Musings on Leadership

Musings on Leadership

By Avinash Agarwal

UPSC GENERAL STUDIES: Paper IV (Ethics) 

Quotes on Leadership

A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves. —Lao Tzu

Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others. —Jack Welch

A leader is a dealer in hope. —Napoleon Bonaparte

My responsibility is getting all my players playing for the name on the front of the jersey, not the one on the back. –Unknown

It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership. —Nelson Mandela

                                  Leadership is in an uncertain place. We long desperately for better leaders. But perhaps it is precisely our longing that’s the problem. We’re waiting for a rescue at the cost of our own redemption. Because it’s easier to complain about the leaders we have than to try to do better. After all, it’s a pretty hard job.........

What is good leadership?

Constant Adaptation and Improvisation

No one would have predicted just a decade ago that Nokia would be something like a distant memory of a household name. Yet, while its decline was happening, Nokia’s leaders, though they were acting like leaders—reassuring, confident, calm, giving fine speeches—were not being leaders. They weren’t doing the things they had to do to set their company up for the future, things that, precisely because the future is uncertain, sometimes make you look hesitant, or fumbling, or foolish.

Not Grabbing Power, but Empowering

Leaders are not merely politicians, human calculators of advantage whose main goal is to attain, and then maintain, power. But the job of leaders is not taking power, but the opposite: empowering. If a leader fails to empower his or her teammates, it will eventually lead to stagnation and the setting in of a rot.

Create a Sense of Purpose

Te job of a leader is to create a reality in which performance itself stops being merely a performance—to focus people on the meaning and mission of their work, not on the politics of flattering and threatening, cajoling and conquering. When Steve Jobs asked John Sculley his famous question, “Do you really want to spend your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?” he was making just such a distinction. Selling sugared water might make you a few bucks—but only at the cost of doing something that matters. The purpose of a leader is to create a purpose.

Finally, to Inspire to Achieve

The job of a leader is indeed to inspire people—but in the truer sense of the word: from the Latin inspirare, inspire, to breathe or blow into. Leaders breathe life into the organizations they lead, into the people they’re responsible for. They breathe life into possibilities. They make it more possible for the rest of us to dare, imagine, create and build. They do not merely encourage us to do so; theirs is the hard work of crafting all the incentives, processes, systems and roles that actually empower us to do so.

Why just putting a high-performer in the leadership role will not be enough?

Leadership requires constant adaptation to today’s challenge and improvisation upon yesterday’s performance. But good leadership also requires:

* Empowering of team mates

* Creating a sense of purpose among team members.

* Inspiring the entire organization.

If our goal is discovering and cultivating leaders like that, then we aren’t likely to find them among our best performers, but among those who are challenging our ideas of what performance can be.

Can we think of examples where high performers made for poor leaders?