My Favorite Leadership Paradigm

You can not proclaim to be a leader. To be a leader you need willing followers. These followers should be excited to join hands with you, looking towards you for mentoring, and more importantly, followers should see you as their dream enabler, a person with utmost integrity and someone they can trust.

Once this awareness is reflected upon, your focus of activities to become a leader will change. Leader is someone who sees his/her success in enabling others to succeed. But even before that, it is important to have capability (or call it charisma) to connect with people. So to be a leader, critical traits are that connect one human being with another human being. Reflect in your own world. For me, I feel being kind, caring, compassionate, candid, high moral values, honesty are important. One quality that guarantees all other qualities is Integrity of Character. Without that nothing else can be trusted. Finally, I think time has come to abandon "practice what you preach" and adopt "preach only what you practice" paradigm. This is when actions and words stay in harmony and leaders emerge among people. cheers - arunb