To be a leader

I have some thoughts on what it takes to be a leader in general. No puns intended for general as in an army general but it was meant generically. Anyway, being a leader fully involves paradoxes as you will get to see in this article.

A leader should know the art of being a good follower as well. Same concept as a good conversationalist. A good conversationalist has to be a good listener too, paradoxically. In fact, what would probably be challenging for a leader to do would be to know when to follow and when not to. Following does not mean giving up or giving in but leading from behind. Leaders should be willing to give others a chance to lead. Speaking of which, they should be learnable as well. Do good teachers make good leaders? Probably yes because they need to possess leadership qualities in order to be an effective teacher. For an instance, we would have come across teachers who allow their students to teach their peers sometimes, since some students learn better when being taught by someone of the same age.

The society demands leaders to be ones who are beyond the natural negative emotions like anger, hatred, jealousy, revenge, selfishness etc. Yet, they still need to be forgiving, jovial, kind and understanding. Leaders should not just lead but also lead by example.

Creativity is an essential charateristic too. Mahatma Gandhi, one of the best examples of a leader in history, was creative with his general approach. He thought of non-violence when every soul could only react violently. In other words, he responded while others reacted.

"Don't react. Respond" - Zig Zigler

Moving on, I think a leader should know the team members individually. When managing the team, poor leaders play the game of checkers while successful leaders play the game of chess. In the game of checkers, every piece is the same. They move the same way and get slaughtered the same way. Bad leaders treat all their members the same way with self-same expectations. Chess on the other hand, is a game with unique pieces. They move differently. Prior to this concept, good leaders would be able to identify each and every individual members' working styles to a certain extent and be able to utilise them in the right manner. It makes it easy for the team as well to explain things to the leader, knowing that he will know what they are into. The team members would be more willing to open up to the leader if they are facing any difficulty. Also the leader has to make them feel special and important by involving them whenever necessary. Needless to say, giving credit for a good job done would boost their morale tremendously. The leader gains respect this way.

Having people skills are of paramount importance and technical knowledge alone can never be complete for a leader. Having said this, it was no wonder that Andrew Carnegie was the "king of steel" once upon a time not because he knew a great deal about steel but because he knew how to deal with people who were working for him. In fact, his employees knew about steel more than him.

These are just some of the tips to be a successful and well respected leader. Before wrapping up, I shall translate a few lines from an old tamil song.

"Generosity makes a philanthropist; dutiful makes a warrior; patience makes a saint; whilst these three make up a leader".

Helping the self before helping others

As a huge observer of paradoxes and that too of life's parodies, I have strongly believed in this paradox since young. That of helping oneself is of paramount importance before helping others. We cannot effectively help others if we are in need of help ourselves. Perhaps it will be better if I relate this to an organisational context which I experienced when I was in the Army.

Back in those days, actually just more than a year ago lest I sound too old, I was working in this department of the highest division of the largest formation in the Army. I have to mention that the department is of high level so as to highlight the importance of having good internal resources for workers to work with. Being at the Head Quarters level, where the administration gets extremely busy, we needed relatively fast and reliable computers to work with. We had a buggy version of windows 95 and there was a total lack of basic hardware which made it all the more difficult to transfer information on a daily basis. I had failed to make my supervisor see the importance of having good resources to work with. So this is the scenario in the organisation. In fact this is congruent to how most companies function today.

Most companies, in the quest for satisfying customers, keep cutting down on costs. The problem is that they do not know how to differentiate necessary and unnecessary costs/liabilities. By having less than adequate resources for employees to work with, they easily lose pride and satisfaction in doing their jobs. This affects their performance and in turn brings down the overall quality of an organisation's products and services. Being customer-oriented is not enough to succeed, keeping the employees is equally vital. By keeping them happy, they would feel appreciated and see themselves as an integral part of the company's strength.

Relating back to our initial paradox statement, companies have to help themselves to be well equipped before providing value to their customers. They have to serve themselves internally before serving externally.

This is the same concept when people, being people, invest so much effort, money and time on unnecessities and invest none for their health and well-being of their emotional state. It boils down to their obliviousness of the fact that we need to help ourslves before helping others.

Ignorance is bliss - A different perspective

We are familiar with the saying "ignorance is bliss". We are also familiar with the surface meaning (note "surface meaning") that not having knowledge of something is a good thing due to its lack of disturbance to the mind. I have thought of a meaning of this phrase from a different perspective. Probably this is the actual inner meaning to the phrase. All right here goes Thana's perspective on this. Let me inject a saying upon this saying. We know the phrase "the more we know, the more we realise that we don't know". Based on this phrase, we know that the more we learn new things, the more we realise that we don't know some things. This is simply because whenever we learn something new, we come to know that that there is much more to learn about it. This is very much akin to an iceberg. By looking at the tip of an iceberg, we realise that there is so much more to be seen of the iceberg. Coming back to our original phrase, by knowing something new, we come to know how ignorant we are of the depth of that subject. Hence, "ignorance is bliss" may not refer to our lack of knowledge. It ironically refers to our awareness of ignorance resulting from the knowledge of something. By having this awareness, we achieve the good feeling of bliss. Henceforth we have the meaningful phrase "ignorance is bliss". I hope the knowledge of this phrase from my perspective has brought bliss, if you know what I mean. Haha, just kidding!