Questioner: Sometimes we find that when a new head or CEO comes into a company, he makes many changes that are at odds with the company’s past culture. This leads to a lot of instability within the organisation. How should we deal with that?
Sadhguru: In every institution, there is always a process in the selection of a leader. However, once we elect or select the leader, if everyone does not give their support, he or she will not be able to take the organisation anywhere. If we are interested in the company, organisation, nation, or any institution for that matter, we must give our full support.
If you continue your old habits just because you think they are good for you, what can a new leader do? As an employee, you may want status quo, but maybe the new leader wants to take the organisation elsewhere, to a completely different place that you cannot think of right now. If you could think up all that, they would have made you the leader.
In order to make something large happen, many steps have to be strategised. If there is no strategy, no leadership works. A leader cannot go down the line and tell the entire staff of the company about his plans. It will not work. A leader must think a hundred steps ahead—but if you talk about these hundred steps, no one will stay with you. Anyone who leads from the front is always alone in this, because you cannot share it to even the nearest person around you. If you reveal the whole of it, they may freak. To one person, you may explain a few things; to another, you may explain a little more; and to many more people, you may not explain anything at all. If you explain everything to everyone, nothing will work because people will make a chaos out of it.
Whoever the leader in your corporation is, you do not know what he has on his mind. The problem is, the moment a leader tries to make changes, everyone down the line, from top to the bottom, thinks the boss does not know what he is doing. It is better to leave it to your new boss, because once he becomes a leader, it is not just that he can wield power. He is also responsible to make work successful. If he fails, what has to happen to him will happen. You do not have to go about pulling his leg and making it a failure.
Before they selected him, people have gone through a certain process of due deligence and they believe he will succeed. Let him do what he wants to do—just support him. If he knows what he is doing, it will be a success. Otherwise, it will be a failure. Your business is to take instructions and just do it, whatever it is.
If you want to grow into leadership, you must show the necessary competence and above all, be willing to take responsibility for whatever damn things that happen—good or bad. At the end of the day, do not sit and calculate how much you have done. At the end of the day, if you always see: “there were so many more things to do, but I have not done them today because I ran out of time or energy,” you will naturally grow into a leadership position.
Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, a bestselling author & poet. He has been conferred the Padma Vibhushan
in 2017. Isha.sadhguru.org