"Strong" Leaders - Good or Bad?

Journalist-turned-author Sankarsan Thakur is not known to be a leadership guru. But in a recent interview to a Web portal, he brought up an important point related to leadership, which is very relevant to the Indian political scene as of today. He says, "I think it is important for leaders to be decisive. But in a democracy like ours, it is equally important for leaders to consult and build consensus. Another important issue relates to party and organisation building. Too many of our political entities revolve around individuals or a set of individuals and I think that is not healthy. I see that already happening with the fledgling AAP (Aam Aadmi Party) as well. Arvind Kejriwal [has] already become a cult figure around [whom] everything is beginning to revolve. Leaders should be able to build institutions and leave a legacy behind. Sadly, that does not happen too often."

A decisive leader who takes firm action, even unilaterally, is generally rated higher than a consensus builder who delays decisions by trying to take everybody along. But such leaders are not necessarily good for their team, whether a business organization or a political party. Self-belief and decisiveness are important in a leader but equally important is the ability to convince those around you, including dissenters, about the correctness of your decisions. Otherwise you end up steamrolling all opposition by the sheer force of your personality (or the image your PR team has built for you). This weakens your team in the long run by preventing the emergence of new leaders with their own points of view. While Sankarsan is right about the cult of Kejriwal, the cult of Modi is even more dangerous, for being more powerful and yet more intolerant of criticism.

Winning Ways

I'm currently reading "The Winning Way" by Anita and Harsha Bhogle. Awarded by the HR team of my previous company more than 2 years ago, it had been gathering dust on my bookshelf. But once I started with it, I rather liked the way this team of the HR person wife and cricket commentator husband has presented their insights on the art of Winning. Here are some (edited) excerpts that I found worth sharing:

When companies start becoming completed goal-centric and forget that it is people who produce results, they struggle. Just as players in good teams enjoy going to compete, so should people enjoy going to work. This is one reason why the human resource function is such an important aspect of winning teams!

A steady inflow of fresh and young talent becomes potent only when that talent is encouraged to think and is empowered to express their views. Getting people to express their views leads to greater accountability. Once a decision is taken and the whole team comes on board, it is difficult to pass the buck.

There are certain things in life that you want to accomplish or milestones that you wish to achieve. Fix a deadline and just go ahead and do them. Then there are those wonderful feel good things that you always wanted to do. Store them away at the back of your mind till you really have the time. The first set of thoughts are your goals, the second, your dreams. The moment you put a deadline on a dream, it becomes a goal.

One way for teams to overcome a lack of self-belief is to celebrate even small wins, which remind them that they can win and thus start breaking the downward spiral. Slowly, the team develops a winning habit, it builds confidence and the wins attract talent since everyone loves to work with a winning team.

During testing times, leaders often take risks. When they can pull of those risks, the team starts backing them for their courage. A team would be anxious to turn things around as fast as possible but sometimes performance does not improve overnight. Everyone, including the leader, must be patient.

Mistakes are invaluable because they teach you lessons. They are like potholes on the road that you learn to avoid. Mistakes warn you about where you shouldn't be going and what not to do the next time. Winning is not about not making mistakes, but about how to learn from them and become wiser and stronger. It's not about not getting knocked down but about how fast you can get up and fight again.

Change is not an enemy, it is merely a challenge to a set way of doing things, a compulsion to get out of your comfort zone and go into unfamiliar territory. We live in a dynamic environment and so, whether it is a change from within or forced upon us from outside, we have to discard old ways of doing things and learn new ways that are essential to survival. Eventually we discover that change is not the monster we feared it to be.

Communication is the final barometer to test team health. Lack of communication, or one-way communication, can spell trouble for any team. Communication involves clarity of goals and roles, a respect for the views of all team members, a climate conducive to debate and discussion and finally, walking the talk.

A leader is particularly disadvantaged if he lacks communication skills. This is not as much to do with fluency and glibness as it is to do with coming through as genuine, and the ability to connect with the heterogeneous people who sometimes constitute a team. It is about reaching out to those team members who are not doing so well. It is about trusting the team and being seen as someone who can be trusted.

Football and Leadership

The Corporate Dossier supplement of today's ET has an interesting article about the lessons a corporate Senior Manager can draw from the world of football. Anyone who follows the English Premier League would know that Managers of top club football teams face much more pressure than their corporate counterparts. So it is difficult to disagree with leadership expert Mike Carson when he says that if you can manage a football team, you can lead anywhere in the world. Here are the 5 key learnings from the said article, albeit slightly modified to be less football-specific.

