A message for all of us

In his book How, he argues that there are essentially just two kinds of authority: formal authority and moral authority.

Seidman believes that in today's world "moral authority is now so much more important than formal authority, where power is shifting to individuals who can easily connect and combine their power exponentially for good or ill."

Writing in The New York Times last week, Thomas L Friedman wondered whether Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan could learn from what Seidman says about moral authority and formal authority. But Seidman's message is not just for Erdogan. Democracy is not just about elections but about the exercise of power every day: how you converse with citizens.

Politicians who remain in power for a long time often forget that you don't get moral authority just from being elected or born. Success goes to their heads, and they become arrogant and autocratic and start imposing themselves on everyone, expecting their decisions to be accepted blindly and obeyed automatically.

This is what happened to the PN in the last five years. Their leaders refused to read all the signs on the wall that the majority was fed up of their government.

I remember a former minister standing by me at Naxxar in the counting hall when the result came out about Labour's landslide victory. He was visibly shocked and shaking his head in disbelief. I asked him, "Why are you so surprised? Surely you had access to the surveys carried out regularly by the PN month after month before the general elections in March. Surely your numbers showed you to the last day what the result was going to be."

He answered that he was shown the survey results every week and they did predict correctly what the final outcome was, and the numbers barely changed during the election campaign. He told me the PN leaders still believed that somehow the result would be different and that somehow something would happen on election day to make people vote for the PN again.

In the months before the election the PN did everything it could to regain voters and retain a majority. But the majority was fed up with the PN's arrogance and its selfish use of power.

Three months after losing the election, the PN refuses to learn any lessons, and most of its politicians are still behaving arrogantly and as if the majority of our citizens had no right to vote them out and bring in a Labour government. They look on us as usurpers and as if we have deprived them of their divine right to govern forever.

But even though it is early days for us we must not become arrogant ourselves and repeat the PN's mistakes. If we do that, the majority will treat us the same way they treated the PN at the last election. The PN lost the election long before 9 March 2013, as it lost its moral authority after clinging to formal authority with its slight victory in the 2008 elections, which it obtained thanks to using power to buy votes.

Seidman says, "Moral authority is something you have to continue to earn by how you behave, by how you build trust with your people... Every time you exercise formal authority - by calling out the police - you deplete it. Every time you exercise moral authority, leading by example, treating people with respect, you strengthen it."

I believe that what Seidman says applies for all of us who hold some position of power over others, not just for people at the top in politics, business and the public sector. Often those holding power at the workplace, whatever level they may occupy, still resort to a command and control style of governance, instead of exercising power through serving others and leading by example and moral persuasion.

Seidman has no doubt that those who want to lead and use their power just "by commanding power over people" are being very shortsighted "and should think again. In this age, the only way to effectively lead is to generate power through people because you have connected with them in a way that earned their trust and enlisted them in a shared vision."