LEADERSHIP – the usual boring discussion
This blog is for salespeople. Tomorrow’s leaders growing inside some of the salespeople as a budding leaders. As such this post can be a guideline for them, in my view. We need to get rid of Leadership Myths and should know what is right.
I am sure that all of you are bored reading or watching Boss-Leader posts and writeup in social media. Mostly those are to get likes and negative in nature. Where criticising the boss is the purpose. Also, you may find the people who react or who make comments on these posts are usually not the people who are in leadership roles but juniors who are somehow unhappy with their bosses. So, real understanding is required to develop a positive mindset, hence this article. Some of you may also find this article an interesting read, as I write in my unique style and zero copy-past content.
In the same way, we made politics a negative word (I explained in my ‘office politics’ post in this blog), the boss is also portrayed as negative. The meaning of Boss is ‘a person who is in charge of a worker, group, or organization’. So, like any other profession, every individual can be different. A boss can be bad or good, the same is applied to a leader also can be good or bad. So firstly, we need to remove from our mind that boss means bad.
Of course, we rightly feel that leaders should be a person of good nature, kind, sympathetic, efficient and always respected. It is also may not right. A leader needs to perform his/her duty, and his team may have efficient or inefficient people. So, sometimes a leader also needs to bite the bullet if some poor performers do not want to change or do not have the quality to perform well. The moment a leader is tough he became a so-called boss in the eyes of that particular subordinates. The subordinates find cruelty, lack of empathy, etc etc in that leader. The world is full of complex people so better not to draw a sharp divider, but it is more important, to how good or bad you are and what is the situation before judging a person.
Let me conclude here with a nice example then giving a laundry list of what are the qualities of a leader and bad natures of a boss which you can get plenty everywhere.
One day Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Salman Khan were sitting idle between two shots. Nawazuddin asks Shalman, what is the difference between an actor and a star in his view. Salman replied, take the example of a task of putting the thread in a needle given to an actor and star. What the actor will do is to try it with the most perfection and shall try to do it successfully in one attempt. However, what a star would do is not the task that is important. He knows people looking at him and not his task. So, his body language is that this is me and not important the thread going inside the needle hole or not.
This is not a good example for this article, but I could not resist myself telling you this nice example. One of the reasons that both are correct. People pay for the star as well as the producer pays him half of the budget of the film, is a fact, so a star needs to justice for his showmanship. As well as the actor doing his job nicely. So, do not judge a person on his cover but one needs to raise himself/herself to that level to understand his role and action.
However, do not conclude following the example that Leaders need to have showmanship only. Usually, they should have some level of it but at the end, their core competence and quality of performing the duty matters most. Like, stars are usually good actors also!