PASSION: THE KEY TO GREAT LEADERSHIP! OR, ‘WIMPS MAKE LOUSY LEADERS!’
By Charles Kovess
© 2006 Charles Kovess. All rights reserved.
Reprinted by Remacue with permission
Who are the great leaders? What makes a great leader? Are John Howard or Kim Beazley or any other political leaders inspiring you with their energy? Are any of them demonstrating the leadership qualities that you believe are important? Do our leaders impress you with their ability to tell the truth?
I believe we have too many wimps who hold leadership positions in Australia, in business, in politics, and in sport. They are wimps because they don’t have the courage to say what they really believe!
Where is Australia heading? What’s the vision? I have not heard either of the leaders of the major parties articulate a passionately-held vision that could inspire a nation to look further than next week’s pay cheque! To what are we as a nation aspiring?
My vision is an Australia in the year 2020 with a population of 50 million, where our well-recognised sense of fair play and tolerance will ensure a successful nation regardless of origin of our people. My parents both came from Hungary, and could not speak a word of English when they arrived in 1949. I was born in 1952, the second of six children, who have made, and continue to make, a valuable contribution to Australia.
The only way we can achieve this challenging and scary target is with a passionate commitment to growth and migration, to an understanding that it is human energy and heart that is the key to a nation’s prosperity. Such an attitude derives from a positive, giving, growing perspective rather than a negative, fear-filled perspective of building fortress Australia.
Wimps lack passion. Passion is the key to leadership because it engages more than the mind. Passion is a source of unlimited energy from the heart, or soul, that enables a person to produce extraordinary results. Passion gives us our direction, our purpose; our minds, on the other hand, are designed to help us pursue our purpose! However, for most leaders, it is the mind that dominates, and heart disappears.
The word ‘courage’ derives from the Latin word ‘cor’ meaning ‘heart’. In fact, when we follow our heart, that’s what we mean by being courageous. Our minds are designed to protect us, and often our minds are in conflict with our hearts. A classic example of this is a soldier at war. When he is fired at, his mind says ‘RUN’, however, his heart says ‘I’m fighting for my country, so I won’t run’, thus demonstrating courage.
Courage is not the absence of fear, it is acting despite the fear.
The trouble is that our minds can easily be dominated by fear. And fear of not being elected does funny things to our leaders. That’s why they don’t say what they really believe. The problem is that people know when they’re being told ‘bullshit’, they can feel it! Even through television, we can tell whether a leader of any description really believes what he or she is saying.
In business, many chief executives act like wimps. They don’t have the passion, the courage, to stand up to the screen jockeys, the young fund managers and traders, whose time frames are mere months, whilst the superannuation funds they manage and invest contain the funds of Australians who will be retiring in 25 years’ time. How can you run a major company on a short-term basis?
Walt Disney had no time for his company being driven by short-term price needs. In Bob Thomas’ authorised biography of this extraordinary, passionate visionary, one who had the guts to follow his heart, and to overcome the fear of lack of money that the mind kept throwing up, the point was clearly made:
“When the stock was in a slump during the post war period, influential stockholders urged the Disneys (Walt and his brother Roy) to announce a big expansion in order to inflate the stock price. The threat of stockholder suits was raised. The Disney answer: ‘Sue all you want. We’re doing what we think we should do, and that’s to take care of the best interests of the company, not any individual stockholder.’” (p. 283)
The other issue for leaders is that they must care for people, and it is difficult to care for people when you don’t care for yourself! In my work as a speaker, facilitator and corporate coach, I have found very few leaders who care for themselves, for their bodies, for their souls.
Such an attitude kills us early, and many of our executives are dying at an incredibly young age. We are designed to live healthily and happily, and be sexually active, till we are 120! That only happens when we balance the mental, physical, and spiritual elements of our lives. When leaders understand this critical need for balance in their lives, they will take steps to facilitate balance in the lives of those they lead: that’s the key to long-term business success!
If employees don’t feel cared for by their leaders, then their customers won’t feel cared for either! Sam Walton, of Wal-Mart fame, is quoted in The Human Equation by Jeffrey Pfeffer (Harvard Business School Press 1998) that the key to his extraordinary success was to understand this rule. He says, at page 293, that
‘the way management treats employees is exactly how the employees will treat the customers. And if the employees treat the customers well, the customers will return again and again, and that’s where the real profit lies, not in trying to drag strangers into your stores for one time purchases...’
So, let’s get rid ourselves of the wimps, not by removing them, but by en-couraging them to be passionate, to be true to themselves, and to become real leaders. That’s the way to build a great Australia, a growing Australia, a balanced Australia, where we have soul, as well as cash, and an outstanding national future!
Charles B Kovess, LL.B. (Hons), LL.M., CSP, MAICD, MAITD
Australia’s Passion Provocateur© www.kovess.com March 2006
