My article “Leadership is Branding” in TMS Learning Exchange E-Journal (Australia):
“Hemant Karandikar rounds out the edition with a unique angle by highlighting the connections, and sometimes parallels, between leadership and branding to give learning points for us all.”
Here is the link http://bit.ly/12MCtmg (Log in required. It is free)
Hindu Business Line, March 5, 2013, Hemant Karandikar’s interview by Vinay Kamath ( Link to the original article http://bit.ly/1517AyQ )
Leaders are self made. Anyone can improve leadership skills. One may be born with intellect or personality, but one has to use it, work on it and keep improving.
Why do you call it regenerative leadership? How do you define it?
I use the term ‘Regenerative Leadership’ to convey an important benefit of this development framework — it helps you to regenerate your time, talent, and resources. It helps you to regenerate your organisation. The ‘Regenerative Leadership’ achieves more from less, it embraces changes before they threaten existence, and it sets the organisation on to the virtuous loop of higher and higher performance.
Why did you adopt this workbook approach?
I have always believed that knowing something is important only if I can apply it. There are a large number of books on leadership. Many articles and research papers regularly appear on the subject. We know that leaders think differently. Unfortunately, most of the books focus on experiences of others (case studies) alone and on ‘prescribing’ things. Most leadership development programmes also take the same prescriptive approach. There is a lot to read but little to practice. To change your thinking you need practice and improvisation in your own area of work.
I took this workbook approach to offer a practical, experiential, and a directly useful program and to make leadership learning more accessible.
Who do you think will benefit from this approach as it requires some degree of meticulousness? At what level of people in an organisation can use this approach?
Anyone who has a strong desire to improve her or his leadership skills and who is willing to commit to personal thinking efforts can benefit from this book. The book will benefit leaders at all levels — CEOs, business heads, intrapreneurs, functional or operational heads, departmental heads, middle-level managers, group or team leaders, and experts. Entrepreneurs, business owners, and those working in social organisations will find this programme book valuable. This book is suitable for business school students. Anyone who is preparing to take up any of the above roles for career advancement will find this book useful.
Are leaders born or made? I mean you can go through executive coaches, leadership courses at Harvard, workbooks et al and yet be a lousy leader.
Leaders are self made. Anyone can improve leadership skills further. One may be born with intellect, personality, or inheritance, but one has to use it, work on it, and keep improving. We all take on responsibilities, therefore, we all lead.
Improving leadership skills is like improving any other skill — driving, running, cooking etc. One needs to have passion for it and one needs to practice correct techniques. A few people manage to improve skills through experience without direct help. For all the rest, intentional practice of good techniques helps. Coaching helps even further.
Yes, it is possible to be a lousy leader despite ‘going through’ various programmes, if someone lacks willingness to learn and sincerity to take efforts. No programme can help such people.
Have you measured or gauged how somebody has emerged as a ‘regenerative leader’ after he has gone through this workbook?
My ‘Regenerative Leadership’ programmes have a workout for mapping leadership skills’ baseline. I have used this to gauge changes in leadership skills of people — those people who worked with me in the company I headed during 1998-2001 and those people who worked with my client companies during my consulting work. As people improve their leadership skills they start spending more time in doing things that help regeneration, for example, innovation, improving processes, preventing rework, shared learning and so on. Anyone using the book can use this workout to find their own starting line. After one has worked through the book and implemented one’s action points one can see the changed leadership baseline. One will notice a tangible improvement.
‘Lead to Regenerate’ is now in Crossword book stores and how! It took its time to get to the book store.
But it is in some great company. The book is available on flipkart.com and it will reach other book stores as well.
Lead to Regenerate is unlike many other books on leadership. It is neither jargon laden nor it is simplistic. It presents a whole new way of learning leadership. Read all about the book here http://www.learning-leadership.com/blog/lead-to-regenerate/ and read book reviews here
Take out some time to look up a recent review by Makarand Karakare here http://mkarkare.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/lead-to-regenerate/
“Lead to Regenerate” : If you have any difficulty in obtaining the book, please contact the publisher here
A workbook for you
Ananya Publishing House, an imprint of The Word Bookshop, 899/Boottee Street, Camp, Pune 411001, India. Email : ananyapublishing@gmail.com Ph. 020-30580010/11/13 – 09370678113
Info about the book is here http://bit.ly/ZUbqon
Learning to lead? First, give some thought to how we learn.
We all begin our life learning. We see infants and toddlers learning all the time. They get up and fall. They get up again. They try to climb, they slip. They climb again. They try to catch a ball, they miss it. They try again. They try to utter a word that they hear, they make strange sounds. They try again. They take all the help they can grab. They imitate, try, and they improvise. They don’t give up.
In our schools too, we learn more by trying to solve problems, thinking up an answers to questions than by just reading books and listening to lectures.
As we get mature, we start learning by asking questions to ourselves and through reflection, synthesis, hypothesizing, and experimenting. We should. Experimentation is same as trying and improvising by children.
Why should learning of leadership skills be restricted to lectures or presentations , reading others’ experiences, and solving others’ case studies? It shouldn’t be.
