Last 4 days, I was fortunate to be part of the ‘Leadership Management Workshop’ and I must acknowledge these days have been an exhilarating, self realizing & self discovering experience.
Being in Amdocs, a company that really makes an effort of developing leadership through specialized programmes such as this one, has been of immense value to me over last 6 months as I am able to get into lot of such workshops / trainings to enhance myself.
Coming back to the workshop that was conducted by
Raj Mali, who calls him self a corporate mystic, was conducted over a period of 4 days and had several engaging discussions that ultimately led to the group understanding the secrets of successful corporate leadership.
Its do have lots to write about the experience of last 4 days and I would be genuinely attempting to write few articles on my experience of last 4 days and how I have grasped, understood and learnt few things. This is obviously the first attempt to start a series of the discussions on the topic of ‘Leadership’.
Our training group of 10 was consisted of managers across various competency centres of Amdocs, some of us were new and coming from other organizations and few of them were veterans who are with the company for close to 10 years or so, thus making it one of the more diverse forums and at the same time, an interesting one.
The common pattern of the last 4 days was consistent. More focus was given on group discussions, observations, role plays and games. It was so surprising that the amount multimedia that was involved was very less. More details on the same, with genuine hope, I will be able to post in coming days on my blog.
In this article, I want to reflect on the very first topic that we discussed in the programme and that was a simple question,
“What do you think leadership means to you?”
On the face value of the question, it looks very simple to everyone, however what surprised me and probably others was that when this was thrown at us, we had really take a pause and think, what it really means?
Few interesting answers that came out of the discussion were,
– Leadership is all about getting things done on time within budget & costs
– Leadership means helping your team grow
– Its about people management
– Its about how you handle issues and the pressure cooker situations
– Leadership is how you motivate people to do their jobs
– Leadership is about managing the work and team
– Leadership is controlling the behaviour and emotions of self and influencing in others
– Leadership is all about setting the rules and helping the followers follow them !
and the answer I gave was “Leadership is all about taking risks and making key decisions that help you grow your team”.
However, after the session is now complete, what I have understood about leadership is as follows,
Leadership is not a science, its an art. Its an art on how you understand the mindset of individuals as well as groups, connect with people of various styles and patterns and still form a successful team and achieve a common goal of growth & success. However, none of the above is possible, without yourself making a conscious effort to understand yourself, your own emotions and learn to control and channelize them to create positive energy around.
Leadership is demonstrated by various people and they have unique style of executing leadership within the group. Raj, very effectively classifies all the styles into 4 simple categories and had easily explained them through two games, one group and other pair.
I would like to mention about the games in next article, however, till then, I would like to know your view on what you perceive leadership as and if you have to define, how would be defining the same?
Let me know !
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