Management Mantra @ Leadership is the ability to see the future before it happens: IMD Professor
Chennai, August
31:
The
ability to connect to people, the management team, the organisation’s goals and
being able to touch customers, are all ingredients that a high performance
leader needs today. And, add to that the ability to see round the corner or the
future in some way before it actually happens is the stuff of leadership, says
George Kohlrieser, Professor of Leadership and Organisational Behaviour at the
top Swiss B-school, IMD in Lausanne.
“The
whole idea of the ‘hero’ leader is pretty much dead. Leaders depend on
high-performing teams; how they attract talented people and let them do the
best they can do,” he explains in an interview to BusinessLine.
The
biggest challenge leadership faces today is in dealing with relentless change,
which is deeper than one realises. “We also face a lot of ambiguity and
uncertainty, politically, socially, economically. It’s hard to predict what is
actually going to happen. So, in organisations, a leader has to be able to
provide some sense of security in an insecure world. I don’t think people
expect leaders to be magicians, but they do expect them to be trustworthy and
also communicate that ‘I am interested in you’, that this is not a self-serving
process for me as a leader or the organisation,” he elaborates.
At
IMD, Kohlrieser says, leadership at high performance levels is for one to reach
the maximum potential by always learning and expanding so that they are doing
the very best in a consistent way. “You can be high performing and not reach a
dramatic outcome but it can bring out the best in other people. Or, you can
achieve dramatic outcomes. It could be ROI or other kinds of objective
measures. Engagement is most important; if employees are engaged, they are
likely to get more quality and better quantity in performance,” he says.
Kohlrieser,
who is in Chennai to conduct a workshop on leadership on behalf of the Loyola
Institute of Business Administration (LIBA) for senior management, lays great
emphasis on CEOs bonding with the people in an organisation. “The Board can
hire someone to give them the best advice on strategy, but they can’t hire
someone to lead the people. They have to do that themselves. So leading people
involves understanding what motivates. I think a real differentiator of the
high-performing leader is not the ability to create a great strategy but the
ability to inspire people,” he says.
A
veteran hostage negotiator as well as a psychologist, the IMD Professor draws
analogies between a physically-held hostage and holding one’s mind hostage.
“The
essence of being a hostage is to be powerless. If I hold a weapon or scissors
to your head or body, you feel powerless. What is your emotional response? If
you don’t have a physical weapon, but you feel powerless, it produces an
equivalent result,” he explains, adding that people should free their minds
from being held hostage.
Kohlrieser
stresses a lot on values, beliefs and purpose, an ethic he ingrained from his
years as a farm boy in the rural outback in Ohio in the US and several years in
a seminary where he was training to be a priest, before he took to the world of
academia and consulting.
While
he dips into philosophy and psychology a lot to make his point, he says his
focus in on understanding people, even though strategy is important for an
organisation. “I love strategy and it is very important. I talk strategy with
my colleagues at IMD. But my focus is on understanding the person effect. Why does
one leader get a positive response and another does a similar thing and get a
negative response? Why are some leaders able to influence people positively and
others provoke negative responses. And studying that becomes important.”
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior Manager @
Knowledge Repository
Khaitan
& Co
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