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Blame it on the Beer
The corporate world today wants everyone to be a leader. We are scared to call a manager a manager. We are even scared to call a newbie a newbie! Everyone is on his way to becoming a leader or is already there. And then there are degrees of leadership - emerging, established, senior, seasoned, and so on.
In my opinion, leadership is a trait you are born with, just like customer service. You can train someone to hold the tray in a certain way and serve from the left or right, but you’ll never be able to train a person to bend down and gently flick away the bread crumbs unnoticed, or teach a Barista to look at a customer and realise that he or she can’t speak the language and be genuinely empathetic. In the same way, you can never train someone to become Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, or to take an example from our beloved cricketing world, a Clive Lloyd or even an MS Dhoni. How can you train a person to be another Alexander the Great or even a Jack Welch? Just imagine training someone to be Oprah Winfrey or Mahatma Gandhi or Subhas Chandra Bose. It’s just not going to happen. You can train people in leadership skills, but that little extra spark that they bring to the table will never be brought (or bought) by training. You can ape Steve Jobs all you want - the way he walked, talked, slept and snored - but you still won't be able to turn around an Apple (not even the fruit, leave alone the company).
Most of the CEOs today are glorified super managers. A handful, perhaps, are true leaders and that's the real challenge in the corporate world. We spend all our time trying to talk everyone, including the doorman, into becoming a leader and forget that not everyone can or needs to be a leader. No one needs to take offence if he or she is called a great manager or a wonderful colleague and not a brilliant emerging leader. Many "leadership" teams are a motley crowd of bad managers who stuck around long enough in an organisation (most likely because they wouldn't be hired elsewhere), spoke big words, looked into the horizon in deep thought, praised the next leader, called each other great leaders and got lucky! No, despite how it may sound, I am not cynical at all. I am just wondering about what we are missing in today’s corporate world - inspiration and true leadership: leadership that wants to make a difference, that wants to leave a legacy behind, that truly cherishes the gift of leadership and knows the responsibility that comes with it.
Titles never made a leader; traits and tread make you a leader. We need to spend time training managers and not chase after some misguided dream of creating leaders. When we do stumble upon a leader, we need to train the "leadership" team to step aside and provide support. Okay ... I suppose that’s asking for too much. But can we at least get out of the way and spend our time training "C" and "D" managers to, as far as possible, become "B" managers? Surely, that is doable and badly needed to get work done and keep the bus running.
The workplace will be a lot better if we have good and great managers and an occasional leader. There, I called out the elephant in several board rooms and probably miffed a bus load of leaders!
PGPMAX Class of 2013
Antony Rajkumar