Damocles was a courtier of Dionysius I of Syracuse during the classical Greek era. Sword of Damocles by Richard Westall is based on an anecdote retold by the Roman philosopher, Cicero. This is a story about a King and his Advisor. Damocles has an unhealthy and uncontextualized admiration towards the King and his position.
So, the King offers to trade places for a day. Damocles, thrilled, took his place.
You can see the young Advisor sitting on the throne while the King stands beside him. You see the women presenting wine to him. One of the women is naked. They're all beautiful. There’s silk and marble and gold and flowers. This is as good as it can get. But the King wanted him to have the full experience for what it means to sit in this chair. So he hung a razor-sharp sword from the ceiling. Suspended only by a single strand of horsehair, he positioned it over Damocles’ head.
The Advisor was meant to sit there all day. He gave up the position in a matter of minutes. The King did this to show what it’s like to be in his position.
At any moment the sword could fall. It wouldn't take much. Enough of a ripple to break this single thread. The metaphor extends to modern leadership.
When you're in a position of power, you lose big if things go wrong. For example, if you are running a business and it isn’t operating as it should, you will not earn any profits. If it continues, you might have to shut it all down and you end up losing a lot of money and time during this process. However, the staff still gets paid. The money still goes out, no matter what. And I don't mean boo that's a problem. I mean that's your obligation. It's your responsibility. It's your oath. For every single business owner, take the number of people that work for them. Whatever that number is. They wake up with that many problems every day, guaranteed, even if everything's going perfectly. This is of course, a very watered down version of the threats that a King faces.
But the fact of consequentialism remains that everybody on the outside of power looks only at their benefits. And everybody on the inside of power is living a life of some type of dread, doing their best to hold it in.
This is why people who deal with consequential work have higher rates of suicide and drug use. They tend to buy fast cars and drive really fast. If you are very worried about things coming to an end, you don't play safe. I need to live hard now. You don't think about the future. For as far as the reality of the situation goes, there might not be a future.
I see some companies set up ‘shadow boards’ where they have a bunch of young people sit on a board of advisors. But I don't love it that much because they don't actually do anything.
How do you bear the weight of responsibility and consequentialism? You can't really simulate consequentialism. It either is consequential or it's not.
When you have a tremendous amount of responsibility and power, problems are permanent. Problems are a normative thing. But the common discourse on the subject seems to miss this most relevant of points. Because when I hear people talk about leadership, and they say it is very rewarding, I ask – Who are you talking to? It's like they haven't even read it in a book. They heard it from somebody who's been talking about it this way because that's how we're supposed to talk about it. It’s just marketing.
The Sword of Damocles gets this point right. Leadership is about consequences. And consequences feel like a sword hanging above your head.