CityVP Manjit

7 years ago · 4 min. reading time · 0 ·

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Practice of Leadership

Practice of Leadership

LEARNING JOURNEY 55
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This pyramid is for emergent thinking and learning purposes of OyVP Manjit and designed solely for that approach - ema: ctyvp@chibmember orf -02 Dec 2016 The greatest dilemma in leadership today is that the more we write or opine about leadership the less we seem to be changing trust in leadership or engagement through leadership. 

Buzz Submitted by : Sushmita Thakare Jain

Buzz: Leadership may be encouraging! But are you a Leader

There are lots of views about Leadership but practice of leadership is not an academic pursuit.
 

When Suchmita asked in her recent buzz "but are you a leader?" the temptation is to answer that question.  There is one drawback with that temptation - the answer to that question is found in the practice of leadership and not in personally pontificating about leadership.  This is like pontificating are we a body builder when we have not built our own body - and even if have built a body that is comparable to Arnold Schwarzenegger - it is the few not the many who will take that with them into practice.

There is little point in saying that on paper I have the makings of a great leader, if I keep out of the fire much like the way Garth Brooks sings it :

My purpose is not to write another book on leadership, nor participate in the same leadership discussions I have seen for the last two decades - because if those discussions had a meaningful contribution to actual leadership practice, we would not be seeing instruments such as trust barometers being created now.  In all of this the right question about leadership is are we a leader, but the right answer is 100% in our practice.
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Comments

CityVP Manjit

7 years ago #3

#4
Dear Mohammed, what you have introduced in your commentary is specialization and professionalism. Leaders who can think at great levels of abstraction can deal with higher complexities of practice. Leaders who best think at the concrete level can deal with end-to-end managerial practice all the way down to operating a lemonade stand. Their is much mess in not noticing this Having said that, Warren Buffett began his business practice as a newspaper boy, at each level of leadership practice, Buffett accumulated greater levels of leadership ability. Consequently Buffetts letters to his partners and then to his shareholders mirrors the growth of Berkshire Hathaway. How Warren Buffett developed is 100% in his practice and these can be seen in both his shareholder letters http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html and his original letters to his partners - through constancy of purpose he got really good at what he did. The question is not in learning to read Buffett's letters, it is how best would we write them if we were expressing our leadership year-in-year-out in the form of a letter. It is not only leadership that is a practice, but so is management, so is medicine, so is public speaking. Thinking is a practice.

CityVP Manjit

7 years ago #2

#2
The theoretical when it comes to the practitioner is very important as leaders transition to greater challenges. When I look at the behemoths like LinkedIn and Facebook, I find entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who also are hard-core thinkers. Peter Thiel who was one of the geniuses behind both Facebook and Paypal thinks at an extremely high level of capability including what informs him at the philosophical level. http://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-on-rene-girards-influence-2014-11 Then there are actual philosopher kings that turn into entrepreneurs like Yvon Chouinard http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/19/patagonias-philosopher-king and don't forget Reid Hoffman at LinkedIn. Then there is leadership at brass tacks level - a leader who is running several stores at a local level. These leaders don't need to think at global levels, indeed they will be extremely bored to run a business at the local level. The same as it would if I asked Yvon Chouinard and Peter Thiel to partner with me, because they are not interested in the day-to-day leadership challenges, they are already thinking many years out and at levels of investment that are challenging to comprehend. The pond metaphor then is very apt. The big fish in a small pond is a leader, and the small fish in the big pond is a leader, but the big fish in the big pond is what most leadership theory aims to address - and that is why understanding that leadership is a practice is fundamental starting point, you and me recognize that, but we don't think of leadership that way, instead leadership books deliver a mythological leadership. For sure our society does require mythology to keep it running, but it also needs practitioners who can operate the larger visions of society, and it is those leaders that I am definitely interested in.

CityVP Manjit

7 years ago #1

#3
Leadership is exponential with complexity. At the most basic level leadership can be practiced at the most mundane level, without great levels of complexity and when we level set to an organization at an early stage of development or that has reached a low ceiling at which it operates, then that is a different form of leadership than running a huge global organization. There are also some founders who like starting companies but don't want the leadership challenges of scaling a business. There are problems for a leadership mindset that entertains global level ambitions when the organization itself is not going to grow beyond the local level where it was founded, because then there is a misalignment between the needs of that organization and the capability of the leader - for then the leader with a big vision operating in limited settings will create unnecessary complexity to be designed into a business and then the competitor who operates with a simpler framework will win the day in the marketplace and the leadership of that competitor do not necessarily need to be the smartest people in the room. At the other end of the scale, in the world of mergers and acquisitions, getting the smartest minds into leadership practice is more important because the complexities are far richer. There is one thing leading an organization with a large percentage of grassroots level employees and leading a multi-billion enterprise that is about to see a transfer in ownership. In this case failure in addressing leadership talent can lead to an increase in the likelihood of merger and acquisition failure, which according to Forbes can be high as 83%. It really comes down to level-setting what kind of leadership we are preparing ourselves for and not the one size of leadership fits all that comes across with cookie-cutter solutions.

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