Leadership wanted in the new age

robertteh SG

What is leadership ? What kind of leaders do people do we need for today's business organizations or enterprises? What qualifies must leaders possess?

In my opinion, leaders are people who not only must possess sufficient intelligence, qualifications they must possess most of all the fire, passions and highest prerequisites to motivate people and mobilize them to new challenges in today's society.

Above all else, leaders should be committed to implementation efficiency, and accountable and transparent corporate governance to motivate all the reach goals and objectives.

Leaders should continually sustain, develop and nurture the social, cultural and economic vibrancy of the whole enterprise to keep up with competitions and survival.

In particular, they should take proactive actions e.g :-

(1) Identify new challenges, set directions to reach aspired goals and objectives.

(2) Set high standards by personal examples so as to preserve the morale necessary for mass participation and competitiveness.

It is especially crucial for leaders to lead the people by suffering together with the people and not expect only the people to bear short-term pains and sacrifices while the leaders are free from such struggles.

For the above-stated reasons, I would like to urge all leaders and elites and people who are given opportunities not to manage tasks by assumptions of the past.

They should seriously consider that being leaders they are the people who are given opportunities to serve and must serve with passions and implementation capabilities and not assumptions about their own high-cost and elitist pro-administration and pro-foreign investment and job-creation policies which have proven futile and unhelpful to majority of the population.

They should set new directions for the whole population and aim at accomplishing the greatest good or the greatest numbers.

Only when leaders can see the difference they can make claims about their talents and abilities. New ministers who have not proven themselves should refrain from introducing new policies that are not fully tested or supported by tbe people.

People now expect ministers to get real and answer to problems about the dropping of wages and increases of costs. They should not mull over such problems.

In the economic sphere, they should govern holistically with entrepreneurship and competitiveness - coordination and practical knowledge application to take advantage of new and constantly upgrading technologies.

At the same time, they must unite people and not harp on matters or polices which merely cause hardship without progress or divide the people.

PRACTOCAL LEADERSHIP QUALITIES - IMPLEMENTATION ABILITIES

Leaders must be able to target on implementation excellence or empower the people through the collective actions of the rank and file.

To do so successfully over time, they must practise accountability and transparency to manage the organization with a good set of corporate governance.

In summary, leaders must possess the following abilities which are to be proven in actual work performance:-

(1) Passion,
(2) Ability to Inspire and Motivate followers,
(3) Ability to get people to work with coordination and apply knowledge.
(4) Ability to translate complex goals and ideas into implementation processes to bring about competitiveness, technology start-ups and jobs etc.
(5) Invest monies and perform tasks with Accountability and Transparency
(6) Collective leadership by core team to make major decisions,
(7) Sense of integrity free from theoretical assumptions or controls that stifle mass participation in knowledge application.

PATIENCE AND DETERMINATION

Very often however leaders may become too complacent and only concern themselves wih assumptions and fail to sustain the undertaking with sufficient patience and determination to motivate all in efficient implementation.

It would be disastrous to concern themselves with ideas, assumptions and stop getting the people to sustain their fighting spirits and share rewards to do so throught the people.

People are not machines and will resist unfair or inequitable practices.

HUMILITY AND RELIABILITY

There is an overriding need today for leaders to come fully equipped implementation processes and work practices in lowering costs and creating jobs.

In leading from behind, leaders must serve the people with humility of servant, reliability, sense of justice, empathy to attain social and economic wellbeing of all.

HONOUR AND INTEGRITY

Leaders are now too obsessed with money, and they might now be too involved in situations of coflicts in contracts or self-reward or self-promotion or assumptions.

SOCIAL AND CULTURAL VIBRANCY

Leaders must cultivate in-depth social, cultural and economic vibracny of people to develop and maximise mass participation through interactions to reach excellence.

BROAD-BASED EDUCATION AND KNOWLEDGE APPLICATION

They should constantly equip them with skills and knowledge application abilities through broad-based practical education.

USUAL MISTAKES - JUSTIFICATIONS AND DENIALS

Finally, leaders should be humble and not resort to shallow argumentations to put up look-good justifications and policies which tend to delay or deny their solutions.

