If your mentor gives applause for all the good things you did; great. If your mentor is satisfied with what you have done and never induces you to push your limits; beware! Great leaders are great followers too. Leaders ideally will have mentor(s) who shows them the way to greatness.

A little experience with LeadCap has provided with the following understanding about the roles of a mentor when developing a potential leader into a great leader and also the role of the person mentored in the process.

Roles of the mentor:

1. Keep the vision alive with actions and words
2. Assurance that s/he will become a leader
3. Push her/his limits to greater heights
4. Freedom to fail

Roles of potential leader:

1. Decision to lead
2. Very positive ‘I can’ attitude
3. Challenge the self every minute of every day
4. Raise the bars
5. Work really hard

In a movement where we are building a nation of leaders each and every person must raise their bars and aim greater heights. Meeting with the defining moment and decision to lead is just a beginning. When the worldly comforts and sloth slows you down, remember that in the leadership journey you have to push your limits and keep the leadership quotient high with string of decisions. “Never give up” should be the mantra.

Mohammad Nibras P.K.
LeadCap

As per the official statistics of the Election Commission, 56% of the registered voters in Bangalore did not cast their vote during the Elections held on 10/05/08. These 56% had better work at home than to decide what will be the shape of their future Government. Some of this 56% would have found going to a resort, family picnic or a movie as being more important than casting their vote. Most of these 56% will continue to point their fingers as to what is wrong with the Country but don’t want to stain their fingers with the election dye on 10/05/08. These are the people who crib about corruption but on 10/05/08 left their votes for possible manipulation.

There were many people who turned up to vote but did not find their names on the list. This 56% had their names on the list but did not believe in the power of democracy and a vote. This 56% will continue to complain about poor infrastructure, corruption and every conceivable problem under the sun but could not walk a few 100 meters on 10/05 to cast their vote.

Ask them they will say, what guarantee is there that the person whom we vote for does win and more importantly deliver on his promises. Excuse me, don’t we lock houses our even though we know that burglars still can break in. Do we middle class stop investing in the share market just because we lost money on one particular share? Why do we plan vacations during holidays given for voting? Would we plan for vacations during our children exams? Elections are the examination for the country. We fail to vote we have to suffer for five long years.

Name not present in the voter list is the excuse which does not hold water in today’s internet world. Voters Lists are frequently displayed on the web by the Election Commission. If we care for our vote, we will definitely ensure that our name is in the final list.

Don’t ask what difference will one vote make? The power of one is infinite. Have we forgotten Buddha, Mahatma Gandhiji, Dr. B R Ambedkar or for that matter sport icons like PT Usha and Kapil Dev? One person can make a lot of difference to the society. Only if each one of us rises to the demands of the society, will a change come about? Thank God the generation that fought for our freedom from imperial rule did not have a pessimistic mind set like ours.

Balu A.M.- LeadCapper

From Charles Handy’s memoir, “Myself and Other More Important Matters”.

Here are a few lessons to take away:
1) If all your expectations with life work out well then you probably haven’t pushed yourself far enough. There may be lives out there that you could have lived had you dared more.
2) I learnt that in most human situations there is no textbook answer, that everyone is different and that you have to make your own judgments most of the time, make your own decisions and then stand by them. Only in technical matters does the expert know better.
3) Schools, at every level, prefer to teach what can be taught, rather than what needs to be learnt.
4) Organizations are not machines. They are living communities of individuals. To describe them we need to use the language of communities and the language of individuals. The essential task of leadership is to combine the aspirations and needs of the individuals with the purposes of the larger community to which they belong. You do not need to be a genius to see that the task is much easier if the leader knows what the purpose of the community should be and can convince everyone of its importance.
5) My belief is that most people have a fundamental understanding of what makes organizations work. They just need to be reminded of it and encouraged to apply their understanding to their own work. The late Sumantra Goshal of the London Business School once described Peter Drucker as practising the scholarship of common sense. I would like that said of me. For example, it is only common sense that people are more likely to be committed to a cause or mission if they had a hand in shaping it. That does not need research to prove it. Nor do you have to see the research to know that groups are likely to produce better results than the same individuals acting on their own.

