A new lens on leadership
Your leadership calls, and how you interpret
opportunities and threats, are influenced by your lenses, which are unique and
personal to you
The mighty elephant is hidden inside the wood
The mighty elephant hides the wood
The Creator is hidden inside the
expansiveness of the universe
The magic of Creation hides the expansiveness
of the universe
— A translation of a
verse by Tamil saint Thirumoolar
Each of us perceives the world differently
because our brain decodes it differently based on sensory inputs—sight, sound,
taste, smell and touch. To make meaning of all this, our brain then overlays
emotions on the sensory inputs, followed by another filter—our beliefs. The way
we make meaning of the world influences our choices and decisions. It is
precisely these perceptual differences that give rise to the many hues of the
same thing—our different world views, or the lenses through which we perceive
the world.
It is these different lenses that make
leaders interpret opportunities and threats so differently. The lens of a
leader impacts his perspectives, ambition, risk appetite and orientation to
trust. These in turn impact the approach the leader takes with respect to his
comprehension and choice of vision or ideology, strategy, innovation,
organization culture and decision-making.
Let me illustrate the various ways their lens
impacts their decisions.
1. It makes leaders interpret the same context differently and hold it as their personal realities.
To give you an example from the world of
politics, see the different approaches of American presidential candidates
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton—and our reactions to each.
Trump, the Republican Party nominee, sees a
world which is dangerous enough for the US to contemplate building the modern
Great Wall and erect an iron curtain that will keep its enemies out (and throw
out those already in). He is unable to see this as a wall and a curtain that
will also isolate Americans. His idea of America is of a land only for the new
“native Americans”, never mind that the US was built by immigrants.
How could Clinton, the Democratic Party
nominee, be so blind to the “realities” that Trump sees? How could she deny
that the US is probably the most hated nation after Rome? Is she naïve not to
know that America’s allies want to bite off the hand that feeds them? Is she
oblivious to the deep religious and ethnic fault lines across the world and
which threaten her homeland? Unlike Trump, she sees hope and opportunity, and
not fear and despondency. She accepts that the idea of America as envisioned by
its founding fathers—that all men are created equal—is still work in progress.
Yet, she wants “togetherness” and an inclusive America for all.
2. It makes leaders believe that opposite ideas will achieve the same objective.
Before Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, during all
the 2,500 years of recorded history, no group of people were able to evict a
foreign occupier without military engagement. A mere decade after Gandhi, even
with Gandhi’s example before them, the African National Congress became
disillusioned with about 50 years of other means to overthrow apartheid. Goaded
by Nelson Mandela, it chose armed confrontation, until it changed its approach
again a decade after.
Communist revolutionary leaders like Vladimir
Lenin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro sought to obliterate class
inequality by curtailing individual freedom. Others have sought the same
outcome through free market, free enterprise and freedom of expression.
Many of us extol the Chinese model of
development. Some leaders believe that democracy and freedom can coexist with
development. Some believe that if it comes to a trade-off between individual
freedom and development, they will elect the former. Still others believe that
it is agreeable, though not prudent, to sacrifice individual freedom in favour
of economic development.
These themes play out in other institutions
too. For example, some business leaders believe that they need to restrain
employees—serving and those who have left—from critically reviewing them or
their organizations. They see this as bringing disrepute to the institution.
The values they espouse are, all secrets should remain within the family and
the family honour is paramount. They put loyalty above freedom of expression
and transparency.
A variant of this world view is that any
criticism of the supremo is anti-institutional. The belief here is that the
well-being of an institution is inextricably entwined with that of the leader,
no matter how inappropriate his actions. The institution here can be a nation,
commercial organization, social organization or a family. How else will we make
sense of the R.K. Pachauri saga and the choices made by the wise leaders who
governed The Energy and Resources Institute?
3. It makes us justify something in one context and denounce it in another, without any contradictions in our minds.
The founding fathers of the US embedded the
idea of equality in their constitution and yet were blind to racial and gender
inequality and oppression. Sir Winston Churchill and the so-called free world
fought for liberty and freedom in World War II when the forces arraigned on
both sides were all imperial powers. Before then their unsaid position was “my
freedom and liberty is my right while yours is not. I will cling to my imperial
holdings, but have ethical and moral objections when some other nation flexes
its imperial muscle and threatens my sovereignty”.
Now let us move to the mundane from the
sublime.
In the business context, the leaders’ lens
determines the path to market leadership.
For the leadership of one bank, it is balance
sheet growth; that of another is prepared to trade-off balance sheet size for
profitability. For one packaged consumer goods company, it is product
innovation; for another it is cost leadership and pricing power. For one firm
the opportunity lies in cross-border business expansion; for another it is
maximizing growth in the local market.
Their lens also colours how they view
competence. For many leaders, proficiency in English is the indicator. This
makes them blind to the fact that in most commercial organizations success at
the junior level of leadership is largely driven by problem-solving skills,
interpersonal effectiveness and personal drive. None of these have anything to
do with proficiency in English. This leads us to exclude a large number of
competent people from the consideration set because they are not proficient in
English.
