Part 1
Today I want to share with you in Part 1 of this three-part article my address to incoming students of the UWI Arthur Lok Jack Graduate School of Business on the opening of the 2011/2012 academic year on September 14.
Good afternoon. You have responded to the call for leaders. You have come running. Does that mean that all of you are already leaders? Perhaps, not. Regardless of where you are in your leadership competency, I am sure that you have a desire to become better leaders. But do you understand the nature of leadership? And do you understand how you can go about becoming better leaders?
How do you determine the extent to which you are already leading? Your leadership is best measured by the extent to which you can inspire others to want to follow you voluntarily. I repeat. Your leadership is best measured by the extent to which you can inspire others to want to follow you voluntarily. This means that to be a leader you must be able to win the respect, admiration and trust of others. It means that you must be able to touch the hearts of others such that they feel good about themselves and that implies that you are able to lift their spirits and imbue them with a sense of hope that better is possible.
In short, leaders are those who are able to inspire others to rise to a higher level. Inspiration is in the spiritual realm and it involves the energising of your mind and spirit through the expression of your spiritual energy. It follows that leadership is an inspirational or spiritual process. Leadership is not about coercion. Occupying a position of high office gives you managerial power, but not necessarily leadership power, although great leadership may be expected of you. Leadership power is not for you to demand, far less to take. It is for you to receive and this can only happen when others choose to offer it to you voluntarily. An age-old question of leadership is: "How can we help those who occupy positions from which leadership is expected to be effective leaders?"
Is there a roadmap for leadership development?
Folks, the long and short answer to these questions is that we have not done well at defining the road to leadership. In fact, we have been fudging and befuddling the pro-cess. We have been looking for shortcuts and most times we end up lost in the woody maze of management. We have been teaching, and continue to teach, mostly about management but calling it leadership. We have succeeded in entangling leadership in the jungle of management styles and management skills and the never-ending creative invention of empty jargonised phrases which publishers love as they make for great book titles.
The word "leadership" has marketing power and it has proven to be an effective way to sell management tomes and to attract students. It is estimated that up to 90 per cent of books claiming to be leadership books are really only management texts. The need for a better understanding of the road to leadership became more urgent following the leadership and moral failings that led to the meltdown of the world's financial system in 2008/2009 and continuing. Here in T&T we have seen some of our "models" of business success come crashing down for the same reasons.
Business schools around the world are now scrambling to completely recast the teaching of leadership. They are all in search of an effective roadmap for principle-centred leadership development. We intuitively understand the importance of leadership in building great organisations and great societies. When we look back at our human history we can easily discern the transformational power of great leaders. The leadership power of Nelson Mandela is now universally recognised and celebrated, even by his former enemies. Studies conducted in countries around the world have repeatedly shown that great leaders all won the trust of their followers because of their honesty and fairness, in addition to them being competent. Further, they were all highly inspiring and visionary individuals. Somewhere therein lay our roadmap.
And here I want to share with you a personal story of how I came to be involved in the business of leadership development. It started here in Trinidad and Tobago where I found the seed but it was in South Africa that the seed germinated, took root and found the nourishment to grow despite the sometimes very challenging environmental conditions. It is at the St Augustine campus of UWI that I first came face-to-face with the fact that management alone cannot build great organisations or great societies. So often management is all we know and hence it is all we can depend upon. It is while being burdened down with management as the head of the Department of Crop Science that I begun to ask the question: Is there a better way? This started me on my search. When I had the opportunity to establish a new unit in the then Faculty of Agriculture, I took the opportunity to try a new way. I chose to build this unit (Cepat) on the basis of trust rather than to assume, as we usually do, that you cannot trust people and that you have to depend on the rules and regulations of management to drive productivity. I found that when you trust others that the trust is returned and your leadership replaces management as the driving force for organisational growth and high productivity.
This approach worked like magic as we created one of the most highly motivated and productive teams of human beings that I have had the opportunity to work with. This was brought home to me when recently, I was asked by a retired accountant of the UWI Bursary: "Theo, tell me something, how did you get your team of 20 people to do the work of 200 people at the same salaries as others and to be so happy?" It is then that I came to the full realisation that I had indeed found the seed to the better way although I could not articulate it at the time. That seed is our inner power, which is what gives us the confidence to be able to trust others. Our inner power is like the engine room of our lives.
Next week I will continue to share my story of the pursuit of
the roadmap to principle-centred leadership development as it takes me to South Africa where the
seed germinated and took root
