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If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much;

Kipling is describing his vision of a ‘whole’ person but these two lines sum up perfectly the requirement for a good leader – to know, to be known and to remain untainted. A great leader never puts his soul on display to those he is leading but he does let them see his emotions. Someone without obvious feelings may be obeyed in a slavish and disgruntled way for a while but he cannot expect to be followed. Those who respond unwillingly end up taking their revenge for real or imagined slights and wrongs.

Leaders are not born. Good looks, clear brain, smiling face, bright personality, athletic build and natural emotional intelligence are advantages in the early stages of leadership learning. I have seen many with these head starts in life fall by the way, just as the disadvantaged often become tremendous examples of light and progress. Indeed, a few good knocks early in life build better leaders than silver spoons and a charmed childhood. That is why parents should encourage their children to take reasonable risks rather than sheltering them from every danger.

A leader takes responsibility when others shun it. He can learn to do this systematically or he can force himself by simply getting on with it. Nike put it well: “Just do it”. The Chairman of ICI once told me that he handled his enormous correspondence by dealing only with those matters to which there were no solutions. If he could see an answer to a problem, he said, someone else could too.

Of all leadership traits the most difficult to teach is truly caring for others. When work gets removed from the context of whole life and becomes a pursuit unrelated to anything but profit, it has already acquired the seeds of its own destruction. Certainly, some profits may be made for a time; a few people, even, may get rich, but at a terrible price. To have failed to contribute to the wellbeing of your fellow creatures would be difficult to live with; to have positively damaged their careers must haunt you for life.

The world has tried hard in the aftermath of two deadly world wars to find a substitute for leaders, presumably because of the flawed decisions that caused such terrible slaughter. In its attempt to find an alternative it has come up with a peculiar form of democracy – a procedure for kicking out good leaders and substituting them with mediocre. Truly well led societies don’t need that sort of democracy because the leaders listen, care, communicate and dedicate their efforts to the good of their people. Any successful tribe knows this.

So it has to be in business. We hear the word ‘team’ used all the time. There must be a captain of the team. His job is to weld the other players together. One or two may score the goals but it’s the team as a whole that makes success possible.

The best lesson I was taught when learning to lead was to ask myself this question at the end of each day: In what ways have I lifted my colleagues’ eyes beyond the horizon today? The leader who offers a vision, however limited, to each of his fellow workers is teaching them self-motivation. Without it they will never follow and he will never lead.

Next time I will develop the theme of self-motivation to see how the employee can make the relationship with his employer truly symbiotic.