True Leaders

" A leader is best when people barely know he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worst when they despise him. But of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say, We did this ourselves! "

Lao-tzu might have said this in the 6th Century BC, but it is so applicable even now. Each of us irrespective of what we do are or should be leaders in our own right. But how many of us are ready to forego the credit for something which we have done? Especially if it is something that garners a lot of positive attention?

A few incidents over the past few months have been nagging me and forcing me to think who you would term as a leader and what are the traits a of a good leader. What is it that some have and the others don't that the world calls them great leaders?

They are genuinely interested in their team

"Leadership is not so much about technique and methods as it is about opening the heart. Leadership is about inspiration—of oneself and of others. Great leadership is about human experiences, not processes. Leadership is not a formula or a program, it is a human activity that comes from the heart and considers the hearts of others. It is an attitude, not a routine.More than anything else today, followers believe they are part of a system, a process that lacks heart. If there is one thing a leader can do to connect with followers at a human, or better still a spiritual level, it is to become engaged with them fully, to share experiences and emotions, and to set aside the processes of leadership we have learned by rote" - Lance Secretan

You might have the best processes in the world, your technology might be cutting edge, but getting what you need and more are dependent on the people you have. Many leaders forget that what they deal with day to day are real men and women with very human emotions, needs and aspirations. To understand this, you have to have a genuine interest in your team.
The best leaders know what makes their team members tick, what motivates them and what are their issues. For this level of empathy with the team, first and foremost, the leader should own his/her team, in every sense. You can easily make out teams whose leaders have this sense of ownership and pride about them. Their members have a feeling of belonging and the faith that things are and will be taken care of.

Being genuinely interested is also a lot of responsibility. You are no more responsible for yourself, you have to take care of an entire team's needs. This is not as difficult as it might seem. Once others feel that your interest in them is genuine, it builds the confidence in them to come and discuss things with you, which are positive as well as negative. You start getting different perspectives on the same situation.

They are absolutely Ethical

"In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don't have the first, the other two will kill you." - Warren Buffet

What lead to the mighty fall of many a buiness empire, be it Enron ealier or an AIG and Lehman Brothers recently? The discussed about causes might be numerous, but at the root, it boils down to just one thing - lack of ethics or integrity, the feeling that my returns today is more important than the lives of thousands tomorrow. Almost always, it starts with a small thing. When they get away with it, comes the next slightly bigger step. It keeps compounding and when the fall happens, many an innocent is crushed underneath.

It takes a person of a very high level of integrity to resist that first step. To know the real spirit of an organization, it is enough to know its leaders. As they are, so will be their followers be.

They have a clear vision and they share it

"Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion" - Jack Welch

Imagine a wonderful journey in an extremely comfortable vehicle with all amenities and your favourite food, but you have no clue where you are going. You will enjoy the journey in the beginning, get bored after sometime and then frustrated. That is what happens with teams where the leaders have no vision.

It is not only important that the leader has a clear vision, but also that he communicates it down to the team. A team that knows where it is going and why and how gets there really fast and in the shortest time.

They delegate and believe in freedom to work

"Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity" - General George S. Patton

The biggest mistake a leader can commit is not to delegate at the right time. If a leader has to spend time on strategies, he has to learn to entrust the practical mattters to others. The catch here is knowing when, how and who to delegate to. Going wrong in any of these could spell doom for the whole team.

Delegating does not mean that the leader is not involved in what is happening at the ground level. It has several sides to it. For one to grow in an organization, it is vital that a back up is created rightly. There are leaders who are control freaks who are scared of letting go, but they do not realize, they can grow only if their subordinates grow to take up the leader's current responsibilities. It is a win - win situation for everyone.

Another trait of the best leaders is that they don't intefere too much in their team member's work. You recruit a person after being convinced that he / she has the requisite knowledge and expertise for the requirement. To get the best out of people, good leaders tell them what is wanted and not how it is to be done.

They are quick to praise and slow to condemn

"I praise loudly, I blame softly" - Catherine the Great

If something goes wrong, I take the blame, if something goes right, it is the team - who wouldn't want to follow such a leader? The absolute faith and respect this attitude generates cannot be described. It is not that these great leaders do no take their team members to task. They know how and when to do it and without hurting the concerned person. Nothing is personal here. It is the conduct and not the person that is being judged.

A timely appreciation for a job well done, that too in front of others many a time maked an ordinary person great. And no one knows this better than a true leader.

They know and they are competent

"The leader must know, must know that he knows and must be able to make it abundantly clear to those around him that he knows" - Clarence Randall

You may love your team, give them absolute freedom to work, great motivators and so and so forth, but if you do not have the requisite knowledge of the job athand, you will still not be able to lead your team successfully. The passion to know, know more and to let the team also know is what makes the leader and the team he leads succeed.

"The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on" - Walter Lippman

And this is what I aspire to be - a leader who is not visible with a team which is visible, and finally leave behind a team of true leaders!

Need...

some me time.....

a break from work and home.......

a steaming hot cup of coffee in bed every morning....

shoulder, back and foot rub every evening....

eight hours of my beauty sleep without any break in between, at least once a month.....

something to stimulate my rusted brains....

trek in the mountains, just me and wind and streams and trees and grass and flowers and birds and butterflies....

my mother....

Huh!!

