Leadership Excellence: And the Power of Soft Skills

By Swami Bodhananda

Swami Bodhananda connects leadership excellence in an intricate yet simple manner to the life and soft skills needed.  Through Five Themes: Relationships, Happiness, Joy of Doing, Nurturing Values, and Caring and Sharing, he elaborates in a practical manner how excellence in leadership can be achieved, as well as the critical and reflective thinking needed to be in touch with the environment and people from a practical perspective.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: May 10, 2024

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SWAMI BODHANANDA

LEADERSHIP EXCELLENCE

And the Power of Soft Skills

LEADERSHIP EXCELLENCE AND THE POWER OF SOFT SKILLS

Chapter One

Relationships

Leaders and managers operate in a networked world of nested relationships. All the stakeholders in an enterprise have to be satisfied for enduring success. More important is the personal touch and feeling that one brings into relationships. How to develop the energy and language of the heart to develop and sustain enduring relationships will be the major thrust of this presentation.

The topic, Leadership Excellence and the Power of Soft Skills that we will be reflecting for the next five evenings, I think, is a very important topic, especially in the context of what is happening in our country and in the world at large.

What distinguishes a leader from the ordinary folk? We are all leaders in our own respective spheres of activity, whether you are a housewife, corporate tycoon, a political boss or a research scientist, whichever area you operate, in those areas, on your own right, you are a leader. The leader is one who takes decisions and whose decisions affect people around him. A leader is one who resolves conflicts, and the world is full of conflicts. So what distinguishes a leader from a manager, or a technician, is the soft skill—the ability to touch your heart, the ability to transform your vision, especially his followers—one who can move the stakeholders from a mediocre to a higher level of thinking.

A leader speaks from his heart, not just from the head, though intellect is very important in leadership decisions. A person who simply talks from his heart is an emotional person, and he cannot be a leader. He can only cry and you feel sympathy for him. A leader is one who can think rationally, pragmatically and at the same time can power his thinking with his emotion and passion. Without passion, you cannot reach anywhere. Passion is energy, the fuel and reason gives you the direction. Without direction, passion has no purpose, is blind. Mere passion can lead you nowhere, except to the nearest ditch.

A leader is one who harnesses passion to reason, thinks through his passion, speaks from his heart, has integrated his head and heart, and is totally committed. There are lots of rational people in this world who can collect and crunch data, analyze it, and then arrive at solutions. They become good consultants. They can give you options such as ‘if you do this, this will be the consequence’, ‘if you do that, something else will be the outcome’, etc. There are people who can give you options and alternatives. But still someone should be there t0 take decisions based upon those options.

You cannot prevaricate between many choices for long. A leader has to focus and decide on painful choices. It is not just crunching data, or rational analysis. What is important is intuitiveness, intuitive wisdom, ability to see clearly the future and communicate his convictions to the people around him who may think differently. Different people hold different ideas and opinions and have different ways of looking at the world. People think mainly of their security and well-being. A leader has to take interests of all stakeholders into consideration, and factor their thinking in his decision making.

What distinguishes and makes a leader effective are his soft skills, the ability to manage, channelize and coordinate emotions and feelings into productive team work. We need excellent leaders who pursue excellence in life and work. The Bhagavad Gita defines Yoga, self- management, as ‘excellence in work’. Excellence is a relentless, ongoing pursuit. You cannot say I have reached excellence. There is no end in the pursuit of excellence. You can go on and on and on ….

This is the substance of soft skills. What makes a leader different from a technocrat or bureaucrat is the soft skill that he has. Hard skill is a given in any one who passes out from an IIT or IIM. But hard skills alone do not make a leader. A leader may have all the hard skills, which is not even possible, in this complex world of specialization. At the same time a leader has to bring into the decision making process varied and diverse skill sets. A given individual is not expected to have mastery over all those domains. You may have studied law, but you have not studied engineering. You have studied engineering, but have not studied economics; you have studied economics, but have not studied psychology. You have studied all these, but you don’t have the knowledge of history. Unfortunately, in the modern world, more and more specialization makes you more and more blind, a kind of tunnel vision, due to which you are unable to see things in perspective or holistically.

Leadership and the Ability to Bring Diverse Talents

The leader needs to have a holistic vision, and the ability to bring diverse talents together in the decision making process. Leader is like a mother in a family set up. When children fight for a pencil or a book, or a musical disk, etc. the mother intervenes. She has the total vision about the well-being of the family, understanding about the genuine needs of each member of the family and the resource constraints. She asks the children to sit down and very sweetly she will talk. She will take into consideration the interest and the follies and foibles of all her children in taking a decision.

On that respect, a considerate and emphatic mother is a better leader than any politician or businessman or army general. We can learn a lot of management and leadership lessons from family settings. The initial lessons of leadership were learnt from battlegrounds and religious organizations.

