PAPERmaking! FROM THE PUBLISHERS OF PAPER TECHNOLOGY Volume 2, Number 1, 2016
Even in an army, much more is done by persuasion, by gaining the confidence of your soldiers, than by barking harsh orders at them. Persuasion is a tremendous element in all this. Then there must be, in reserve, a determination that, when it is necessary, the unpleasantness and worse of using this compulsion must be accepted. The example is the purest form of leadership and, in many ways, the most effective because example, instead of saying "go on", says "come on" and men will always respond to that very much better. If you asked me to define leadership, I should say that it is an extension of personality. Leadership is an extremely personal thing and everybody exercises it a little bit differently from everybody else. But it is, essentially, making people do what you want them to do even when sometimes they do not want to do it very much, by an extension of your personality. Well, all right. If you are going to be a leader, leadership is the extension of personality. What sort of a personality does the chap have to have to become a leader? It is very important to decide what the qualities of a leader should be, first of all, because we want to develop it in ourselves and, equally important, especially in industry and in the Army we want to be able to recognise those qualities very early in those who serve under us so that we can train them and bring them up and mark them for leadership. Of course, if you want to list the qualities of a leader, you could go on with a list as long as your arm; but to my mind there are six basic qualities that a leader must have and which we must look for, and the first of these is courage. A leader must have courage . Courage is not so much a virtue, it is the virtue, because without courage there are no virtues. Faith, hope and charity and all the rest of them, are not virtues until it takes courage to exercise them. But a leader wants not so much physical courage, perhaps, as moral courage and that is a much harder thing to get. He must be prepared to do what he thinks is right, even if the consequences to him are not going to be very pleasant. Every man must be as big as his job and a real test of being as big as your job is to be prepared to give it up if people are trying to force you to do something which you believe so strongly is either morally or materially, if you like, wrong. But, courage is an essential of any kind of leadership. Then, next to courage I would put will-power because if you want to lead, you will always find plenty of opposition and the most difficult opposition to deal with does not always come from your enemy or from your competitor in business; it very often comes from your own people and it is, very often, very genuine opposition and you have got to have sufficient determination and will-power and tenacity to overcome that opposition. So, it is not much good trying to be a leader unless you have got will-power. Next, I would put judgment , the power of balancing alternative courses and choosing the right one or, at any rate, a reasonable one. Now, if you select a leader who has not got judgment, the greater his courage, the stronger his will-power, if he lacks judgment, the more disastrous will be his leadership. So, judgment is an absolutely essential quality. As far as judgment is concerned, I always used it to tell my people, when I was in the Army, that when they had two courses of action open to them and the arguments appeared to be pretty equally balanced and they were in doubt as to which they should pursue, I always told them to choose the bold one. Now, we are getting on where we have got courage and will-power and judgment, but the world is a very rapidly changing place these days and there is a quality of leadership which
Page 3 of 8
Article 12 – Leadership (Field-Marshall Slim)
Made with FlippingBook Digital Publishing Software