A subtle thing about leadership.

There is this strange thing about leadership which I am experiencing first hand over some time now.Whenever someone becomes a leader or assumes a leadership role, he unconsciously moves into an orbit that's one notch higher than that of his followers.

This normally helps the leader in gaining a natural psychological edge over his followers thus helping him/her a lot in creating a dedicated team that seeks to understand & follow the leader. But in the process it also creates a line of separation that gets increasing difficult to erase as days pass by.

You can see this happening almost everywhere. Take the armed forces/police as an example.It almost creates a line of separation between the ranks as a part of the process. It helps in having a strong command over lower ranks but it is highly detrimental when it comes to helping the officer in understanding the problems faced by his juniors.

Take a school/college. The staff seldom use the same facilities as that of the students. Be it buses or washrooms. Most of them even have a staff canteen thus essentially shielding them from the problems that they are supposed to fix.

No better example than politicians. The surface transport minister gets the traffic cleared whenever he moves. He is in a different league & so miseries of normal people on the road becomes increasingly difficult for him to grasp.

A software firm is no exception. Except for the non-routine team meet,you'll seldom find a senior executive dining with his juniors as a practice. Everyone prefers to move around in crowds that's his or her own league. Even if there is that exceptional leader who actually makes a conscious effort to break the routine, it's highly possible that the conversations that takes place in his presence are very different from the ones that would have taken place in his absence.

It's a very fine balancing act.Once you get higher credentials, it's very difficult to maintain your feet at the same level as those of the people you lead. And unless you do that, it might actually be difficult to know their real issues and problems. The saddest thing is that it's actually the leader who is mostly empowered to make a change to fix those issues.More so in a highly hierarchical society like India.

I got a feel of this firsthand when I went to take a short session for my juniors in college recently. The look on their faces told me that they were all highly inquisitive about what actually happens in the Industry. I was just left wondering at the end of the day whether I would have done a better job if I had been just another student amongst them and talked impromptu one fine day.It took me a lot of effort to make them realise that I was just another guy as them and they need not look upto me as a 'Senior' who passed out of the college a while back. Though I did manage to do a decent job at the session, my doubts were best confirmed by the use of 'Sir' to address me by almost all of them till the end of the program :)