Windmills of the mind

Organisations are today, more than ever, trying to ‘develop’ leaders. They are aware that in the coming years, the most critical and strategic resource will be not technology, not even managerial talent, but leadership.

They seem to leave no stone unturned.

While recruiting, they administer questionnaires that are supposed to tell them of their prospective recruits’ leadership potential; once they recruit, they assess how well their new recruits are functioning as leaders, they send them to training programmes, subject them to numerous lectures by leadership gurus (who, in terms of numbers, might be fast approaching the number of managers in whom the magic potion of leadership is sought to be administered) and initiate sophisticated mentorship programmes.

The result is still a feeling of some disappointment.

Why are the leaders not developing despite all our efforts, they ask?

The answer is simple: because leaders cannot be developed. People can only develop themselves to become leaders. And organisations do precious little to help people in self development.

Leaders live life as if they were acting, playing different roles. In this great drama, they need to understand the roles they are playing, and enact them convincingly.

They have to take stock of a situation, write the script impromptu, decide on their role, and the way they must play the role, all on the fly. Life is thus play acting in a continuous manner with no rehearsals, no retakes.

Traditional methods of leadership training and education give limited scope for this play acting. In this sense, Konstantin Stanislavki’s book An Actor Prepares may be a better reading in a course on leadership than a case study or even a book on a great leader.

Literature is an interpretation of human nature by the writer, just as a painting is an interpretation of reality by an artist.

Great pieces of literature present the complexity of human relations, to enable the reader to interpret and come to his or her own conclusions. It’s this interpretation that is the key to personal growth.

Great characters like Macbeth or Chanakya appeal to us because they tell us something, and also because we see a reflection of our own personality and aspirations in these characters. The same scene is seen in life by everybody, but interpretations differ.

So how does the study of literature help in preparing for this role as leaders? We believe that it helps leaders learn to interpret life — of themselves, of others.

A serious study of great works of literature broadens one’s viewpoint and helps in self development.

It helps in attaining greater breadth and capacity to respect others’ opinions, and ability to put things in perspective and see a holistic picture.

It also helps in attaining the versatility that allows one to switch from one subject to another and deal concurrently with many subjects. And finally, it gives greater ability to perceive, conceptually interpret and judge.

The essence of leadership is not merely setting goals, measuring performance, and giving rewards. We think it’s really about creating a charged atmosphere; one of excitement and inspiration where followers rise to heights they never dreamt were possible.

It’s to connect emotionally to people, and get people emotionally connected to one another.

It’s to get people to work not for rewards, but for causes, these causes being seen as valuable ends in themselves. Organisations stress decisions taken ‘coolly’ and without getting emotionally involved.

But can any truly important decisions be taken without emotional involvement? Can there be leadership without emotions? Emotions aren’t an undesirable side effect, they are the main driver in good decisions.

Once this point is grasped, it’s easy to see why training programmes based on the traditional methodologies fail.

They try to apply techniques based on logic, techniques that demand usage of head rather than heart, techniques that are consequentialist and instrumentalist in their approach (So what? What is the increase in profit?).

These techniques are valuable in training and developing managers, but they fail when applied to leadership development because they fail to address the core issue of how to arouse and sustain emotions.

Great writers, poets and playwrights create an interpretation of human life that strikes the chords in the hearts of readers because there is some truth in them, but not the whole truth.

The whole truth is to be interpreted and understood by each reader in his or her own way.

Facts are there, but meaning has to be imputed to them. It’s this possibility of interpretation that make great classics — works that have never finished telling all they have to tell.

Literature provides anchors to understand issues and opportunity to creatively interpret — create numerous circuits — and arrive at one’s own picture.

This is the world view of an individual. We have tried to teach leadership through this method at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, for more than a decade.

Through exposing students to great works of literature, supplemented by some films, we have tried to provoke discussions on a wide variety of issues.

Examples of the works used include Ceravantes’ Don Quixote, Shaw’s Saint Joan, Karnad’s Tughlaq, Visakhadatta’s Mudra Rakshasa, Achibe’s Things Fall Apart, Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, Irawati Karve’s Yuganthar and so on.

The response has been highly satisfying. Last year 146 students out of 170 took this course. Not bad, considering that it was declared at the outset that the course had no teaching objectives, and students must set their own learning objectives!

What we are planning to do, through a series of articles to be presented in Corporate Dossier in the coming weeks, is to present an entirely different approach to leadership.

The essence of the approach is to show how humanities can be used as a powerful way to understand human emotions, and how one can develop a better understanding of leadership in the process.

We plan to show how your heart can be developed, to enable you to grow, hopefully into a better leader, but grow in any case.

It will be a spur to self development, and hence it would be our endeavour to spur the readers to read further on their own, discover new works, new ideas and new roads.

For as Don Quixote famously remarked, “The pleasure is not when we reach the inn, the pleasure is on the road”!