Leadership Styles-- Lessons from Cricketing Icons

These are days when finding an able leader is like finding a pin in a hay stack. Like in business, in polity or in socio-cultural platforms, leadership is something that is becoming difficult to find. It is like there are many who are aspiring, achieved significantly, but unfortunately fall short of mass followership and effectiveness. Sports is another platform, the lack of leadership is getting to be a very strong reason for non-performance and when that happens there is significant fall in the followership and equally significant fall in role models.

I have been an eternal optimist, at least as far as Sports followership is concerned and a fair bit of my thought process has been driven by Sports. I feel that a we should continuously attempt to analyse Sports or Sports people, time and again, in order to find good practices and look for role models to effectively perform various acts in life. Leadership in Sports is a fine arena to look for role models. To me, Cricket is a great game and has, to a large extent, produced Icons from whom one can attempt to learn quite a bit, Leadership included.

In this post I am attempting to bring out similarities between various accepted leadership styles and leadership styles of Sports Icons. Just like the definition of these leadership styles, the Sports Icons in reference seem to have conducted themselves, whether explicitly or during the course of their leadership tenures.

This  post is being presented in such a manner to have each of the styles and the related Sports Icon, listed as separate posts, so as to ensure that readers are able to clearly see the similarity and accordingly appreciate each of the styles as they deserve.

Now to the widely accepted Leadership Styles and Sports Icons:-

1. Autocratic Leadership
Sunil Gavaskar, Greg Chappel, Douglas Jardine
2. Bureaucratic Leadership
Greg Chappel
3. Charismatic Leadership
Mike Brearley, Vivian Richards, Imran Khan
4. Democratic Leadership
Steve Waugh, M S Dhoni
5. Laissez Faire Leadership
Mohammed Azharuddin
6. People-Oriented Leadership
Arjuna Ranatunga
7. Servant Leadership
 Rahul Dravid
8. Task-Oriented Leadership
Kapil Dev, Javed Miandad
9. Transactional Leadership
West Indian Board post great West Indian ERA and present day New Zealand Board
10. Transformational Leadership
Clive Lloyd, Saurav Ganguly, Allan Border, Greame Smith

The next post follows with definition and examples of behaviour under various circumstances similar to the leadership style so defined.

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