WHY WE HAVE TOO MANY BOSSES AND TOO FEW LEADERS

BY EMILY TAN

FINANCIAL DAILY, FRIDAY 11 FEBRUARY 2011

Career paths are littered with many bosses, but few leaders.  A truly great leader is someone who brings out the best in you, who you can respect for who he is, and who genuinely cares about your success and growth.

To be a leader, you must understand failure and you must feel deeply about current inadequacies and feel driven to do something about it.  The first step to becoming a leader is to close your eyes and clearly see a better future.  Leader aren’t lone wolves, they understand the need to enlist co-leader and to galvanise the entire enterprise to work towards their goals.

When you become a leader you have to become a net giver and not a net taker.  A leader’s primary role is to build the ‘brains’, ‘bones’ and ‘nerves’ of the organisation and not to seek to create result themselves.

BRAINS	BONES	NERVES
Vision	Quality of talents	Cultural Philosophy
Strategy	Supporting systems and processes	Compensation and rewards
Unique Capabilities	Roles and responsibilities	Quality of leadership
	Resources allocation	Learning and renewal
	Design and structure

A company’s greatness doesn’t truly lie in its technology.  Technology will be out dated.  Innovation can be copied.  Talent can be poached.  The single thing a leader can create that is hardest to replicate is its culture.

Leadership is what your team does when you’re not around.  Too many bosses say one thing and do another which undermines the corporation’s culture.  The difference between leaders and bosses in a nut shell is that leader set out to create a better future while bosses cling to the past and cope with the present.

Talk by Rajeev

Pashewaria CEO of the International Centre for Leadership in Finance (ICLIF)