--By Dr Rabindra Karna

 

Leadership is ability to ensure safe and sheltered feeling across the whole organisation. It’s not just managing uncertainty, adversity, crisis and changes but demands complete maturity and preparedness. It engages clarity around organisational, sharing, realising vision and most importantly coordination and balancing the inconsistency in interests of all organisational members, including stakeholders.  In the current competitive market scenario, change management requires greater self-assurance, alertness and serenity to manage uncertainty. 

 

Management scientists seemingly are aligned that leadership cannot be taught rather coaching may add value to learning and improvisation. The self-control of leader reflects in overall presence that comprises of body language, attitude, communication, decision-making, etc. It’s common for leaders to lose tranquility during crisis hours that mostly turns into worry and fear resulting to insecure workplace culture. Leaders’ serenity provides ease and comfort to the team/organisation, leaving no room for panic and adversity.

 

Remaining fearless amidst uncertainty is compulsory for leaders to retain confidence of those they lead. When situation becomes fearful, leaders must examine the “ultimate worst that can happen” and they will realize that fear is gone and uncertainty has become manageable. This is how most leaders live their professional life, beating uncertainty or keeping close friendship with it.

 

A positive position during crisis or in the hours of uncertainty helps counterbalance disarray and pandemonium allowing leaders also to correct any negativity that has come across. It is advisable to keep positive outlook and continue moving forward towards business objective. 

 

Most of the leaders try to control and wrestle against looking distressed and weak. During this process, stress multiplies and they become more stressed and reactive. Instead of managing challenges by accepting it as part of their professional journey, they put double efforts to get out of the psychological twinge. Stress is as natural as anything in life and is also the most critical acceptance in life that one needs for having healthy feelings that are essential to take and execute decisions and achieve better results as a leader. 

 

It is observed and known fact that leadership is full of challenges that necessitate building comfortable relationship amidst thorns. It also expects huge amount of control over discomforts while treading on the path of value driven action to advance executions and achievements. To guarantee oneself capability of efficient management of interference and refreshing the value proposition of the business, management, scientists/researches suggest professional leaders of overcoming of seven key challenges. These proposition, they claim, are essential to sustain strong profitability along with harmony in operation:

 

1. Emotional Intelligence: It has been noticed that many leaders lose emotional self-control and get distracted from the trouble in the hour of need. Leaders are expected to display high regard to self-control over emotion. They are expected to use emotion in order to lead philosophy and behaviour that supports differentiations and labeling variety of emotions appropriately.

 

Management scientists are unanimous that leaders that are gleaming technically and possess fantastic strategic capability but are harsh, discourteous, sharp and rude in operating routines and maintain simple transactional relationship might duly be lacking emotional engagement.

 

2. Confident and decisive: Guided by office politics and other dynamics, business decisions may not always be logical and hence leaders at times become defensive.  To overcome this challenge, leaders must remain daring with full confidence of facing adversaries. They are required to display passion, self-belief and ability for all cases. 

 

3. Positive Energy: A Leader who is often uncertain becomes lethargic that causes emergence of negative energy into the institution. During difficult times it is essential for leaders to know how to inspire employees and enhance positive rational stance. This also helps to sharpen leadership and problem solving skills – by staying sturdy and genuinely exhibiting a sense of kindness accompanied with smile.

 

4. Accountability: Remaining accountable reassures the decision of assuming responsibility to proceed for troubleshooting and begin neutralization of problems. As a leader, one need to discover the prospects implanted within problems. It enhances comfort and confidence in dealing issues in spite of the enormity of problems. It is easy to pass on and blame others for things not coming ones own way but true leaders never do that; rather take responsibility that helps sustain healthy culture. It knots total team to remain on mission and none of the problems gets chance of any adverse or added effect.

 

It is thus suggested for leaders to take initiative and deal with every problem. When we begin to connect with problems as opportunity, we observe that all the problems are same, only packs are different.

 

5. Change Management: Global market is changing rapidly. Due to incredibly brutal competition, it has become extremely difficult to sustain success. Change management is compulsion in current business context and if change is not served, solved and adopted, business is subject to paralysis/disability. Change keeps human resources, customers and as such the whole organisation on their toes. Leader must continuously be driving change that keeps organisation competent in the market, helps improve productivity, enhances human resource performance, promotes forward thinking, supports career advancement and brings improvement in overall operating standards. As a leader we need to be open and welcoming change and discover new ways to exploit resources challenging entire organization to follow the same.

 

6. Articulating Alternative: True leadership emerges while working with team to define alternative. It is important to guide total team towards preferred future. It’s easy to blemish dilemma, difficulty and trouble; its fairly another pole of magnet to form solution for the same. Being Leader, one's optimum value becomes visible while helping team to find and define productive alternatives. 

 

7. Talent Management: Mostly, leaders ignore appropriate allocation and utilisation of internal and external talent; while they are expected to never abuse resources. Most of the time, a leader may not be even aware of available resources like community, media, vendors etc., yet we need to learn optimum utilisation of resources in the form of knowing what and when to use them or not. Leaders need to be mindful of resources around that can strengthen organisational value offer.

 

An equal focus is desired from management leadership for skills retention and enhancement that ensures the sustainable bridging of knowledge gap. It is expected from leaders to focus on overall performance of the organisation and determine skills needed for improvisation. This also stops skills from stepping out of the door as it supports internal competition and disrupts unhealthy disruptions as disengagement also gets automatically discouraged.

 

To conclude, leaders are expected to be self-starter who enjoys competition. While these challenges are clearly route to enhance individuality that let a leader stand out remarkable, at times a leader needs to review and address areas of identified improvement. They need to leverage their usual competence and strength – it is the determinant of leadership quality and success. 

 

The best leaders are characterized by the existence of quality and potency, not the absence of limitations.

 

(Dr Karna is Executive Chairperson at MARK Business Solutions Pvt Ltd and Managing Director of Advance Cement. This article is based on various research reports and practical Experiences as Management Practitioner.)