Q. Understanding leadership and its style is important to motivate employees and achieve organisational goals. How would you define your style of leadership?
A. I envision the kind of impact and outcome that needs to be produced with our customers and users, and create an organisation that motivates and leads the team to realise that. As a strategic thinker, I always look at the larger picture to achieve long-term organisational goals.
As a leader, I ensure that my team takes ownership and follows it till its completion. Ownership is a strong performance motivator. I invite participation and opinions of my team, understand their point of view before expressing my own. Employee responses work as a brainstorming session and hence help in getting new ideas from different perspectives.
Q. How does one measure the effect of leadership style on organisational effectiveness?
A. When leading an organisation that impacts the world, the effectiveness is entirely dependent on the style of leadership. The outcome produced is the key measure of the effectiveness.
Inviting employees to share the impact created for customers and having employees participate in setting targets and goals ensures their motivation to achieve the goals. Fulfilling these targets directly reflects on the outcome and the effectiveness of the leadership style.
Q. Leaders in India have a strong tendency to express dominance in their leadership styles. What reasons do you attribute to it?
A. The west has leaders with a profession-centric approach which reflects in their expression of ownership.
India and other long tradition economies are large business promoter driven and there is an inheritance implicit in that. The sense of ownership and affinity for the organisation is reflected as a dominant expression of leadership.
Q. Daniel Goleman, in his book Primal Leadership, describes six different styles of leadership namely visionary, coaching, affinitive, democratic, pacesetting and commanding. Please share your thoughts.
A. Emotions play an indispensable role in leadership. In today’s innovation driven world with a quest for empowerment, an effective leadership style from an organisational viewpoint is that of a visionary who thinks strategically for solutions to transcend generic approaches. From an employee’s perspective, a democratic leader encourages employees to have a free hand and this is a motivator to showcase the best of the employee’s potential.
Q. Leaders use different methods to get work done. What methods do you follow?
A. As a leader, I suggest and wait for my team to absorb the suggestion and come to terms with their responsibilities. My leadership style is that of a coach and a guide. I am always available and give employees the space to come up with their own strategies.
Q. How would you differentiate between transformational and transactional leadership?
A. Transformational leadership is the one where moving away from status quo is the need. The leader has to invite lot of people including the customers and users to change and realign in a new direction. Transformational leadership implies a forward movement encompassing growth with change to ensure progress in the future.
In transactional leadership, there is clarity about what needs to be done. Motivation, measurement, attention to details and constant monitoring are hallmark of this style of leadership.
Q. The style of leadership often depends on the situation and on leader’s personality. How complex is the interplay between these two factors?
A. A good leader has tremendous self-awareness and is accustomed to dealing with his or her own personal traits and judges a situation with greater relevance to the situation at hand. Leaders also have a good deal of flexibility in adopting themselves to a situation within a reasonable extent.
The complexity of the interplay between situation and the personality is directly related to the congruence between the style of leadership demanded by the situation and the natural personality of the leader.
Q. A great deal of research on leadership has focused only on leaders at the top level and not much on the leaders at middle or lower level. Why reasons do you attribute to it?
A. The top level people are the most visible part of the organisation and what they do has an impact on the entire institution, and even outside it. At the middle and lower levels, the leadership comes out in leadership moments and there have been studies and research in that area too. However, most of the time, it comes under the banner of character, not leadership.
Q. Organisational hierarchy is found to be one of the significant determinants of the leadership styles. Can you elaborate on that?
A. Hierarchy is inherent in any organisation because of the span of control. The higher an individual is in the hierarchy, the greater impact he has on the organisation.
The style of leadership plays an important role – as to where the leader is in the hierarchy structure determining their leadership style.
Q. What are the three key similarities in the western and Indian leadership styles?
A. Today, Indian and western leadership styles, though adopted in different demographics, have some key similarities which are as follows:
1 A leader always has an aspiration for growth with a vision of where he or she would like to take the enterprise in the future. 2 A leader across geographies is primarily concerned about and mindful of customers and employees. 3 Leaders have a global mindset that transcends the geographical space in which they operate.
