SLAP Leadership

This is dedicated to Prof. Unnikrishnan Nair, our Organizational Behavior Faculty.

I recently happened to attend a two day session titled “Leadership” by SLAP. The session was more than interesting and, like my friend sigsegv mentioned in an earlier post, it shattered all the myths about leadership. There were about 28 people in the session hailing from Japan, Korea, Australia and India. Some of these folks had travelled 12/16 hours to get to this place. You could not choose to attend this, you had to be nominated (sic) meaning your company/managers needed to see in you, a future “leader” in the making. I was fortunate to be one of those. This whole affair was pretty expensive, just figuring out that participants had flown in from Japan, Korea and Australia would kind of substantiate that fact. The facilitator flew in from California, US along with her deputy.

The session was very well conducted and I enjoyed it thoroughly. It was all about what leadership meant -Values, your conviction and uncompromising attitude when your values were challenged! We were asked to chose our top 10 values and then narrow it down to 5 and then to a final 3. Believe me, it was tough! There was an emotional session about identifying how and why these 3 became our top values. This is the moment of truth.

So what about values? Why do we have values and why do we need to identify and communicate/demonstrate them? This is done because it helps in bringing the connect between a leader and his followers.

What do we know about leadership? Can we name/think of some leaders? What were their attributes? Is there one common thing that stands out when you think of leaders? Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi? Well one thing that does come out is that these leaders were not born, they were made!  They believed in their values and when it was challenged or questioned, they chose not to compromise.

Gandhiji’s core value was “freedom” – freedom to do what he wanted, freedom to buy a ticket and travel in a first class compartment….and when this value was challenged in a train in South Africa, he did not compromise. He chose to fight it and thus Gandhiji the leader was born. So how did Gandhiji get people to follow him? His value was freedom, alright, but all his followers had different values! So how could he influence them? Well, it was the unwavering belief in his core values and his demonstration of his values. An example of the chauri chaura incident is a reinforcement of “Non-violence” as one of Gandhiji’s values. Gandhiji was able to make a leadership speech in which he was able to express his values, the moment of truth (incident in the train), express the bitter place (British ruled India) and the better place (Free India). When Gandhiji could connect with his followers by describing “What’s in it for you along the way”, he touched on the significant, self worth and belonging pieces of Abraham Maslow’s theory. He “motivated” people without telling them how to get there! This, my friends, is simple, Leadership!

This 2 day session brought in a sea change in the leadership concepts and shattered myths. My thoughts went back to Prof. Unnikrishnan Nair and his class a month back on contempory issues in management. Prof. had conducted a session at the IIMK campus for the eMEP students. This class/batch should be proud that we had the privilege to attend a great lecture on “Leadership”, a lecture/session for which corporates spend millions of rupees in training/travel budget.

Hats off to Prof. Unnikrishnan Nair!