Like a cricket captain who understands the capabilities and feelings of each player and fields them accordingly, as victory of the team is his ultimate objective, the leader has to creatively involve each member of his work force in realizing organizational goals. The same is the case with a housewife, a war leader or a spiritual master in their respective fields of activity.

The leader has to take care of the interests of all stakeholders optimally. You cannot ignore one part of the body and emphasize another part. You cannot ignore the worker and promote the shareholder, nor can you ignore progress and promote ecology. A leader is focused and acts locally without losing sight of the big picture. These are some of the skills a leader has to have for successfully operating in the world.

The defining characteristic of the modern world is connectivity. There was a time when the world was not connected so intimately. In the 1960s, it was almost next to impossible to make a phone call from America to India. First, it was expensive, second it was time consuming as there was no band-width. Similarly, to find an Indian restaurant in America or Europe was like searching for a needle in a haystack. Today you go to any corner of the world, even to Timbuktu, you will find an Indian tea stall. Wherever you go you will find people congregated from all parts the world, belonging to different cultures, races, languages and religions. You find Filipinos, Indians, Chinese, Africans, Sri Lankans, Tibetans, Vietnamese—a rainbow mix of people of all shapes and shades. Connectivity is the space in which a modern leader operates.

To Feel Comfortable with Constant Change

Another aspect of the modern world is the constant movement of people. Earlier nobody would want to move out of their villages because people’s needs were few and they lived self-sufficiently and happily in their villages shut out from the outer world. These days you couldn’t care less selling your ancient home in the village and moving out to a city, or even abroad. You don’t mind living in a rented apartment.

Those who are comfortable with constant movement, from job to job, from city to city and from country to country alone can survive in the modern world. You cannot be glued to your own little house in a little village and say I want to live here. One thing is that it will be economically unwise, for someone is going to offer you an attractive price or the government may take it by offering market value for setting up a Special Economic Zone. As the saying goes, ‘you have to keep running to stay stable in this ever changing world’. Anyone who wants to be a successful entrepreneur or leader has to feel comfortable with constant change.

The third dominant factor that rules the present world is market competition. Competition for scarce resources is very acute and ruthless in the modern world. If you lose, the winner will swallow you up. You cannot survive as a loser in this world. If you lose in one field, you have to move to another field as fast as possible, otherwise you will miss opportunities.

Here is a story that illustrates the point. Two friends were relaxing in a forest. They were on an adventure trip. Unexpectedly, they saw a bear. The bear advanced towards them. The startled friends picked up things and took to their heels. While they were running—you cannot outrun a bear, which runs at 50 miles per hour—one of them sat down and started putting on his sneakers. The other one who was still running shouted, ‘What a foolish fellow you are. You think you can outrun the bear by wearing the sneakers’? ‘I need not have to outrun the bear, I have to only outrun you, because if you lose the run, the bear will pounce on you and I can escape while the bear deals with you’, said the cunning friend. The bear of competition will eat up the loser, and the winner will run with the booty.

The leader has to emerge through a process of competition based on rules. Competition has become global in this closely knit and networked world. People can come from any corner of the world to challenge your competence and leadership. Earlier, let us say till the eighties, competition was confined within national, regional or linguistic boundaries- between Indians, or among Gujaratis or Andhraites. You could appeal to people’s national, regional or linguistic loyalties in creating competitive advantages. Competition is global now with global rules and standards governing the process of competition. There is no more Indian or American standard, unlike the Indian secretary of Commonwealth Game said, ‘this is the Indian standard of cleanliness’! There is no Indian or American cleanliness.

Vikram Pandit, the CEO of Citicorp is an Indian; Indra Nooyi, who runs PepsiCo, is a South Indian. Nitin Nohria, the Dean of Harvard Business School, is a Maharastrian Indian. Talents, especially of leadership quality, are very rare in this world. Big corporations will vie with each other to recruit the best and the brightest from anywhere in the world, wherever they are. They will send you a helicopter to bring you to the headquarters, will give you fat salaries, dine you, wine you and fuss over you, if you are talented.

Connectivity, Mobility and Competition

These are three important factors that characterize the world today—connectivity, mobility and competition. It is imperative that we know all these things. India is facing stiff competition from China. China is far ahead of India economically and socially. There was a brief period of time when scholars clubbed India with China—the Indian Tiger and the Chinese Dragon. Now, in 2012, China is far ahead of India. We have to compete with China. Otherwise China is going to eat us up. China may not physically or militarily dominate India. But China will shame us in GDP growth as well as in HDI standards.

China is geographically three times as big as India. China has three trillion dollars in their foreign exchange kitty, whereas India has only 300 billion dollars. China’s foreign trade is five times more than India’s. Indians smugly say that they exported Buddhism to China. But that is only an old story. Today in 2012, China is giving us stiff competition. Chinese goods are flooding Indian markets. Even Ganesha idols and Diwali crackers are imported from China. An emboldened China has started making claims on Arunachal Pradesh in the east and in Ladakh