Leadership Essays

Leadership Essays

25/1/17

Some of the recent news headlines have brought the question of leadership again into focus.  The news items mentioned below are the glaring ones, but the not so glamorous news items also in subtle ways come back to the same question I want to deliberate.

• The Tata business house: Selection of a leader by a due process, followed by rejecting their decision in a couple of years, and again going through the same process.
• Action by an ‘elected leader’ that has not only divided the ‘followers’ sharply on the grounds of ideology but also has unnecessarily inconvenienced the whole population with the promise of some imagined benefit.
• The demise of a ‘leader’ leaving a vacuum at the top, for the ‘followers’ to go in diverse and possibly in unproductive directions such as finding a surrogate leader, creating an alternate leader, look for guidance from outsiders to appoint a leader etc.

I don’t want to deliberate on these cases, but want to pick out a common theme involving not only these but many other situations.  The question is, how do we identify a leader.  This is not just a philosophical question, but is of great practical significance in all organizations, and in my opinion, to a large extent poorly answered by many.  The reason for me to make this assertion is that in many organizations, selection of the wrong leader results in suboptimal performance, and thus the returns on the resources employed (capital, talent, market opportunities) are below target.

The problem is in identifying what leadership is, but in most situations the organization goes about identifying who the leader is.  Peter Drucker said that management is practice, and not science or profession.  I think this also applies to leadership.  Leadership is what one does deliberately when there are many available choices – but the action is deliberate.  The action can also include passive inaction, if done deliberately, a la MK Gandhi and non-cooperative movement.  Leadership is not a designation, a position, an authority or a promulgation.

While identifying a leader may not be easy, identifying leadership is much more difficult.  But let me explore how one might go about looking for it.  Everybody can be a leader, at least in many small things they do, but most don’t want to be one.  There are only two positions, either you are a leader or you are a follower.  Some argue that one (most) sit on the fence and don’t decide one way or the other.  I would say that even in that situation you can be a leader if you consciously and deliberately take that position of ‘sitting on the fence’, or it could be because you are ‘following’ the many others who are sitting on the fence.

There are many situations which are custom made either for leadership or for followership.  But even here not everyone in those positions act according to script.  Some examples:

Reading a Book:  this situation is for the followers, the readers follow the ideas of the writer by the act of reading and relating.  Leaders in this situation not only take in the writers ideas, but also go beyond, and expand their concepts or ideas into areas not intended by the writer.  Thus, scholarship comes from leaders who move ideas and concepts beyond and ahead from their predecessors.

Business Development: this is an area for the leadership to manifest.  You expect the incumbent to ‘develop’ business into newer territories, newer markets, newer segments, newer customers, etc.  But many follow the beaten track.  Follow an established template of reaching the identified customer, and if the demand from the customer goes up (market pull) they are in the good part of the business cycle, else they are in the downward spiral of the cycle.

Thus, in every errand, every role one has the choice of being a follower or a leader, and leadership is about in how many of these situations a person is able to chart a new path, while the followers follow the path and not the leader per se.  This is so apparent in the ant walk trails, when you can see the following ants stop when the leader stops and resume only after the leader takes off.  Rarely do they try to take a shorter route or a different destination.