The Hindu Business Line : Many faces of leadership

Can you guess the number of entries Google throws up on leadership? An astronomical 152 million! Leadership is the most common thing written and talked about, and is a big enough bag for stuffing attributes such as integrity, initiative, judgment, sensitivity, empathy, receptivity, responsiveness, vision, values, commitment and what have you. Add to these courage in crises, risk management capabilities, drive, getting the best out of people and the killer instinct when fac e-to-face with competition, and the individual becomes redoubtable as a role model.

Tomes on leadership and leaders are avidly lapped up by millions of readers round the globe. They make it look as if by just aping some names celebrated in popular lore for having made a success of whatever organisations they headed, you too can automatically inherit their mantle. This instant imitation does not allow for the possibility of their success being accidental or transient, having little to do with their contribution.

It is a well-known but ironical fact that the careers of a majority of the corporate ‘leaders’ who were extolled for their achievements in the famous book Pursuit of Excellence came to an ignominious end within a short time of its being published. Many of the Numero Uno’s of enterprises such as Enron, Worldcom and Parmalat which collapsed in disgrace were hailed as shining examples of top notch leadership.

Leadership, therefore, is not the sum of a string of the old, familiar, unexceptionable nostrums. This is not to say that they are irrelevant or invalid: They have their place, they do no harm and may conceivably do good.

Where management gurus go wrong is in taking a standard inventory of tenets and traits to be universally applicable without reference to the types of organisations, nature of responsibilities, kinds of situations and even differences in cultures. For, leadership is very much conditioned by the impact of these factors singly or in a variety of combinations.

Unimaginably bizarre

The starkest distinction in leadership that comes to mind is the one between the civil and military leadership. It is a divide that few have bridged, because the roles are not interchangeable. Other than perhaps Ulysses Grant and Dwight Eisenhower, there are hardly any Army Generals having made a success of civilian leadership, and that too as the President, winning the acclaim of contemporaries and posterity.

There are, of course, any number of examples in Latin America and some Third World countries of such exchange of roles, but most of them have ended in chaos and disaster. The prospect of a leader in civil life heading the armed forces is unimaginably bizarre, although in old British history, army commissions were on sale and bought by some big shots. One of the Generals who participated in the Battle of Balaclava, immortalised in Lord Tennyson’s poem, The Charge of the Light Brigade, was an inexperienced nobleman.

It is common to come across in civil life leaders doing well in one type of activity becoming an utter failure in another. The British electorate showed remarkable percipience in deciding that Winston Churchill, an outstanding war leader, would not do as a peace time Prime Minister. Similarly, Gandhiji who provided unparalleled leadership during the freedom struggle might not have fitted into the role of a head of government.

It is naïve to think that with just the core qualities of leadership, a person can move from, say, engineering to aviation, automobiles to pharmaceuticals, banking to biotechnology, manufacturing to bourses, or academia to officialdom.

Each of them is a universe in itself calling for highly differentiated and nuanced treatment, and subjecting them to identical types and styles of leadership may be a prelude to serious crises spinning out of control.

B. S. RAGHAVAN