Leadership is a privilege, not an entitlement.

An organisation can appoint you to authority. It cannot make you worthy of it.

My position: Authority is the privilege. Responsibility is the price. Accountability comes with both. Leadership is what you prove through how you carry them.

There is an old Chinese question:

时势造英雄，还是英雄造时势？

Do extraordinary times create great leaders, or do great leaders shape the times?

I have been thinking about this more recently.

The world feels unsettled. Governments, companies and institutions are being tested. Some leaders have risen to the occasion.

Many have not.

Perhaps weak leadership has become more common. Or perhaps I am simply unusually sensitive to it.

I have always had a thing for leadership.

Strangely, I never treated it as something I needed to study deliberately. I did not read every leadership book, collect frameworks or plan a career around becoming a leader.

But whenever I found myself badly led, I reacted strongly.

Not merely because I thought the leader was incompetent.

Because somebody else usually had to pay for it.

I was irritated into leadership

In secondary school, I joined the National Police Cadet Corps.

I could see routines, decisions and ways of doing things that could be improved. Many were not.

That frustrated me.

Eventually, I decided complaining from below was not enough. If I believed something could be done better, I had to take some responsibility for doing it better.

The same instinct returned during Basic Military Training.

Like most National Service boys, I was not searching for hardship or some grand leadership journey. I wanted an easy two years. At one point, I wanted to become a driver.

Then I encountered sergeants who could make casually stupid decisions and have everyone below them absorb the consequences.

Waste our time.

Create avoidable problems.

Make our lives unnecessarily difficult.

Then use their rank to make the problem ours.

I remember thinking that I needed to get into a position where I could command people like them.

Not to punish them.

I wanted better for the people coming after me.

I was not attracted to the glamour of command.

I was irritated into leadership.

Leadership became a responsibility

I eventually entered Officer Cadet School.

That was where leadership became more than frustration with the people above me.

It became responsibility for the people below me.

I was briefly trained by Colonel Fred Cheong, a former SAF Special Operations Force commando who was part of the team that stormed the hijacked Singapore Airlines flight SQ117 in 1991. He later trained generations of officer cadets before retiring from the military and becoming the Buddhist monk Venerable Tenzin Drachom.

Our interaction was brief.

The impression was not.

I remember fragments of what he taught:

Leadership is to serve.

Live to fight another day.

Rest is also a form of training.

They were not all lessons about charging forward.

Some were about restraint.

Thinking.

Preserving your people and resources for the next fight.

Understanding that leadership was not a licence to demand endlessly from others. It was an obligation to prepare them, make decisions for them and sometimes protect them from your own ego.

Leadership became more real again during my entrepreneurship years.

I entered entrepreneurship with a fairly naïve ambition.

Build something.

Grow quickly.

Sell it.

Make enough money to never feel financially vulnerable again.

It did not happen that way.

But entrepreneurship gave me something else: the opportunity to practise leadership in its fullest and most uncomfortable form.

Employees were no longer names on an organisation chart.

They were people whose income, development, confidence and family lives could be affected by my judgment.

A founder’s bad decision does not remain an intellectual mistake.

It becomes somebody’s delayed salary.

Somebody’s wasted effort.

Somebody’s lost opportunity.

Somebody going home and explaining to a spouse why the future suddenly feels less secure.

Once other people’s lives sit behind your decisions, authority stops feeling like an achievement.

It becomes a liability you have agreed to carry.

Leaders are not born. They are made. Really?

We are often told:

Leaders are not born. They are made.

I broadly agree.

But I think the familiar debate misses something.

Before leaders are born or made, most of them are simply appointed.

A company gives someone a title.

A team.

A budget.

Decision rights.

A larger salary.

A higher place on the organisation chart.

Everybody else is then instructed to report to them.

That creates authority.

It does not necessarily create leadership.

Authority is appointed from above. Leadership is judged from below.

A company can require employees to comply with someone’s decisions.

It cannot require them to trust that person’s judgment.

It can mandate attendance.

It cannot mandate respect.

It can grant power.

It cannot manufacture legitimacy.

That comes later.

Sometimes it never comes at all.

Leaders make decisions other people have to live with

Weak leadership bothers me because I do not see leadership primarily as status.

I see it as the power to make decisions that other people have to live with.

