Find the leader in you!

A rekindle of past and present experiences that made who I am

Introduction

Hello everyone!,

This blog post is based on my experience and learnings that happened to shape the person I am and the leader I became in the process.

There are lot of references and guidance I take help in my every day life be it personal or professional to be an effective leader, a worthy person.

Just thought will share some of them with you all and I sincerely believe there is an experience that we can newly learn from each others life. Do comment your experiences and opportunities that you utilized to learn.

First and foremost for becoming a leader is to have a mentor.

Have a mentor to become a mentor!

I should say that I am one of the fortunates who got to work under a genuine soul, my first manager. His way of leading it by example has allowed us to learn everything from him practically. Even now to this date, all of my conducts and leadership style will be attributed to his empathetic role model.

Even after 20+ years, he is my goto person for any guidance, be it professional, personal etc…

Having a mentor doesn’t mean that you need to have a person explicitly called out as a mentor. You just need to find a person or sometime person(s) who’s leadership characteristics you would like to imbibe so that it brings the best in you, your actions and the positive change you wished for!

Some of character traits that I learnt and am sure will help you as well are

1.Always thank the person or team whose service you needed. No matter how small or big it is and do it right away.

We used to see it in our job. Our leader used to send the appreciation emails for the good work done as soon as it is due. Infact, there are days where we used to get his appreciation emails first followed by the actual email that someone else sent acknowledging the work - the very reason for the appreciations.

2.Always thank sincerely and address the individuals by name.

Our leader when he sends the appreciations or calls out the work done, he ensures that it is addressed to that individual and as well as the appreciation will be personalized for the work that person as done.

For example:

1. Congratulation John Doe for the extraordinary work done in performance tuning the application. By your hard work, the jobs that took 20+ hours to complete are taking mere 40 mins. Excellent work.

2. A well deserved promotion for John Doe. You have been instrumental in leading multi-million dollar projects. Your keen eye for implementation details, meticulous planning and support all through for your team led to the successfully delivery of the program.

You get the idea right! Always contextualize, bring in relevance and address them individually. It brings out that pride in the employee and they will feel very grateful and loyal. You will essentially be building a strong foundation of dedicated team members who will go above and beyond for they know that they are in the right place under right person.

3.Never blame your team even for their own mistakes

We have made fair share of goof ups. But as a leader, he has never put us on the line of fire. At the same time, he has always frontended us in any difficult situations and allowed us to be free of those pressure.

Internally in a closed group settings, he will walk us through some of his thought process on how to make the situation good. But even then he will never make it as if it is like - “I said so” (or) “I told you so”.

Ensure that your team can trust you and know that they always have your backing. Provide them the support as well as identify what are their strength / weakness and accordingly help them improve upon / overcome.

4.Servant Leadership attitude

In all the major work that we have delivered or where we have got the accolades, if I were to look closely, it is invariably his leadership and guidance behind the scenes that would have made the magic.

But when it comes to recognition, without a second thought he will pass it on to every single individual who has worked on it be it from his team or across the department. Never he will claim that recognition for himself.

Even when we explicitly say that it is because of him, the gracious acceptance and right way giving the due credits back to the team, indeed boosted the team morale very much. We felt that pride and self-esteem to be associated with him in any shape or form.

Ensure that the leader is nobody if there are no followers and to have followers, you need to recognize their true power which even they themselves wouldn’t have realized that they possess.

5.Walk in your leader’s footsteps

Not all times, you will have your leader around to guide you, mentor you and show you the right path. Sometimes, you will need to take some decisions and that’s where looking back on how he/she solved a similar challenge and the learnings that you can get by observing your leader will help.

So have a keen eye for observing how your leader conducts their daily business.

6.Have an open mind for learning from anyone.

Though I say, you should have a mentor to learn, there are always opportunities to learn from anyone. Be it your own family, kid, friend, neighbor, peer or some 3rd person you saw on the road. It doesn’t matter. As long as you have the inner urge to learn and are willing to learn good principles from anyone, you are becoming a great leader every single day.

Conclusion

I have thoroughly enjoyed working under my leader, have seen myself grown in my very own eyes from where I was and where I am. Even now in many a situations, I look back and put my leader in my shoes and think - “what would he do in this situation? how would he handle this issue?”. It has always worked for me and I cannot thank enough my leader for all the mentoring and guidance that he has done and continues to do.

To put it shortly, it is a blessing to have a great leader and let us also try being that blessing for someone else in their life.

Happy Leadership! Thanks for reading!