Recently, I was traveling from Bangalore to Chennai in a train. One of my co-passengers were a retired professor of accounting and control from some university in Chennai. As soon as he saw the "HBR on The Mind of the Leader" his immediate reaction was you will learn more leadership from talking to leaders than reading books. I wanted to avoid a debate in the train. It helps no one and with my schedule of job, course work for exec-MBA it's really hard for me to find time to read a book which I did not want to spoile. Yet, I decided to talk to him and be a non-contributor. There are two distinct points he made although in very crude terms we will have lots of examples in lreal life to substantiate.
- Leadership is about being a good listener
- To be a successful leader it's important to be a good follower in early part of your life
I found both of these viewpoints unique in someway and very nice. Of course the HBR analysis does not talk about these anywhere. Some learning which only gets to you when you grow grey hair may be :-)
3 comments:
Well unfortunately i do not agree to both the traits that you mention in a leader.
Listening and a follower earlier.
Leaders are never followers because if you are a follower then you have got into the habit of following . Leaders have mentors in their early (pre leadership days ) but not follow.
Listening again i am not sure most of the cases exemplary leadership is shown in areas where the situation is such that there is no one to listen to.
Whom was mahatma gandhi listening to , whom was hitler listening to?
Leadership has a lot to do with how you are brought up how much confidence you have within
and how much you believe in yourself :)
Hi Samrat,
Thanks for your comments. However, the way we look at the leadership literature is when it all happened and they all became great men. There is an old story that is so uneventful that we do not describe much about it.
The fact that Gandhi became a great leader was because there was a synergy between his line of thinking and Gokhale and Indian leaders of pre-Gandhian era. To grow as a leader there is also an agreement needed from the people who are current leaders. In case of Hitler also he was invited by then Kaiser though Hitler had no leadership. Leadership involves to certain extent concensus building which cannot be ignored.
regards,
Sambit
Correction Hitler has no majority.
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