Ramsey Naja is chief creative officer, JWT MEA
“There’s probably been more ink used on the topic of good leadership than blood spilled by bad leaders. Motivational speakers, industry gurus, and endless writers of self-help, get-rich-quick and Donald Trump-esque business publications have all waxed lyrical and pontificated endlessly on the subject and, in the process, made fortunes from the back of people’s gullibility.
Frankly, I am yet to find a poor leader who has actually become a good one thanks to a self-help book or a motivational lecture. Leadership is something you learn in the course of getting beaten up in the school playground, while working out how to put together a network for selling illicit goods to fellow pupils and lying to your mum to let your sister meet her boyfriend. It is a trait that grows proportionally to the misfortunes you encounter and the slings and arrows you manage to dodge along the way.
Still, it remains relatively easy to identify a natural born leader: all it takes is a crisis associated with a personal issue and the moment when someone stands up to take care of it all, appease client, wring production’s neck… and send flowers to the aggrieved party while doing so. True leaders manifest themselves in that fashion: cometh the hour, cometh the man.
But can you nurture a leader? For anyone in management, this is an endeavour as predictable as the North Korean missile programme. It is not that you can’t teach the key aspects of looking after people, like assuming responsibility, running the show and managing projects: the one thing that distinguishes bosses from leaders is the ability to, well, lead. By this I mean to blaze a trail where there isn’t one, to find a guiding star on a cloudy night and to inspire their team to create cutting-edge communication for something as evocative as hemorrhoid cream. But, more to the point, the one thing that books won’t tell you, nor any motivational speaker, is that a leader’s aim is not just to lead, but to create an army of leaders. In fact, a good leader is someone who does his best to make his role redundant.”
