“Because we’re all broken — every single one of us — and yet we pretend that we’re not. We all live lives of imperfection and yet we cling to the fantasy that there’s a perfect life and that our leaders should embody it, but if we expect our leaders to live on some higher moral plane than the rest of us, well, we’re just asking to be deceived.”
– Jimmy Smits as Matt Santos, in “2162 votes”, The West Wing
Take a walk down to any bookstores and you will find many books on leadership. In many books pertaining to leadership, the authors try to summarize characteristics of a successful and good leader. They will always talk about those who failed in a passing note. History provides us a good perspective of good and bad leadership from people. Some people think that leadership is an easy job but frankly it is not. The reason for that is that interactions between different people are complex and each one of us has our individual perspectives on different issues.
1. Taking it too personally
If we want to understand people and how they work, we can draw lessons from ancient wisdom. Aristotle commented that Man is a political animal. In every organization, the leader has to deal with dissent, engage in conflict resolution and taking a stand when making an important decision. Whenever there is an important decision to be made, the leader has to collate all the information required to make the decision. If they decide upon a course of action and has to face dissent among his team members, things might go awry for the leader if he or she is being challenged by his team. During such times, the leader needs to put personal feelings aside and try to get something sorted out.
Of course, there are times when a leader is under fire from his or her team or from the board of directors above. Things might go haywire when they start ending themselves in a fight. It’s always difficult for the person to accept the fact that comes with the criticism. This ended up in taking things too personally. It is an unfortunate problem that most people don’t take criticism well and bounce from it, but I suppose that it’s a fact of life that one has to subscribe to . Of course, when in doubt, I still recommend that you read the 48 laws of power and work out how your leadership should look like.
2. Micro-management
Whatever you do, don’t micro-manage your team. It is a trait of a control freak. Notice that I use the word “freak”. If you are leading a group of more than ten people, you have to know that delegation of duties is an important skill that you must learn to acquire. I mentioned before that the most powerful people have the ability to acquire power while giving it away.
Imagine you are an employee, your boss is watching your movement and controlling every action of yours in the office every day. Can you imagine that you have to follow everything that he or she orders? This kind of phenomenon is evident in the military because a soldier needs to obey orders. It cannot be imported to the business world, because no one would want to work for someone that gives them no growth opportunities. Besides, who wants to be your puppet that is continuously controlled by a micro-manager?
It is important to learn to delegate and put some faith in people who work for you. Trust is an important trait that a leader must possess. As a leader, you cannot be sitting in every company meeting. You can do that when you are still in startup. In every organization, everyone has a role to play, and learning to play that role is essential. The role of the leader is to manage and not to micromanage. No doubt that there will be days where things screw up, it is not to put blame but to accept the responsibility and make the best out of a situation. The art of being a successful leader is not to manage ten people but ten thousand people.
3. Your interests come first before the organization.
The organization is bigger than the individual. The vision of the company must continues after the founder has retired. The visionary who leads the company to be a big hitter must facilitate a transition where a new administration will bring another era of growth. The problem is that not a lot of people have great vision. In most of the cases, when personal interests gets above the company, the possibility in abusing your power is great. You may hear of the Enron scandal where the executives cheated the investors by window dressing their accounts to keep the stock price from dropping. When the scandal broke, the entire company collapsed. Now, those who are responsible for the scandal are still in trial for their crimes.
It is important that being a leader is not about yourself. Vanity is a dangerous sin, and one must guard against such flaws in character. I went through many trials and tribulations against personal vanity to realize that leading a team is about the team and the good of the organization. It is only once when you see beyond your own leadership, you will realize that there are things bigger than yourself which you can achieve. I believe that it’s important to protect yourself and also works towards the vision of the company.
4. Giving orders without carrying out what you need to do.
You must be able to talk the walk and walk the talk. If you are leading a team, you must explain everyone’s role including yourself so that you can move ahead with the execution of the objectives of the team. If you are only good at giving orders without doing things that people of the lowest level can do, it is likely that you will fail.
There are very few rare occasions in my life that I feel that I am a leader. There was once when I was leading a team to organize a global conference. Before the conference, I was helping all the way to the ground even till the level of being a labourer. I convinced my team that I can do what they do, and when the time of the conference comes, they backed me without me worrying whether they will slip up in their tasks. I remembered that there was a logistics problem and I was about to drop my role to help the team, but the logistics lead said to me that I should stick to my position to get the show going and they will be sort out the problem to back me up. I was so heartened by their comments, and realized that it was one of the few happy moments in life I have in life to have your team support you for a big cause.
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