Achieving Shared Organisational Goals: A leader's role in an organisation is to guide employees in achieving shared goals. The leader brings people and their efforts together to achieve common goals. There was little point in asking them to think strategically, to design a more horizontal and empathetic leadership, to allow for team building, or to think long term, because they were basically trying to survive from day to day. In moments of euphoria when they had been doing well in their circumstances, their self-sufficiency increased; in moments of decline and crisis, depression and paralysis were enhanced. But this is not an individual problem; it is more structural in nature. Often, this goes unnoticed because the problem of leadership is not usually looked at from a broader perspective, amplifying the feeling that it is something that only affects one’s own country. I define a leader as anyone who takes responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes, and who has the courage to develop that potential.”

To be sure, as concepts, both politics and leadership provide fertile ground for dispute and confusion. To consider them together requires a merger of disciplinary perspectives that may challenge some conventional ways of thinking. Such a merger requires some revisiting of well-worn ideas and some reinvention. It maybe fair (some may contest this assertion!) to say that most students of leadership have an inadequate appreciation and understanding of politics and most students of politics have a similarly inadequate appreciation and understanding of leadership. Although the latter may be in general agreement that politics, generically, is a social process through which contested values are distributed, they rarely pursue the implications of this basic conceptualization into the informal or nonpublic realm. The crux of the matter is that conceptual clarity and precision is at the heart of any theory, and leadership is a highly abstract concept extremely difficult to make either clear or precise. The latter is particularly significant because no attempt at conceptual clarity for leadership seems possible without dealing with other such concepts, such as politics, in the process.While there has been a near universal avoidance of the notion that the key to the leadership phenomenon is its fundamental political nature, the problem has been compounded by the failure of most analysts successfully to distinguish “leadership as process” from “leadership as property.” As the presumed property of those possessed of status, rank, or position, leadership is reduced to a subordinate aspect of preexisting social structures. Hence, overwhelmingly, research on leadership is conducted on the presumption that leadership is a property associated with formal position within formal organization.

The greatest leaders are students of leadership. They grow their influence by becoming experts in their craft. Additionally, they develop more leaders by sharing what they’ve learned with others. As Historian Henry Adams once said, “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”Barbara Tuchman asked how good human beings are at leading us in her book March of Folly, telling us: “A remarkable phenomenon throughout history beyond place or period is the execution of policies from governments that are contrary to their own interests. Humanity, it would seem, performs worse on government than on almost any other human activity. In this realm, wisdom, defined as the exercise of judgment based on experience, common sense, and available information, is less operative and more thwarted than it should be.”