Leadership lessons from the Dhoni playbook

Image: Instagram/ziva_singh_dhoni

‘Neuroscience for Leadership: Harnessing the Brain Gain Advantage’, ‘The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth’, and ‘Edge: Turning Adversity into Advantage’, are all recommended reading for aspiring leaders studying at the world’s top business schools.

It may be time to junk them all for there’s a new book on leadership that has all the tips and tricks an aspiring leader will need. Unimaginatively titled ‘Lessons from the life of Mahendra Singh Dhoni’, it is yet to be written or even conceived; but, its contents have been playing out over the last 15 years on cricket pitches across the globe.

Dhoni, who retired from international cricket on August 15, is a modern Indian sporting phenomenon, but his life is an old-fashioned text book, one that can be read and understood equally by an adolescent as well as a 24-year-old striving to make his way through the world’s top corporations.

That’s because there is nothing complex about the Dhoni way of doing things. At his best he kept it simple with his decision-making always unconventional but firm. As a player, his helicopter shots and his innovative wicket keeping were just the fastest way of getting the results for the team.

He had become captain quite by accident in 2007. With Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar and Sourav Ganguly staying away from the first T20 World Cup, the selectors decided to give Dhoni the job. He proceeded to make the most of that one chance and led the team to victory against Pakistan in the finals, a win fashioned out of a moment of pure inspiration when for the final over of the game he tossed the ball to a rookie, Joginder Sharma, rather than to a more experienced bowler. Leaders grab their chances, never mind the circumstances under which they get them.

It is a measure of the man’s influence that his average in ODIs, a respectable 50.57 and a somewhat underwhelming 38.1 in Tests, is rarely discussed. After all, it has never been about the numbers. Even his most decisive knock, the 91 not out in the 2011 World Cup finals came at the end of a tournament where till then he had averaged a mere 30 in seven innings (twice not out). The word associated most often with Dhoni is impact and that’s really what leaders are expected to have. Great leaders such as Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Jack Welch, are those that transformed their companies, putting them on hyper growth trajectories through path-breaking moves and strokes of pure genius.

That Dhoni did this without cursing and sledging, on or off the field, is another part of his credo and puts into perspective the fire breathing, invective-hurling leader, the kind that fed the cult of so many tyrants across companies. One, it never worked and two, there’s another gentler and calmer way. It came to be embodied by Captain Cool, as he went about victories and defeats with the same impassive look and quiet word of advice for his colleagues.

It couldn’t have been easy taking on the captaincy of a team that included superstars such as Sachin Tendulkar, Dravid, VVS Laxman, Ganguly, Anil Kumble, Harbhajan Singh — four of them former captains. Yet, Dhoni resisted the urge to show them who was boss, and created an environment where each one felt equal and the captain merely the first among them. Respect, as Dhoni showed when he briefly invited Ganguly to captain the team in his last test match at Nagpur, is a two-way street.

Too many leaders believe that once they are in the hot seat, they must change their lifestyle and their behaviour to reflect their new position. Which is why the fancy car and the tony golf course apartment are the first priorities even as their tone becomes more authoritative and their homilies more frequent. Through all his success, Dhoni’s stayed essentially the same person. Junior players speak of his earthy humour even when they were being ticked off, while his friends swear by his loyalty.

Cricket was a game that had given him everything, but it wasn’t going to morph him into a different person. Whether it was jumping into the driver’s seat of the team bus or drinking tea with his childhood friends in Ranchi, he stayed true to his roots.

Above all, he may have been Indian cricket’s most successful captain, but Dhoni never believed in his invincibility. In the Dhoni playbook, games could be lost, but not without trying, and so there was no hand wringing even after the painful loss to New Zealand in the 2019 World Cup semi-finals, though anyone who saw the look on his face when he walked back, felt his pain. There was simply an acceptance that this once he had failed to take the team across the line. Perhaps, in his mind, that’s the day Dhoni knew it was time for him to go.

It had happened earlier. Towards the end of his tenure as Test captain, the phase between the 2011 World Cup win and his retirement in 2014, the results in overseas matches had been poor, 13 losses in 20 games with just two wins. Quietly, after yet another series defeat in Australia, Dhoni announced he was done. Knowing when it is time to go is probably the most difficult thing for business leaders many of whom have stayed way past their sell-by dates.

Longevity based on past glory rather than current performance has been the bane of many a business family patriarch. Not only does that act as a drag on the business, it also muddies the waters for the successor and ends up destroying relationships as well. When Virat Kohli says that Dhoni will always be his captain it speaks of the respect he has for the man and also the timing of the handover.

Indeed for a leader who paid little heed to theories, Dhoni fits almost perfectly management guru Warren Bennis’ definition of leadership which is: “the capacity to create a compelling vision, translate it into action and sustain it.”

Sundeep Khanna is a senior journalist. Views are personal.