A Manager:

1. Needs to be equipped to handle exogenous shocks

2. Should understand the values and beliefs that drive the team members

3. Has to realize that no team member is bigger than the team

4. Should know how to manage multiple stakeholders

5. Must relish the role and focus on getting the priorities right

Leadership, Guru, Broom

In a supplement of yesterday's ET, Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev says that leaders need three Is - inspiration, integrity and insight. "Leaders essentially grapple with something larger than what others are willing to grapple with, which is what makes them leaders. They need inspiration to be able to do that, else they will get frustrated. The second component is integrity, which is a key element in building trust, without which you are never ever going to be a leader. Integrity is about coherence between what you say, do and think. It is in your actions, in the way you are, the way you carry yourself. [...] Life offers leader a perch higher than other people have. If leaders cannot see any better than others, they become objects of ridicule. They must have insight into situations, into problems and possible solutions."

The guru also offers an excellent explanation for the "drought of leadership at all levels of life in our country". He says, "Being an occupied nation for centuries, we have learnt to keep our heads down. If I get up and do something, I may get into trouble." I think he has really nailed that one - whether in politics or in the corporate world, we Indians have an in-built tendency to lie low and go with the flow. We know that anyone who dares to stand up and challenge the status quo is either cut down to size or forced out of the race. To break the monopoly of the leadership elite, you need to build up a certain escape velocity, for which you need to be very strong-willed and thick-skinned.

But that is what leadership is all about, isn't it? Breaking the shackles... As the guru further says, "Leadership is neither about you or me, it is about something that needs to be done. Leaders figure out how it can be made to happen and get ten or a million people to see that this is the way to do it." In the field of politics, Arvind Kejriwal is a good example of this. Although the existing political parties tried their best to derail his popular movement, AK managed to get millions of Indians hooked on to his simple but powerful message of demolishing corruption. The results are there for all to see. What remains to be seen is how far AK's movement goes towards its ultimate goal.

AK's inspiration, one can say, was the redoubtable Anna Hazare. His insight was the realization that no system can be changed from the outside - when the political parties scuttled his Jan Lokpal agitation, AK decided that "if you can't beat them, join them". He waded into the cesspool of politics wielding the broom of his own political party, to sweep away the entrenched resistance to change. Now we come to the guru's third point of integrity, which will be the toughest challenge yet for AK and his team. If they can't walk the anti-corruption talk in terms of their own behaviour, the very citizens who have empowered their broom will also sweep them out of existence.

Leadership and Transparency

This morning, while reading the Economic Times, I came across this quote from the global HR head of one of India's leading Consumer Products & Services companies: "In turbulent times there is a need for greater transparency at the workplace, which will lead to higher accountability, responsibility and responsiveness on [the employee's] part". This struck me as a very powerful idea, one that I believe needs to be implemented urgently by all companies.

Whether your company has just lost a big deal, or has run out of working capital in a recession year, or is facing a hostile takeover by a rival organization, be transparent - go ahead and tell your employees all about it. Also tell them the short-term and long-term impacts of the problem. Normally, whenever a company faces tough times, the natural reaction of the leadership is to shut themselves off from the employees. They feel that, by not conveying the bad news for as long as possible, they can protect the employees from demotivation and low productivity. But we need to realize that such an information blackout normally has the opposite effect on our team. An employee who knows what is going on is more secure mentally, since there is no uncertainty about the situation of the company. Such an employee has two straightforward choices - either stick with the company and help it tide over the bad times, or leave immediately for greener pastures. On the other hand, an employee who is kept insulated from the bad news will soon realize that something is being hidden from him but at the same time will not be sure as to what that hidden matter is. This uncertainty will keep preying on his mind continuously, thereby reducing both his immediate productivity and his long-term engagement with the organization.

Another aspect of transparency is to treat all employees equally during a crisis. If you apply one set of rules for some employees, and another set of rules for others, you run the risk of alienating both groups by making each think you favored the other. For instance, if you implement a cost cutting drive, ensure that applies to everyone, including the leadership team. If the leaders don't lead by example, they will find it difficult to push through any unpopular measures in their respective departments. Or else, if there is a cash crisis and salary payments are delayed, ensure that all the employees are paid at the same time or nobody is. If you decide to pay the junior employees first, saying that they are more dependent on salary income, the seniors will definitely support you. But somewhere in their minds, they will feel betrayed and the first thought of quitting will begin to arise. A third instance where transparency is needed is during appraisals. When one employee gets a good rating, or an award, or a promotion, it is your responsibility as a leader to explain to the rest of the team why that person is getting the special recognition. This will guard against bad blood and allegations of favoritism.