Was Scrooge a Great Leader?? (REDUX)

In December, 2014, I posted the following article. Due to the interest I received, I thought I would repost it for those who are new to my blog.  

Was Scrooge a great leader? I am not so sure we can say that. However, there are some great leadership lessons we can learn from him. At this Christmas holiday, I wanted to share some thoughts about leadership and the Christmas season. While researching for this post, I found something that I think you, the leader, would enjoy.

In his blog, “Words and Looks: Leadership Lessons from A Christmas Carol,” David Hurst looks at some leadership lessons we can draw from this great story, A Christmas Carol. 

Hurst states that A Christmas Carol is the story of personal renewal, of the conversion of “a grasping, joyless taskmaster into a public benefactor and caring friend. Dickens also outlines a process of change, which many modern organizations might try to follow. Indeed, as a story of personal and organizational transformation, it reports results that would delight any change consultant. Of course Scrooge had three consultants…” 

He goes on to write that Scrooge’s transformation begins in crisis, with the disturbing appearance of the ghost of his former partner, Joseph Marley, seven years after his death. “It seems that real change often demands a crisis – a manifest failure of the status quo – to smash the constraints, imagined or real, that bind people and their organizations.” Scrooge, being shaken out of his comfortable routine and his self-assurance, is prepared for the visions to be shown him of the Past, Present and Future. “For change in behavior takes experience, not just exposure to ideas, and Scrooge has to be immersed in each of these dimensions of time if he is to be changed. He must relive the past, truly experience the present and anticipate the future.”

The Past

In his visit to the Past, he revisits the firm where he was an apprentice under his first master, Mr. Fezziwig. “Here he experiences once again the excitement and warmth of that small community at the office Christmas party. When the Spirit disparages Fezziwig’s contribution and the small expenditure involved, Scrooge defends his former boss with powerful insight into the role he plays: ‘He has the power to render us happy or unhappy, to make our service light or burdensome, a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks, in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to count ‘em up; what then? The happiness he gives us is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.’ And the sudden recollection of this old role model makes Scrooge strangely thoughtful.”

The Present

“The sustaining power and warmth of community wherever it is to be found is the central theme of Scrooge’s experience of the Present.” He sees the family of his poor clerk, Bob Cratchit, very busy preparing for Christmas dinner. Bob Cratchit has few material possessions, but his life is rich with his family, all of whom care deeply for each other. “The joy of community continues at his nephew’s house, his nephew who is now the only connection left with his dead sister. Indeed, the story is now about the development and sustenance of relationships.” “Once again he feels at first hand what it is like to belong among a community of friends.”

The Future

“The Spirit of Christmas Future comes to Scrooge hooded and silent, part of the darkness, reflecting its mysterious, unfathomable nature. The future that Scrooge sees is a jumble of events, a series of scenes,…. and yet he has more control here than he had in either the Past or the Present. It gradually becomes clear to him that the Future he is seeing is not something that inevitably will be: it is something that may be. The Future can be changed.” And realizing what he needs to do to change and through an effort of sheer will, Scrooge succeeds for the briefest of moments in grasping the “spectral hand” of the Future. “I will live in the Past, the Present and the Future”, he cries, “The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that teach.”

The Insight

So, what can be gleaned from all of this? Hurst writes that at the end of A Christmas Carol, we begin to understand our own condition. “To have a shut-up heart is to be stuck in Time, to be chained on the treadmill of the Present, without an appreciation of Past and Future. It is to be locked up with our own concerns; senseless and separated from the community of others. It is to be obsessed with superficialities and abstractions, for our spirits, like Marley’s, never to rove beyond the narrow limits of our “money-changing holes.” 

We also gain insight into the nature of leadership and of how change consultants might help the process. Leadership is about the recreation of community, about reconnecting “the narratives of people’s lives: giving meaning to the past, explaining the present and supplying guidance for the future.” The best leaders are always aware of their place in time: they are always dealing with endings and beginnings. Too often, as leaders, we just seem to muddle things between the ending and beginning. 

Hurst writes that there are plenty of crises in organizations today: but the message of A Christmas Carol is that in each crisis there is a positive opportunity. “It is a sobering thought, but in that realization there is redemption.” As Dickens put it, “Best and happiest of all, the Time before him was his own, to make amends in!”

And so we end with what Tiny Tim, “God bless Us, Every One!”

What are your thoughts? I welcome your comments.