Be aware of bachelor lion and beware of your new boss

The people who exhibit the leadership style of a bachelor lion has to be carefully dealt with by the corporate leaders. The corporate leaders if get amazed by the aggressive lion like leadership style of such people, such people might do more harm than good to the corporate ecosystem. Of course, they are only ‘lion like’ and not ‘lion’ hence should be ‘poached’ immediately by the HR function.

The free roaming bachelor lion always look for a pride of lionesses to mate and to takeover the pride. For the above goal, they engage in fierce fight with the existing lion of the pride. If the bachelor lion wins the battle, they immediately spot the cubs and kill them brutally. The helpless lionesses accept not only the brutality of the new lion towards their cubs but also accept them fully and wholly as their partner, guardian and father of their future cubs. The lion that kill the cubs is only to get the acceptance of the female lion to mate with. As long as they are busy nursing & caring the existing cubs, they will not accept the new partner.

Exactly like the bachelor lion who engaged in killing the cubs of his new pride, many newly joined bosses in corporate ensure that the people working under them abandon, drop or scrap most of the initiatives, projects, assignments of the previous boss. Only when all such previous assignments are scrapped, the new ideas of the new boss can be sold to the people. Only when the new ideas are taken up by the people, these bosses can showcase to the top leadership of the corporate about the difference what they have brought in the corporate.

During such transition, the corporate only suffers the worst. Certainly some subordinates also. Who benefit the best is the newly joined boss. Unfortunately, the top leaders of most corporate seldom understand the above because they focus only on the aggressive lion like leadership style of the new boss. They further compare the new boss versus the earlier one and believe that only when the people show such high level of aggression, the corporate would grow. The truth is that they exhibit such aggression only for ‘own’ sake and not for the corporate or for the people.

Any newly joined employee in a corporate will have the struggle to prove and establish their worth and value. Creating something new and proving ones worth is always difficult for people in general. Whereas, describing what already exist in the corporate is meaningless & wrong and suggesting it to be destroyed is always easy. Unfortunately the corporate would venerate such newly joined bosses as assertive, aggressive and agent of change etc.

Understand the lion like leadership style of people and its dangerous side effects. Ensure that let them be like lion but never allow them to destroy and change the earlier initiatives if they are useful to the organization.

Dr S Ranganathan