‘Leadership Clinic’ run to churn unique ideas

Most leaders are focused on the bare minimum required to run businesses: increasing employee output, turning in profits and maximising shareholder value. However, these are challenges that run a lot deeper, and require a set of core skills.

The concept is inspired by the Bhagwad Gita. To drive it home, IIM Kozhikode  organised a three-day workshop recently titled — Leadership Clinic — with the heads of India Inc in Mumbai.

“The workshop  focused on the inner life of the participants and particularly on the mental models they use to deal with situations in their work lives,” says  Mr Chatterjee. He says the deep-rooted cultural acceptance of values in India is increasingly relevant in modern workplaces.

Almost 50 directors and CEOs of companies like HSBC, Nokia, 3i-Infotech (Europe) Coal India, Vijaya Bank, Aegis, Jindal Steel and Power and ACC participated in the workshop, where conventional views on leadership was debated.

The premise of the workshop is to challenge indoctrinated learning and help participants discover their own model that could benefit stakeholders, employees and shareholders, besides the community.

“There’s need of a breakthrough in corporate training that will go beyond the classical theory of magic pills, methodologies that either ‘tell’ or ‘ask’,” says Aparup Sengupta, MD and global CEO, Aegis, the ITeS arm of Essar.

He believes the workshop is not in a ‘catch the leader’ programme. “Leadership is an infinite possibility residing everywhere and with every being. This will provide elements of discovering them through experience.”

Most organisations are struggling to find potential leaders who would mentor others to realise their potential, says another participant from Delhi, Prakash V Bhide, president, corporate HR of JK Organisation (Eastern Zone).

“I hope the workshop would have helped participants explore and experience unique ways to get in touch with their leadership potential and how they can help others realise their own leadership identity,” he says.

The workshop seeks to bring a different definition to leadership skills. “It is not the function of a leader to motivate followers. It is the function of a leader to find out what is demotivating followers and systematically get rid of it,” says Mr Chatterjee.