(An extract from PM Power’s upcoming book Full Stack Leadership)
Leadership is influencing and guiding people to achieve a shared vision or goal. Leadership can be exercised by an individual or a group of individuals acting together. It is not influenced by the person’s title or position in a hierarchy. Even the lowest ranking member in a hierarchy can exercise effective leadership. You can see that in the army, platoon sergeants sometimes are able to exert leadership influence on and coach and mentor younger lieutenants that are technically leading the platoons.
An effective leader has emotional intelligence, has integrity, is self-confident, has a vision for the future, is a good communicator, has empathy, is a good manager, is willing to take risks when required, thinks differently, creatively, and innovatively, listens to people and is willing to change when required, is resilient and persistent, and is proactive in times of crisis.
An ideal leader has to be a super-person. In Indian mystic thought, there is a concept called Ashta Siddhis or eight superpowers. These eight superpowers are Anima (become as small as one wants), Mahima (become as big as one wants), Garima (become as heavy as one wants), Laghima (become as light as one wants), Prapti (ability to get/gain whatever one wants), Prakamya (freedom of will or ability to adapt and survive in any circumstance), Ishitva (lordship over everything), and Vashitva (influence or other minds and other things). A full stack leader is a person who has all these superpowers to a good extent.
Anima of waste – The leader should reduce wastes of commission and omission to a minimum
Mahima of vision – The leader should have a growth mindset to be able to make their vision as large and as beneficial to stakeholders as possible
Garima of integrity – The leader should be able to increase their weight as much as they want, so that nobody is able to move them when it comes to integrity of character.
Laghima of ego – The leader should be able to make their ego as light as possible so that they can be a true servant leader
Prapti of happiness – The leader should be able to look out for opportunities to gain and bring happiness to all their stakeholders
Prakamya of learning – The leader should be able to have the will to learn from mistakes and failures and from others and be adaptable to face any situation, positive or negative.
Ishitva of business – The leader should have authority and responsibility over the business they are leading
Vashitva of influence – The leader should have great influence over all their stakeholders
Leaders emerge in all groups and societies, unless suppressed by conflicting interests. In these cases, leadership is not a self-declared attribute. Leadership is evident and validated when there is a followership. Effective and persuasive communication is a key skill here.
Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela are examples of effective leaders that emerged in highly oppressive and discriminatory environments and used their super powers to lead large groups of people to independence and self-confidence.
Leaders have to be super-persons. They need to have the eight super powers or Ashta Siddhis.
9 Responses
An interesting “angle”! There is usually an emphasis on empathy among team members for better team work and self-organization. Would teams truly consider the manager/leader also as part of the team? Needs some mindset change. I think Emotional Intelligence training/coaching should bring out this aspect – that EI (Empathy being part of it) does not draw boundaries of applicability! Enjoyed reading a refreshingly different blog…
Thanks, Shiv. Yes, completely agree with your point on EI’s role in this regard. Gopal
Nice angle! And nice twist in the title of the blog!
Good perspective, which is normally missed.
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Nice article, Gopal.
We all know one filed where downwards empathy is hardly ever seen, but upward empathy is expected and demanded. Politics.
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Nice article, Gopal! Very good insight. Practicing Empathy needs an effort as it needs seeing the world from the perspective of the another person. It is all the more difficult when you do not see everything that the other person sees. I remember one instance in my life when a manager reporting to me was promoted to senior manager’s post and moved away from me on a new, higher level assignment. After a few days she came to meet me and I enquired how she was doing on the new role. She said, “Milind now I know the kind of pressure you faced from above. You never passed that onto us and kept us shielded. Now I know how difficult your role and life is. I am trying to be like you!” So, the true empathy comes out of having experienced similar situations yourself.
So, Milind is the message “a little empathy is better than a late empathy”?
Gopal,
Nice blog.
This is a very valid and necessary perspective that everyone should have.
Somehow, in most organizations, just like ‘agile’ is considered as something for the teams and team members, these may be labeled as management and only for managers – as part of the leadership development plans.
Some ways how I have contextualized this in some situations:
• At an individual contributor level: connecting to empathy as a key skill for design thinking [observing and understanding users]
• At a team level: the togetherness and one-team idea [teams making commitments, the huddles in cricket and other sports etc], to use daily standups, for example, to recalibrate oneself after sensing how the others feel on that day or in a particular situation
• For managers: understanding and doing what they can, to make their managers successful, particularly when the complaint is that my manager does not understand me or my needs