Chapter 4 - Methods Of Developing Leadership Skills
Day 5
The key to success for anyone in this world is effective communication conveying the intended meaning,
timely two-way communication. Do not just say whatever you feel is right and walk away.
Make sure that the person has received and digested your message and responded to it. It is your ability to evoke a reciprocal response from whoever you are communicating with.
And this will not happen unless you are truly integrated in your own life. So I would say that it is every individual's birthright to have a disease-free body, a quiver-free breath, a confusion-free mind.
An inhibition-free intellect, a trauma-free memory and an ego which is not constrained but which encompasses everyone. And I would give the term spirituality to anything that provides all these.
I see it as a force which does not allow anything or anyone to take the smile away from you. We need to be able to smile through any adverse situation.
4. Having Freedom At The Workplace - When you are at peace with yourself, you can re-create this peace in your workspace and the work culture will also improve.
You will need to give some thought to how you can create an easy and informal atmosphere for others around you at work. When you walk in and out of the office, you always get a greeting.
Are these genuine or superficial? Most of the pleasantries we exchange come from a superficial level, greetings like thank you very much', or you did a good job' or have a nice day.
The entire work environment is filled with such superficial, sometimes even hypocritical greetings. How can you expect such an environment to produce the results you are looking for?
When the President of the World Bank met me, he asked what the secret of my success was and how I got so much work done with so little money at my disposal.
I told him that it was not just the money that did it but something more. It was the freedom at the workplace. In the span of just one year, 3,000 volunteers adopted 21,000 villages in India, in the 5H programme.
This was done incurring an expenditure of only two crore rupees. Nobody could believe it but it did happen. They could construct roads, provide proper drinking water and do many more things with that amount.
And it is purely due to the dedication and inspiration of those involved. We should know the difference between motivation and inspiration. We can motivate somebody by giving them a few hundred rupees.
But such a motivation is short-lived. It will only last two or three months. After that, they will want some money again. If people are not inspired from within, it will not be possible to build a good work ethic.
Work culture revolves around either inspiration or emergency deadlines or fear psychosis. And if such fear psychosis is created in people, it works for some time, but it is not a healthy thing in the long run.
Today, many of our work set-ups increasingly run on fear psychosis. To meet deadlines, it is this insecurity that we need to lose, rather than the motivation.
5. Developing The Right Mindset - Our mindset is the next thing we need to attend to. I think there are two kinds - one is the labour union mind and the other is the authoritarian mind.
The labour union mind tends to point a finger at others. Such a person may feel that the manager is not good enough, that the senior is not nice - he does not let the juniors take their own decisions.
If your mind is in the present moment, it will stop complaining. Your complaining is a product of your minute. The authoritarian-minded person always feels that only he can do something, that no one else is as efficient or capable as he is.
In this country, right from ancient times, we have been very good at delegating. Though there is one God, we have divided God into creator, manager and transformer - Brahma, Vishnu, and Mahesh.
We have allocated three important portfolios to women - finance to Lakshmi, education to Saraswati and defence to Durga. Delegation is important but it can only happen when you step out of the authoritarian mindset.
Such a mindset does not allow the leader to take responsibility for making others work. This is on the managerial level. So if he does not trust anybody with work, how will he motivate or inspire the team to sustain their efforts?
6. Realising Dreams - It is very important to dream. But there has to be a fine balance between practicality and dreams. When you are given certain tasks, you find that they get done because of your atmik shakti, along with your sankalpa shakti.
Sankalpa is your determination.
Once I had announced that I would go to Pakistan. But I had no visa till the last day. Our people talked to many people but everyone was discouraging. They urged me not to go.
The Pakistani authorities had
found out that I had an Israeli stamp in my passport. Islamabad follows a policy of not granting a visa if the applicant's passport has an Israeli stamp in it.
So people began to wonder what was going to happen because a big programme had already been arranged for me in Islamabad and Karachi. But it happened.
I insisted that I just had to go. And I got the visa because I was bent on it. I got it at 4 pm, and took the 6 pm flight. The Pakistani High Commissioner and I were in the same place, where the SAARC meeting was going on in Pakistan, and even he was amazed as to how I had obtained the visa.
The human mind assumes that it works in isolation, but the truth is that there is some other force also at work. You can move ahead and achieve all you want against all odds. You just have to have the faith. There was another incident.
One evening, a big satsang had been planned in Ambala. But it had been raining all day. The organisers had the faith that if we had planned an evening satsang, the rain would stop by then.
And their conviction was such that there was no rain in the evening and we had a great satsang. And this has happened not once but over and over again.
Nature supports you when you have the conviction. It was Guru Gobind Singh Ji who revived this culture in our country. The entire country is indebted to him.
He told us to work like warriors. It is this warrior-like quality which is needed if we wish to realise our dreams. Unfortunately, our corporate culture is clogged by a comfort zone attitude.
We prefer to live in our own comfort zone and not be adventurous. We do not want to stretch ourselves a little more than we think we can. We need to inspire people around us, to push them a little to make them do what they can do.
I want to give you another example. I was told that there is a certain place, a village in China, where they make only buttons. The buttons on our shirts are all made in China.
This one village monopolises the production of buttons. We may feel that manufacturing of buttons is a small industry. But it is a wonder the way the industry has grown and that village has become strong.
This kind of phenomenon was
common in India too but it is not seen much anymore. Different communities specialising in different things is a practise that can boost our economy, our self confidence, it can benefit the morale of our people.
