Leadership

Mc Kinsey, Merill Lynch, BCG, J. P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley... or any other big name that is coming to IIT for recruitments this year - ask for one thing from the candidates in their 'What we look for in you' section - Leadership. I was intrigued by this demand of theirs'; maybe because I don't know what they mean by leadership. What then is leadership? I thought instead of looking at this from their perspective, let me analyse 'leadership' from my own perspective.

Arnold Toynbee once said these famous lines (courtesy 'Against the tide') "If a democratic regime is to work satisfactorily, it needs a leader... who is a person of such manifest ethical and intellectual worth that his fellow citizens will follow his lead without having to be either coerced or emotionally excited." But is this what leadership implies today? In IIT, the student community looks upon leadership to be something related wholly to holding an office as a student; be it a Councilor post in one's hostel, or the Department General Secretary post, or the posts of organizational heads for IIT's festivals - Mood Indigo and Techfest. Is this what Toynbee meant by leadership? Did he say, that leadership merely signifies leading a group of people towards achieving a common goal? Well, he didn't; but leadership does signify that. But the term holds in itself a hidden purport as well.

It isn't just about leading a bunch of people to do some task. It is far more than that. We happen to focus more on only the role of a leader these days. We tend to forget the whole process of functioning of leadership. Besides, the concept of leader is baseless without the concept of a follower; which again is grossly misunderstood today. Every one of us is a leader. We are really poor followers. The result - the collapse of the very values that our culture has been founded upon. A poor follower cannot become a great leader. How can a leader cause 'his fellow citizens to follow his lead without having to be either coerced or emotionally excited' when he was a bad follower himself?

In the Bhagavad Gita, the Lord (Krishna) tells his follower (Arjuna), after having imparted him with all the knowledge there is in the Gita, to reflect over it fully, and act in the way he pleases to. In response, Arjuna says that his delusion is destroyed, that he is firm and that all his doubts are gone. And he says 'Lord, I'll do thy word'. In my view, this is the highest level of the leader-follower relationship that can be seen. The manipulative, ego-centric, supremely powerful image of a leader that we harbour today is replaced in here by one of a powerful yet humble, noble, and progressive personality. Sadly, today we take our stand based on what the lord said. We never turn to what his follower had to say.

And that is what bothers me - the image of a leader we students have at IIT. Is it also shared by the companies who will come to our institute for campus recruitments? Well, we'll come to know soon.