With Charles Dickens's Christmas Carol has happened something similar to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: it has become a common place. Something that everybody talks about, and for whatever reason possible, we feel that they really do not know what they are talking about. Just there are hundreds of interpretations of the Hymn to Joy, even the Muppets have their own version, Walt Disney did the same with the Dickens tale: he prepared his own representation of it, having Uncle McDuck as Ebenezer Scrooge.

Scrooge has become the quintessential antihero: that man who hates Christmas and, like every popular symbol, he has his legends, has undergone transformations and has become something that departs from his own origin and nature. Many of the ones who take Scrooge as an emblem, mistakes it for figures like the Grinch and have no idea what it stands for. Charles Dickens never imagined that this would be the most popular character to emerge from his pen. Nor did he think his example would serve to teach businessmen lessons.

Generally speaking, I have always thought that the world of sports has many similarities to the business universe. With the rereading of Dickens's tale, I realize that many literary characters can illuminate us with professional wisdom. Ebenezer Scrooge was, in the very words of Dickens, a man with a well-known trade name, his firm stamping on the seriousness of a business. Few know that this man was a money changer who enjoyed prestige in the business world, yet he was not a beloved man. Scrooge was talented, but he got lost in the traps of doing something very well.

This is the case for organizations that get lost in the skills forest without defining a model that allows them to make sense of their work. Scrooge was a man who worked incessantly, who saved up to the limits of the miserable and who was unable to enjoy the honey of success. Scrooge's main problem seems to be that he had no definition. Lack of definition overlooks the moment when we have reached a goal and we persist in effort to wear.

On the other hand, lacking deficiency, Scrooge not only subjected himself to the rigor of insane work, but did so with his collaborators who received neither encouragement nor recognition from his boss. That, obviously on a real-world team, causes demotivation and long-term wear. While Scrooge lacked vision and perspective, that is, the ability to glimpse what's coming and be able to share it realistically with the team, I have also lacked the empathetic ability to innovate and adapt to change. The image of the money changer who needed to receive the visit of Marley's ultra-tomb, his partner, to make him reflect, is the foolishness of some leaders to blind self to the need of his team and subject them to efforts that will come nowhere.

The exacerbated ego of those in a position of power leads them to close their senses, to tighten their eyes and to stop listening. Mr. Scrooge needed to pay attention and incentivize the emotions that are the fuel of the engine to guide efforts. He did not understand that based on the understanding of others, force and impetus would be incorporated into the work. There are times when it's easy to motivate the team, give it recognition, there are others where that means taking ideas into account and incorporating them into the work system. Understanding that people are capable of spawning ideas and that taking care of them is a good idea.

Dickens did not endow Scrooge with interpersonal effectiveness, i.e. he did not have the ability to relate consistently and consistently in a way that created circles of trust. It's true that the money changer's employee always knew what he might expect from his boss, the bad thing is that they weren't very good things. Charles Dickens's Christmas Carol is not intended to be a leadership lesson, nor does Scrooge be a reference model. However, from the reading of the story we can come to valuable conclusions.

Leadership is a hard competition to find. She easily disguises herself in the dresses of a well-done task, but a leader needs more than knowing how to do things right. One of a leader's great performances is the empathy that is that specific feature that helps to train work teams and calibrate the rhythms needed to achieve goals and reach the goal. The leader must open the senses and be alert to their surroundings and to the watchful of their team.

Scrooge's example helps us understand that a leader who does not incorporate human management into his work loses vision and meaning in his work. It can be a person who efficiently achieves results but who can misplace himself in the maze of everyday life. The lessons we learn from this popular antihero today is that, in the foundations, every leader must be based on solid values, must have the ability to know how to transmit them, to the participation of his team other team since he risks squandering his effort.

We all know bosses like Ebenezer Scrooge, the lesson is to know if we, when we stand in front of the mirror, recognize characteristics of this figure that has reached very high levels of popularity. If so, it is time to recompose the way and to forge ourselves as people capable of encouraging creativity, of stoking enthusiasm, of igniting the spark and belonging of producing a greater sense of. Maybe, if I am permitted to give a piece of advice, I would recommend to read A Christmas Carol to understand what this great writer tried to tell us. The message is a really good one.