Leadership

by example?

A Pragmatic Leader. Does this sound like

a contradiction? In popular culture we

often see a leader portrayed as a

visionary, a person who is always

pushing to achieve a high goal, and who

fights to avoid compromise.

But is this image accurate? I don’t think

so. I think it’s a “compressed image” of

great leaders which our culture

preserves after they are gone.  In reality,

when you examine their lives

more deeply, you will find that most

leaders – both the celebrated and the

common – had to be pragmatic in their

day-to-day work. No vision was ever

achieved in one go – and seldom without

sacrifice, self-discovery, and

collaboration. Along the way, nearly all

great leaders had to accept defeat, and to

adjust to a changing world as well as to

the people they worked with. It’s fair to

say that dogmatism on strategy and

tactics has never been a sign of great

leadership.

In our current world there is more place

for leaders and leadership than we

imagine. In the developed world we see

now a slow evolution of the social

structures from large, command-and-

control organizations towards more

distributed organisms made of

collaborating smaller groups.

The proliferation of startups that now

seem to pop up everywhere – each with

its leaders animated by a vision they are

willing to bet their future on – is another

manifestation of this change. Numerous

non-governmental organization follow

the same model albeit with different

goals. As the hierarchical model is being

abandoned even in the corporate world

the role of managers changes there too –

leadership is now more valued.

The change I just described was

brought about by movements. Along with

all the positive changes they bring,

however, a huge load of dogmatism that

makes the followers blind to limitations

of their methods and processes. The key

message seems to be “everything that

was done before us was wrong and

dysfunctional”. And despite the declared

focus on persons those methods still

primarily discuss processes, tools and

tricks.

I believe a good leader of today should

be more pragmatic than that. He or she

should see methods, methodologies and

processes as just tools in his “leadership

toolbox”, recognizing both their

advantages and limitations. And he or

she must be a much more humane, more

people-centered leader. A Pragmatic

Leader must consciously create an

inclusive culture (even if for a carefully

selected team), one that is rooted in

genuine respect for others as humans, a

culture that will help them grow. Only in

such environment people have a chance

to go beyond their perceived limitations

and deliver astonishing results.