A lot of people are waiting for Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi to come back—but they are gone. We are it. It is up to us. It is up to you.
— MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN
leader sounds a call to summon others. The call is a plea for commitment to a purpose that is defined, embodied, and symbolized by who that leader is and by what he says and does. The commitment that is summoned is often a transformational power, a force that can create substance out of mere dreams and promises through the dedication, involvement, and persistence of those who offer it. The commitment of others is the fulfillment of the leader’s art; without the commitment of others, a leader is just a voice.
Because leaders cannot lead without the commitment of others, understanding commitment in its various forms is central to their purposes. The four forms of commitment are:
Political —commitment to something in order to gain something else
Intellectual —commitment of the mind to a good idea
Emotional —commitment that arises out of strong feelings
Spiritual —commitment to a higher purpose
These four forms of commitment combine in various ways to make up a four-tiered hierarchy from the shallowest to the most profound. Political commitment is at the lowest level, intellectual or emotional commitment at the next level, the combination of intellectual and emotional commitment at the next level, and spiritual commitment at the highest level. The four kinds of commitment combining to form four levels, from the shallowest at the bottom to the most profound at the top. The triangle in the figure represents the amount of human energy that becomes available as people make the various kinds of commitments described in the diagram. Given the same number of followers, the least amount of energy is generated when commitment is purely at the political level, more energy becomes available when either intellectual or emotional commitment is inspired, still more when intellectual and emotional commitments are both inspired, and the greatest amount of energy when spiritual commitment is inspired.
Although millions of Web sites and thousands of books offer guidance-to leaders, the vast majority of this guidance calls attention to one of the four forms of commitment, but not to all of them. In other words, some guidance explains how to call for political commitment, some how to call for intellectual commitment, some how to call for emotional commitment, and some how to call for spiritual commitment. This book provides a synthesis that will guide any leader to judge the level of commitment needed to produce change in any given situation, to know whether or not it is possible, and what the leader might do in order to gain that form of commitment from followers.