Tag: self awareness

The Mantra of Personal Mastery


Recently at an IIM Udaipur conducted Management Development Program (MDP) for Indus Towers managers, I anchored four sessions. We started with the overarching perspective of Leadership and personal mastery before drilling down to specifics of Power & influence in teams, Managing high performance teams and the Feedback & Delegation aspects in Team Dynamics. We ensured a surfeit of activities, Role Plays and Case Studies to deepen the learning through practice and Ideation.

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In one of the sessions, we were in discussion of the aspects of ‘Honouring one’s word’ and ‘Being Authentic’ as performance accelerators of a team. Several participants mentioned their reservations about this, as under:

“If we become authentic and honour our word and others in the team do not do it, we would be taken advantage of and would be forced to do the work of others”

“All this is good theory but just does not work in real life. The fact is the Management has perceptions of who are good versus who are bad and irrespective of whether we honour our word or not, the favoured ones would get rewarded in terms of promotions and bonus”

In life, we are conditioned to judge others on moral and ethical yardsticks but remain quick to rationalize our own failings against the same yardsticks. We look around to try and determine who all are ‘honouring their word’ and tell ourselves that we would wait for others to honour and keep their word before we keep our own. As Chris Argyris had said about self-deception, ‘Put simply, people consistently act inconsistently, unaware of the contradiction between the way they think they are acting and the way they really act.’

 To gain the ability to honour our own word, we should be prepared to deeply deliberate and answer the question, ‘Where is my word when it comes time for me to keep my own word?’  In the ultimate analysis, there is a simple but inviolable equation of workability which is YOU are equal to YOUR WORD.

As I explained to the participants, team performance has very little to do with peering over shoulders to ascertain who is doing what. It has almost everything to do with how we can create trust of others in us. And creating trust has everything to do about Integrity viz. honouring our word and being authentic about how we show up for others. While some may try and take advantage of your trust in the short term, the aura of trust leads to team members gravitating towards you, working with you as you shift into being a natural leader.

How might you incorporate ‘Honouring your word’ and ‘Being authentic’ as part of how you show up tomorrow with your stakeholders?

In Learning……. Shakti Ghosal

Further Reading: ‘Integrity is a matter of a person’s word- nothing more, nothing less’– Michael Jensen, Professor Emeritus, Harvard Business School. Revised March 28, 2014.

Note : Indus Towers is India’s largest mobile tower installation company.  In India, 3 out of every 5 calls made are through an Indus site. https://www.industowers.com/

The Dynamics of Arrogance


Dear Reader,

I wish you an empowering and purposeful New Year.

As we get set to usher in a brand new 2019, I would like you to reflect on the following.

What could we do in a fast changing and complex world that would satisfy issues faced by our team?  How could we develop our relational intelligence to gain traction with stakeholders?  How could we construct a dynamic game plan to get our organisation shift from the present to the created future?

What if I told you that the key to each of the above questions lies in one specific aspect of our own personality? 

To understand this some more, let me tell you my own story.

As the business head, I was the top dog in the organisational hierarchy. I felt cocooned by the warm comfort of managers, supervisors and executives being there to do my bidding. Somewhere along the way, this ‘being there’ feeling changed into a ‘better than’ mindset. And this is when my leadership problems started.

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The being there mindset

I began to think of myself as superior. I thought that as a Leader I had to be! And this led to my being arrogant. Over time this became my garb. ‘I had to use every opportunity to make all these little people understand that I was simply better than they were!’ I could just not afford not to know everything there was to know. So the arrogance led to my being inauthentic. Worse, the decision making increasingly started bordering on ‘my way or highway’. For accepting an outside possibility would undermine me would it not! This of course led to my becoming isolated.

Dynamics of Arrogance

My inauthenticity and isolation started eating into the organisation’s openness and team work. And when this impacted overall performance, the blame game hit the roof. With me of course doing most of the blaming!

The turning point came with the plummeting organisational performance. It took the shape of the following.

  • The advent of Self Awareness in me that “I need to curb this feeling of superiority that rears its head every time I interact”.
  • Getting my hands dirty by adopting a ‘walking and talking’ leadership style and thereby becoming curious about people, not results.
  • Practicing the Attitude of Gratitude, realizing how fortunate I have been in receiving support of others inspite of my shortcomings.
  • Leading with Generosity by jettisoning the fear of being taken advantage of. Realizing that even though I would be taken advantage of,  that would be better than being closed to openness and possibilities.

So in the New Year, what could each one of us do as leaders to jettison our superiority mindset and arrogance?

In Learning……..

Shakti Ghosal