|
 Leadership
is all about managing people. The one essential, indispensable factor
in a company being able to create the right customer experience
that is so necessary for its continued survival is its people. A
company will have among its employees, planners, enablers, and doers.
But it doesn't pay to forget that all of them are people and that
their roles can never be compartmentalised in a rigid fashion.
A leader's first concern should be to formulate
a vision for his organisation. The vision must be an operating system
for the company, providing a roadmap for the future and enabling
the employees to benchmark themselves against the best in their
class in the world. It also follows from this that the leader must
build a first-class team that is not only able to relate to his
vision, but exhibits an enthusiasm to live up to the highest quality
benchmarks.
If he is to truly energise his organisation,
a leader must select team members who are self-driven and can meet
and exceed the performance targets laid down by the organisation.
Another critical factor on which a leader's
success hinges is his ability to stimulate a thinking environment
within the organisation. For decades, 'think' was the guiding philosophy
at IBM. All employees, not just the top management, should participate
in ideation and adding value. A leader, in fact, must insist that
his whole organisation remain constantly in the ideation mode. If
a leader is successful in getting the whole organisation to 'think',
a major competitive weapon will be unleashed.
Last, but by no means the least, leadership
is about accessibility, encouragement and guidance, not just the
ability to define an organisation's values in purely negative terms.
|
