The Perfect Leader

There have been countless strategies and people who have led people throughout the history; sometimes towards a revolt, against oppression; sometimes towards infamous, inhumane acts such as the holocaust itself… So, the question is were they all leaders, if yes… how good were they?

See, the simple definition of leadership is the art of driving (or motivating) a group of people towards a common goal. The understanding, however, could be really subjective. In my opinion, leadership is seeing the collective good, setting it as a goal, and rallying people towards the achievement of that goal. Leadership involves empathy and concern. The fact is, leadership of an institute is what defines the institute. There is but no one word definition better for the institute than the leadership it features. Figuring the kind of leaders, an institute needs is the key to finding the right future path and the sole decider of the corporation’s fate. Also, a very common misconception that needs to be forgone is that leadership doesn’t have to come with titles or a post; you are a leader at your home, at your place of worship, in the neighbourhood, all without any titles..

Another important question; Are leaders born or made?!

The answer, latter, is beautifully brought out in the following example:

Consider the example of Steve Jobs, who had been kicked from the board of directors of APPLE in 1985, the company he founded along with Wozniac, due to some internal feud. His early years with his employees were forgettable. According to some ex-employees, he was intolerant of anything he viewed as a failure and often appeared to be a narcissistic. But, this changed, over the years he found PIXAR animation studios and NeXT, after which he was rehired as apple CEO and developed the revolutionary iPod and iphone. He understood that not all people were the same, and they had limitations. He gave up his habit of being brutally honest, and found his way with the employees. He incorporated empathy and was disheartened when some of the employees had to be let go from Apple.

His legacy continues even after his death, and his innovations are still market leaders. Perhaps, this would not have been the case, had he not matured his management skills.

It is now obvious from the above instance that leadership is a skill, more so a set of skills that can be learnt and perfected same as the other skills.

Following are some of the qualities that are generally expected of good leaders:

• Vision: the leader has to have the foresight and a belief on the same, for thing to land on the positive side.
• Communicative skills: leader should have the power of persuasion, he has to be a good orator to be able to motivate and get the best out of his team.
• Will power and self confidence: the leader has to have the guts to take decisions in times of turmoil, or at times when a sole decision decides the entire future path.
• Humanist: the ultimate goal is to deal with people; he has to handle the personal as well as professional aspects of problems of his team members.
• Empathy: this is the golden point; it helps in fairly judging the situations and reflects at situations from the employees’ side. This involves taking note of personal and private spaces of team members.
• Knowledge of work: the leader has to have exceptional knowledge of the field; the lack of it will only lead to fall in trust and internal feuds. Both of which are disastrous for a project.