Rituals of top leaders

Alfred Darmanin, SJ

A leader’s main role is to motivate, inspire, and energise people towards a common shared vision.

Recently I came across a book entitled Leadership Wisdom: The Eight Rituals of the Best Leaders by Robin Sharma, who also wrote the international bestseller The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari. In it, Sharma proposes the following eight rituals which I found to be both insightful and practical for today’s leaders:

1. Compelling future focus. A leader’s main role is to motivate, inspire, and energise people towards a common shared vision. More than merely managing things, leadership is about developing people. When leaders present a meaningful, clear vision for their organisation’s future, their followers start feeling good about what they do and as a result, about themselves.

Encouraging people to internalise and own the vision statement will generate greater loyalty, trust and commitment. This positive attitude is achieved through empowerment of people.

Great leaders manage the present while inventing the future. They have to learn how to focus on the summit while clearing the path. “The best way to succeed in the future is to create it,” Helen Keller once said.

2. Manage by mind, lead by heart. Or as someone else put it, “Manage by the left brain, lead by the right brain”. A good leader shows interest, care and concern for people and tries to establish interpersonal relations with each member by listening to them genuinely, understanding them and showing them empathy. People need to feel accepted, appreciated and cared for personally.

This is also referred to as the ritual of human relations and communication competency. Leaders make use of their own people skills and talents to reach the hearts of their followers through intuition more than through rational approaches.

3. Teambuilding. Good leaders reward employees who help build group teamwork. They are re­warded for what they do and recognised for who they are. The way a leader treats employees will determine the way they treat customers.

4. Adaptability and change management. In today’s information-driven world, adaptability is one of the most essential leadership skills. Sharma says that to change the results you are getting, you must change things you are doing.

A good leader inspires employees to embrace new ideas and share information. They consider employees’ training and development as an investment, not an expense, a necessity not a luxury. If training is expensive, non-training is even more expensive.

5. Personal effectiveness. This involves focusing on what is worthy. Sharma suggests that the secret of having more time to concentrate on the necessary things is to have the courage to neglect those that are unnecessary. The real secret of personal effectiveness is concentration of purpose.

The famous management guru Peter Drucker once wrote “there is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all”, and in the words of Confucius, “the man who chases two rabbits catches neither”.

So the real issue is not whether you are busy but what you are busy with. The test of good time-leadership is actually doing what you planned to do, when you planned to do it.

6. Self-leadership. This is about developing the intra-personal skill of mastering yourself, namely, the way you make choices, take decisions, deal with your personal problems, managing stress, and leading a healthy lifestyle.

True leadership starts from within the person, it’s an inside job. All success in business begins in working on oneself. Any attempt at improving an organisation must begin with self-improvement. Leadership in the world begins with leadership of one’s life. Leaders invest in self-care. For example, they reserve time for daily physical exercise.

It is worth spending time and energy to recharge your batteries by using appropriate tools. As Abraham Lincoln once said, “if I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six hours sharpening my axe”.

7. Creativity and innovation. This ritual translates into “See what all see, think what none think”. It consists in developing the skill of discovering new solutions to old problems and in seeking better ways of doing what you do. That is, seeing things not only as they are but as they can become.

Good leaders encourage their followers to be creative and innovative, whether at home, school or work.

To be creative and innovative means to see light where others see only darkness, to feel hopeful where others experience despair, to find opportunities where others feel threats.

8. Contribution and significance. This consists in linking leadership to legacy. In so doing leaders fulfil their calling to liberate the fullness of their personal gifts for a worthy cause. In essence, it’s leaving a legacy.

As Leo Rosten said, “The purpose of life is to matter, to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you have lived at all.” The purpose of life is a life of purpose. To quote a yogi, “what makes greatness is beginning something that does not end with you.” And “to create a successful present while building a brilliant future.”

Fr Darmanin is a clinical psychologist and author of Developing Leadership Skills.