Leadership lessons and IK’s PMship

Imran Khan’s era as Prime Minister (2018–2022) ended on Sunday. Here, I summarise five lessons from IK’s leadership model that should be learned by all political, business and community leaders.

Understand the purpose of your role: Beside winning hearts and minds, highly effective leaders understand the core purpose of their role. The core purpose of any PM is to run the government by formulating legislations and policies and making investment decisions that provide jobs, houses, food, transport, education, safety and security. Focusing on core purposes helps leaders to see the bigger picture and navigate different policies to implement their programmes. IK believed he did not become PM to fix the prices of tomatoes and potatoes, thus misunderstanding the core purpose of his role. Good leaders focus on keeping things running smoothly, stay in touch with reality, empathise with people who are suffering from increasing living costs and provide space for citizens to raise issues.

Develop competency: Competent leaders formulate and implement policies through expert-policy-political collaborations. Experts provide the scientific and social evidence for making rational policies. Policymakers navigate this evidence and rationalise the institutional architecture and available resources. Politicians mobilise collective efforts and generate an enabling environment to implement these policies. Highly effective leaders are not experts on every aspect of policy and must put ego aside and seek expert advice. Pakistan is dealing with highly complex problems; therefore, the leader’s role should be to find creative solutions through collaboration. In terms of housing, transport, the environment, development and higher education, IK’s government did not develop such collaborations, but IK brought ego into every policy and programme he launched, including the tenure of HEC chairman.

Build relationships with internal and external stakeholders: The role of a leader to shape policies by developing trustworthy and respectful relationships with internal and external stakeholders. All stakeholders have their strengths, weaknesses, objectives and priorities. Influential leaders understand the different priorities of their stakeholders and align their goals with these. Stakeholder management is a slow process that needs to build trust through mutual respect and integrity and develops an enabling environment to generate creative responses to make effective policies. Unfortunately, IK failed to build meaningful relationships with any internal (parliament, opposition parties, businesses) or external (US, EU, China, India, etc) stakeholders. There is no perfect way to build these relationships but understanding sensitivities and complexity are essential.

Create a high-performance team: Good leadership builds a high-performance team through improving trust in the leader’s commitment and competence. Team building is only possible when leaders are inclusive and generous and appoint the right people. Choosing incompetent or weak people shows the insecurity of a leader wishing to retain power. IK forgot his earlier successes in cricket and social welfare achieved by high-performance teams. IK failed to listen to his friends who showed concerns about selecting Buzdar to run a 110million-strong province. All leaders make mistakes, but listening to people and taking responsibility helps to fix them. No politician can save the country through personal strength alone. Only a competent team can put a country on the right path.

Understand the strengths and limits of the narrative: The purpose of building a narrative (via social media, etc) is to inform, educate and unite people to adopt policies that affect them. Effective and positive narratives only work if accompanied by a high level of performance. It is like icing on a cake. Without a cake or with an uncooked cake, icing may work for a while but is not sustainable. Narratives should be built on empathy, carefully chosen words and people-centred approaches rather than religious, ethnic and political conspiracies. Narratives should show that leaders are genuinely concerned with people’s needs rather than exploiting their biases and conflicts. In IK’s three years and eight months as PM, narratives were built and social media was used to attack opponents rather than spread positivity and reduce polarisation. Such tactics might work for an opposition leader but not a PM. IK was a great communicator but his speeches as PM lacked direction, meaning and empathy for the people of Pakistan. I wished his speeches would motivate people to clean their streets and plant trees in their homes. The Pakistani people need a leader who is kind, understands their lives and engages them in the upward journey.  

No leader is perfect, including IK. Before becoming PM in 2018, he articulated his imaginative vision for the country, mobilising all people for Naya Pakistan. However, his PMship did not achieve this vision. Like many Pakistani people, my dream is ended, but hope to make Pakistan strong still lives.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 12^th, 2022.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.