Smart Alec | Lessons from Voldemort

It’s graduate school application time for seniors right now, so I’m joining thousands of others in writing insipid essays about “leadership.” One of the classic ways to learn about leadership is to study the good and bad examples of others, so in that spirit I present the lessons we can learn from the leadership example of Harry Potter’s big bad Lord Voldemort. Whether you are a student group leader of the future or a grad school applicant of the present, I hope this helps to crystallize your thoughts. Spoilers ahead!

One of the joys of the Harry Potter series is that evil is undone by its own stupidity rather than its intrinsic inferiority to good. It was He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named’s choices and his failures of leadership that led to his downfall rather than, say, his morally repugnant policies. Therefore, everyone can learn from his failures (more than Harry Potter’s successes, which were largely the result of manipulation). As a former Dark Lord of student government and current Dark Lord of Philomathea, I’ve found two of Lord Voldemort’s lessons especially valuable, even if I have been lousy at internalizing them. They apply to anyone interested in tyrannizing any group at Penn or in the professional wizarding world.

First, Voldemort was a bad delegator. He could delegate the small jobs — killing that Auror, being Headmaster of Hogwarts — but when it came to the “big” jobs, Voldemort insisted on personally intervening even when he was demonstrably incompetent. Voldemort’s insistence that he kill Harry Potter personally gave Potter countless opportunities to escape a grisly end while Voldemort was winging his way to the scene. Needless to say, Voldemort’s movement utterly collapsed in his absence, so bad was he at giving vital tasks to subordinates.

Likewise, we are tempted when taking on leadership roles to gladly delegate the “small things,” like sending e-mails, but reserve to ourselves the big responsibilities. Sometimes this makes sense — some things just can’t be delegated — but getting to do the big jobs is why students run for board positions. The best-run groups are those where the positions are almost interchangeable, allowing the groups to respond to emergencies and keep going after a leadership transition.

Of course, delegation requires a degree of institutional flexibility, which leads to lesson number two: don’t let symbols stand in the way of getting the job done. Voldemort was obsessed with symbols, prophesies and generally the “right way of doing things.” This love of tradition led him to make many errors — choosing famous places to hide his life-sustaining Horcruxes rather than, say, a series of nondescript pits, insisting on killing Harry Potter through a duel in the fourth book when just killing him with one spell (or, good grief, a gun) would have done just as well, and so on.

Likewise, older traditional groups — especially social organizations like fraternities or sororities — often will let “how things have always been done” usurp new and exciting ideas that may well be in line with the group’s core mission. Often this has the effect of dampening first-year students — the sources of new ideas and passion in most groups — killing the spark of innovation needed to keep a group relevant.

An undue adherence to traditions not only manifests itself in poor delegating — since constitutional position descriptions tend to discourage individual officers from innovating outside their role — but also prevents the whole organization from adapting to fit the times. Tradition is an essential bulwark of any student group, but a group at its healthiest relentlessly questions its traditions, finding new ways to adapt them to the students and situations of the present day.

So learn from Lord Voldemort, and when you try to take over the wizarding world may you be more successful in the attempt!

Alec Webley is a College senior from Melbourne, Australia. He is the former chairman of the Undergraduate Assembly and the Moderator of the Philomathean Society. His e-mail address is webley@theDP.com. Smart Alec appears on Thursdays.

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