I often ask my people this question: What do you do if you are outdoors and it begins to rain? Run for cover? Find a bus shelter, an overbridge, or even a tree to protect yourself from getting wet? Or, do you stand your ground, instinctively change your game-plan and take delight at the sudden turn of events?

Unlike children, we adults draw comfort working within predictable boundaries. The sudden turn that used to delight us when we were kids raises our guard as adults.

Have you seen a child’s eyes light up when it rains and he or she is caught outdoors? They soak in the wetness and the smell of the thirsty earth, they splash in the water and find new games to play in the rain.

There is a forgotten lesson we leaders can learn here as we deal with the thundering rain in the world of business right now.

Once you are wet, the fear of getting wet is over and you start enjoying the rain. With the fear gone, you return to your work with unmitigated enthusiasm. However, if you freeze indoors because of rain, there is no way you will reach anyplace.

Leadership is not child’s play, we have been told. We usually try to draw leadership lessons from teachers, parents, freedom fighters, influential business leaders, the army, even dolphins and geese…but why not children?

Just for once, let’s look at leadership as child’s play. What lessons do we draw from them?

As the corporate world brushes the dust off leadership readings to dig out experiences that can guide us in the mess we are in today, the book entitled Lasting Leadership: Lessons from the 25 Most Influential Business People of Our Times published by Wharton School Publishing comes to mind. It identifies eight attributes of leadership, each of which has its own chapter in the book. These are: the ability to build a strong corporate culture; to be a truth-teller; to find and cater to under-served markets; to ‘see the invisible’; to use price to build competitive advantage; to excel at managing and building their organization’s brand ; to be a fast learner; and to be skilled at managing risk.

The book includes essays describing a major challenge that each leader faced during his or her career, and detailed timelines of each leader’s life. But if I were to look at it in a different way, four out of these eight leadership attributes are lessons that we can learn from children if we observe them carefully.

For starters, kids are honest – at least, most of the time. Kids tell it like they see it, like they feel it, like they want it. And while their communication may be embarrassing and brutal for their parents, there’s no doubt their communication is genuine and its delivery, faultless. Do we tell it like we witness or feel it, or do we sugar-coat or window-dress our communication? Do we communicate instantaneously and clearly, or do we strategize and stage-manage our actions to procrastinate the inevitable?

The games they play often have an element of ‘imagine’, which we leaders overlook in our obsessive focus on movement on the road ahead and the rear view mirror. The question ‘Why?’ has taken inordinate precedence over the all important child-like question: ‘Why not?’

And, of course, the curiosity of a child is incomparable. Children ask questions because they want to know. Naturally curious, hungry for information, and constantly churning new facts to understand the world around.

And as they learn, children take calculated risks. Oblivious of their level of competence or incompetence – whichever way you look at it — they take their chances. On a rainy day, they soak in the wetness, and take the chance of catching a chill — a calculated risk.

We can discuss other traits of children – trust, loyalty, intuitiveness, responsibility, dedication, competitiveness, collaboration, excitement, adventure, challenge, moral fulfillment, et al. – and apply them to leadership, and I’m sure the lessons derived will surprise the most experienced and hardened leader on our planet.

Eartha Kitt once said, “I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma.” We are students all our lives because, no matter how or what we feel, say and think, today the only successful leader is the ‘student leader’ who draws lessons from everyday experiences to expand into new horizons.

I think it’s time to wipe our bloody nose and discover the child within us to give our leadership a much-needed makeover.

I was listening the other day to Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of the Yale School of Management discuss leadership lessons from the financial meltdown with Wall Street Journal. Jeff likened the finger-pointing towards systemic failure to a man tripping while walking down the street and blaming the city for not paving the path properly.  As the dust settles, and the world turns its attention to the effectiveness of the bailout package instead, it might be worthwhile to move the spotlight from the regulators and go back to dig deeper and discover what really are the lessons here? They are powerful in their simplicity.

• Courage to walk away: The very first learning that emerged from what is now being termed as a financial Armageddon was the need for courage: The courage to carve your own path and walk away from the herd. We in India were born with this lesson as we gained independence with ‘non-violence’ in an era of World Wars. In the US financial world, we saw Warren Buffet display the courage to walk away. Back in 2002, when companies began toying with exotic derivative instruments, Warren Buffet termed derivatives ‘financial weapons of mass destruction.’ Few listened to him then but today he stands out as the voice of sanity.
• Save it for a rainy day: The second lesson is the forgotten power of savings. The ‘savings mentality’ has always been a hallmark of the Asian culture. India, for one, has always had a high rate of savings – a phenomenon that is getting eroded with a new culture of consumerism sweeping across our cities today. Interestingly, America, which is home to 5% of the world’s population, accounted for 30% of global production and 37% of global consumption during boom times! On an individual level in the recent crisis, the ninja loans reflect this mentality, but collectively it made the entire country vulnerable to risk. And there were those who saw the warning signals.In 2005, when the times were good, economists Paul Volcker and Clyde Prestowitz, pointed out that America was vulnerable due to all the leveraging, and predicted that a financial crisis could soon hit its shores. This has come true and – be it at a macro level or a micro level – it highlights a forgotten lesson on the power of savings and that that we should leverage only to the extent we can afford to service our debt. Its time for a “back to basics” approach, old fashioned as it may seen. Save and plough back in good times, and not fritter liquid assets away.
• Caution, compliance and governance: The role of the American regulatory bodies can be debated till kingdom come. If investors such as George Soros and Warren Buffet and economists such as Paul Volcker saw it coming, why couldn’t the American financial agencies? The fact is that caution, compliance and governance are self checks that business needs to bring back. What was so extraordinarily complex about the bubble that a few investors could see and regulators could not? But the danger here is to get over-dependent on regulatory direction and therefore over-regulation. Lesson here: We have no choice but to think on our feet, keep our radar scanning the environment constantly, and not follow the herd blindly despite what the regulators have allowed.
• Look ahead – A lot has been written about the fall and a lot is yet to be written. However, it is time we stop reading and start looking ahead. The world will emerge from this crisis the same way it has from many such crisis before­­ – stronger. We need to look ahead as organizations and convert this crisis as an opportunity to transform the today for a better future. The people who look ahead will come out of this as winners, and I do hope more and more people start doing just that.