Leaders decide which risks to take, which warnings to ignore, which targets to impose and which costs other people must absorb.

They can decide that a team must do more with less.

That a business unit should close.

That a transformation must proceed even though the people doing the work know it is not ready.

That an employee’s role is redundant.

The people most affected by those decisions often have the least power to reverse them.

And it is precisely why accountability should increase with authority.

The more power you have over outcomes other people must live with, the less acceptable it is to take the credit when things work and outsource the consequences when they do not.

A bad employee gets performance-managed.

A bad salesperson misses quota.

A bad vendor loses the contract.

But a bad leader can sometimes remain a leader precisely because the hierarchy that gave them authority also protects them from the consequences of exercising it badly.

The people below experience the damage.

The people above may only see the presentation.

The higher you climb, the more you have to prove

There is a strange assumption that seniority should automatically produce deference.

I think the presumption should work in the opposite direction.

The higher you climb, the more information you receive.

The more discretion you have.

The more you are paid.

The greater your ability to influence outcomes.

The more protection you usually have when things go wrong.

So the higher you climb, the more you have to prove.

A title does not prove that you deserve trust.

It gives you more opportunities to demonstrate whether you do.

And more responsibility to remain accountable when you do not.

Leadership should therefore feel less like ownership as your authority increases.

More like borrowed power.

You are borrowing authority from the institution that appointed you.

More importantly, you are borrowing cooperation from the people expected to live with your decisions.

“There was nothing we could do”

One phrase immediately makes me suspicious:

There was nothing we could do.

Really?

Nothing?

Or nothing you were willing to do?

Sometimes leaders genuinely inherit terrible circumstances.

Markets turn.

Funding disappears.

A major customer leaves.

Regulations change.

The final decision may genuinely be painful and necessary.

But necessity at the end does not erase the decisions that came before it.

What was known earlier?

Which warnings were ignored?

Were alternative scenarios prepared?

Could people have been redeployed?

Could hiring have stopped sooner?

Could natural attrition have absorbed some of the reduction?

Could other spending have been cut?

And when the difficult decision finally arrived, who gave up what?

The word inevitable is often used to make a decision sound as though it appeared fully formed from the sky.

Most supposedly inevitable decisions have a history.

Leadership means owning that history too.

Good planning creates options before circumstances remove them.

Weak leadership waits until the choices disappear, then presents the remaining option as inevitable.

Good leadership, however, also does not mean painless leadership.

There is an obvious objection to my argument.

Leaders are not employed to protect everyone from every negative consequence.

They are responsible for the survival and performance of the organisation.

A leader who refuses to close an unviable operation, reduce costs or remove poor performers may appear compassionate while putting everyone else at greater risk.

Sometimes jobs must be cut.

Sometimes people must be disappointed.

Sometimes a leader must choose between two bad outcomes.

I accept that.

Good leadership is not painless leadership.

The test is not whether anybody suffered.

The test is whether the harm was necessary, whether the alternatives were seriously considered, whether the burden was distributed fairly and whether the leader remained accountable after making the decision.

Constraints may explain a decision.

They do not automatically absolve the person making it.

If you want the authority when things go well, you do not get to outsource accountability when things go badly.

Authority is the privilege

“Leadership is to serve” can sound soft.

It is not.

Serving does not mean agreeing with everyone, avoiding conflict or keeping employees permanently comfortable.

It means remembering what the authority is for.

A military officer does not lead so soldiers can admire his rank.

A founder does not employ people merely to validate his ambition.

A corporate leader does not receive decision rights so responsibility can flow downwards while credit flows upwards.

Somebody has to make the judgment.

Being trusted to make it is the privilege.

Responsibility is the price.

Accountability comes with both.

Leadership is what you prove through how you carry them.

The higher you rise, the less authority should feel like an entitlement and the more it should feel borrowed.

Because if everyone below you repeatedly pays for your judgment while you keep the credit, protection and excuses, the problem is no longer difficult circumstances.

The problem is you.

People say:

Heavy is the head that wears the crown.

To me, the choice is quite simple.

Either do not wear it, or train your neck until it is strong enough to carry it.

Do not put on a heavy crown with a weak neck, then expect everyone below you to hold it up for you.

Because when they finally let go, then your neck breaks and you die lah.