A major source of our cynicism comes from the belief that our leaders regard us as naive and therefore try to fool us rather than lead us.

Instead of leading the people to own and solve adaptive challenges in their communities and businesses, many of our leaders want us to believe that our work is to elect them so that they can solve our problems for us. Both in political and corporate contexts, we have been duped too many times by leaders who say they want to solve our problems for us.

But at a deeper level, we are cynical about our leaders because we realize that they are a reflection of what we as a nation have become. Our leaders are trained in our families, communities and schools and are elected by us. The misguided leadership and ethical confusion that we see in some of our leaders forces us to confront our own misguided and unethical ways. It is much easier to cynically critique our leaders than it is to become the kind of people that will foster and require ethical leadership.

It is my belief that an ethical leader must have a philosophical or theological basis from which he or she derives his or her understanding of ethics. Without this basis, one’s practice of ethical behavior will be constantly changing as a result of changing circumstances and personal preferences. It can be likened to building a house on a reinforced foundation or building it on shifting sand. Those who do the hard work of building their ethical behavior upon philosophically or theologically derived moral absolutes are like the house built upon reinforced foundation.

I have been totally inspired by my boss, Neeta Patil, at Reliance where I was working for a few months. She is a lady I admire for her leadership qualities. The first thing she would say when I would address her as my ‘boss’ would be “I am your colleague and not boss”. She would treat herself same as us. Here I would like to illustrate one example. I was working as a Customer Service Executive and she was our Area Manager. Our store Ethical Leadership had done awesome sales for a particular period and all cheers were to her, but she said that the good work was just under my guidance but done by the team. This is one scenario but on the other side when things were not going fine, there wasn’t even one sale for the day which went for four days, she was someone who gave us the motivation and spirit to move ahead, she would take the pressure on her and not let it come over us. ‘Managers tell you what to do... But Leaders tell you how to do’. I truly believe this and indeed she was a leader and not manager.

I am also greatly inspired by our respected President, Dr. A. P. J. Kalam. After the successful launch of SL3 there was thunderous applause from all the stations and visitors gallery. When asked to handle the press conference the message he conveyed was, “When success comes in after hard work the leader should give the credit of the success to the team members. When failure comes the leaders should absorb the failures and protect the team members.”

I could not get this beautiful, technological education of failure management in any of the text books written by any of the Harvard or any of the management institutes at that time. Since I am doing an IT Business Management course and will be managing IT professionals, dealing with a challenging task, I would like everybody to follow what Dr. Kalam said: “There will be failure in a system, failure in a project, failure in the procurement action or failure in the administrative action even failure in the political system. It is vital to protect the team immediately after a failure from the onslaught effect of failures. Equally we should celebrate success of individuals and team.” On this Mahatma Gandhi has also said in his autobiography; “It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honored by the humiliation of their fellow men!”

Drashti Parekh
Student, SCIT, Pune