– YES! I AM A LEADER –

Being a leader has always been my aim from a very young age since the day I came across the quote “A Leader is one who knows the way, goes the way and shows the way – John C Maxwell” (John C Maxwell 1993 – Developing the leader within you). I was fascinated after realizing the importance of a leader in a company and personally troubled, not knowing what steps to take in order to achieve this goal. That is when I crossed paths with one of the most inspirational leaders in South Asia, Mr Sohan Roy.

Sohan Roy is a Forbes listed multi-billionaire, CEO and owner of Aries group of companies, with over 53 companies in 15 countries across the world. He started off his career as a Naval architect, conquered the seas and then plunged into his passion towards the Indian film industry (Sohan Roy 2019). Apart from his various accomplishments in the film industry over the years, he is also the owner of the revolutionary US$10 Billion initiative and south Asia’s biggest film carnival, Indywood (IFC 2019).His perspective towards management inspired me so much, that I followed his path and achieved the position of working as the project manager of Indywood for two years. Over my work period, i induced an autocratic leadership towards the 178 employees who used to work under me. My strong delegation and troubleshooting skills helped me throughout my role as a leader and assisted me in completing every task put forth, under the time limit. I soon started facing situations similar to that of the case study of Ricardo Semler (Ricardo YouTube interview) where my subordinates were struggling with high work pressure and health problems due to prolonged working hours. In order to build my team building skills, I decided to adapt to Adair’s model of Action centred leadership (Adair 1979).

My Development Plan

Through the implementation of Adair’s model, I could improve my leadership skills by achieving the objectives of the group, meeting the needs of the individual members of the group as well as maintaining morale and team building spirit (Mullins 2016).Once I have gained the trust and support of the entire team, I would move ahead with a situational leadership style, so that I could analyse each team members ability and assign them tasks accordingly(Brighide team al (2011:1060)),thereby making them more efficient and happy at the same time.

I continued my pursuit towards team management skills by taking up a post graduate degree in management and working close with my colleagues in team building activities.As each activity passed by, I felt the difference in an environment where everyone worked together towards the aim, whilst having fun and respecting each other equally.Getting feedback from my peers played an important role in sculpturing myself, hence I decided to use the Johari window so as to develop a self-insight, thereby reducing the hidden area through self disclosure and the blind area through my teams feedback (Mullins 2016).  

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Team Feedback

From the various feedbacks that I received from my fellow teammates, I was able to analyse myself and identify the loopholes in my leadership skills. I realised that I had to work on my Team building and listening skills, to achieve a proper democratic leadership. I sorted out to ask myself, how I could lead my team more effectively, and finally came up with a solution. Based on an article by Tuckman and Jensen, we need to structure our leadership plan in steps of Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing and Adjourning so as build up the perfect working team (Tuckman and Jensen (1977)).

My Future

Each person is different with a different set of skills and techniques. If the task is tailored according to their interest, the outcome could be doubled in the same time frame. Therefore, I wish to build and design a team according to Belbins team roles for better output (Belbin 2012). By adapting to leadership styles as mentioned above and the feedbacks from my fellow colleagues, I can surely overcome my drawbacks so as to become the ideal Leader that I had dreamed of, since childhood.

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References

John Adair – Handbook of Management and Leadership, available at http://kolegjifama.eu/materialet/Biblioteka%20Elektronike/Handbook_of_Management_and_Leadership.pdf

Tuckman and Jensen (1977) – available at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/105960117700200404

Sohan Roy 2019 – available at http://www.sohanroy.com/about.php

IFC 2019 – available at https://www.indywood.co.in/indywood-concept

Ricardo semler case study – available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4vzhweOefs

Belbin, R.M., (2012). Team roles at work

Riccardo semler youtube interview – available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=17&v=USC1RE8jE50&feature=emb_logo

Brighide team al (2011:1060) – available at https://newedgeleadersuzi.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/m005-e04-unit-6-leadership-jan-2015.pdf

John C Maxwell 1993 – Developing the leader within you