Once upon a time, there was a little ship…
At my more modest level than the Larousse, the best explanation of leadership is the one I drew from a simple joke that almost everyone knows without perhaps having drawn a parallel with the subject for themselves.
The short version of the joke tells the story of a crew of 10 on a small boat in the middle of a huge storm. The captain says, “We’ve got to lighten the boat or we’ll capsize, so one of us has to jump overboard until the storm’s over. But as it’s at the risk of his life, I’m not imposing it on anyone, I’m asking for a volunteer”. After a few moments of heavy silence, someone jumped into the water! After hours of battling the raging elements, the storm came to an end, and after a great deal of searching and effort, the waterlogged, swollen and half-dead sailor was fished out. The whole crew, saluting his courage, roared with joy, congratulating him and proclaiming him the hero of the adventure. And the sailor replies half-heartedly, “Thank you, thank you my friends, thank you very much, but tell me, who pushed me?”
It was a long time later that this joke struck me as the best illustration of what corporate leadership is all about. There isn’t one leader in this hilarious story, there are three.
The first leader is the captain, of course. He has a title, he’s an institutional leader. He holds command in a functional sense: Director of this, Manager of that! But above all, he’s the one with the solution: he analyzes the situation, and his experience and expertise enable him to know what needs to be done. He has a pragmatic cost-benefit approach and chooses the optimal alternative. He knows that he will have to risk the life of a crew member. But it’s clear that it’s not his. He’s not going to jump overboard; he’s asking for a volunteer, among the others… We may be tempted to see the limits of his leadership in this, but not necessarily. For if the captain himself were to die, what would become of the boat, and could the sailors steer it after the storm? So, objectively speaking, it’s a good solution that it’s not the captain who jumps, and that’s not in itself a lack of courage on his part. It’s a fairly objective choice that the breakage in business always happens at the bottom…
The second leader is the sailor who has jumped, the one who is fished out in the glory of the savior. He’s the one who reaps the laurels, the one they put on the podiums, the face of success. He’s an apparent leader. Behind him lies a whole invisible world that has worked towards the success he is credited with. He’s the tip of the iceberg. He merely overhangs an enormous mass of buried facts, actors and activities that support him at arm’s length and without which he is nothing. As in history, he’s often groggy, the avatar of another existing, completely surprised to be where he is. He lives in fear of people realizing that his reputation is overrated, that he’s not as great as he’s made out to be, and he rides every wave to make sure he doesn’t miss the right one. You have to look around for a hard-working little nigger who is the real genius, of whom this “leader” is merely the visible vehicle and pretentious parrot. This kind of leader inevitably ends up making recovery a mode of survival, since he himself is not fertile.
The third leader is perhaps the only true leader, and in any case the most indispensable for me. He’s the one who took the decision to push one of his buddies, incognito but effectively. He’s the natural leader. The one who is in the crowd and celebrates the product he imagined, but which is presented by his boss. The one in the crowd applauding the speech he’s written for the boss. He’s an invisible leader; we don’t celebrate him, or even know him (necessarily). He’s the one who gets things done. No matter how much management explains its direction, no matter how much the golden boys rant at meetings, without him it’s all just talk, it doesn’t happen. The natural leader has the ability to create a new reality and has a concrete impact on his environment. He translates vision into strategy, and strategy into operational tasks. He seeks little or no recognition from others. His real objective is a result. He’s not the stationmaster, he’s not the train driver, he’s the engineer. He doesn’t announce solutions, he doesn’t advertise them, he solves problems!
The natural leaders in a group are like the elite in a people. The real elite are those capable of imagining and implementing solutions to the major challenges facing a people. You don’t become part of the elite by automatically belonging to a self-proclaimed clan. You’re not a natural leader because you’re appointed or chosen, tracked or elected, rich or notable or whatever. You’re a natural leader because you find solutions, or because you’re part of the solutions.
The spiritual to the rescue of the material
But as always, my corporate life has brought me back to my everyday life. And it’s in spirituality that the big answers lie. After the Larousse, analogies and training courses, I finally decided what leadership really means to me. And the axiom is solid faith in a Divine Creator, Initiator and Ruler of universal laws.
I believe that He rules the world, that He holds the power and that He is Eternal, i.e. Master of time. But the rudder gives direction, power possesses strength and SPEED is merely a derivative of time. We all know what direction, strength and speed are. So for the believer that I am and by definition, the Creator is the ultimate Leader.
For me, every attribute of God is a facet of leadership. To become a leader is to try, on our humble human scale (multi-nanoscopic by comparison), to inhabit one of the divine attributes.
By way of example, anyone who tries to live the Truth, and therefore unilaterally decides not to utter a single lie, and who then lives this promise on a daily basis, eventually and necessarily becomes a leader in the group in which he or she evolves. Of course, it’s not possible to succeed, only to try, but this single attempt puts us above the fray. And the same is true of generosity or mercy or any other Divine attribute. Whoever tries to inhabit any attribute in a constant and consistent manner becomes a leader in its pool. The group always ends up turning to him as a referent to solve problems!
And the real challenge is that to try to carry a divine attribute, you have to bear at least 7 others. Carrying the Truth implies Justice, Courage, Confidence, Vigilance, Firmness, Honor, Fairness and so on.
Who really is a leader?
My personal answer came when I realized that the company is not just another place to live, where you have to learn the rules of standardized and contextual leadership.
Life is a whole, life is everywhere. Values within the company must be the same as values outside the company. Quite simply, they are human values, Divine values. All freely constituted groups, from marriage to the nation, encounter problems, and leaders are the ones who solve problems.
My former colleagues will no doubt remember the speech I used to give them, which in my mind took the place of ersatz (accelerated and free) leadership training. While they waited for me in the fertile soil of their BAC +5, High-Tech, hyper-management and the galvanizing terrain of expertise, competence and innovation, I served them a cold soup like “I don’t know what a good engineer is. I have no idea! But I do know what a Good Man is. As far as I’m concerned, if you want to be good team players, you have to be good to your spouse, good to your families, good to your neighborhoods, good to your community, good to your country and your people. Then, perhaps, you’ll have a chance to become good Engineers”.
