Authentic Leaders Do Not Lead for Power and Admiration
There are many ways a leader can lead, and there are many schools of thoughts that seek to categorize these leadership styles into several major types that can hopefully be taught to many of the younger generations who would one day, rise to take up the mantle of leadership in various organisations. All with the sole objective of fostering great leaders through education.
Certainly, education can teach us to be effective leaders, through proven methodology and processes, we can streamline many things at work, create potent standard operating procedures, and win respects from our teammates based on our expertise. However, we all yearn to be an authentic leader who can inspire everyone to work for our cause unconditionally.
We are not simply talking about ordinary effectiveness here, we are talking about a powerful culture that can render anything impossible into a possibility.
However, can we really learn to be an authentic leader through a formalized education system?
Probably Not.
We Do Not Study The Books To Be Leaders, We Simply Make Many Friends Who Help Us
When we pull all stops to help our friends, they too will come to us when we reach out to them
No we are not here to be leaders, or to act as one. We are here to make friends, and to turn the workplace from a serious workshop into a fun place where we can freely joke around, tease each other, laugh until everyone from other teams start staring at us and “convince” our managing director towards accepting our new work culture.
But when we do get serious, we are a force uncanny, capable of taking down a foe ten times our size in a single stroke. And it starts with a goal and a plan, drawn by the leader, criticized and reinforced by the team, and executed ferociously by all who take a genuine stake in the result.
And why is it that we can be so effective? It is simple really, every single person in the team owns a stake in the plan, and we will enjoy the credit together. Because an authentic leader knows that a single person can only accomplish as much, and these friends deserve a slice of the pie.
Basically, we have fun together, we suffer together, we work hard together. And thus the trust is built and fastened.
End of the day, everyone in the team knows, we either win together, or we lose together. And the leader knows, there is absolutely no room for a loss.
We Lead by Example, Because We Cannot Allow All the Passengers in the Ship to Drown
When the team works double, the leader works triple.
Life as an authentic leader is never the easiest. We do not work hard solely for our own goals, we work hard because we cannot afford to let down of the teammates who placed their trust in us. Remember how the resulting goal is the fruit to be enjoyed by the team, if it is within our capability to ensure a successful harvest of the fruit, we will put in all the work, we will pull all the stops, and we will succeed or die trying.
And the team does not have to be told of the tales, they will witness it with their own eyes, and they will feel the fire burning within them. “We too, cannot allow this to fail”.
Alas, when the harvesting season comes, everyone will take a slice from the pie and recall the gruesome month where we literally worked 16 hours every day to achieve an impossible goal. It later become a tale of brotherhood and sisterhood by the fireside where we share the wisdom and the intensely satisfying moments we share together during those nights of hard work, where we occasionally pop the beer cans or single malt bottles stashed in the office
But if the harvest did not yield the expected result, the leader will be the first and the only to fall.
An Authentic Leader is Fully Accountable
The one single most important tenet of any leader who genuinely cares about his team is, the leader, and only the leader is accountable for ultimate failure in delivering the job.
An authentic leader does not blame his team for failing, because the team failure is always the leader’s failure.
So what happens when we have a teammate who is not doing the job correctly? The leader should have put this mate into his/her right place and provided constructive guidance to allow this mate to deliver satisfactorily
Then what happens when the team simply does not have the right talent? The talent should have asked for additional resource from the management committee no?
And what if the leader has put in all the measures and checkpoints but failed due to an external headwind? The leader will still take accountability of the failure, and say, “We fail today, but we will recover more than what we fail today, keep me accountable for what I just said and tell me about it in exactly one year time!”
Ultimately, a successful leader will always have a creative way to get things done, and if we don’t, we tell the management committee early, that we are trying to go to war with the US with only a single destroyer deployed on the high seas, the venture will fail, and let me suggest you a better alternative.
Authenticity Comes From The Heart
And while it is true that books and lectures help us little in rising up to be an authentic leader, we can still learn to be such a leader that so many adore.
We learn to listen to our heart, learn to genuinely enjoy the company of people around us, learn to genuinely feel the difficulties and concerns of those who work with us, and we learn, how to be the first to fall to the sword when trouble brews, because we are accountable for a job well done.
And lastly, if we truly cannot feel that much level of comfort working with everyone in the end, pursue other form of leadership, the last we need is a leader who is trying to be authentic but fails to understand the first rule of being authentic.
I made that mistake of trying to be an authentic leader once in earlier part of my career, where I failed badly, and ironically, after I step down from the formal leadership role, I developed the friendships that would propel me into the role again, this time, as a person who would never sacrifice his team for any goals. If we were to reach the goal, we will reach it together hand in hand.
Authentic Leadership is a Journey
No, I don’t think I even understand how to be an authentic leader yet, though I had small successes here and there and I won many friendships in people who are willing to brave fire with me, I still believe there are much to improve upon.
And such is the journey towards authentic leadership, we may later meet teammates who genuinely cause troubles everywhere, we can be tossed into a working culture that is totally alien to us, we can face new difficult challenges that we had no experience in.
Yet, that is how we develop ourselves further, not by reading a book, attending a lecture, but by experiencing the many new challenges that we face as leaders. And perhaps one day in the future, this budding leader can bloom into something greater in the society.
Not sure if this will happen, but I will succeed, or die trying.
