RAA Group

Most leaders avoid openness and vulnerability like the plague – some even view it like kryptonite. However, for the flawless leader, vulnerability is not optional; it’s oxygen! Without vulnerability and openness, a leader is trapped in a world that is severely limited by her own perceptions and assumptions.

A mandatory vulnerability for flawless leaders is forgiveness. Forgiveness is often the only key that can dislodge a leader stuck in the trap of her own perceptions.

“He knew that our enemies by contrast seem always with us. The greater our hatred the more persistent the memory of them, so that a truly terrible enemy becomes deathless. The man who has done you great injury or injustice makes himself a guest in your house forever. Perhaps only forgiveness can dislodge him” Cormac McCarthy, Cities Of The Plains.

Forgiveness is just too abstract to discuss without making it personal with examples. Forgiveness must be experienced viscerally. Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables illustrates this eloquently. Jean Valjean, the main character, spends nineteen years in prison for stealing. He is released after being hardened and calloused by excruciating cruelty during his long sentence. Now, a former convict, he must carry identification that informs everyone he is lecherous and dangerous. After wandering four days in a merciless world that summarily rejects him, he is shown kindness by Bishop Myriel, who gives him a warm meal and shelter for the night. The tough, indifferent Valjean only knows a world of judgment, threats, and survival, and returns the first gift of love he has received in almost twenty years by stealing the Bishop’s silver and leaving in the night. The next day the authorities return with Valjean in custody to restore the stolen silver to its rightful owner. The Bishop unexpectedly swings open both the door and his arms widely, and warmly greets Valjean as a long lost friend. He exclaims he is overjoyed that Valjean has returned. Myriel then explains to the gendarmes that Jean had evidently forgotten to take the silver candlesticks that he had given him also. The police leave, and Jean Valjean’s hardened heart of stone melts as the Bishop explains that he forgives him. The Bishop’s gift of the silver is to start a new and honest life, a life full of love and power. Hugo’s tale then expounds on the beautiful transformation that occurs in Valjean’s life – a life that essentially becomes an enormous expression of compassion and kindness, a huge enlivening ripple in the sea of humanity from one flawless leader’s act of forgiveness.

From this story we can clearly see the raw anatomy of forgiveness. Forgiveness is a three-part harmony that Myriel evidently knew well. It is 1) a recognition of evil and harm, 2) the willful abandonment of judgment and rightful resentment, and 3) authentic acts of undeserving kindness toward the harmful evildoer. While the evil of Valjean is necessary for forgiveness to occur, the clarity of self-identity and transcendent capability of Myriel is even more necessary. Hugo’s scene of forgiveness occurred more because of whom Myriel was than because of what Valjean had done. Let us also make no mistake, Myriel’s act of forgiveness was not selfless; it was appropriately self-caring and self-honoring. He was grounded in firm submission to a powerful purpose: the healing restoration and transformation of others. For by compassionately freeing himself from his wall of wounds, his vexing victimization, and his addictive prison of resentment, Myriel was able to lead Valjean toward his own freedom. Flawless leaders must first scale their walls of wounds, like Myriel, before they can free others.

The lack of forgiveness is rooted deeply in most all societies. In Hemmingway’s short story The Capital of the World, he writes of a Spanish father who decides to reconcile with his son, Paco. The remorseful father places an ad in a newspaper saying “Paco, Meet Me At Hotel Montana Noon Tuesday. All Is Forgiven, Papa.” Caught up in the emotional desire for reconciliation when making the newspaper ad, the father did not realize that Paco is such a common name in Spain. On Tuesday, eight hundred young Pacos showed up at Hotel Montana, looking for their father’s love.

Flawless leaders are willing to abandon power in favor of love, vacate condemnation in favor of compassion, jettison judgment in favor of acceptance, shuck self-protection in favor of vulnerability, ignore independence in favor of relationship, and forsake fairness in favor of forgiveness. Anger and resentment are appropriately human responses to injustice. Forgiveness is an appropriately super-human intervention of healing and restoration.

What resentments limit your leadership? What forgiveness would set you free?