Excellence In Leadership

This is a transcript of Ajit Doval’s speech at Vidarbha University in April 2015. Because it’s quite big, I’ve tried to cut it short by keeping only contextual information and avoided the rest.

Before understanding excellence in leadership, let’s first understand leadership and its types.

The word leadership has different connotation and meaning in today’s corporate world. In a way all our life, we are consciously or unconsciously leading or being led. In our society, work place or family we are constantly interacting with people and leadership is all about interactions. In modern parlance it’s called transactional analysis i.e. why we behave the way we behave. Do we always take logical, rational and well calculated decision before we act? Or is it impetuous, spontaneous or emotional outburst or are there influences working on us that we are not even aware of? Probably the answer is that it’s a combination of all factors, but the fact remains that we are constantly transacting with the rest of the world.

While we are constantly being influenced in our thinking, behavior and actions, we are being led. There is a force that is directly or indirectly controlling us. It could be a boss, family, peers but we are being led. It’s not that we don’t admit it, it’s just that we are not even aware of it. This leading (being led) is of various varieties and types and that is why a lot of confusion gets created.

There is a leadership that arises out of authority; also called as positional leadership. Examples are CEOs, head of organizations etc… those that derive authority from their positions. This also applies to all successful people. They are successful because they can lead either consciously or unconsciously. In turn they are also being led. While these successful people have plenty of successes, achieved many things; they still have a longing to achieve many things that they have not achieved yet. While there is success, there is also a feeling of inadequacy of it. Leadership is all about change, hence they want to change. They want to change from one scenario to another which is more successful. This change is not the function of leadership only. There are people who can be great on their own; work in isolation. They can sit in a cave, pray and meditate for humanity. Probably they are also contributing but they are not leaders. They can be great saints, scientists, solo performers – but leadership is when you change through people. You change through the medium of people that you come in contact with. The people who you can drill, who listen to you, and on whom you wield influence. There are other types of leaderships as well. However in today’s corporate world we mostly think about positional leadership. The rules of engagement and the principals that form the positional leadership are slightly different from the rules and principals of other types of leaderships.

Next in the line is intellectual leadership. People get great individual ideas. Karl Marx wrote Das Capital in 1867 in isolation through his intellectual genius. Since then he has provided intellectual leadership to a large group of people for last 148 years. He led revolutions, and changed geopolitical areas that he himself had never seen. He made communism one of the most prominent ideas of modern times. Young and ambitious people got led by this idea of what an equitable and just society is and it became an ideology. Why these people took up this ideology – because the intellectuals led them to think that way. We also get influenced when we read the books. We get influenced when we read of these great ideas, including corporate management gurus. We find those ideas fit in our own style of thinking and in this process we get led. This is definitely a higher degree of leadership than positional leadership. Intellectual leaders have the ability to influence us and get things done from us without ever knowing us or us knowing them.

There is a leadership type even higher in degree than intellectual leadership - that is emotional leadership where an emotional leader controls our emotions. A quick example is Osama Bin Laden. Not trying to portray him positively but he was able to emotionally inspire youth in 57 countries of the world. He was able to recruit people for a fight that was inhuman, against the religion that he stood for and was destined to die a death in defeat. Still he was able to emotionally charge people. It was not an intellectual leadership because there was no reasoning to it – it was emotional in nature. The fact is – intellectual leadership gets dwarfed in front of emotional leadership; at least for short time periods, just as positional leadership gets dwarfed in front of intellectual leadership. Anyone can sell you a solution that takes you from point A to point B, unfortunately B isn’t always where you wanted to be. The emotional leaders take us to point B but this point B is actually not a solution in life. Emotional leaders try to change us, and we do change but it doesn’t solve any problem.

Many a times a question is asked whether leaders are born or made. It’s both ways, they are born and sometimes they are made. It depends what kind of leadership we are talking about. Positional leaders are always made; they are not born. Intellectual leadership can also be cultivated. You can study, research and influence intellectually for a change. Emotional leadership is also cultivable. However there is another type of leadership that is not cultivable at all. That is spiritual leadership. This is the leadership that is the most superior of all types of leaderships. This leadership changes people for their life and for generations to come. Examples are Jesus Christ, Gautama Buddha etc…

There is a quote by Swami Vivekananda about spiritual leaders.

“I’m persuaded that a leader is not made in one life. He has to be born for it. Difficulty is not in organizing or making plans. The real test of a leader lies in hording different people together along the lines of their common sympathies and this can only be done unconsciously and never by trying.”

But don’t mistake the spiritual leadership as the sole quality of leadership. The point is that if you develop your own spiritual strength, nothing helps you more than this quality in becoming a leader. Developing this spiritual strength means a lot. It speaks a lot about the values, selfishness and the cause. These leaderships are not compartmentalized as well – there is a mix. There is a mix of positional leadership, intellectual leadership, emotional leadership and spiritual leadership and each one of us has some elements of them.

The problem in understanding the excellence in leadership is that for each type of leadership the definition of excellence in different. In positional leadership the excellence depends on our skills, trade craft, vision, innovation and courage that we demonstrate. However there are some points which are common to all and plenty are common; only difference is of amount of emphasis on them.

  The excellence in leadership is – bigger the idea, greater the leadership. A small idea requires little effort, short vision and less of leadership. Greater idea makes greater leaders. Another point is that leaders live in future. They learn from past but think of future and live in it. The third quality is ability and determination to convert a vision in action. Leaders are ordinary people with extraordinary determination. Leaders believe in themselves and others and they believe in the cause as well.