This article is the first in this series of articles on “Catalytic Leadership”.
What exactly is Catalytic Leadership? Let’s start with a small story!
Once there was a farmer who had 3 sons. In his deathbed, he wrote a will for them.
The will read as “The land has to be divided equally among the sons. The cattle has to be divided as follows. The first son was the one who helped me at all times, so he gets to have half the cattle I have. The other two sons contributed less and based on their contributions their shares on the cattle will be 1/3rd and 1/9th respectively”.
The farmer left behind 6 acres of land and 17 cattle. The division of the property was left to the head of the village.
First, the village-head divided the land and the sons got 2 acres each. However, the village-head stumbled when dividing the cattle. There were 17 animals in the cattle and dividing half of it was not possible without killing one of them; which no one wanted. The other option would be to divide it disproportionately that went against the will.
That’s when a wise old man intervened, he said that the farmer who died was his close friend and he would like to help the farmer’s sons in a situation like this.
He would help resolve the settlement by lending one of his cattle temporarily and will take back once the settlement is resolved. Everyone agreed, and now there were 18 cattle.
So, half of it – 9 – went to the first son.
1/3rd of it – 6 – went to the second son.
1/9th of it – 2 – went to the third son.
In total, there were 17 (9 + 6 + 2) cattle distributed to the sons. Now, the wise man took the one remaining cattle after the split, that he originally lent to resolve the issue. Finally, the cattle were divided between the sons in an agreeable way.
More importantly, the wise man, who lent his cattle, didn’t lose or gain anything in the process. He was the “catalyst” to make things happen.
Catalytic leaders have such an effect on the people around them. They can make things move faster, help kick start something that is stagnant or do something that was thought as impossible to accomplish.
To sum up, a catalytic leader is one who can bring about a change by getting into the problem and solving it; yet his/her characteristics/traits remain unaffected in the process.
We’ll see more about Catalytic Leadership in the upcoming articles.
Image Credits: PublicDomainPictures – Pixabay