By Dr Atique Ur Rehman
Managing human resource and getting best out of them as a team is most difficult task for any leader. Individual skills are nothing unless harnessed into a collective effort.
Richard Nixon writes in his book that leader who seek power for its own sake and find self-definition in possessing it and do not apply it to move country ahead is no good for the nation.
Today’s world is complex chaotic and over crowded. It is harder than ever to exercise control through old mechanisms and stereo type. Political heads, executives of corporations cannot supervise everything themselves but if they submit to complexity and let go of the chain of command, chaos will consume the states, institutions and corporations.
The key to success is a strategy to select, groom, and placement of leaders proteges. A leader must metaphorically cloned himself in these men, who will enact the spirit of his reforms on his behalf, saving him time and making him appear not as a manipulator but as a delegator. It will help to run organisation efficiently on its own-fewer people to deal with, fewer irrelevant reports to read, less wasted time on every level. This streamlining achieved, leader could guide the machine with a lighter touch.
Executed authority but never yell and never challenge men frontally. Try communicating your wishes indirectly-a skill that is all the more effective. Operate through a kind of remote control. Hire deputies who share your vision but can think on their own, acting as you would in their place. Instead of wasting time negotiating with every difficult person, work on spreading a spirit of camaraderie and efficiency that becomes self-policing. Streamline the organization, cutting out waste-in staff, in the irrelevant reports on your desk, in pointless meetings. The less attention you spend on petty details, the more time you will have for the larger picture, for asserting your authority generally and indirectly. People will follow your lead without feeling bullied. That is the ultimate in control.
The truth is that everything starts from the top. What determines your failure or success is your style of leadership and the chain of command that you design. If your orders are vague and halfhearted, by the time they reach the field they will be meaningless. Let people work unsupervised and they will revert to their natural selfishness: they will see in your orders what they want to see, and their behavior will promote their own interests.
Unless you adapt your leadership style to the weaknesses of the people in your group, you will almost certainly end up with a break in the vagueness at the top turned into confusion and lethargy at the bottom. Success depend upon, clarity of vision by leader , ruthless execution of orders and on speed with which information could pass in both directions along the chain of command.
The control it brings to commander at top, is not an accident; it is the creation by commander himself, a work of art that requires constant attention and care. Ignore it at your peril.
Xenophon famous quote, “For what the leaders are, that, as a rule, will the men below them be”.
