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:
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Empowering of team mates
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Creating a sense of purpose among team members.
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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?