In 2007, when my team and I were
brainstorming at Kashid near Mumbai, we were bold enough to challenge this lens
on competence. That is where the now successful ICICI Bank probationary
officers programme was born. During the last eight years, ICICI Bank has inducted
around 10,000 youth from the interiors of India, who have turned out to be
stellar bankers and more importantly, leaders. All that was required was to
challenge and grind our lens to see the world of competence differently. What
is interesting is that only a year into their training, all these probationary
officers became as proficient in English as the best from any convent school.
Similarly, the leadership of many
institutions see investment in physical distribution as the most efficient and
effective way to expand their reach and improve customer service, while a few
see the digital route as the answer. Proponents of the physical channel argue
that customer service will be impersonal on the digital channel. Their lens
prevents them from seeing the reality that old mothers swear by Skype and
Facetime to connect with their children abroad, and find the experience as
deeply personal and intimate. More importantly, where it comes to the
established banks in the world, this lens has made them sitting ducks to be
disrupted by the newer banks, which swear by the digital channel. The
leadership of the established banks is failing to see the irrelevance of a
physical branch when less than 10% of the total customer base and an almost
insignificant percentage of the profitable customers ever visit a branch.
Unfortunately, the leaders in these banks are hesitant to correct their myopic
lens.
How does all of this
connect to leadership? In my book, leadership comes into play only when we are
seeking to transform/alter/change a status quo. (This understanding of
leadership is shaped by my personal lens and many readers could have other
nuanced understanding of leadership.)
Like I said in the
beginning, a leader’s lens impacts his perspective, ambition, risk appetite and
orientation to trust. These in turn impact his vision and strategy.
Perspective is the heart
of leadership and our orientation to trust has a significant impact on
perspectives—whether it will be narrow and broad.
A hyper magnified (zoomed in) leadership lens
leads us to an inductive thought process and a narrow perspective. We seek more
and more sensory inputs (data). We are driven by the need for detailing and
concreteness. We seek proof that the decision will work. This in turn
influences our risk appetite and decision-making. A hyper magnified lens is
shaped by our orientation to trust. This is dictated by our emotions based on
our past experience—such as fear of failure, shame arising from getting
something wrong or loss arising out of being cheated. We therefore seek proof
before we trust. Proof seeking demands more and more verifiable data.
In contrast, a
telescopic (zoomed out) leadership lens leads us to a deductive thought process
and a broad perspective. This lens frames a wide-angle picture which connects
disparate images and information, and tells a story—of the world as we “want”
it to be or we “believe” it can be. This lens influences risk appetite and
decision-making very differently. A telescopic lens too is shaped by our
orientation to trust.
Our beliefs and our
emotions impact the way we collect and integrate sensory data. Based on our
beliefs and emotional triggers, we give significance to certain data, filter
out others, morph a few, choose the classification into which it will be put into
and the connections that will be made to present us with a story (meaning and
comprehension).
Since we are working
with the lens metaphor, we cannot limit our understanding only to the narrow or
broad perspectives. This is a function of focus. Emotions and beliefs also
colour our world view—the Trump or Clinton world view; the Marx or the McCarthy
world view; the Gandhi or the Subhash Chandra Bose world view. What we refer to
as orientations, is the function of the emotion and belief that overlays the sensory
data. That is why machine processed data will go through plain glass and not a
lens. When we classify leaders as left or right, conservative or liberal,
inclusive or exclusive, optimistic or pessimistic, radical or conventional, we
are talking about the colour of our lenses (and the colour of the leaders’
lenses too).
When we use the term
“bias” we actually refer to our lens amplifying or diminishing, colouring or
distorting certain sensory data. Bias is actually preference for certain
characteristics, choices, outcomes or practices. This can become a leader’s
default setting. Gandhi preferred non-violence, while Bose believed that
foreign occupation cannot be removed without armed conflict. Leaders who have
an orientation for relationship amplify the positives of customer contact in
physical channels and find drawbacks with automated channels by amplifying
their impersonal nature. So, bias is not only likes and dislikes for people.
Leaders’ approach to strategy, culture, innovation and decision-making thus get
impacted by the colour of their lenses.
All leadership processes such as vision,
choice set of strategies that we arraign, staying inside or stepping out of a
paradigm (innovation), and the calls we eventually make are shaped, directed
and controlled by our perspectives—narrow or broad, or the colour of the
perspectives. Our lens to the world therefore is the key to our leadership fit
for a given leadership context.
Without our unique world
view, we would all end up making the same choice given a context. The
consequence would be that problems and solutions which that one lens cannot
comprehend would remain unsolved forever.
If sensory data alone
could shape our lenses, we would have been no different from the other animal
species. That emotions and beliefs define the nature and character of our
lenses is what makes humans special. It is this that allows us to shape the
world around us. Is this not the essence of leadership?
K. Ramkumar is the
founder and chief executive of Leadership Centre, an institution dedicated to
building world-class thought and practice in the domain of leadership
consulting, research and development. He is a retired executive director of
ICICI Bank and retired president of ICICI Foundation.
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior
Manager @ Library
Khaitan
& Co
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