I met my team F6 for MGMT Skills for leadership during the orientation. As a test run, each team was given a short case study ‘Icarus’ to present. Icarus was an eye-opener for us as we were all over the place. We breached the deadline, made last minute changes and were highly inefficient. This happened mainly due to conflicts of ideas and partly because of my idea of leading the team with ‘know it all’ attitude.
For long my idea of leadership was to be someone who is in the position of control and command, someone who can derive a project single handedly and someone who stay on top of everything. I have seen my understanding of leadership shifted during the course when I read the ‘Incomplete Leader’ article and learned about ‘15% initiatives’. I also got the hands on experience on these concepts as I participated in the sustainability team project wherein my team provided “triple bottom line” solutions for the assigned company.
The revelation that have shaped the way I approach the idea of leadership is summed up by the quote “No leader is perfect. The best one’s don’t try to be – they concentrate on honing their strengths and find other who can make up for their limitations”
A misconception that I had about leadership was that it required a person to do everything and be perfect. During my work experience I was told a number of times that you can lead from any position but I never believed it because it always came from the people who were in leadership
As part of the team project, I and my teammates started off by discussing the problems that the assigned company is facing and divided the work amongst ourselves. Reflecting on the Icarus project and Incomplete leader lesson, I decided that instead of taking charge of all the areas, let each member choose the part of the presentation that one wants to work on. This time I banked on the strengths of each team member. The result of this approach was that at the end everything fitted like a jigsaw puzzle.
During the project, accepting that a leader...
