PAPERmaking! g FROM THE PUBLISHERS OF PAPER TECHNOLOGY Volume 2, Number 1, 2016
is becoming more and more important and that is mental flexibility . Any organism that survives in nature is able to adapt itself to new conditions; otherwise, it just fades out. Conditions are changing so rapidly and in every direction that, unless we have this mental flexibility, it is rather difficult to survive. There is this struggle always in leadership between determination, so that it does not become just obstinacy, and flexibility, so that it does not become vacillation. Now, if you can hold the balance between determination and flexibility, I think anybody who can do that is well on the way to being a real leader. But it is not easy to do. Very often one changes one's mind and when I have done that, which I have done frequently, I have found a quotation from Emerson very useful. As far as I remember, Emerson at one time wrote: "A foolish consistency is the hob-goblin of a little mind." You try that when you want to change your mind; it is great company. Then, of course, a leader must have knowledge . After all, unless you know more about the thing which you are telling other people to do than they do, you have no right to lead them. That does not mean that you have to know the details of the work of every man who serves under you. You can't expect an Army commander to drive a tank as well as a professional tank driver, to take a wireless set to pieces and to put it together as well as a signaller or preach a sermon as well as an Army Chaplain or take out an appendix as well as an Army doctor, or something like that. But, he must have knowledge of all the conditions under which those things are done and how long they take and the strain that they entail on the men who do them and in what ways they can be helped in their tasks. And, of course, if he is down on the low level, if you are a section commander or a platoon commander you ought to be able to do everything that any man in your section or your platoon does at least as well as he can and if you can't, get out behind the hut and practise till you can; but as you go up, your detail knowledge must, of course, inevitably grow less. Now, I have given you five qualities: courage, will-power, judgment, flexibility and knowledge, and there is one more that I think the real leader ought to have. If you have those five qualities, you will be a leader. Nothing will stop you from being a leader. But if you are to be a leader for me, then I think you must have one more and this is not so much of a quality as an element in which all the other qualities work, and that is what I would call integrity . Integrity is a little more than just plain honesty. It is really the old, Christian virtue of loving your neighbour even before yourself, and "your neighbour", for a leader, is the people he leads and he must always think of them and put their well-being actually before his own: That is not only, I think, good ethics, but it is good business because one will find then that when your leader has integrity, even if things do not go very well with him, people will stand by him. If he hasn't got integrity, he will be a fair-weather leader and there are very few of us who have ever tried to lead anything who have not run into some pretty bad weather sometime. In this exercise of leadership in any field, there are three elements. There is, first of all, the commander. In the Army, he is usually a General. In business, he may be a chairman or a board. But it is, whatever you like to call it, the top man or the top men. Then there are subordinates who are his subordinate commanders, divisional commanders or regimental commanders; in business, his managers, and so on. That is the second element.
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Article 12 – Leadership (Field-Marshall Slim)
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