Vikram is a star maker. He creates a start leader in a person so that they can develop a powerful executive presence, stand out, and build market dominance. He started his journey in 2003 and since then he has spent 20 years decoding the behaviour of star leaders on how they connect, collaborate, and compete with ease. At Coach Vikram, we help leaders with clarity to solve critical problems, drive business value, and succeed in a competitive business environment. Coach Vikram has previously worked with Aditya Birla Group, Asian Paints, Avendus, Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance Company, Bank Of America, BCG, Capgemini, Concept Medical, Continental, DBS, DE Shaw, Eaton, Fresenius-Kabi Oncology, Google, Gyanodaya- Aditya Birla Global Center for Leadership, HDFC Life, J.P.Morgan, KPMG, Mahindra, Marico Innovation Foundation, McKinsey, Lightspeed India Partners, MegaDelta Capital, Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, More Retail, Nomura, PwC, Rheo TV, SBI Card, TEDx, True North, UTI AMC, VISA, Young Presidents’ Organization, ZS Associates.
Whatever your level of intelligence, expertise, drive, or enthusiasm, your potential to lead and motivate a team will determine how successful you are as an entrepreneur. An influential leader is one who can motivate his/her team members to coordinate well towards a shared vision. Owing to the exceptional quality of the staff, a company has exponential growth. Although, an organization constantly tries to improve, is it really doing enough to identify as high performing organization? Actually, no. For instance, in a recent event, the company head hosted an annual two-day event to honour the best 5 of the employees across the organisation with an objective of developing the leadership team. Furthermore, he/she received an invitation to a posh mountain resort. The first night featured an elegant gala with speeches from the CEO and a few unexpected visitors—often from the world of sports followed by a pleasant first day. The fundamental victories from the previous year were celebrated. The CEO provided some fantabulous anecdotes about the company’s former years to contextualise these incredible successes. He revealed to the audience, “I remember when we had a $150,000 a day, and we were celebrating. Our best day of the year was $29 million in the current year. That’s more than we sold in all of 1984!”
When a leader actively listens to people, it promotes psychological safety, builds trust between the two parties, and demonstrates empathy for others. Your function as a partner, friend, colleague, coach, and mentor will be strengthened by your ability to listen carefully, ask questions, clarify, and encourage people to share their standpoints. After rejoicing everyone’s as well as the company’s successes that evening, concentration was on the day two now. We are nowadays drilling into our forthcoming leadership team development initiatives. He would stimulate others by using metaphors. He juxtaposed with being in the top 5% of performers for getting nominated for the Olympic team. “You were magnificent during the previous year; just like you’ve accomplished the 100 metres in 9.9 seconds. However, now that the competition is toughened, we require you to cut that time to 9.4 seconds if we desire victory in the future. He then went on to elucidate in detail what that would entail for each function, speaking promptly into their ears. The CEO had literally mulled over it; he needed to get informed beforehand of the worries and inquiries regarding his staff members, and he would then formulate a scheme to address those directly during the event. He walked around and got in touch with everyone during those two days. Additionally, he expressed his personal congratulations and spoke candidly about the opportunities and obstacles that every outstanding performer faced provided that he was already familiar with every region and shop. He would draw parallels between his problems and the ones that others needed to overcome in the past, which was tremendously stimulating for the CEO to deduce.
After everything was completed, those top achievers would get back to their own teams and areas and were further provided a DVD encompassing the CEO’s stirring speech. This assisted those performers in circulating the CEO’s encouraging message to all of their employees. This made certain that everyone in the company shared the top leadership’s strategy and vision, which is an indispensable step in the establishment of a leadership team. By putting an emphasis on important victories, the organization’s finest employees were able to not only sustain an exceptional level of enthusiasm, but also develop into excellent cascading communicators for the entire business. Others got self-motivated to ascertain what it would take to break into the top 5 per cent in the subsequent year during the times when the cascading message was most persuasive.
If you want to be like other leaders, your game should be based upon improvisation. Just remember to put some effort to acknowledge the glimmer of hope as well as encourage others to do the same.
Summary
Outstanding leaders encourage others to achieve greatness. Effective team leaders assess workloads, assess teammates’ strengths and limitations, and distribute duties across team members as necessary. Your team will probably lack motivation if you do. As a team leader, it’s critical to set your own expectations, acknowledge your successes, and give yourself praise.