43″To be an effective leader, a public official must maintain the highest ethical and moral standards.”
The speaker consider the leader as the model of the highest ethical and moral standards, which I disapprove. To explain my idea about it, the effective leader should be defined at first. Leader is the person that direct people to make their common goals successful. An effective leader is to achieve that every individual can benifit from the entire success. Making the provement more pursuasive, we limiting the leader as the national leader, for the leader of a nation is indispensable to the people.
Admittedly, the high moral and ethical standards is an attractive chracter to the people. An honest kind and loyal man is obviously likely to have more followers. The reason is complicated. It’s truely that people have nature to trust a man with such virtue, however the deeply reason is that people prefer to trust them for the higher possibility to get profit, whether the wealth or reputation. And also, such leader may not deprive their own posses. It has already been demonstrate by the human history again and again. Thus, the speaker’s assertion seems to be correct. Unfortunatly, the fact is that the most effective leaders are not as holy as they looked like.
Being a proponent of Machivelli. N, I insist that the leader is not a holy man. All he has to do is to ensure his nation safety and profitable. The duty that protect his country and people’s interest has the absolutely priorty to anything else, even the moral and ethical principle. For example, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the one of the most respectable president of United States, had involved in the World War II. Engaging in a war never fails to betray the ethical principle, for the death it would bring. However, to protect his country ,his people, also, his family, Roosevelt didn’t follow the moral and ethical stadard any longer. The final victory of the war pronounced his wisdom decision: the people were safe, moreover, the national interests had been promoted in a great extent. That is what an effective leader should do.
Besides, the effective leader has no inextracable relation with moral. People concern what the leader can bring them rather than what the leader like. As a strong support, the 42th president of US, Bill Clinton should be mentioned. He is a president of controversy, for presiding the longest expansion of economic since the WWII, for the Lewinsky Scandal and other scandals occured during his term. Grantedly, his approval rating had reached 68%, firstime since the WWII, and the prosperity is hard to ignore as well. We can conclude that he is an effective leader, though the scandals make him never a man of honour.
In sum, the highest moral and ethical standards are not neccessary to a leader, on account for that the leader’s duty is never to be a moral model.