Since leaders think differently and in better ways, learning should involve thinking ‘differently’ kind of habit forming practice. Thinking needs some fodder. What better fodder than your own work situations -goals and issues, logic, emotions, and decision making? This fodder also allows experimentation and improvisation which others’ case studies can’t.
Think!
If you think you and your team need such leadership practice, you can have it through the ’Lead to Regenerate Program Book‘ or ‘Learning Leadership‘ web site.
Share the link, order it, use it, develop your team, review it.
The program book for learning Regenerative Leadership “Lead to Regenerate” can now be easily purchased on flipkart.com (direct link http://buff.ly/ZJiNxT ) Book reviews by business leaders and experts are here
The book is meant for your ‘use’ . Do buy copies for yourself, your team members, and have it ’used’ by them. It will do much more than expensive management development programs on practically a shoe string budget. Rs 699 per person and the person’s about 16 hours of ‘own work’ over a couple of weeks and a small monitoring effort. That’s all!
You may contact the publisher for corporate and quantity discounts here:
The Word Bookshop, 899 Boottee Street, Pune 411001. 020-30580010/11/13 – 09370678113. thewordbookshop@gmail.com
The ‘ rules’ or traits or capabilities -or whatever you may call them -of leadership don’t change. For example, ability to learn quickly, ‘walking’ around to understand what is happening, respect for individuals and many such things have always been leaders’ capabilities. So also, the ability to see big(ger) picture, practicing values, and ability to develop people have always been important for leadership.
Businesses, markets, technologies, offerings change. e.g. trawling the net and participation in social media interaction may be today’s equivalent of ‘walking’ around.
Let us understand and learn the first principles of leadership well. Let us also learn about markets, businesses, technologies, cultures etc well. Both are important, but let us not get mixed up about them.
Every now and then the ‘Culture Fix’ appears. A research paper is published to show what the culture fix achieved and what it did not. Everything from revenue growth to employee satisfaction is shown to have changed dramatically due to the culture fix.
Here is one more article on the subject. A $15,000 desk, an oriental rug, shift to another office, banning people from checking emails during meetings, a two day trust building meeting, deploying 15 culture champions and such ‘powerful’ actions fix culture. So it seems. And yes there is also a famous ‘work-not-from-home’ edict as part of this culture thing.
And the astonishing thing is that these fixes are said to work. Even more astonishing is that management experts consider these worthy of research.
Every time a new CEO arrives he or she talks ‘culture’ which was just fine until the day before. No wonder that employees get thoroughly cynical of any such talk.
Real changes in culture happen through a passionate, committed, and consistent leadership at various levels and which has a firm long term agenda other than just bonuses. Culture changes ever so slowly and through change of thinking , through the way values are practiced (used for making all decisions), through improving business processes and through making tangible difference to customers, employees, vendors, and then other stake holders. None of it is dramatic and none of it gets easy press. And management folk falls for culture fixes. That is the problem.
Around the Women’s Day, the discussion on this subject had an added intensity. Much of the suggestions dealt with what should the corporations do, how men’s attitude needs to change, security aspects, work-life balance etc. A blog post on the WSJ argues that the real hurdle in women’s career growth is the amount time that they need to put in and what companies can do to organize work.
Rightly so -there is a lot to do in all these areas.
I think we are missing an important point -pressed as they are for time, how women should get the best out of their time at work. It seems to be a given thing that as you climb the career ladder you need to put in more and more time at work.
The notion that when you have higher level of responsibilities or you are handling bigger sales revenue you need more time is absurd. It also makes a mockery of the thing called ‘organization’ which supposedly has people at different levels and in specialist positions and that these people are responsible for their work. The argument that ‘buck stops her’ is wrongly used.
The buck stops at every leadership level -the leader must make sure that people in the team are doing their own jobs. Most fail. Leaders become ‘pure’ managers who somehow manage to get results -make hard workers do more, take short cuts, put in more personal efforts, put off important work with long term consequences. In short they don’t lead.
Everyone who works this way has to put in a lot of time at work. Much more than needed causing burnouts, health or family issues. Unfortunately leadership is implicitly made synonymous such ‘heroic’ methods. It necessary to junk such a ‘heroic’ model of leadership.
That is where the model of Regenerative Leadership comes in. This model helps ‘creating’ time. It puts focus and onus on an individual to learn powerful techniques and thinking patterns. Current and potential women leaders can benefit because they have to accept this unhappy trade off between work that they enjoy and the family they cherish.
Men can benefit too.
Programs are at Learning Leadership (web based) at http://buff.ly/P2mKIj and in the book form Lead to Regenerate program book http://buff.ly/P1TzFE. Workshops and face-to-face sessions are also available on request. Visit these links and write to support@learning-leadership.com
Now you will have another big brother; your employer will be glad to put you permanently under his gaze. Read this
Your office furniture, windows, coffee machines, wash rooms, and all that fitted with sensors will tell your employer much more than your clicks and keystrokes and falling asleep at your desk.
Though some sensor fitting programs may be essential and beneficial such techniques will give illusions of control and betterment to CEOs who have no connection with their organizations, managers who don’t walk around to observe, and all those who are too lazy to lead meaningfully.
If you wonder why should you work in such places, you should!