The promise and paradoxes of leadership.

• Author: Calloway, D. Wayne
• Position: Reprint from Directors & Boards, Winter 1985 - Putting In Place the Right Board for the 21st Century

I'VE BEEN TALKING with PepsiCo management people about leadership because I believe it is the avenue, perhaps the only avenue, to the achievement of our personal and corporate goals. Frankly, the real limitation on our growth is not financial capital. It's human talent -- good, skilled, motivated people living up to their potential.

In my book, leaders are people whose focus always is on results. Through a hard-to-define, perhaps even mystical, blending of inspiration, imagination, and initiative, they formulate a vision of the future -- their own future, and the organization's future. And they are able to transmit their values and their vision to their associates. This permits a harmonious team to accomplish far more than the same number of people could accomplish working alone.

As executives, leadership is our most important responsibility. The first duty of the leader is to perpetuate the enterprise, and that means growing the business, because if you try to settle for what you've got, the competition will kill you.

The answer, then, to the common question of what a leader does is: The leader creates the future -- his or her own future -- and the future of the organization. And because the track is getting faster each year, companies looking for success have no choice but to discover better ways of motivating and challenging their people.

If we boil it all down to one sentence, what's different about leaders is not what they do, but how they approach life and the task at hand. Often, this is called vision. Some say it's the capacity to see connections and to draw inferences that aren't obvious, that are unprecedented. Others call it the ability to see around corners. It is a compelling vision that is simple, complete, and unified, and one that can be communicated whole to subordinates.

Of interest to me are the apparent contradictions about leadership. People get confused about leadership when they watch leaders in action.

The first paradox is that, on the one hand, leaders must be strong, tough, and decisive. Yet they also must be sensitive to people, even to the point of bringing them into the decisionmaking process.

This is not a contradiction. We're not talking about making decisions by a show of hands. The leader simply knows that people have insights, and will help if asked. It's been my experience that no one can do too much listening. A leader has to make the tough calls alone, but having empathy for other people is not a sign of...