Leadership becoming a rare commodity in Pakistan

Leadership is a rare commodity. Yet here in Pakistan we have tens of thousands of leaders. Everyone who leads a political party or holds an office in one is dubbed a leader by the popular media. Are they getting this right? Are these people really leaders?
Well, in a technical sense they are. The Oxford Dictionary defines a leader as: The person who leads or commands a group, organization, or country. But this surely cannot be the whole story — especially where a country is concerned. There has to be a way to distinguish, for example, between the leader Mohammad Ali Jinnah — the founder of Pakistan, and the leader Mian Mohammad Nawaz Sharif — the current premier. To maintain that they are both of a single fabric is to stretch the truth. One could add a prefix for qualification: Kim Il Sung — the North Korean dictator — was the “great” leader. His son and successor the equally brutal Kim Jong Il was the “supreme” leader. Clearly prefixes are not useful indicators of leadership quality.
Here a comparison between business and politics is apt. The business world — corporations and business schools — devotes a lot of time and effort to identify who constitutes a good leader. Courses are offered, theses are written, and faculty chairs are endowed to understand leadership. The objective is to search for a meaning to the term. Is a leader just someone who is installed in the top position, and by virtue of this position earns his or her title? Or is he or she someone with very special qualities? Can men and women be trained to become leaders in the same way that they are trained to become engineers or doctors? Or is leadership an innate quality? Are CEO’s born not made?
These questions become even more important in the context of politics. Political leaders have to run countries not corporations. They become responsible for the well being of millions of citizens, not thousands of paid employees. Getting the wrong person as the leader of a country can have catastrophic consequences. Installing an incompetent CEO may, at worst, result in a bankrupt company.
Surprising then, that we find much less attention paid to the quality of leadership in politics than in business.
Every corporation has a culture, strategy and objectives. Often, in response to changes in their environments, they need to change all or some of these elements. Their survival depends on how well and how quickly they are able to adapt. This in turn depends on the quality of the leader — his or her ability to earn the respect, trust, and confidence of employees.
Countries are much the same. The world changes. Countries who do not keep up fall behind or fail. Bringing change to countries is clearly a much harder task than transforming a corporation. For one thing corporate leaders have to influence fewer people — their paid employees who put their jobs at risk by failing to comply with instructions. Political leaders must influence entire populations to change their ways. And they cannot “fire” those who do not comply. So they must have other skills to coax change. People must like them and respect their intelligence and integrity, and trust them.
This being so, one fleeting look at the quality of our ‘leaders’ speaks volumes about where Pakistan stands — if it stands at all — in the world today.
Arguably, most if not all of our problems today can be traced to a single fundamental cause: Our political “leaders” are not leaders at all. They are men, and some women, who have used privilege, family background, or other less savory methods to find a place in the corridors of power. And now that they are here they have no idea what to do. Are these people we trust? Do they have the integrity, competence, education and experience to run Pakistan? Will they forsake self-interest for Pakistan’s interests?
There is a revealing line in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: Cassius is trying to convince a reluctant but respected fellow Senator — Brutus — to join a conspiracy against the emperor. He says: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
And this is where we in Pakistan stand today. The fault is not in our stars. But in ourselves that we install singularly unqualified men and women to positions of national leadership.

- Nadeem M. Qureshi is chairman Mustaqbil Pakistan.