Happy New Year! A warm welcome back to all of you who are returning to the blog after my long sabbatical, and an equally warm welcome to our new visitors from Australia. We look forward to your contributing comments in the future.

My travels over the past two months have given me further insights into certain aspects of leadership. And I’m going to start our discussion for 2010 by looking at one challenging but essential aspect of leadership which I call TOUGH LOVE. Just before I explain what this is, let me tell you what it is NOT. Tough love is not a leader saying to his followers: ‘Do it my way or take the highway’, although this is a common practice in poor leadership and management. Tough love is what is required from good leaders when they have to make a decision or call for action which may initially upset an individual or group, but which is identifiably in the best interests of that individual or group.

Let’s take my former neighbour, Mr. C. Mr. C was a kindly gentleman who worked with the railways. After doing fairly basic tasks at a local station for several years, he was promoted to the position of signal guard. That’s the man in the movies who blows a whistle and shouts ‘All aboard’ when the train is about to depart. The films don’t show the responsibility of that person, though. The guard has to see that everyone is safely on board and the doors firmly shut before he gives a signal to the driver to leave the station. Timing and good co-ordination with the train driver are essential.

Well, this new assignment proved very stressful for Mr. C, who was a slow-moving, slow-thinking sort of man, and he struggled to keep up with the fast pace of action which was expected from him. He was proud of his new position, though, and the pay rise that went with it, so he tried to keep up the pace until his boss came and told him that he had to move him to another position. Mr. C was hurt and unhappy for some time until he realised that he was actually enjoying his low-stress replacement assignment in the station office. He renewed his friendship with his boss who had had to apply tough love in order to help him.

Two months ago I again experienced the challenge of tough love. As many of you know, my husband and I work in Ethiopia, and one of the things we do there is to train entrepreneurs who are trying to run small and medium businesses. We sometimes also organise loans to our trainees to expand their businesses or to make important acquisitions from a loan pool we have recently set up in an association called Ethiopian Enterprises.

On our working trip to Ethiopia last November, we were approached by a young man we know who told us excitedly of his plans to start up his own business. He planned to invest family money in the business but also needed a sizeable loan, one which we knew he would have virtually no chance of returning to the loan fund. He had had no business training whatsoever, lacked the professional skills required for the business he wanted to start (an internet café) and would be giving up a fixed wage at his current job for this risky venture. He was not savvy about computers and would be unable to fix problems himself in a land where power cuts are regular and repairmen few and far between. He asked if we could supply the loan.

Now I love entrepreneurial spirit, and we all know that dreams can become realities. But in this case I saw no current chance of success for this project. The risk of his losing his family’s inheritance in his attempt was huge. We had to refuse. We were let off the hook to some extent because one of the rules of our association is that we only organise loans from our fund for people we have trained ourselves and whose businesses show potential, or who can show that they have received comparable training. He has not received training. But it was still hard to refuse him and to explain why we felt that his business plan was highly risky. Perhaps he will attend a training in the future, and things may look different then. But for now we have had to disappoint and possibly anger him. He thought we were his friends, and we are. But we didn’t make the loan. That’s what tough love involves: upsetting someone in order to help them further. It’s an essential leader’s tool and yes, it is tough.