Taken from Leadershipnow

James O’Toole surveys the works of Aristotle in Creating the Good Life, and creates a practical framework that can be used to evaluate leadership in our own time. This excerpt is from a section regarding community leadership:

Aristotle says a leader also needs practical wisdom. Practical wisdom has “nothing to do with calculating magnitudes,” nothing to do with science, theory, disciplinary knowledge, or knowledge of facts in any way. It is concerned “neither with eternal and unchangeable truth nor with anything and everything that comes into being (and passes away again). Instead, it deals with matters where doubt and deliberation are possible.” In particular, practical wisdom is not concerned with the way things are but with “how things can be other than they are.” In other words, it is about how conditions in society and organizations could be made better. And “it implies the use of one’s faculty of opinion in judging matters” relating to what is right and wrong for a group, or society as a whole.

In Aristotle’s eyes, such practical wisdom is the prerequisite of “moral excellence,” the sine qua non of leadership: “That is why we say Pericles and men like him have practical wisdom. They have the capacity to see what is good for themselves and for humankind.”

Aristotle concludes that virtuous leaders in the Periclean mold are rare, but their scarcity is not due to a shortage of leadership capacity in the human race. Instead, he believes the virtue manifested by those rare leaders is an acquired trait; he believes leaders are made, not born. Indeed they are self-made.

At all times, the conscious goal of a just leader is to help followers achieve what is good for them, which, on occasion, may be something different from what they think they want. Hence, in addition to effectiveness, leadership has a moral dimension: the capacity to discern and provide justice.

From Leadership Now

If I start by asking a question: How many NGOs are operating here in India? What would your answer be? Not sure? Well, it would be the condition of most of us, even true for the quiz enthusiasts. Not let me ask a related question: What do you think the reason that we don’t know the exact number of NGOs? Now there will be many answers to that. May be NGO is not that interesting subject, they don’t work much in India, I have other things to know, etc. But probably the closest to the correct answer would be that many of them don’t want you to know about them.

NGO or Non Governmental Organizations are generally known as those who work in the different social sectors & often address the glaring issues of the nation. Their activities are of two types viz. the spike activities. i.e. the rehabilitation activities or food, clothes etc supplying activities right after any natural calamity. The other type consists of the regular activities which go on throughout the year. The NGOs work in different areas based on their vision. For example some are active in the area of children right, some try to fight illiteracy, some work for equality of women, health care, emergency services – the scopes are many in India. However, often these activities can’t scale up to the national level; often NGOs are also happy to work within their known territory.

During my management studies I got an opportunity to interact with many NGOs from different parts of India. Surprisingly, I found that many of them don’t want to expand their activities beyond the regions they operate in. When asked, the reasons are plenty: ‘I don’t know whether we can perform equally well in some other regions’, ‘We are making significant difference in the region we are working, we don’t need to look beyond this’, ‘the issue we address doesn’t have any ground in other regions’, ‘we don’t have the man power to expand’, ‘we don’t have sufficient money’, etc. But what is the actual reason behind this? Why are these NGOs not going beyond their own territory? The obvious answer is that they think their model will not be sustainable beyond their own area. But they made their model sustainable in one area, then why not somewhere else?

From a small survey of different NGOs the actual answer came up. Many of these NGOs actually don’t have any fixed man power. They work based on the involvement of the volunteers. When this model is good in terms of low operating cost the actual problem is that it has a very low exit barrier for the people & the NGO as well. The volunteer pool fluctuates & the model doesn’t allow enforcing accountability on individuals. Thus gradually the NGO starts suffering in two ways: first it loses credibility to the external stakeholders & secondly the activities are no longer directed by the vision of the NGO, rather it finds a high correlation with the competency of the volunteers. Thus an NGO operating in Bangalore works mainly in the education field. When we tried to understand their actual activities, we found that some volunteers just go to the schools on Saturdays & teach English and mathematics. A survey on the volunteers revealed that most of them are actually working in the IT/ ITES sector in Bangalore & hence feel more comfortable teaching English & mathematics. However, the work in education sector could mean a lot more & not just sending a few volunteers to a few local schools.

A question may come here: Aren’t these NGOs working at all? Aren’t they making any difference? Well, donating a penny while the requirement is of a million & the capacity to donate is probably thousand – if you call this making a difference, they are definitely making a difference. But the actual requirement is of much more. This is the time that the NGOs come out of their shell & think of a better operating model. Without that, India will be a land of thousands of NGOs with almost zero impact to the society. Till then the NGOs will remain as places for casual recreation of a few well-to-do people who will have complacency that they made a great difference by spending one time half an hour among a few children.

- Soumyadip Chakraborty, IIM Bangalore, LeadCap