Did you catch the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump? Setting political persuasions aside – if you can! – tell me, who looked the strongest?

If seeing the former president so flustered does not compute, that’s partly because of the image he has promulgated of himself: the strong leader who will get the deals done and drag the US back into greatness. This idea of strength is inextricable from the Trump brand – and robust strength is a quality he admires in other world leaders. ‘Sometimes you need a strongman’, he said just the other week of Hungary’s populist authoritarian ruler Viktor Orbán.

In the political sphere, the ‘strongman’ leader is having a moment. There’s Hungary’s Orbán, but also Erdoğan in Türkiye, Putin in Russia and Xi Jinping in China, to name just a few. We’d be wrong to assume widespread distaste for this kind of leadership. In 2019, a poll by the think tank Onward found that some two-thirds of younger UK voters would be in favour of a ‘strongman’ leader prepared to go against parliament. Just last year, a worldwide report by the Open Society Foundations (OSF) found that 35% of young people felt a ‘strong leader’ who did not hold elections or consult parliament was ‘a good way to run a country’.

The strongman leader’s dubious strength

So what exactly is this kind of strong leadership? ‘Strength’ can be defined in many different ways, after all. Is there anything we can learn as non-political leaders from these ‘strongmen’?

First, let’s be clear about just what kind of strength this is. It’s strength that abhors weakness. It is strength as dominance.

As historian Timothy Snyder writes, ‘The fantasy goes [that] the strongman will get things done. But dictatorial power today is not about achieving anything positive. It is about preventing anyone else from achieving anything.’

In a world where truth is in dispute, suspicion of the media is rife, and we’re overwhelmed by a constant deluge of opinion, it’s hard to know where to turn for a reliable take. That’s when the brashest, most self-assured voices become compelling. The strongman breaks things down for us. He promises a simpler life. But it’s on their terms. What’s the alternative?

Strength is about holding complexity and diversity

Strength lies in leading without resorting to falsehoods. It lies in admitting that the world is complex and that we all have to find a way to rub along together. It is not about aggressively simplifying the world by excluding inconvenient truths and groups. As Snyder says, ‘an aspiring dictator will always claim that some belong and others don’t. He will define one group after another as the enemy.’

To be a strong leader – not a ‘strongman’ or ‘strongwoman’ – we must look the young people in our organisation in the eye and speak honestly. The path ahead won’t be easy or simple, we might say – after all, it never is, whatever the strongman might have you believe – but we can and must navigate it together.

If strength is load-bearing, then the weight a strong leader must hold is that of truth. Show that you are capable of gracefully holding the truth of your organisation in all its unwieldy messiness. Show grit – lightened with wit – and a steadfast focus that does not exclude the arrival of inconvenient new truths. Strength is a tool that we must learn to use and then to put down. It should never be your entire identity.