Is Leadership the same everywhere?

 

What is leadership? To you, a leader might be your college principal, dance teacher, or the President of the nation. To me, it might be my mother, my father, or even my best friend. What most of us fail to realize is that a leader lives in all of us. Most of us don't even understand that when the time comes, the leader in us will emerge and lead the way. However, there are several challenges that one has to face when it comes to leading a company or even the armed forces.

A few days back, I got the opportunity to watch two brilliant movies- Guru and Few Good Men. In Guru, the movie talks about the life of Dhirubhai Ambani, and how he rose to power. Albeit a few fictional songs and some aesthetic scenes to add to the beauty of the movie, it gives the viewers a pretty good idea about the hardships he went through to establish a titan of a company, Reliance Pvt. Limited. However, his life and his life's achievement was not without its challenges. While being the leader of a company there are several challenges that one will have to face. 

1. Being an inspiration to others: This is the challenge of being able to motivate others and inspire them enough to work for your company. While it sounds like an easy task, it is not one that you dole out to your employees. You have to drill it into your employees' minds that what they are working for is worthwhile, what they are doing will bring a change in the world. 

2. Having self-confidence: Although it sounds easy, being self-confident is not a simple task to accomplish. While it may seem like all those who become leaders are self-confident, they always have a grain of self-doubt in them. A good leader is one who overcomes it and manages to confidently lead his/her company. 

3. Managing stakeholders: This basically encapsulates the management of relationships, politics, and image. While managing a company's stakeholders, a leader has to ensure that they gain managerial support, managing the company-stakeholder relation, and getting buy-ins from other departments, groups, or individuals. 

Like mentioned before, I also watched Few Good Men. Other than having stellar performances from Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise, the movie is a brilliant insight into the true workings of the armed forces. The story is about a soldier who dies just days before his transfer. When red lights start popping in his death, a court martial is ordered to figure out if a "code red" had been carried out to kill the soldier. A brilliant commentary on the sinister faces of the armed forces, the movie also talks about the leadership challenges the armed forces face. 

1. Leadership for new roles: Being a leader in the armed forces not only is a lot of pressure, there is a lot of adaptability involved as well. Based on the operation you are undertaking, your role will change. The non-traditional roles like peace corps, non-combat roles, etc keep on growing based on which your leadership style may change. 

2. Increasing non-traditional roles: As mentioned above, being a leader in the armed forces is not easy. We can see an increase in the number of non-traditional roles a leader has to portray. So based on that, leaders will need to have an expansive knowledge set and additional skills to adapt to whatever situation befalls them. 

3. Maintaining technologically driven change: Future warfare seems to be that; futuristic. We will definitely be seeing a lot more of modern technology being used in wars. The technological revolution is likely to intensify, leading not only to new weapon systems, but also to information revolution which will change the nature of war. Technologically-driven change puts constant pressure on military organizations to reinvent themselves. Successful leaders have to be proactive engineers of change.

As we all know, there are lesser women in the corporate section. While there may be 20 men CEOs, the women CEOs might just be 3. Although they work just as well as men do, women don't seem to get the recognition they deserve. With ideas and thoughts that are powerful and can bring changes in a company, women get paid very less when compared to men who do the same job. No matter what, be it in a sexist or non-feminist way, we can definitely see gender influence playing a major role in various companies. 

Moving on to the armed forces, the grass is definitely not greener on the other side. Even there, it looks like women are grossly under-represented when compared to men- especially in combat roles. Most of the armed forces feel like women are not as capable as men when it comes to combat and can also cause 'distraction' on the battlefield. Be it the lawyers or even Army doctors, they too are always considered feminine and suppresses by saying that a man can do their job better.