In preparation for this article, I asked some young religious: “Could you give me the names of some leaders?” And they mentioned, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Narendra Modi, Pope Francis, Mother Teresa and some other great persons. Nobody mentioned the names of their provincials or community superiors. And yet every superior is supposed to be a leader.
“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.”
–Lao Tzu
To the question of what leadership is there were many answers. Common in most of the answers was the idea that leadership is the capacity of a person to direct people to do something. While this is a common way of understanding leadership, it is a very simplistic description as it focuses only on one aspect (directing others) of leadership, which is a complex reality. Further, it considers leadership as unidirectional, from the leader to the followers and fails to take into consideration the impact the followers may have on the leader.
Jose Kuttianimattathil, sdb
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