Spotting Leaders...

My wife never refers to a plant as "it" but as "her".  We had a plant that had been re-potted and was struggling to come back to life.  My wife kept talking to "her" for over a month and kept encouraging her to spring back to life.  She kept telling her, "I want to see your flower."  One sunny day my wife and I returned home and as we stepped through the gate, my wife let out a squeal of joy.  She pointed out to the plant that she had been talking to for over a month..."she" had a bud.  To me, the one month of continuously talking to the plant and showering the love "she" needed is seeing the unseen and hearing the unheard.  This is leadership.

Many a time we pass existing leaders in our teams and bring someone from outside.  This happens for few reasons.  It is like our child who is growing up in front of our eyes. We struggle to imagine our little daughter has become a teenager.  Similarly, we struggle to see the leader that has grown in front of our eyes.  The other reason is that since we have been closely watching the people we work with, we know their strengths and improvement areas.  These improvement areas are familiar to us and they breed contempt.  We do not notice the improvement areas of the new leaders that we interview and realise that, many a time the leader inside the organization was better than the one we just brought in.

Many organizations and leaders in organizations struggle to spot leaders. What has worked for me in spotting leaders have been few qualities that I notice as I begin to work with people - these include "the can do" attitude, negotiation skills, collaborative skills, taking ownership and being accountable, ability to take decisions and more importantly living down wrong decisions, willingness and ability to communicate expectations very clearly, ability to be on the dance floor while bringing in a balcony view and above all, being a human being.

Spotting leaders is an art and it is often the small deeds or acts that bring forth the leaders in us.  As I stated above, the act of talking to the plant to bring "her" back to life and bloom, to me was leadership at its best.

I was talking to this 10 year old child who was the leader of a gang of girls in her school.  This was a small gang of 5 and they all had decided that she should be the leader.  Other gangs were trying to poach members from this gang so that they could grow their gang.  So, in order to protect her gang, she made one of them Vice-Captain of her gang.  She then made another member the Stand-In leader when she was absent and another member the Stand-In Vice Captain when the Vice Captain was absent.  This way, she negotiated positions for each person and they all were so happy that they decided not to leave the gang.  When the time came to go in different directions, she did not think twice to disband the gang.  These are clear signs of leadership of a 10 year old who is ready to take decisions based on the circumstances on hand and not take a stance based on her own position or a decision made earlier.

In my earlier writings, I have discussed what it is to be a human being and what it is to have a "can do" attitude.  I would like to talk today on living down the mistakes that we make as leaders and not beating ourselves up.  In our daily lives, all of us wear the leadership hat.  Many a time we don't know we are wearing the hat but actually do.  We take thousands of decisions.  Many of them do not work the way we thought they would or have un-intended consequences...consequences that we could not imagine when we took those decisions.  As they say, we are always smarter on the hindsight.  Many of us are ashamed of the decisions that we took and beat ourselves up and live with the burdens.  There are others who are willing to accept the errors of judgement made and move on in life.  True leaders don't beat themselves up continuously.  If we are humans, we will make those errors - it is after all human to err.  The leader is not above this maxim.  If we understand this and take the errors that we make in our stride, take accountability for those errors, face the consequences and not let those errors stop us in lives, we are on our way to becoming true leaders.  When President Nixon accepted his errors of judgement, in an interview on television on the Watergate Scandal, he showed what it is to make a mistake and live down that mistake.  He showed courage, grit and leadership.