Leadership

Lets talk about leadership !!

I read a wonderful article in Times of India, wonderful because it is so right and it matches my thoughts about what is needed around us today. So, I thought I should share this (copy+paste/ Plagiarise) it here. It is very relevant for us and we should introspect and find out what we as leaders have or what is missing in us.

Quote:"Ten Commandments to make a successful leader"

Leading a big public company is one of the world’s most important jobs. It is already fiendishly difficult, and seems to be getting harder all the time. Those who make it to the top frequently fail: they stay for shorter and shorter periods.

And there is more competition than there used to be for the talents of top bosses because private equity now offers another option. To judge by the huge pay packets offered to the few deemed capable of doing such jobs, there is a dire shortage of people thought to have what it takes. Here is a ten-point checklist of the necessary qualities.

1. A sound ethical compass. If the boss’s values are undemanding, the company’s will also be wobbly. That may not put it out of business, but it means the company will have to pay a premium for talent. Good people do not like working for organisations whose values they mistrust.
2. The ability to take unpleasant decisions. Many judgments must be made on the basis of ambiguous information. Leaders often have to deal swiftly with conflicting demands without being sure of their facts. That calls for a strong stomach.
3. Clarity and focus are essential requirements for making those awkward judgments. Leading a large company, and dealing at speed with a host of complicated and many-sided issues, is an immense intellectual challenge. In order to survive the clamour for time and attention, a leader must also be able to screen out unnecessary noise and to focus on what really matters.
4. Ambition. The best leaders are empire-builders who want to create something that outlasts them. That is different from ego-boosting personal ambition.
5. Effective communications skills are a relatively new requirement, the result of the increasing intrusion of the outside world. A good corporate leader should talk convincingly, which is not always the same thing as telling the whole truth.
6. The ability to judge people is an essential pre-requisite, given the importance of human capital. Judging who will work best in which slot is one of the key tasks of leadership. Like so many aspects of the top job, it requires intuition as well as experience.
7. A knack for developing talent is needed to build a stock of future leaders. People learn far more about the art of leading from a good mentor than from a great book.
8. Emotional self-confidence. Accumulating a pool of talent requires an ability to work with people who may be better at their job than you are at yours, and to guide and motivate them. Leaders who are jealous of their followers do not inspire loyalty. Self-confidence also allows people to admit to weakness and ask for help without feeling defensive or inadequate. Successful leaders need to be able to say, I don’t know what to do next, without losing the respect of their colleagues.
9. Adaptability will prove invaluable when things go wrong. Surviving a reverse calls for resilience and flexibility. The key is an ability to reframe: to reshape a problem so that from some angles it can look like a success.
10. Charm is not a quality taught on MBA courses, but few get to the top without it. A bit of luck helps too, though that may prove hard to arrange.

Many of these qualities are useful for leading any enterprise, but especially a publicly-traded corporation. In turn, the way companies are led determines the prosperity of nations and the happiness of their workforce and their customers.

In response to the scandals and collapses of the past two years, governments have rushed in to tighten the rules of corporate governance. That is no bad thing: good governance may not guarantee good performance, but at least it provides tools to tackle bad management.

And it is right to give boards a sense of responsibility and the means to exercise it. All this helps to rebuild trust.

And if all else fails...Talk to the chief executive of a public corporation about a job in private equity and the first question is, When can I start?’

Running a business for a private-equity firm means not only shelter from the limelight: no small shareholders turn up at your annual meeting to moan about your pay, and the media and non-governmental groups are much less intrusive.

In addition, there is a refreshing lack of ambiguity about what you are expected to achieve.
The timeframe is manageable. The investor is rational and interested. The rewards for success are huge. And nobody asks awkward public questions about your pay package.

The Economist

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