Good team leader is a teacher with a dedicated following

If you have school-going children you will relate to what is written here. This is an incident which happened a few years ago.

I was talking to my daughter Anusha about her school. "Dad", she said, "In the afternoon there are a lot of people waiting outside my school. All of them come to pick up their childrens and hold up traffic outside the school." "Anusha, it is not 'childrens'. The plural of child is children. And the word children is never used with an 's' at the end." "Appa, this is how our teacher says it," she replied. And ended the line with a dismissive, "You don't know anything, appa."

Maybe it was a one-off mistake by the teacher. Possibly the children had heard the teacher wrong. I tried arguing. It didn't work. All that I said fell on deaf ears. In Anusha's eyes, the teacher was right. I was wrong.

Don't we see this trait in all our children? The teacher is seldom wrong. In fact, it's never, if the children are to be believed. Try telling them that something they learnt at school is incorrect; the vociferous retorts will sometimes instil a feeling of self-doubt in you. Many a time, parents start wondering if the teacher was in fact right. Such is the power of the strong belief children have in their teachers.

Why does every child blindly follow what the teacher does or says, even if it is at the cost of arguing with the parent? What has the teacher done to the child? What is the relationship between the teacher and the child transforming to?

In our lives and in careers, we come across leaders who instill the same kind of faith in us. The feeling of trust and dependence is so high that we are willing to do anything for that individual. History is reminiscent of many such leaders, for whom people were willing to lay down everything for. Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and many others were leaders who instilled this sense of confidence and faith in their followers and got a blind following in return.

In the corporate world, it is seen that leaders who instil this sense of trust often manage to build a team of high-performing, motivated individuals. This sense of belonging and faith makes team members stick to the same leader; in the process, helping the leader deliver on the expectations the organisation has from him, even in times of extreme crisis.

Such leaders raise the aspirations of followers and inculcate in them a desire to reach for the stars. Mahatma Gandhi created a vision of independence and raised the aspirations of our people. People followed him the same way Anusha followed her teacher. Everything that Gandhi uttered was gospel truth. He built that faith in his followers, by adopting a selfless approach to what he was doing.

Leadership is about making people say, "I will walk on water for you." It is about creating a worthy dream and helping people achieve it. And people will go the distance for you if they believe you. Leadership is all about building a teacher-student like relationship with subordinates.

This faith, however, takes time to build. Even a single act of indiscretion or selfishness can shatter the faith that everyone has in the leader. When you look at our corporate world, good leaders are often defined by how they stand by their commitments, back their people in times of adversity, support them when they are in trouble and how they step up their engagement with them in times of crisis.

In the words of Seneca, the Greek philosopher, "Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men." Isn't all this what a good teacher does with your child in school? Don't you expect them of a leader you would place your trust in?

The teacher-student relationship throws up a very important learning for all of us. If we want our subordinates to follow us, believe in us, in the same way as my daughter Anusha believed her teacher and argued with me on the use of 'childrens' instead of 'children', we need to inculcate all the values, traits, integrity, coaching and morals of a teacher in our conduct towards our team. The day we do that, we will become leaders in true sense of the word.

(Ravi Subramanian, Banker & author of 'Devil in Pinstripes')