Welfare Leadership

 WELFARE LEADERSHIP : UNIVERSAL AND SUSTAINABLE

Most of the leadership Theories followed, taught and learnt are developed in Western counties, predominantly in United States of America, Western Europe and United Kingdom. Those Theories are moving around the Business Houses, Industries, Work Place Management, Work Life Balance, Equality Policies, Human Centric Governance, Emotional and Spiritual Intelligence, Human Psychology etc. Attributes like Humility, Compassion, Values and Empathy are the major parameters of such studies. Outcomes are confined to employees commitment and loyalty resulting overall growth of the institution with respect to scale and profit. 

Gandhian Philosophy and Mandela Philophy are  two globally most respected Human Philosophies for existence of peace and harmony and contributed a lot for value based leadership theory. The studies done by few western leadership researchers Zhang, Yukl, Laung, Jeffery Pfeffer, Christensten, Lark etc. have contributed substantially to the field including few social psychologists. The ideology and concepts developed in last two decades are centred around political leaders of this Century Barack Obama, Past President of USA, Theresa May, Prime Minister of United Kingdom, Xi Jinping of China, Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India and industrial leaders like Lary Page of Google, Steve Jobs of Apple, Elon Musk of Tesla, Marks Juker Berg of Facebook etc and their life experiences, good or bad, right or wrong, big or small have contributed substantially for development of contemporary leadership theories. . Slowly the concepts like Feemium, Socialisation of Businesses, Creation of Values in the society through effective business models, scaling up and reaching to the mass, empathy, emotional intelligence, human relationship, Trust etc. are the outcome of those studies. The case study of Madam Chanchilla, a Stanford Alumni and Ideology of few German researchers on work life balance have contributed substantially to the study. 

My following few visits and one to one interactions with people of those areas including Similipal Jungle of Odisha and my verbal and non-verbal communication with 50-60 people residing in different villages inside the jungle Peripheral villages of Baripada, district headquarter of Mayurbhanj, day long interactions with hundreds of villagers and follow up interactions with academicians, policy makers and highly educated successful youth oh the district Kandhamal district and interaction with couple of villagers and school teachers Discussion with office bearers of village committees of number of interior villages of the state had forced me to rethink about the leadership theory differently.

While visiting and interacting with such people, I could find that this is a different world all together and those communities are growing with the philosophy of naturalism and humanism and basic ideology, core of such leadership is connected to spiritualism and its regular and loyal practices. Majority of such people were illiterate, have never experienced freedom and bound themselves with traditional beliefs and thoughts and tried to follow this. Their children just emulate or follow the lives, their parents lead or in the way they earn their livelihood. The system runs for generations without disruption. Village committees,  Puja committees, Temple Committees, Panchayat Committees etc work at free of cost voluntarily by keeping human values and humanity at the top most priority. 

In this country, where seventy percent of population live in rural areas and 10-15% of them live in abject poverty, such voluntary institutions drive the whole community and 70 crores of people are socially regulated with such age old ancient system with high degree of commitment and strung faith on this. The combination of commitment and trust drive the generations to be connected to thier route, developing habits of continuous learning, building confidence, as the system is owned by each one of them and taken up with high dignity. 

As such leaders and leadership institutions provide services with the concept of ” Basudheya Kutumbakam and Sarbe Bhabantu Sukhina” purely voluntary without any functional and non-functional remuneration, focused only for welfare of the community can be called as “Welfare Leadership”. While all the traditional and contemporary theories of Leadership converge starting from Behavioural, situational and cognitive theories. Here humility, empathy, compassion and feeling of togetherness play a vital role. Attributes like Gratitude, Humility, Wisdom, Strong Character, Empathetic, Persuasive, Esteem Play the major role in defining leadership role of each and every institution and leader.

Several examples are there that this natural human leadership keeps the generation connected to the culture and humanism. While I interacted with village folks, those who are residing in the village and engaged in small miniature jobs, say they are living in peace without support of anyone.   They follow traditional professions of their family either agriculture or making indigenous products, produced by using the indigenous technology like extraction of Honey, managing and protecting forest products.  Effective utilisation of indigenous resources, art and culture. Millions of such people are driven by their own dream and pioneered by the real life examples. 

Human development, Indian Culture, Human Autonomy and Dignity are seen to play a major role and created a check and balance system for maintaining transparency and building confidence and acceptability. Such concept, of Welfare Leadership which is driving a large community or large number of communities is having the capabilities to drive the whole humanity towards accomplishment of human civilisation.

Head of Village, selected by the villagers lead the community by examples, they maintain high moral and ethical standards, contribute unconditionally for the people of that village without any financial aspirations, they organise different events spiritual, institutional or political with the support of the people, where people feel the strength of togetherness and working for the common goal. In the jurisprudence, which is purely based on human values and spiritualism, each and every member of the community follow it with high respect.

The natural evolution of such system focused for human wellbeing or welfare, which has naturally connected large mass of population in this country. Even in cities, such examples of welfare leadership is seen in managing societies, temple administration or for accomplishment of some societal goal.

Now the question is such leadership concepts are universally acceptable because of its sanity and purity in the system, which is driven by gratitude, love and commitment to service for the humanity or absence of commercial involvement or absence of fear of concentration of power, money etc. with particular group of people provides opportunities for universal ownership and leadership, which makes the system self sustainable. No codified rule or regulation, no monitoring, no controlling just based on………