IMPLEMENTATION ABILITY THE KEY

Above all, leaders should be committed to objective selfless implementation processes above party or personal interest so as to empower all to reach for results with minimal petty controls and self-centred assumptions.

It is not enough that the leaders themselves are efficient or able - the whole team must be so. To produce organizational efficiency, they deliver team efficiency, coordination and knowledge application.

Leaders shoudd not be merely concerned with their own views, statistics or presentations or with only the bottomline, evenues or surpluses.

They must sustain the whole organization, plans for continuing expansions, job creation or lowering of costs of basic services to his people.

They must be able to utilise limited available resources e.g. use of empty properties, vacant lands, idle capitals for expansion and survival through innovations, entrepreneurship, application of knowledge and value-add competitiveness.

When leaders must take consistent and focused actions to meet these unknown with certainties without being hindered by any forms of self-centred or intuitive policies or assumptions.

Finally when over time, leaders must take steps to overcome human problems and uncertainties to keep the team vibrant and desist from taking credits and "let go" so that the team will produce team efficiency and productivity to attain larger results and objectives.

durai SG

Agree with you. Our ruling party can definitely review their current system in their way of governing Singapore.

Btw, I just put up a thread titled "Temasek & 98 Holdings". Knowing that you are very in tune with these issues, can you offer some suggestions as to why such a deal was done?

robertteh SG

Asian values and confucianism were adopted as convenient catch-phrase to justify the autocratic style of leadership in many Asian states from the 1960s.

In actual fact the primary success factor in any effective leadership lies in empowerment of the masses in practical knowledge application which will bring about real advances and progress.

Such leadership is collective in nature with the people identified as close partners of progress with the leaders and elites surrounding the leaders. If leaders want to produce results in any significant manner, they will have to be able to motivate the people and suffer together with them in time of hardship.

In the period leading up to the Asian Financial crisis many autocratic Asian leaders were seen busy trying to use Asian virtues and Confucianism to clothe their personality cult as some sort of flesh to cover their nakedness of self. They were seen lagging behind in corporate governance standards often making decisions without participations of the rest of the collective leadership.

So the only way such leaders can lead the country is through compulsion of the citizens with all sorts of controls and regulations to enforce their personal wishes and agendas.

Suharto was found to be issuing decress and edicts to enforce his various narrow concepts of Pancasilla. The citizens had to suffer in silence of corruptions and nepotism and cronyism.

All these grandiose promotion of Asian values had to grind to an abrupt halt as autocractic leadership typical of Asian cultures was found to breed self-centredness the root cause of the lack of accountability and transparency in running of the respective Asian authoritarian states which led to total collapses of the economy.

By promoting personality and leadership, many autocratic states were clearly governed with little regard for accountability and transparency.

However as soon as the Asian Financial crisis was over, self-centred individualism reasseted itself and was creating again new pressures on the people in these Asian autocratic states.

There is no sign that leaders in these Asian states have learned from the Asian Financial Crisis and soon forgot the many lessens attributable to the accountability and transparency in running the country. They prefer to govern according to their wishes and commands.

NKF was a case where an organization was run by individualistic personality which led to many problems. Finally such a self-centred system breeds abuses and malpractices. Those who were in charge were seen wanting to govern according to their own personal wishes which were called talents or leadership but such self-centred practices were unable to motivate and empower the masses.

There is a critical need to learn from the Asian Financial crisis and NKF. Yet how many Asian leaders are prepared to admit their self was the root cause of widespread discontent which often cause great harm to the unity and vibrancy of society creating instability and more future financial and social crises.

Until and unless the Asian states learn how to govern their countries with accountable pro-people and pro-result work processes there will be continual instability in all these countries.

There will be difficulty in giving up self-centred past practices because of in-born characteristics and other cultural factors.

However if they want to progress as well as other pro-people empowering system, as practised by advanced democracy like Finland and Switzerland, they will have little chance to win over their people who will want to be co-owners of the whole system for the long-term governance of the country. Only in this way will the Asian autocratic states survive and compete well in the future.