Corporate Vs Political Leaders

I have in some colleges spoken to youngsters on various aspects of leadership. I have also spoken on leadership in my own company to a team of leaders in making. And one aspect that I always over emphasized, is that leaders should be able to inspire trust.

The best of leaders fail if their tracks when teams lack trust in them or if due to some turn of events, the trust that the teams have dwindles or is all together breached.

On the other hand, when we examine the political arena, we find a host of leaders who people don’t trust. Do their followers trust, an extrovert Lalu, a reclusive Mayawati or an enigmatic Jayalalitha. The answer that is mostly expected is a vehement denial and complete lack of trust such leaders. How then are these leaders successful and how they script their comeback is something that baffles the common mind.

Unlike corporate leaders, the political leaders thrive on the cult that they create about themselves. Misgivings notwithstanding, I am talking about leaders who have used caste and other demographic diversity to monopolize power and am not alluding in any measure to some transformational or inspirational leaders. As the latter rely mostly on personal charisma. They also don’t follow any pre-defined model for leadership. They are impromptu,  masters of the moment, and skilled in the art of the rhetoric.

Corporates leaders lead their immediate teams, which in turn provide leadership and guidance to the next level and this process of cascading continues. Political leaders don’t work with the people they lead. They work with their secretariat, which does not have the power to comment on criticize them. The people who this political class leads are far removed from their leaders, and seldom get a peak into what they do, and rely more on what they say.

While corporate leaders like to work to a plan, political leaders including transformational leaders may often like extempore action till the time the activities are not antagonistic to their public image. They also maintain deliberated distance and calibrated allofness from their followers. They try to create a perception of un-approachability that stokes that myth and cult that they try to build around themselves.

Ability to listen, and then ability distill the salient points made by the team is a very important trait for corporate leader. It is said that Alfred Sloan would very intently listen in a meeting, and then in the end, beautifully summarize the meeting, and send a brief memo on the actionable points to the team. While this trait is important for both, it is particularly important for political leaders, given their variegated mass base.

But one thing that is common to both corporate and military leaders is that both work to a plan. For any leader to succeed, it is very critical that he conceives a plan, and then works to that plan. And how many times plans succeed is something that I don’t need to expound upon. We all know, more often than not, in personal and business lives, plans don’t succeed. This does not mean, that we don’t plan or work to that plan. If we don’t work to a plan, losing traction of the firmament on which we stand is almost certain. The reasons why plans don’t often work are usually extraneous to the plan and exist in the evolving eco-system, which swoops on the plan, and frustrates it. For a pharma company, it could be warning letter from the regulator, or for a manufacturing labor-intensive business, it could be a strike.

Napoleon was a very meticulous planner, and so was Alexander of Greece. But we all know their plans failed more often than they worked. But Napoleon was prone to planning each successive battle with greater meticulousness than the previous one. Plans can be hostage to unforeseen events but their failure not withstanding, planning cannot be jettisoned to vagaries of the ecosytem. A team working to a plan has far more chances of succeeding in adversity than a team relying on adhocism.