The Leadership Illusion: When Control Masquerades as Stewardship
The recent Venezuela-US geopolitical episode, when stripped of its international power dynamics, reveals a fundamental misconception about leadership that resonates deeply within Indian contexts. This incident exposes the dangerous illusion that leadership equates to takeover, leverage, and immediate solutions rather than genuine stewardship. This approach resembles dealership more than true leadership—focused on extracting value from resources, enforcing compliance, and maintaining order through authority rather than building shared purpose.
The Transactional Trap in Indian Organizations
Many Indian leaders, whether in political spheres or corporate boardrooms, operate with similar dealership mentalities, albeit on smaller stages. They prioritize control over genuine consent, purchase loyalty rather than earn it through trust, and replace meaningful relationships with transactional deals. This dealership mindset asks only surface-level questions: What can be extracted? How quickly can results be demonstrated? Who can be blamed when outcomes falter?
In contrast, authentic leadership poses more profound, unsettling inquiries: Why are we undertaking this endeavor? What long-term significance does this hold? Who are we becoming through these decisions? Will this choice maintain its validity beyond immediate appraisal cycles?
Identifying Dealership in Disguise
Within Indian organizational structures, dealership masquerading as leadership manifests through predictable patterns. It arrives armed with performance dashboards, aggressive deadlines, and sudden enthusiasm for "global best practices" discovered through superficial research. This approach treats organizational culture as an afterthought—something to address only after quarterly targets are achieved. When cultural values conflict with performance metrics, culture becomes subject to realignment or relocation rather than serving as the foundation for sustainable growth.
Genuine leadership proves far less convenient in comparison. It insists that values aren't decorative elements positioned behind managing directors' chairs but living principles guiding daily decisions. It recognizes that people transcend the "human resources" terminology prevalent in HR systems, acknowledging their humanity beyond transactional utility. Most radically, true leadership maintains that long-term trust outweighs short-term applause, even when this perspective appears recklessly idealistic.
The Fundamental Distinction: Power vs Purpose
The critical question emerges: Is leadership fundamentally about commanding power and extracting advantage, or about cultivating purpose and enabling collective transformation? The difference, subtle in rhetoric but seismic in practical impact, separates authentic leadership from mere dealership. Leadership transcends positional authority to become dispositional—a way of being rather than merely a role to occupy.
Dealers operate within transactional silos, while leaders stand firmly on principles. Dealers optimize existing systems for efficiency, while leaders nurture cultures for resilience. Dealers respond reactively to favorable conditions, while leaders proactively shape environments for sustainable success.
Geopolitical Metaphors and Organizational Realities
When powerful nations speak of "running" other countries following displays of force, they employ vocabulary of acquisition rather than responsibility. Such episodes, while temporarily spectacular, serve as revealing metaphors for organizational dynamics. They expose mindsets that equate leadership with dealership and purpose with possession.
Within most Indian organizations, this confusion has become endemic. Managers receive promotions primarily for delivering numerical targets, while leaders face tolerance only when they avoid disturbing established metrics. Offices fill with professionals optimizing systems they fundamentally distrust, presiding over cultures they privately question. Managers operate comfortably behind desks and dashboards, while leaders—when they emerge—stand awkwardly on principle, often receiving advice to become more "practical."
Stewardship: The Unfashionable Alternative
Yet leadership worthy of its name emerges from within communities rather than imposing itself from above. It concerns itself less with extraction than with sustainability. In India's more enlightened institutions, leadership has traditionally meant stewardship—the recognition that one holds temporary responsibility for something that must outlast individual tenure. This perspective grows increasingly unfashionable precisely because it resists photogenic presentation and cannot be neatly summarized in social media posts or quarterly reports.
Sporting and Technological Analogies
Sports provide revealing, if somewhat vulgar, analogies. Cricket franchises and football clubs dismiss coaches with ritual regularity, hoping new faces will magically produce improved results. Leadership becomes treated as a consumable commodity, similar to foreign players purchased at auctions. What truly gets traded in these transactions is hope—but hope, when endlessly mortgaged, transforms into cynicism. Championship-winning culture cannot be acquired through mid-season purchases or quarterly analyses.
The technology sector presents its own comedic version of this phenomenon. Corporate boards behave as though leadership can be downloaded through executive search firms. Compensation packages expand while tenures contract. Integrity receives respectful mention during meetings but operational disregard in practice. Indian boardrooms hire and fire chief executives as if leadership were merely a software update—when performance declines, replacements get installed; when confidence falters, consultants receive summons.
Transformative Examples and Lasting Principles
Yet leadership doesn't arrive by corporate courier. It cultivates gradually through purpose, resilience, and integrity—qualities that resist easy measurement and mock conventional incentive schemes. A quieter but more instructive contrast appears in leaders who transform organizations from within. Satya Nadella's tenure at Microsoft offers a valuable counter-example. Rather than relying on transactional incentives or sweeping reorganization edicts, he shifted internal culture from "know-it-all" to "learn-it-all" orientations. This represented not structural change but dispositional transformation—something that rippled throughout the organization and reshaped how people perceived themselves and their work.
The Contemporary Leadership Landscape
As we examine contemporary leadership narratives—geopolitical boldness among state actors, boardroom turnover in global corporations, tensions between short-term performance and long-term culture—patterns emerge clearly. When leadership reduces to transactional authority, organizational health deteriorates progressively. People comply with directives but withhold genuine commitment. They obey metrics while ignoring values. They survive professionally but fail to flourish personally.
The Essential Challenge for Indian Leaders
The fundamental challenge for corporate leaders, particularly during this era of rapid technological transformation and geopolitical volatility, involves resisting dealership thinking's seductive appeal. Quarterly targets maintain importance but shouldn't sacrifice organizational soul. Market position remains vital but cannot justify abandoning core purpose.
Leadership transcends making more efficient deals with external environments. Instead, it involves making deeper commitments to principles that surpass immediate gains. In our information-overloaded era, the rare competency isn't data parsing but discernment—the capacity to identify what truly matters. This constitutes leadership's essence: not control but care, not leverage but legacy.
India's Distinct Context and Lasting Wisdom
Within India, where institutional memory extends across centuries while institutions themselves remain fragile, this distinction matters acutely. Our civilization has survived millennia not through transactional efficiency but through accommodation and moral imagination. Leaders who treat nations or organizations as showrooms might enjoy temporary applause, while those who approach them as trusts may endure criticism. Only the latter, however, leaves behind something beyond invoices and wreckage: a living inheritance that sustains beyond individual tenures.
