Leadership Models – What is relevant today?

Leadership Models – What is relevant today?

I had to go ‘off-line’ from this blog for about 6 months or so! While I felt guilty every day for being away, I was busy doing something very meaningful at Brocade. After stamping our leadership in the Fibre Channel based Storage Area Network (SAN) space for 12 years we at Brocade needed to expand our total addressable market beyond the datacenter into the broader Ethernet LAN/WAN space. On 22 December we completed the acquisition of Foundry Networks for $2.5Billion, a staggering sum in the difficult money market of today! Having made such a big bet, it is critical for us to ensure that the integration between the two organizations concludes satisfactorily and communicates comfort and confidence to the customer and partners that enables us to bring our end goal (revenue and non-revenue) behind this acquisition to fruition! Pleased to say that things are on track and I am happy as a leader with the progress we have made. Enough said … for more details, please visit http://www.brocade.com/

Starting June, I am also playing ‘Judge’ at the MBA Challenge – Asia’s First Online Reality Show (use this search string on the Facebook search field) i.e. aired EXCLUSIVELY over the WEB with 2 MBA seats worth $25,000 up for grabs (http://www.mbachallenge.tv/). This is the first season of MBA Challenge and from the interest that is quite visible, I am quite certain subsequent seasons are in the offing! The organizers are already putting plans to export the show beyond Singapore. The elimination process has commenced and we are down to the ‘last 8’. The contestants are young, energetic and bubbling with ideas, energy and perspective – very eager to learn. It’s a pleasure and joy to be amongst these young folks and my interesting co-judges. I do confess that I come out of each session (definitely not a walk in the park!) having learnt more than what I have contributed besides having a lot of fun! Go take a look at the website and you will know what I mean! Better still vote for the remaining contestants and aim to compete in the next season if you are one of those who are after an MBA!

In one of the episodes of the MBA Challenge (The Active Channel biz plan – Episode 3), the judges me included came down on the contestants hard for not demonstrating ‘leadership’ in a group situation which goes without saying, is a key attribute of a business leader and for what an MBA stands for. Leadership need not just be linked to a position – a person does not need to be a designated team leader to demonstrate leadership qualities. Leadership can be demonstrated by an individual contributor as well. This core trait shows up because of some specific skills – subject matter expertise, communication skills or just the innate ability of an individual to get people in the team to participate, collaborate and contribute irrespective of their competencies. While doing so a ‘leader’ demonstrates the ability to guide the discussion to its intended conclusion rather than have everyone rambling on endlessly!

Talking about rambling endlessly brings me to the common sight of certain people hogging air-time and not really communicating meaningful substance. Their belief is in equating visibility to importance. This is hardly so! The audience in every possible forum is intelligent and educated to decipher substance from baloney! In today’s connected world, where news travels fast the results can be catastrophic!

In some of the elimination related discussions and deliberations at the show and the Facebook entries, I chanced upon selfless leadership – the ‘servant-leader’ model. The willingness of the leader to set aside personal needs and wants in seeking the greatest good for others, in accomplishing through others rather than seeking personal wins. I have also read about beliefs where the model ‘super leader’ is expected to know where he needs to go and how to get there! They should then be able to communicate with and convince their teams with adequate passion and conviction. Both these concepts could be real and there could be individuals who successfully live out these roles. However like in other instances, I will advise reader discretion and will recommend that these concepts be viewed in the right perspective keeping ‘real world’ workplaces, businesses and circumstances in mind!

The real world has an incredible scarcity of leaders who ‘do-not’ have any personal ‘needs and wants’. These need not be financial or even material! I just find it hard to perceive a leader being successful in leading a team across the line without any personal skin in the game at all! On the contrary, I would call it a risk in hiring or nominating a leader who has no motivation of a personal gain at all and is purely ‘serving’ the team by leading them! To me the servant leader is a relevant philosophy with a specific place in the leadership doctrine but not wholly relevant on a practical plane at least in today’s world gone crazy!

Next, the leader who knows where to go and how to get there… concept wise okay but I question how realistic this is in today’s context?? At work I mostly face management challenges that are mostly multi dimensional in nature. Solving or even addressing these situations by a ‘generalist’ leader or one with a single core skill is virtually impossible! Yes, the leader should be able to set directions towards a ‘landing zone’ in terms of outcome expectations but can hardly do every thing else to take the team to the desired outcome by himself!

Good leader’s build their teams with great people! When faced with a situation, they get these smart guys who ‘get it’ & posses different core competencies and expertise around a table, define the situation, the end goal and then pretend to be the dumbest person in the room! Almost without exceptions, the leader asks great questions, solicits involvement and opinions from everyone on the table (the broader the skills mix the more rounded the discussion & the cumulative opinion) and ensures that the discussion stays on track. These leaders are great at timing their own entry and exit from the group discussion. They do not hog air time, prefer to be great listeners instead! In almost every instance they demonstrate immaculate timing in closing the meeting. They successfully consolidate, summarize and direct the actions that evolve from the ‘session’ that will likely address the required end goal. So you see – the savvy leader of today did not exactly know where to go and definitely did not know how to get there, but leveraged his team members to determine the possible answers.