Laddership is Leadership!

In the last three decades of my work in the behavioral arena, I have met eminent personalities at the highest echelons of society as well as the unsung heroes at the grass-roots. In the process, my conviction has become stronger that leadership means being a ladder for others to rise.

You are a ladder for others when you ‘enable’, ‘let go’ and ‘give permission to fail’. Being a ladder is all about seeing people grow without any insecurity. It is the ability to see the inner potential of a person, trigger it, nurture it and facilitate enhancement.

In this fast moving world, we have no patience to experiment. When a person does not deliver, the easiest solution is to change him. True leaders have a different take on that.

Enablement

Look at the ancient gurus. All of them created discomfort zones for their disciples, frustrated them, chided them, but groomed them. That is what we call coaching or mentoring today. The gurus themselves were sometimes not as great as the disciples but that did not bother them at all. They were happy being ladders for the disciples to climb.

In the leadership lessons of today, the end justifies the means. No wonder more CEOs lost their jobs in the last one decade than the cumulative exit of non-performing CEOs in the last one century. The reason their salaries were pegged to the share market did not work always.

Since these CEOs had hefty severance pays and sign-off bonuses, it did not matter to them. Nor did it provide the right leadership to the organization they led.

As things are, leaders’ growth is always linked to top line and bottom line growth and hardly ever to their people’s growth. So whenever a so-called leader quits, there is an exodus of executives. The history repeats itself with the next leader’s exit.

It is important that the growth of every CEO and his direct reports must be made dependent to the extent of 40% for laddering their juniors with effective enablement.

JRD Tata once addressed a team of young professionals at Titan Watches in the late eighties. He did not talk to us about great fundamentals of managerial effectiveness but simple things like “How to use a stapler?” The message was clear and loud. It is all about perfectibility no matter what the task is!

Brand obsession

We have become victims of branding. No wonder people from the best branded institutes command the highest salaries. But the best brands have not yet produced any Bill Gates, a JRD or a Narayanmurthy.

The upbringing of these leaders, their family values and their discomforts made them what they became and not the branded educational institutions. They built successful empires that resulted in scaling by, large employability, economic growth, community wealth and societal prosperity. It is a different matter that they too push their own children to the assembly line of branded institutes.

Let us trigger our originality. Let us not be fooled by the crowd behavior and force our children to sit for entrance tests of these branded institutes. Who our children are is more important than the branding that these institutes will provide.

Laddering

I have had the pleasure to interview some unbelievable leaders who not only had laddered their employees but created wealth for their neighborhoods, for their country and for the society at large even though their beginnings were extremely humble.

The chairman of Suguna Poultry that runs a 500-million US dollar empire is a school dropout and once worked as a porter at Bangalore railway station. As early as the 1980′s he contemplated business process outsourcing and created 45000 women entrepreneurs ‚Äì which no global leader with the best of branded education has ever done.

It was a win-win. He laddered others and became a leader in the best sense of the world. Laddering others is what leadership is about.