Leadership does matter

Few days back I found a superb quote by Napoleon Bonaparte in Gujarati version:

"જો તમે ૧૦૦ સિંહો ની ફૌજ તૈયાર કરો, તેનો લીડર એક કુતરા ને બનાવો અને યુદ્ધ કરવા જાઓ તો બધા જ સિંહ કુતરા ની મૌત મરશે...
પરંતુ...
જો તમે ૧૦૦ કુતરા ની ફૌજ તૈયાર કરો, તેનો લીડર એક સિંહ ને બનાવો અને યુદ્ધ કરવા જાઓ તો બધા કુતરા સિંહ ની જેમ લડશે."

English Translation:

"If you train an army of 100 lions, appoint a dog as its leader and go to war, all the lions will die like dogs...
But ...
If you train an army of 100 dogs, appoint a lion as its leader and go to war, all the dogs will fight like lions."

I liked the quote a lot and decided to find the original English version of it. Finally, I found it today, "An Army of lions commanded by a deer will never be an army of lions."

Both of these versions are pointing towards the leadership quality. History says that there are extra ordinary leaders born and led ordinary army to the victory. It also happens that you have the best army in the world but due to weak leader your army faces loss. Examples are in movies such as, troy and 300. We can also find the leaders (group leader) and army (group of people) around us which suffers because of weak leader who does not want to fight for his army. Even he does not allow his army to fight on their own. He might think that if in any case my army wins the battle without my leadership then people might put question mark on my leadership. As a result leader's top most position might be in danger. Therefore, most of the leaders nowadays never encourage their army.

I also analyze that, there are two kinds of leaders, one who goes up and pull his people up so everyone found (accept) him as the leader and the other, who pushes down his people to be on top and show everyone on top that he is the leader. Around us we have a lot of leader from second category than the first one.

If you want to be a leader than try to be the leader of your team (people working under you) not of the people working on top of you. Because if they found someone better than you, they will surely change you but your team will always respect you as the leader.

 Isn't it?

Originally posted on 21/07/2013 at https://brijeshbmehta.wordpress.com/2013/07/21/leader-does-matter/