As a youngster, I always dreamt of being a great leader, and not just a self doer or a goal oriented manager. And I believed, that in such pursuit, the single most important requisite was competence or capability .
As time elapsed, hair greyed, androgenic alopecia advanced and neural faculties felt challenged in recalling names of the multitude of people you met, wife and kids, finding my ways increasingly weird and rebelled more than ever, a queer realization dawned on me that pretty much altered my transactional style with the people that I engaged with, on and off work.
As a youngster I always believed, JRD could provide leadership to Air India, because he was an avid aviator himself. Wrong! Flying was his passion not his profession nor his primary domain, and the leadership that he was providing was across sectors of a diversified conglomerate and aviation was just one of his investments. It was therefore clearly not his passion that made him a good leader.
History witnesses, most leaders have not necessarily been good at what they have lead people into accomplishing. Our own ancient teacher, strategist and nation builder, Kautilya Chanakya, who was, I would say, one of the greatest leaders who not only united the frontier states of the north west to resist the Greek onslaught, but successfully united the peaceful and non violent Snataks (graduates) into picking up arms against the marching Greek armies. Churchill a poor soldier and more in staff than combat roles inspired the Brits into a successful victory against the Germans.
A leader must inspire people and inspire trust in his abilities and more than his abilities, in his commitment to the espoused cause. Both Chanakya and Churchill inspired trust in the hearts of the people of their time. One very easy way of inspiring trust is by listening to people, and being empathetic to their positions.
There is also no point in denying group dynamics. The head in the cloud scientist, steeped in research, will always disdain the ‘get it done’ engineer, and latter will always mock the former for lack of practicality and translatability. Even if we may deny, this group rhetoric and dynamic will exist and as a leader it is important that for the success of the product we smoothen this transition.
There is sometimes also a conflict in the gut oriented and the hyper-rational. The latter relentlessly relying on data and algorithms to forecast the future and the former going beyond data and taking a more emotional or sometimes more heuristic approach to the whole thing.
In leadership, cognitive empathy or emotional empathy is a very relevant aspect, and cannot be glossed over. Ability to decipher and decode the feelings of your team and where they are coming from enables you to help them, which in turn enables you to influence them, which in turn allows you to guide them, and that is what a non-positional level leadership is all about.
And of course if you are adept at reading emotions, you can exploit them also, and use them as part of an overall negative construct. Often, in the prevalent narrative of political pragmatism and petty political polemics, the leader exploits popular sentiments, and in doing so, he shows traits of a sociopath -a word now commonly used in place of the earlier used psychopath. With their ability to acutely gauge feelings or popular sentiments, sociopaths engage in a parasitic relationships in which they thrive at the expense of others. Such brand of leadership is seen world wide, and Trump archetypically one.
