New Delhi: The recognised traits of a successful business leader are that he or she should be well-informed, attuned to 'knowledge based decision-making' and interested in human psychology and behaviour since "all business is human activity".

Beyond these, however, it is the maturity of the individual that should be regarded as the core requisite of leadership in any field and that is rooted in the leader's 'power of authenticity' which in turn, flows from a combination of his or her trustworthiness, accessibility, transparency, self-confidence, communication skills, ability to learn from experience and alignment with a declared set of values.

A mature leader knows that right decisions are basically the product of 'complete' knowledge, innate courage and objectivity of approach.

Completeness of information is necessary because 'knowledge' comes in integral packages covering all relevant points -- a business leader employing many men and women has to be aware of the laws pertaining to the safety and security of women at the workplace.

Courage is tested in terms of the nerves that the leader is required to deal with a contingency.

Objectivity was linked to the leader's commitment to the organisational goals that had to be kept above personal benefits.

Sound decision-making is not connected with 'inheritance' or personal 'charisma'.

A mature leader realises that leadership is not a matter only of status but of responsibility as well.

It is the image of maturity of leadership that survives an organisational setback and retains the loyalty of the stakeholders of the enterprise.

Though a leader is made not born -- importance of temperamental make up shaped by grooming to an extent, cannot be denied -- the fact is that maturity is the individual stamp that sets apart one leader from the other.

Only a mature leader can have a strategic thinking.

Some time back the statement of the Chairman of a top company of India advocating 90 hours of work per week for an employee, including Sundays, was found to be disruptive enough for the country's Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman to emphasise -- in her pre-Budget Economic Survey presented to the Parliament on January 31 -- that while 'hard work' is desirable it could not be at the cost of physical and mental health of the employees.

A thoughtless suggestion like this coming from a leader of the business mainstream of India at a time when this country is aspiring to be among the three largest economies of the world, drew attention to the need for maturity and strategic awareness on the part of the leadership of businesses.

This country could not afford to have its image sullied by the thought that it could be exploitative towards the labour for the sake of enhancing productivity.

Fortunately, a number of Indian leaders of business promptly disassociated themselves from the controversial statement.

A leader ought to know how the 'mission' of the organisation fitted in the 'vision' of the nation in a situation of high global competition.

Approach to profitability cannot be to use the 'work force' as a machine that could be made to produce more through longer hours.

A successful leader on the other hand is well -- up in handling human relationships and while being strict about evaluating performance, is empathetic towards the problems of employees.

A competent leader banks on examination of all the information in the 'present', learns from what happened in the 'past' and has the ability to see the opportunities and risks that existed in the 'future'.

An analytical mind, freedom from ego in making a 'course correction' and use of 'imagination' to see beyond the facts in front to perceive what lay ahead and not miss the wood for the tree, is the corresponding package of qualities that makes for a leadership that was mature enough to understood what strategy was.

Maturity is in blending theory with practice, self -righteousnesse with logic and personal confidence with a balanced outlook.

A mature leader maintains one's cool in a crisis, retains his or her thinking capacity in a situation of disturbance and responds to a contingency with self-confidence -- going beyond the empowerment of 'position'.

All this bestows on the leader a strategic outlook by which he or she never loses sight of the macro-vision even while responding at the tactical level.

Such a leader has no need to project oneself at a higher plane of credibility than the organisation's or to keep personal stakes on a different footing from the reputation of the corporate body.

Strategic thinking enables a leader to put 'heads together' while dealing with an organisational challenge, always lead from the front and consider any business emergency as a passing phase requiring a possible 'course correction'.

A successful leader would have already promoted a healthy delegation of decision-making power to the senior hands working for the corporate body, laid down the ethical framework of interpersonal interactions within the organisation, whether between seniors and juniors or among the colleagues and established informal channels of feedback on what was materially important in the external and internal environment of the enterprise.

A leader has the willingness to take responsibility for his or her people and the maturity to grasp the mandate that leadership combined authority with accountability.

A mature leader has an uncanny sense of how to combine the variables of duty and relaxation for oneself and provides the work-life balance to the average employee as well.

The success of leadership lies in the image of dignity, acceptance and respect from the high and the low in the organisation that it is able to establish.

In all spheres of work emphasis has to be on 'efficiency' which was by definition, a measure of productivity per unit of time.

If the work attitude of the employees is otherwise fine, there is no denying the fact that an employee will produce more when he has no distractions linked to any organisational malfunctioning.

The right kind of work environment exists when the employees considered their leaders to be trustworthy, impartial in the matter of giving credits and sensitive to human requirements.

If the person at the very top of an enterprise showed lack of this sensitivity and gave the impression of looking at workers as 'machines' that could produce more and more, no lasting good was going to result from it either for the organisation or for the country at large.

This might even hurt the nation's interests because India would not like to have the image of a country that treated workers as objects for achieving growth.

The talk of 'working hours' however, provides an occasion for economic strategists to ponder over the larger challenge of achieving India's goal of becoming one of the three largest economies of the world along with the US and China.

Since GDP is the sum total of productivity of all individual enterprises -- public and private -- it is important that all these should have the right leadership, the right work culture and the right interpersonal relationships within the organisation.

Government's conscious efforts to add to the 'ease of doing business' entails streamlining the system of 'clearances', increasing the size of the workforce available for hiring and providing an atmosphere of control on law and order for the potential investors.

It goes without saying that in all of this, labour laws defining employer-employee relationship should not give any unfair advantage to either side.

In the ultimate analysis productivity is maximised when the morale of the worker is high, work place environment induced organisational loyalty and the leadership looked 'nurtural'. Leaders without a strategic outlook cannot succeed in business today.

Mature leadership is needed at the levels of business enterprise, national governance and the handling of international relations.

The political executive running the regime in democratic India has to remain well-informed about all that is happening in the country with or without a possible 'instigation' from outside and this makes the task of the national Intelligence organisations so much more difficult in a world of instant connectivity across geographical frontiers that was witnessing the use of social media as an instrument of combat.

At the same time covert offensives from the adversaries has to be unearthed and an ongoing evaluation of the friends in the international community made to enable the ruling elite to shape the nation's foreign policy.

Also, since "national security is inseparable from economic security" the policy has to serve the objectives of both national security as well as the country's economic advancement.

It is a matter of great satisfaction that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has the strategic thinking, dedication and the required political will that were needed to handle issues of both security and development.

(The writer is a former Director of the Intelligence Bureau. Views are personal)

--IANS

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