In my over 11 years of working in various corporate houses, I have concluded on the top 5 things that make a leader. A leader is not a manager and vice versa. Given the aspirations and the mindset of today’s young professionals, a leader must display the following.
1. Practice what you preach
2. Focus on people’s strengths and not their weaknesses
3. Celebrate failure
4. Compassion
5. Make the company’s vision a shared space
Much of my learning has been influenced and shaped by the lighthouse of my life, my guru, Aniruddha Bapu. While he is godlike to many, my greatest learning has been seeing him as a leader, as someone his people love and respect at the same time. Someone everyone looks up to and draws inspiration from.
Read on to read more about my learning in vast subject of leadership.
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There have been reams of text written on leadership. Yet, there are very few practitioners who can be classified as leaders. What is written about leadership is read for theoretical pleasure and not for practical application.
There is often this debate between the 2 terms – manager and leader. A quick look at the etymology of the word manager would reveal its origin in the industrial revolution when the owners of manufacturing units needed someone to look after their factories, especially in their absence. These people were supposed to “manage” or control the business and the workforce on their behalf and therefore, they were managers. That is the precise reason why the term manager is no more valid in most corporates in today’s world.
The world today is of enablement and empowerment more than control. A leader is someone who facilitates just that. A leader drives people to give their best. He is not someone who would ‘manage’ work, he would ensure his people get what they need to deliver their best. Thus, theoretically, the leader may not have any functional knowledge of his subordinate’s area of work but he will definitely know what makes the subordinate click and perform according to the expectations of the organisation. A leader is a provider and not a controller.
Best leadership is learnt by observation, not so much by reading. Observation on 2 counts – become the good examples and avoid becoming the bad ones. Bad examples are mostly those of the ‘bad bosses’. Based on my observations of more than a decade’s working life, here are the top 5 things that I consider make a good leader.
1. Practice what you preach
Role models really work in the corporate world. Role models for executives could range from extremely successful entrepreneurs to successful leaders within the organisation. While a youngster today would like to be Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, he knows his best chance is becoming the CXO he admires in office. Similarly, he looks up to that successful boss in his team. That could very well be you! You have to be the successful role model.
The first step in becoming the role model is to practice what you preach. You may talk for hours on some management funda or a behavioural trait to have, but if you don’t demonstrate the same in you, you will not be able to impress the same upon your team. There are the theoretical managers who would read a lot about these traits and behaviours and counsel their teams but will themselves never practice any of those. That is where one loses his/her team. A demonstration always works best. There has to be a reason why demo is regarded as a critical phase in product purchase decision journey, especially for complex products; leadership is a complex product!
2. Focus on people’s strengths and not their weaknesses
Did Steve Jobs have no weakness? Did Mahatma Gandhi have no weakness? How about Martin Luther King?
Everyone has at least one weakness. Improvement or undoing of a weakness is a hard task. Something that may take years. A better way out is to make the strength so powerful that it shadows or outshines the weakness. It is like the sun; the dark spots are not visible to the naked eye because the rest of the sun is so bright.
A leader will know his people. He will know their strengths and their weaknesses. He will push his people on their strengths to help them make the strength even stronger. A manager, given his nature and inclination towards control, will try and correct the weakness. It is a wasteful exercise. Correction in weakness will bring a person to a par level. Making the strength even stronger will ensure he/she shines above all else.
3. Celebrate failure
When failure comes to people with the right attitude and those who display sincere dedication in what they do, leaders celebrate. They wouldn’t call for a party but will acknowledge the failure and motivate the person to do better the next time. This definitely does not mean that the leader would celebrate failures many times over. Managers like to ‘control’ failure not realising that there are bound to be failures. When failures do happen, managers turn defensive and look for who to put the blame on because in their minds, they had ‘controlled’ the failure and if it has happened, it must have been someone else’s fault.
A leader acknowledges failure and doesn’t blame a person. He takes the blame on to himself or the entire team. He would then figure the root cause and train his people to avoid such failures in future. The reaction is not defensive but constructive – plan to undo any future occurrence. The biggest learning from failure is ‘how something doesn’t work’; a very valuable lesson indeed.
4. Compassion
To understand this aspect of leadership, one has to consider the case of Captain Swenson. In a raw footage on Youtube, Captain Swenson was on what became a rescue mission for his forces in Afghanistan. When he landed at the site, he noticed one of his soldiers badly injured. When this soldier was put into the chopper, Swenson kissed his forehead. Why did he do so? Isn’t the army supposed to train soldiers to be tough? Isn’t this gesture just away from conventional thinking of how the army operates, and that too the US army which is regarded as one of the toughest armies in the world?
Captain Swenson is an example of the modern day leader. He gave his team mate an assurance that he was there for him. His team looked up to him and when he showed that kind gesture, not only did the injured soldier but every team member watching would have been reassured.
In corporate world as well, leaders need to be compassionate. The team needs to know that when everything would be out of their control, the leader, their ‘manager’ would make it right. Leaders need to make their teams feel safe. That is exactly what Simon Sinek mentions in his TED talk – Why good leaders make you feel safe. This quality would be most useful to promote the culture of ‘celebration of failure’. If the leader is not too moved by compassion, no team member would be bold enough to take a dig at something new or audacious; the fear of failure would haunt his/her mind.
5. Make the company’s vision a shared space
This is among the most important pieces in making a good leader. More often than not, the company’s vision is a well-kept secret and in a language that even the CEO would have a tough time decoding. For a company to stand above the rest, every employee needs to connect with the vision and for that, the leader plays a critical role.
Many a time you would hear employees say that they do not know why they are doing what they are supposed to do. There is a strong chance that they think so because they have been directed and not involved in working towards the company’s vision. There is also a chance that the company’s vision may just be for display on the website and that the company may not be working towards the same. In that case, the leader’s job is tougher and even more critical. The leader needs to create a vision for the function or for the team and work towards it. He/she needs to ensure that the team works collectively and complements the efforts of each other towards a common goal. This keeps the team energised.
Being what would be considered a good leader is not easy. One needs to keep eyes and ears open and observe well positioned people in the organisation and it would be clear what makes a good leader and what doesn’t. Many a time, it makes more sense to see what doesn’t make something happen. Those are the things to avoid. As long as you avoid those, you have a good chance of making a good leader.
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