Václav Havel's Leadership Approach
I was in Prague this week to present at the ILA Global Conference – which was fantastic. Back in 2009, the ILA honored Václav Havel, the former President of the Czech Republic, with a leadership award. At this year’s event, the organizers thoughtfully played a short video message Havel had recorded at the time to express his gratitude. In it, he reflected on the qualities he brought to leadership and how he understood the role itself.
For me, it was an opportunity to flex my TypeCoach profiling skills and see if I could get a sense for his cognitive preferences and temperament.
INFP all the way.
As we say in our world, occasionally you just reach a point when all you can say is, “What else could he be?”
Among the best clues were his very calm and demure demeanor which can signal both Introversion and Perceiving along with the emphasis he placed on pretty much all of the priority items we talk about for the Idealist temperament. [To learn more about spotting clues like this, check out the TypeCoach Influence Program!]
One of my favorite moments in the clip was Havel’s reflection that, more often than not, when his colleagues couldn’t find him, they would come looking for him – not because they needed an answer to a specific question or a decision to be made, but (as he put it) for his calm presence, and for the reminder it offered of his moral compass that guided their choices.
He embodied a form of leadership through quiet reassurance while emanating an unambiguous moral reminder of who his people were and who they were trying to be.
As I listened to two excellent speakers elaborate on Havel’s perspective and legacy, something clicked: Europe, for all its bureaucracy and complexity, still bears the mark of this one man’s conscience. The European Union has no single ruler. There is no “president of Europe.” Its power is distributed, its leadership rotating, its legitimacy rooted in consensus rather than charisma. That wasn’t an accident of design – it was the quiet fulfillment of Havel’s lifelong argument against the concentration of power and dictatorship.
He believed deeply that truth is too sacred to be centralized. Tyranny, he warned, begins when people trade conscience for convenience. The antidote is what he called living in truth — refusing to participate in the small lies that make larger lies possible. As one of the speakers suggested, “The EU is a structure built in his image — allergic to dictators.”
I walked out of the conference hall and felt something rare: the realization that one man’s inner philosophy had become an entire continent’s political architecture.
The INFP Blueprint: Inner Conviction, Outer Change
Havel’s life reads like a manual for the INFP — that strange, luminous fusion of fierce moral conviction and creative imagination. He began as a playwright in the 1960s, using theatre to expose the absurdity of totalitarianism. His plays were witty, tragic, and strangely tender; they showed how ordinary people unintentionally or unwittingly collude with systems that eventually dehumanize them.
When his words became too dangerous, he didn’t stop. He wrote anyway. He founded Charter 77, calling on citizens to hold their government accountable to its own constitution. For that, he was imprisoned for years. His writings from prison were introspective and searching, full of spiritual longing.
“The salvation of this human world,” he wrote, “lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and in human responsibility.”
Those lines could be the INFP’s credo. We find that INFP’s tend to lead not by force but by fidelity — to values, to meaning, to truth. They move quietly but decisively, driven by an internal compass that can’t be overridden by external pressure. For them (as we saw in the Why Behind the Why series) authenticity is not a luxury; it’s oxygen.
Havel’s genius wasn’t political cunning — it was existential coherence. He was the same person on stage, in prison, and in office. The inner life of the artist and the outer life of the leader were one continuous thread.
In other words, the lighthouse whose light guided the entire country.
The Rebel Sage
Havel embodied a rare dual archetype — the Rebel and the Sage. The Rebel in him could not stand falseness; he called it “the polluted atmosphere in which we are all forced to breathe.” The Sage in him turned rebellion into insight, transforming defiance into moral philosophy.
In his famous essay The Power of the Powerless, he argued that systems of oppression survive only when people consent to live in lies. The green-grocer who hangs a government slogan in his shop window “because everyone does” is not harmless, he said — he is the foundation of tyranny.
Havel’s revolution was simple but subversive: Stop pretending. Refuse the performance. Live in truth. In referring to dictatorship specifically he said:
[The message provided by the regime of the dictator] … “offers a ready answer to any question whatsoever … all one has to do is accept it, and suddenly everything becomes clear once more, life takes on new meaning, and all mysteries, unanswered questions, anxiety, and loneliness vanish. Of course, one pays dearly for this low-rent home: the price is abdication of one’s own reason, conscience, and responsibility, for an essential aspect of this ideology is the consignment of reason and conscience to a higher authority.”
But, please, you should read the whole piece and the surrounding context if you have even a few minutes: The Power and the Powerless.
For those of us exploring the deeper “Why” of the NF temperament, this is the heart of it. NFs are driven by the longing to restore meaning in a world gone hollow. Their individual potential wound is invisibility — the feeling that their authenticity doesn’t matter or won’t be seen in a cynical world. Havel’s life shows the cure: make authenticity visible. Embody it so fully that it becomes impossible to ignore. He didn’t fight power; he dis-enchanted it. By standing in truth, he made untruth unsustainable.
From Poet to President
When the Velvet Revolution swept through Czechoslovakia in 1989, Havel emerged not as a conqueror but as a conscience. He hadn’t sought office, but the public saw in him what they craved — someone who could translate moral clarity into national renewal.
As president, he brought a playwright’s irony to politics. He spoke of the absurdity of his own role — “I feel like a child who has accidentally wandered into a fairy tale,” he joked — and yet his humility became his authority. Havel reminded citizens that democracy is not a spectator sport.
He refused to mythologize himself. His leadership was deliberately temporary, his influence intentionally diffused. When Havel left office, he left no cult of personality behind — only an ethic of shared responsibility.
I believe this is in part why the European Union today functions as it does: painstakingly collaborative, resistant to domination, sometimes painstakingly slow. For those who yearn for efficiency or speed, it can look like dysfunction. For those who understand Havel, it looks like wisdom. He gave Europe a structure that mirrors his deepest conviction — that humanity’s future depends on our ability to govern ourselves without masters.
Lessons for INFPs — and the Rest of Us
Havel’s life holds a mirror up to every one of us. For INFPs, it’s an especially clear reflection: the courage to live by inner truth, to translate feeling into form, to make meaning visible. But what he modeled isn’t type-specific — it’s human. The revolution of conscience is available to anyone who decides to live in truth.
- Lead through meaning, not authority. Influence born of conscience outlasts every title.
- Turn inner truth outward. Havel used words, art, and humor as vehicles for integrity. Whatever your medium, let your convictions breathe in public.
- Stay grounded in paradox. He laughed in the face of absurdity; humor was his spiritual armor.
- Redefine hope. “Hope,” he wrote, “is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
For those wired like Havel, I hope this piece offers you a form of permission to trust yourself – that your sensitivity, perspective, and conviction can be strength. For everyone else, it’s a reminder that the work of truth belongs to all temperaments. Systems change when individuals choose honesty over expedience — when conscience, not coercion, becomes the organizing principle.
The Quiet Revolution
On my flight back from the conference, I find myself thinking about Havel — the playwright who never stopped being a poet, even in a president’s chair.
For me, and for every INFP who doubts the reach of quiet conviction, Havel’s life is proof that inner truth can reshape outer structures. His revolution wasn’t televised; it was moral. His theatre became history.
I also believe that the world doesn’t need more rulers. It needs more rebels who have learned to become sages — more people willing to live in truth, and in doing so, to make freedom inevitable.
