Everyone of us is blessed with a potential to lead. Some of us discover it early, while some others never do – only to go through lives completely unaware. LeadCap diaries narrate leadership lessons from the experiences of some real people around us. The more you read and reflect on these experiences, the more easily you would gain confidence to rise to a leadership role.
At the same time, there are still many more stories that have leadership lessons which we could all learn from. They could be fables that you have heard, biographies that you have read or even your own life experiences. These stories and lessons could break more myths and could help in drawing more people towards a leadership experience. Share these stories with us by mailing them across to mail@leadcap.org.
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.
Five scores after, you or I will not be there to stride on this earth. But the foundation we are laying through the leadership movement will be there. Dream, of a tomorrow where our vision of making India a nation of leaders is fulfilled and our country becoming a leader of nations! India will be a nation from which other countries will take lessons on leadership and revive their nations on the foundation of democratized leadership. We need to ask ourselves the hard questions, dream really big, and start acting rather than waiting for everything to be fine and then do something. Whole of India should awaken to the call of democratized leadership at the earliest.
Let us incarnate the freedom fighters’ mind in ours. Let the patriotism run in our blood with all its vigour. Let us stand up and say that we are leading our nation. Let us do it for the nation. Let us make it happen now. Let us join our souls and hands for the nation. Let us do it now.
The 8th decision in Sangeeth Varghese’s bestseller ‘Decide to Lead; 8 decisions that can make you a leader’ is “Run to Win”. To quote the author, “leaders focus on winning. Even as they face obstacles in life, all they concentrate on and work toward is victory – nothing more, nothing less. Leaders run not for the sake of running, but to win.” One of my favourite leaders is Walt Disney. Disney cartoon and animated characters have made us laugh and happy for decades. But life of Walt Disney was not as colourful and fun filled as the cartoons.
In business, what will you do if all your team members whom you nurtured and helped to reach excellence ditch you and join your competitor? What will happen when tragedies flow like a mighty river into your life one by one and you don’t have time to think! These and more happened with Walt Disney. Walt Disney was a great leader in the true sense – who always kept high expectations for his animators. He always focused on quality of work. He inspired a nation with his cartoon characters. Even when he was faced with criticism and setbacks in personal and professional life, Walt Disney knew what he was supposed to do. He was running to win.
Walt Disney did what others said was impossible to do. He believed that anything is possible. He was a master salesman; he sold well to do well. He embraced high risk to reap higher returns. He kept on growing because there was no survival without growing. Walt Disney as a leader has gone through all the 8 decisions.
Check out any leader, you will find all the 8 decisions coming into picture in that leader’s life. We need some introspection as to why don’t we have a Gandhi or a Walt Disney in us! I would say, we haven’t still taken the 8 decisions.
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.
