In the first two parts we explored the questions, “Are modern leaders making management lessons look absurd?” and “Is leadership ordained by the Gods?”
In this part, we will look at the self-improvement angle: “How to be great leaders ourselves?” Let us begin with an example of hero that is familiar.
Modi – A Hero in Politics
The leadership journey of PM Modi is built of continuous learning, original thinking and the warrior spirit.
PM Modi’s beginnings as a community organiser, his refreshingly original bottom-up understanding based on his lived experiences, his skill to construct a working philosophy out of those experiences and the ability to cut out flimsy top-down pontifications masquerading as theory, has given him an unparalleled comparative advantage over his rivals. Add his extraordinary oratory skills and political acumen, his political successes seems only inevitable in hindsight.
Modi thinks through the prism of society – whether it is campaign strategy or development programs. He looks at politics as social work. It is at the centre of the concentric circles forming his worldview. His speeches reveal that he wishes to project himself first as a social leader than a political leader.
Such a leadership journey in a truly home-grown party (Congress and Communists were inspired by Western ideals and communist countries respectively) is a remarkable table of serendipity and sagacity.
As Badri Narayan puts it in his “Republic of Hindutva”, “Politics in the time of the neoliberal state became a politics of power, governance and development— losing, in the process, its social moorings. Many politicians stopped having a direct connect with the people. The task of working among people was outsourced to a new institution, namely the NGO, and politicians began to stay aloof from society. The social responsibilities of corporates were outlined, but no attempt was made to ascribe social responsibilities for politicians…..It was this lost tradition of politics as social work that Modi was alluding to when he spoke about the need to do social politics.”
Like with any hero, he was put through multiple trials by fire, which also gave him opportunities for not only embellishing his credentials, but also stirring the souls of the people through his vision for the society.
Does theory meet practice?
So, are modern day leaders proverbially burning HRM 101 (Human Resource Management) and Leadership textbooks? Perhaps, we need to understand that these much vaunted concepts were shaped in the old “supply chain” era of Ford, General Electric etc.
Professors at Harvard Business School and elsewhere elevated management with doses of spiritual wisdom, while management consulting firms like McKinsey and others, added elitism and dollars to these paradigms.
The last fifty years saw a heightened increase in the study of human behaviour in organisations, both large and small. But many concepts viewed as axioms have become incompatible with modern age.
In the vastly changed industrial landscape of the information age, many of them have become anodyne and pithy observations, than codes to adhere to.
But at the practitioners level, learning leadership skills follows the same journey as practical skills – through apprenticeships. Leaders, who grow up from the bottom pick up the “soft skills” that are needed to succeed, along with the core technical skills.
Thus, loyalty to organisations or at least a field of work becomes a essential qualification as it is fundamental to reinforcing and pruning leadership behaviours over time as one moves up the ladder.
Tips for mortals
“Can the principles of “great man theory” be applied to management?”, is a tough question. But it is undeniable that the personality of the “man in the arena” plays a big part of what fills the hearts with hope and manifests on the ground as action.
Leadership has always been dependent on the individual, the organisation, the culture and the context. Organisation leaders have now realised that leadership is an individual’s journey. This explains the sudden mushrooming of the plethora of life coaches, career gurus and leadership training programs. The journey is slowly moving from “How to be a leader?” to the uneasy “Who am I?” question. That in turn explains the rocketing sales of religious and philosophy books.
I found satisfactory explanations of trajectories of some leaders in Harvard professor Ronald Heifetz’s, “Practice of Adaptive Leadership”. “Get on the Balcony to watch yourself dance”, “do not shy away to orchestrate the conflict”, “manage your hungers”, “anchor yourself”, “listen to the song beneath the words”, “build the stomach for the journey”, “know your tuning”, “live life as a leadership lab”, “live in disequilibrium” etc. will resonate with any leadership journey.
The book does not take a top-down approach and thus thrusting liberal values disguised as kumbaya-spirited leadership principles, like other books do. Rather, it distils teachable liberal lessons of successful practitioners.
But still modern leadership literature swallows the inconvenient parts, where the leader has to be cruel to take tough decisions. For those we have to go the oldies – Machiavelli, Chanakya, Sun Tzu or Montaigne.
So finally, what should be one’s management style? That depends on your answer to the “Who am I?” question in the context of things. Ask your guru, dead or alive! Perhaps one can begin self-discovery by getting small things done!
To conclude, the popular Tamil song, featuring MG Ramachandran distils leadership in a couple of sentences quite perfectly:
தன்னை தானும் அறிந்து கொண்டு
ஊருக்கும் சொல்பவர்கள்
தலைவர்கள் ஆவதில்லையா
The ones that understand themselves
And preach to world, Don’t they become leaders?
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