifetime. He wasn’t the first to feel lonely after moving to a strange, new, overwhelming metropolis. He wasn’t even the best community organizer in Chicago. But he was able to articulate a vision that inspired others. He was able to act on his need to form an extraordinary new social network well before anyone ever heard of Facebook or LinkedIn. And he was able to recognize the opportunity to transform what began as a social club into an organization with a greater purpose.
In short, leadership in Rotary is about taking decisive actions for the future. And the history of Rotary tells us that leadership is not necessarily something you are born with, something reserved for those with special gifts or elite status and privileges. It is not about rank or having a position of power.
So, in fact, the great man theory rarely applies to the type of leadership we need in Rotary. Leadership today is about making choices that will have the greatest possible impact in the future. And those choices are rarely made by one person.
Look at the way Rotary approached the scourge of polio in the late 20th century. Health experts weren’t convinced that they should support mass vaccination campaigns against a single disease. So Rotary’s members — and I emphasize our members in the plural here, as it wasn’t the work of a single mythical leader — took the initiative to advocate for polio eradication. Their plan convinced the doubters, and you are all familiar with the rest of the story, which has brought us to the cusp of eradicating a human disease for only the second time in history.
This is the essence of leadership in Rotary — the audacity of a nonprofit organization — not a government ministry or multilateral institution like the UN — to believe it could take on a huge challenge and eradicate polio.
And in my opinion, this success embodies a different type of leadership, because leaders and managers are made, not born. It’s not about titles. It’s about actions, such as the day when each one of you made a
choice to be a district governor. It’s about knowing when to lead for the future and when to manage the present.
Excerpt from “Leadership,” John Hewko, 15 January 2018
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