Leadership principles from Ganesha festival

In the recent past, I am reading a few books on leadership to help me understand my new role. This also improved my effectiveness in performing it.

Outside my work, in the past month I was volunteering for the community event. It was for the Ganesha festival celebrations in Berlin. This was a 11 days of celebrations with more than 3K visitors in total. Many folks recognise Ganesha as elephant-headed-God. We consider Ganesha as the “God of duty” and also believe him to be “remover of obstacles”. Ganesha festival is one amongst many popular festivals in India. 

Reflecting on my lessons in books on leadership, I realised that Ganesh festival has imbibed many of those leadership principles since my childhood.

Here are some common themes I noticed between the two:

Leadership is an attitude and not a designation

Every Karyakarta (team member) in the Ganesh festival is a volunteer. They join the team because of some inner-drive to do something. The term Karyakarta also literally translates to “doer of the task”. They would find the tasks on their own and finish them with passion. Accomplishment of completing their part of duty would give them satisfaction. Every Karyakarta is a leader in some sense. Designations serve only the purpose of co-ordination. 

Servant leadership

Entire team is a decentralised organisational structure. All Karyakartas give their inputs to decide on the action plan. They collectively decide execution steps. There is no supremacy because of designation. Everyone considers themselves as Sevak (servant) for the God. They will evaluate every idea based on its usefulness rather than based on who is putting it on the table.

Shared understanding of mission and vision

Ganesh festival is mainly celebrated in the state of Maharashtra. It is also spread in some other parts of the India. These celebrations happen in a widely distributed manner. Each neighbourhood community would group together for their own celebrations. Team sizes for each celebration vary from 5 to 1000+ volunteers. Number of visitors/participants in the celebrations varies from 50 to 1M+ visitors. Another way to understand the scale of these celebrations is to look at annual turn-over to the economy from this festival. Someone estimated it to be about 2.5B USD (20,000 Crore INR) [source: DNA Assocham]. Major part of these activities is purely “managed” by volunteers with no professional event management companies (barring the exceptions of huge celebrations which have support from some political figures)

This is possible only because of single factor. All Karyakartas have shared understanding of the mission and vision. Everyone puts the team goals above their own ego.

Leading by example

New Karyakarta will look at experienced Karyakartas as a role model. Even experienced Karyakarta was a new Karyakarta when they started. Their suggestions are coming from lessons from the hands-on experience. They are always willing to support new members whenever they need. These Karyakartas are a live manifestation of leading by example. 

Empower and trust

These community celebrations are typically with open-to-all invite. This leads to lot of uncertainties and surprises. Many a times, Karyakartas have to make instant decision to tackle the situation. They have autonomy to take local decision within their scope of work. Entire team has trust in each other and empowers every Karyakarta to perform their duties.   

To summarise, a key takeaway for me was realising this link; between so called “extra-curricular“ activities like being Karyakarta in Ganesh Utsav since my childhood and their impact on my career. Any volunteering activity would help prepare you for leadership principles in your career. For some of us, this is obvious; for many others, it is unknown. They consider volunteering as complete orthogonal to the career.