leadership mantra

TL;DR: stay agile and keep learning appears to be the leadership mantra

Getting to speak to future leaders is always a blessing and their questions set you thinking. I have recently discovered that Strategy and Leadership are the two words that are often attention grabbing for them. No wonder why we see such potential in startups and entrepreneurs across the world. Availability of evangelists, platforms and support groups also help in matching talent with an opportunity to create value.

An indicator of importance ascribed by youth towards leadership roles is the growing need for social esteem. Maslow's need hierarchy pyramid exhibits this need above the physiological and safety needs. A quick look at the LinkedIn designation of people also shows a majority of people putting their work profile as leader in a particular job segment. This is also due to successful efforts by society in instilling a culture of leadership and entrepreneurship in younger workforce.

I have often been asked to define leadership in my terms. I have shied away from doing that because my experience is on the lower side and is heavily influenced by academic exposure to the topic. I have read deeply from books on the topic of leadership and have studied executive development programs conducted by organizations. My conclusion is "Leadership has been a subjective term".

Miyamoto Musashi has defined leadership in a certain way.

Art of war by Sun Tzu describes leadership in another. I see veterans from US military and Short Service Commissioned officers from Indian Military in leadership roles. I see Civil Servants with significant experience in public administration getting into leadership roles in private sector. I look up to Gandhi, Mandela and Martin Luther King as examples of leaders. I look up to Napoleon, Alexander, Patton, Montgomery and Manekshaw as leaders as well. I also look up to Tiger Woods, Usain Bolt and Micheal Phelps as leaders in their sport arenas. I look up to Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix and Uber as leaders as well. GE of golden days and Unilever of current times are CEO factories. Seeing the diversity in the kind of leaders, I believe that leadership has been a subjective term indeed. Is there a common thread to all of them?

So how does leadership emerge? Leadership comes from power to influence and change things. My experience points towards three distinct approaches to leadership, which are as under:

1. Power arising from one's position: If you are pretty significantly up in the hierarchy of an organization structure, your designation imparts you power. When you speak, people listen to you and get influenced. You create and shape opinions.

2. Power derived from one's persona: A personality to influence fellow people to do things for you gives you power as well and you are seen as a go-getter. Those who read newsletter from Victor Cheng regularly would remember him mentioning this trait of personality as 'gravitas' in one of the newsletters.

3. Power by dexterity: If you have skilled yourself to be a master in a trending and impactful topic, then you have the ability to create change by your insights and refined thought processes. Competence is a core part of social eminence. Eminence leads to influence.

Approaches 2 and 3 are often overlapping and are not MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive). If you possess an ability of being self-aware, then your personality changes through cognitive reinforcement. The results of people's MBTI (Myers Briggs Test) have been found to change with age.

Below is a chart from my talk on "creating eminence" at IBM where I helped the participants explore the pathways to be an effective change leader.

For the younger or inexperienced demographic, my suggestion is to master a craft first as that is self-driven and you don't have to depend on someone's help. Next, cultivate agility and grit. Finally, keep trying unconventional methods to achieve the same goal. Right and left brain need to get to work in tandem. This rapid prototyping accelerates the pace of learning and creates experience. All the leaders mentioned in the list above were pioneers and knew their subjects. They were the explorers, experimenters, curious-cats, round pegs in square holes. They thought differently, and changed the society forever.

The ability to exhibit thought leadership and innovation depends on the maturity of one's thought processes. Mature though processes arise from sustained ability to create competence and share it with fellow people to create social eminence. So, stay agile and keep learning appears to be the leadership mantra.