Congratulations, you're now a leadership expert!

I’m not an expert on leadership. But guess what? You don’t have to be! And you can still hold forth as if you are a leadership expert — because everyone is a potential leadership expert, just as everyone is a potential leader, and you too can become a leader if you pay enough money to a leadership consultant. I hereby dedicate this piece to that special breed that makes a living by ripping off suckers who will pay for ‘leadership lessons’.

If you walk into a five star hotel and throw a stone randomly (on second thoughts, if you don’t want to be thrown out by hotel security, make that an apple), it’s bound to fall on a suit who fancies himself an expert on leadership. Leadership is such a vague idea that it is impossible to go wrong when you say anything about it. But there is a small problem:
there is nothing new you can say about it.

So you have every ‘thought leader’ worth the three thoughts in his skull striving to draw ‘leadership lessons’ from the Mahabharata, ‘talent management insights’ from Sholay, and ‘unorthodox leadership tips’ from the Godfather. There is a thriving cottage industry peddling such ‘content’ – not just in the form of articles, blogs and books, but full-fledged ‘leadership development programmes’ where seemingly rational human beings subject themselves to concentrated doses of this stuff in an enclosed space.

But what’s wrong in teaching someone to be a leader, you may ask. My answer: you cannot ‘teach’ leadership anymore than you can teach strength of character. ‘Leadership’ describes a certain kind of behaviour in certain kinds of situations. Such behaviour has its roots in the person’s character – a concept that ‘leadership programmes’ are allergic to, given that ‘character’ has given way to ‘personality’ as the defining paradigm for talking about individuals in the management space.

Until the early 20th century, ‘character’ used to be the default concept for discussing a person’s actions and behaviour. But with the rise and rise of Management as a pseudo-science, two things became necessary: one, to reinvent the human being as a malleable entity that could be trained to work harmoniously with machines as per the machine’s convenience; two, to eliminate the moral dimension from human behaviour, a dimension embedded in the very concept of character, and which therefore makes it unsuitable as a term of reference in the amoral space wherein business management operates.

Management theorists realised pretty fast that while character is difficult to change, behaviour and habits are not. Personality is nothing but the sum total of your behaviour and habits. It can be scientifically observed, if not quantified. Once quantified, a person can be trained to change ‘unsuitable behaviour patterns’ and this change in behaviour can be tracked. And most importantly, ‘personality’ has no applicability in the moral domain. In other words, you can have a good personality and be a bad person (but you cannot have a good character and be a bad person).

Thus, the advantages of focussing on personality as opposed to character are manifold.
But what makes ‘personality development’ a useful tool for managing employees – flexibility, willingness to blindly follow orders, and the lack of a moral compass – renders it inadequate for leadership behaviour. Hence the amount of bilge produced on leadership everyday by wannabe management gurus.

Today you have any number of ‘personality tests’ – Myers-Briggs, TAT, Rorschah Inkblot — and some of them apparently help you identify potential leaders and ‘groom’ them. But no amount of personality reengineering is going to help in producing real leaders. Why? Because what we laud as leadership is simply the byproduct of the positive social difference a person makes – not an antecedent quality that supposedly resides in his personality and makes her ‘act like a leader’, as it were. Leadership is a set of actions borne of character, not a ‘skill’ or a personality trait that can be programmed into someone through training.

Leadership, in a word, is the difference between a Hugo Chavez and a Barack Obama. One acted according to his moral compass, exercised his political autonomy, and will go down in history as a truly great and inspiring leader. The other reserves his moral compass and autonomy only for his speeches. Nobody can deny Obama is leadership material in terms of his personality, but whether he will ever demonstrate leadership behaviour such that it makes a positive social difference to the millions of people subject to his power, is a matter of character.

G Sampath is reachable at sampath4office@gmail.com
l inbox@dnaindia.net