Leadership Lessons for Success
Questioner: So, a lot of entrepreneurs would also be seeing and watching and reading about this interaction. So, any, leadership lessons you want to share with them?
Acharya Prashant: Even before Advait Life Education was founded, I was teaching leadership. That was something done two decades back and left behind. It was only very recently that questions on leadership again came to me in the context of the Lok Sabha Elections
Questioner: Yeah.
Acharya Prashant: Otherwise, spirituality is more of an inner thing, so leading others is not something that I usually speak on.
But yes, you see, if you want to lead people, you have to understand the difference between healing and exploitation. Like the Pied Piper, you could lead them to their doom. For a while, you'll register some success. If we take a screenshot, it would show you as the leader with an entire army following you. But it doesn't help. A few months, a little bit of fame—that's the maximum you'll be able to draw from it.
Leadership is engagement—engagement with a lot of people. You must be very conscious of what this engagement is doing to the other.
You cannot relate to the other to perpetuate your own darkness. You fully well know you are not at ease with yourself. And I'm not coming just from theory or Gita,
Questioner: Yeah.
Acharya Prashant: I used to conduct a lot of management development programs also, so I have experience with top management. That was long back. I'm coming from there as well.
To lead is to not be a fool. You're not there to—to charm people. You must first of all go within and figure out: what do you have for the other?
It is great disrespect to the other, and injustice, to speak to him or her or even approach him before being internally sorted. I do not know my own life. I do not know the source of my own motivations. I do not know where my own desires come from, and I want to infect the other with the same desire in the name of leadership and motivation?
Am I sure that these desires or the goals I have set for myself have, first of all, been auspicious for me? What has not worked for me—how will it work for the other? The path that I'm taking right now—has it been good even for me? Or is it a path that I'm kind of sleepwalking on?
So, the best leaders are really good for their followers. The best leaders produce leaders.
And the general ones are more exploiters than leaders. They would want the follower to remain a follower. They have a stake in never letting the follower become a leader.
So, when you engage with someone, whether as a teacher or a leader, you have to ask yourself: how soon will this person's dependency on me evaporate?
The student is not with you to perpetually remain a student. And the follower is not with you to forever remain a follower, right? Your engagement is a tremendous responsibility. If you're touching someone, you have to touch with responsibility, with care—I dare say, with love. Else, don't touch anybody.
If you're speaking to someone, you are entering his mind. You cannot enter somebody's mind to spoil it. Speaking is a tremendous responsibility. Policymaking is a tremendous responsibility.
The policies that you are making in your organization are going to affect so many people—hundreds, probably thousands. You must be very conscious of what your policies are doing to the mind of the employee and also to the mind of all your stakeholders, including your customers, consumers, the general public.
See, let me put it more materially. All businesses exist to fulfil a need, right? If a business does not clearly realize the need it is addressing, it will not survive. And all businesses need a customer.
The customer is a human being. The most fundamental need of the human being is realization, illumination—call it peace, call it love, whatever.
Hence, you must be able to, through your product or service, in some way bring illumination and peace to your customer, because that is the most fundamental human need. And the customer is, first of all, a human being. You're dealing with a human being, and you say, I'm here to fulfill a need. First of all, know what that word need means.
