Thoughts on Leadership...

Don't know if I am really qualified to write on this subject, but Venkat forced me to write it... so any amount of brickbats are to be sent to him... and all bouquets can be sent to me ( this is your first lesson in leadership!).
The way we have gone about is to take the many facets of a leader and discuss about them one by one... taken some examples from our collective past... thanks to all good and bad managers I have come across - this is dedicated to them all.

Leadership:
1. Technical Expert
You need to be a Technical Expert, in whatever field your team is working on. You can be a manager and get the job done without having an iota of technical knowledge (which we will discuss later), but if you really want your team to respect you as a leader, then you should be able to roll your sleeves and get your hands dirty. You should not overdo this so the team member thinks that you are in contention with them for something!
The team should know and feel that you are there to provide directions when required. Intellectually and technically you should be sharp. You need to know how and when to think logically and when to think out of the box. You need to bring in fresh ideas to the routine job and at the same time should be able to bucket new problems into known patterns, by breaking them down into smaller manageable pieces. So typically; you need to think out-of-the-box for routine issues and think logically for non-routine issues.
You need to be up-to-date and be able to ask intelligent questions. I remember Bhujanga used to read everyday on technical issues and sometimes discuss them. It is a different thing that most of his ideas will go over-the-head for most of us. I also remember how Uma used to explain things from the very basic (once he did that to Gururaj and Guru tried his best to confuse Uma). Till this date we respect them for their technical expertise and willingness to share them with us; so the same applies to all of us, right? If the team knows that you are a subject matter expert and if they aspire to be like you; I guess you are a successful leader.