Being a leader is good. This is an axiom akin to those who say that it is better to be healthy and rich than to be sick and poor. Leadership is very important for everyone who thinks of himself as “one of the few” (A. Makarevich). And that’s why you need to learn to become a leader. There is now a huge amount of advertising about this (such as how to become a leader"). And many “promoted” branded trainers earn good money primarily on the topic of leadership. That is, a serious request is for knowledge about the nature of leadership and a request for ways to acquire leadership qualities for oneself personally. However, do leadership needs exist or what are the essence of leadership needs? If we use A. Maslow’s well-known pyramid, we will find ourselves in a difficult position when trying to correlate leadership qualities with the type of need or instinct indicated there. It turns out that being a leader is not at all necessary for self-actualization. Self-actualization as an authentic process of personality evolution does not require any leadership qualities at all. It is built, as I wrote and spoke about this earlier, on a generative position, on the actualization of generative forms of thinking, perception and behavior. Leadership is not a personal phenomenon, but a socio-psychological one. “It’s better to be the first guy in the village than to be nobody in the city.” A leader is born by a group and even a crowd - let us remember the very recent events on the Kiev Maidan, where unattractive individuals became the leaders of a crowd of nationalists. From a person marked by his environment as a leader, only one thing is required: to comply. There is no compliance (with expectations, values, mood, etc.) - there is no leader. It is clear that not every compliance with a social environment or group is good for the personality of a person who has stood out as a leader of this environment. But every leader is an example of such conformity as group coercion. A leader is always the leader of only a certain social group, which to a certain extent makes him dependent on his psychology. This, of course, deprives the leader of free personal choice. The group a priori “knows” exactly what thoughts and feelings their leader should have. The interests of the leader are always the interests of the environment. It is necessary to state the unity and dialectical contradiction of the relationship between the leader and the environment. On the one hand, the leader cannot fundamentally deviate from group interests. But on the other hand, he must, as a subject, be the most active and energetic (passionate) in order to correspond more than anyone else in the group to its own interests. In other words, any leader contains an initial paradox: for the very fact of leadership, he must be the most vivid - in a personal sense - embodiment of the aspirations and expectations of the environment. This paradox is a paradox between individuality and environment, between part and whole, between an element and the system in which it is built. This paradox can exist and be successfully resolved in the phenomenon of leadership only if a “critical mass of differences” is reached between the group and the leader. The group, as an amorphous and, in a certain sense, uniform value-spectacular habitat of its members, reveals against this background a certain bright embodiment of its interests. The correspondence of the interests of the environment with the properties of the “brightest of the embodiment” - the most flexible element of the system is precisely the guarantor of its integrity. The leader as a bright individual in terms of this compliance is a guarantor of the integrity of the group. Let's just say that this state of affairs - being the most prominent implementer and guarantor - does not always correspond to the real, authentic interests of the leader himself. I would say that it almost never completely corresponds. Simply put, at some stage this correspondence begins to strain and become incongruent. For, as I noted earlier from previous discussions regarding the nature of human authenticity, each.