Recently someone asked for my opinion on “what are the qualities she should have if she wanted to be a good leader?” Not that I am an expert on it but owing to the ‘fact’ that I know her very closely. I did tell her about something that she could improve upon. I pondered over it more later on. After a couple of days I called her up again and said that I would like to take my words back. I also told her that no one could possibly decide that for her because she herself has to think about ‘what she wanted to be known for’.
We might find an almost ‘fixed’ and ‘must have’ traits of a leader in the leadership books. But there is one thing that no one else can teach us and we can’t learn about it in a book. It is what is imbibed in our nature- it is who we are as a person. No matter what we learn from books or people, our core values will surely leave the imprints everywhere; we will come back to behaving according to our basic nature.
Also, being a leader is one thing and a leader with a legacy is another. Legacy is the crux of one’s ethics entirely. It is something that the leader herself/himself has to decide – what they want to be remembered as when they step down. But the irony is even if they decide what they want to be remembered as, and if it is not a part of their ethics, then it is their action and behavior on daily basis, each transaction with people, verbal or otherwise which will become their legacy which is not even legacy to begin with. They are just the person holding a certain post. Even if it is a post of leadership, one might not be a leader, far rare to be a leader with a legacy.