Leadership

I've been contemplating to write on this topic for a while now.
While I was interviewing for my present job, one of the interviewers asked me, "What's leadership according to you?"
I had prepared quite well for the assessment, but somehow missed preparing for this question specifically.
Being an avid cricket follower, I replied that for me Clive Lloyd is a great example of Leadership for the way in which he turned around West Indian cricket.
In one of their tours to Australia, the West Indian lost badly, mostly due to the intimidating bowling of Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thompson.
But by the next tour a few years later, he had created a formidable bowling attack, which decimated the Australian batting lineup with the same intimidating bowling, leaving a few batsmen maimed as well.

To follow it up, their batsmen played aggressively enough to reverse intimidate the Aussie fast bowlers.

When the then English captain Tony Greg made a careless and purportedly racist comment like, "I intend to make them grovel", Clive Lloyd made the entire English team suffer brutally, with the same hostile bowling. This series was so intriguing that a movie called "Fire in Babylon" was made around it.
This picture of Brian Close says it all.

What he did, changed West Indian cricket, which meant that they dominated the world cricket scene for the next 20 years or so. 

I'm sure there have been great captains after that - Kapil Dev, Imran Khan, Steve Waugh, just to name a few.

But the one person that I wanted to talk about is Saurav Ganguly. Of course, he was "God of the Off Side". He transformed the Indian team in a way that no one else did. Undoubtedly, he had "The God of Cricket", "The Wall" and "Very Very Special" in his team, but they could not be great captains themselves.

He led them from the front and backed his team to the hilt. 

Introduced great talent like Yuvraj Singh, Mohammed Kaif, Zaheer Khan and so on.

When Harbhajan Singh was close to getting dropped, but Dada put his foot down and got the selection committee to have him in the team for the Australian "Final Frontier" tour to India. It was Harbhajan's 27 wickets in the 3 tests which was largely responsible to end the 16 test unbeaten run of the 'invincible' Aussie team.

I'm sure a lot of my batch mates will still remember risking their semester exams by watching VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid play the dream partnership at Eden Gardens, which change the whole complexion of the series.

Its legendary, the way in which Dada frustrated Steve Waugh by making him wait for the toss. 

Even more legendary is this picture from the Lord's balcony.

Back in our professional lives, everyone has some or other person they look up to as leaders. For me, a true leader is the one who backs the team, guides them when the challenges seem insurmountable. And eventually delivers in style. Yearning to be a leader is easy, but being one is not. Its easy to talk strategy from 60000 feet. But actually walking the talk, is not.

And remember, "Anyone can steer the ship when the sea is calm".