badge

Monday, April 21, 2014

Your Team doesn't need a Manager. Your Team needs a Leader.

You are in office, sitting at your desk, minding your own business. You know you might not be the best but you still enjoy what you do. Then suddenly an email comes. You are invited to a meeting. You go in the conference room and see your team there. You realize you have a new Manager/Lead/Head. He introduces himself, talks about what he wants to do with the team, you listen. You wait. You wait and wait and wait. And then he talks about it. He talks about the "process" he wishes to put forward. He talks about the "expectations" he has from the team. He talks about the "responsibility" that team should have towards the company. You realize it is another one of those captains who would do well "on paper" but not in the real world.

I don't know why but most professional organizations today prefer trained managers/handlers as compared to intuitive leaders. These handlers specialize in "getting work done" out of people rather than motivating them to do it. They prefer to make sure the individuals abide by the law of the "process" rather than learning and growing themselves. I don't know why it's called a team, it looks like a group, the individuals don't learn from each other - Hell, they dont even learn from themselves. The captain is the most bizzare person in the team - he wants to get the work done - without getting his feet wet - and he doesn't take any responsibility if something goes wrong either. These are the characteristics of a team "owner", not a team "leader".

After looking at just a handful of leaders across different fields it becomes pretty much certain that leadership is something you can't obtain with beauty, brain or money. As my favourite Cricket commentator Harsha Bhogle very rightly puts it, "You can't just wake up one morning and say, 'Right 9 AM, Time to Lead'. That just doesn't happen". It has to come from within. And for this reason, good leaders stay the way they were before they became good leaders. It is because they had those qualities from a very young age and were shaped a great deal by it.

More than the skills, there are some features that distinguish good leaders from the not-so-good leaders. First and foremost is the respect for everybody else, not just in the team but in the entire community. It is natural, people only respect you when you have respect for them. Great leaders though, have not just respect but strong sense of belief in themselves and their team. They allow the team to follow their example. They impart this belief in the individual's mind and motivate him to realize his/her true value. This is the reason why quality people come from environments which have a good leader. Good leaders are also appreciated in the way they carry themselves. They generally have good ethics and moral values and are equally great to hangout with outside their profession. This quality of being a good person is what makes a lot of people want to be like them, which in turn produces some more good leaders. Another important quality is the strength to accept responsibility and stand by one's team when the team is going through tough times. It is easy to pick a scape goat, everyone loves to do it. Good leaders realize the truth, accept it and stay by it.

Such people are found in almost all fields. I am a cricket fan and I find a lot of similarities between the philosophies of life and the game of cricket, so most of my examples are always from cricket. Cricket has had it share of leaders as well. In fact most world cups have given the game a new leader. Clive Lloyd, Kapil Dev, Alan Border, Imran Khan, Arjuna Ranatunga, Steve Waugh, Ricky Ponting, Saurav Ganguly, Ian Chappel, MS Dhoni to name a few. Of all these, I have only observed Dhoni very closely and I am certain he fulfills all the requirements I mentioned above.

I hope the organizations will realize some day that their current approach is too mechanical and would look to add a human touch to it. Then instead of following a "process", they would let individuals play their own game. Monotony would be replaced by Innovation and the individuals would become better professionals as well as better persons in life. There is always hope and room for improvement. May sanity prevail!