Quora Answer: What are the Challenges of Being a Leader?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “What are the challenges of being a leader?” 

The greatest challenge of leadership is finding that balance between being accepted by the people, and doing the necessary unpopular actions for the good of the greater whole.  Leadership is never a popularity contest.  Successful and popular leaders are only popular after the fact, sometimes after they are long gone or after their deaths.  Great leaders are respected, even feared; they are not necessarily popular.  Any leader who is a populist should be treated with suspicion, and have his credibility questioned.  If they resort to populism, either there is a wider strategic plan and they have managed to sell it to the masses, or they are weak and are willing to sell a future advantage for immediate acceptance.  This would apply to most politicians.  They are populist, earning approval, but they sell the future of the nation for immediate electoral gains. 

Another challenge of leadership is the ability to evolve with the needs of the changing environment.  It is the ability to read the room, so to speak, and understand the limits of the people we lead.  A good example of this would be the fate of Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945, during the Second World War, and again from 1951 to 1955.  He won the war, but he proposed Operation Unthinkable, war with the Soviet Union with freed German POWs.  The British public were not ready to keep a war economy going, and he was kicked out of power.  Leaders must be able to see the probable landscape just over the horizon, and act accordingly.  They must never be lost in the success or failures of the moment.