Carried him for nine months...
Tied myself to the bed for three months with my legs up in the air....
Bore all that pain for getting him in my hands....
Didn't sleep at a stretch for more than 2 hours for more than 2 years...
Cleaned all his poop....
Swallowed his left overs....
Kept vigil when he was not well....
Played silly games with him....
Carried him wherever I went, even though he was a riot....
Cooked his favorite food whenever he wanted (well, almost always).....
Read out to him since he was 3 months old....
Took him for sports classes at 6 in the morning after coming home from work at 2 in the night...
Was the one stop shop for all his projects....
Been his trouble shooter for anything and everything....
Spent my weekends on his workshops....

And then he writes in his school essay-

"My favorite person in the family - My Father"

Huh!!

Why did you have to go?

The call came on a Friday morning. The usually chirpy voice was extremely weak, "I had a fever last week. For the past two days my back has been hurting like hell. We are going to Chetthipuzha hospital. Thought I'll just tell you" The pleas to get on to a taxi to come to Cochin where we were fell on to deaf ears. She was admitted on arrival. Her BP went low in the night and she was transferred to ICU. An ECG later, they asked to shift her to a hospital with better facilities.

Saturday evening, it was Pushpagiri and straight into ICU. M and I reached in the evening and she was her pleasant self, though visibly weak. My cousin who is a doctor there assured us there is nothing to worry, but her doctor gave us a different picture - myocariditis , possibly caused by the viral fever she had the previous week or sometime before that. Monday was M's first day in Bangalore office, so I insisted that he go back to Cochin. The first call from ICU came at 10.30 in the night.

"BP is going lower, she is in a critical state, we are injecting the medicine directly into the vein on her neck, please sign this form", and that was the beginning of a number of forms that I signed throughout the night. Sunday did not give us any hopes, except the usual umpteen opinions each one in the family has regarding the hospital, doctors, shifting to another hospital, getting expert opinions from all the doctors in the family and in turn whoever they knew as well. My poor brother who reached there not knowing the seriousness of the situation, my youngest sister who was crying over the phone and wanting to come down from Dubai, B who was already on her way, none of us knew what to do.

Sunday evening, the doctors said her kidneys had started getting affected. For this particular condition of heart, there is no treatment, it has to heal on its own, the only thing that we can do is give maximum support to the other systems. One of them suggested a rarely used machine, which when checked was available only in one hospital in Delhi.

Slight improvement on Monday, bad news again on Tuesday, we were desperattely waiting for the machine even though the doctors had warned us not to expect any miracles. My youngest sister also arrived by then. Wednesday morning, situation was the same and the machine was supposed to arrive by noon. Four o' clock, my brother and I were in the billing section to pay for the machine when my sister calls up and says the doctors have called us to the ICU.

"She had a cardiac arrest a few minutes back". That was it and a part of our life gone, just like that.

It has been seven months now, that heavy stone on my heart has not moved an inch, and it is as if someone is trying to choke me when I think of her. The questions still remain, would it have made a difference if she was in some other hospital, was there something we should have noticed earlier, the list is endless.

She had gone through a lot in her life, but no one had seen her without a smile on her face. She was the conscience keeper of her elder co-sisters, they left the keys to their homes and hearts to her and she guarded it with her life. For someone who came from a village, had not even graduated, had not travelled beyond Chennai, she thought ahead of her times. In a conservative town where her daughters were brought up, she welcomed their male friends home without the slightest of hesitation. In an orthodox Syrian Catholic family, where working women were the exception rather than the norm, she stood by her eldest daughter when she said she doesn't want to get married early and got her second daughter married off. One thing that she never recovered from was her youngest daughter's demise.

Without fail, almost everyone has told us, "It is not you, but I, who have lost. You don't know what she was to me." To her aging parents, she was their life line. To her brothers, she was the rock on which they leaned on. To her sisters, she was their dearest elder sister. To everyone who walked in and out of her home, she was the solution to all their problems.

To the four of us, she was our mother.

First Tag :-)

Thank you so much Nancy, for my first ever tag!! I know it's been delayed, too many things happening in my life :-(

Thinking of 10 things that tax me emotionally has left me totally taxed. Unpleasant memories are such a drain on the mind and heart. Anyway, here goes -

1. Manipulative people who gets things done on the sly and then pretend that they didn't do anything - I just hate them

2. Unruly kids and parents who behave as though there is nothing unusual about it.

3. Men who still think anything and everything at home is the lady's duty irrespective of whether they are working or not, tired or not. Forget about lending a helping hand, if things do not go as they want, they raise hell as well.

4. Hypochondriacs

5. People who keep talking about their rights and turn a deaf ear when someone tries to talk to them about their duty.

6. Friends and family who expect you to be there anytime, anywhere, at their convenience.

7. Having to suppress my anger for the sake of domestic peace (grrrrr...)

8. Infidelity. Especially those who think a so called harmless fling is alright. And they say they love and care for their partners and that they cannot live without each other. I can never understand this. If you love and care for someone, how can you do something that will hurt them to the core?

9. People who go overboard with showing off their piousness but are not so saintly inside. Sometimes they honestly think there is nothing wrong in anything they do, the whole fault is with the others.

10. Drivers who go slow on the right lane on highways. If you overtake them, they suddenly wake up and then it is do or die race. If it is a woman who has overtaken them... the less said the better.

The tag now goes to....
Sreeram
Mathew

Willow Tree

How many times in our life have we been totally awed by the sheer simplicity and beauty of a work of art? I for one am insanely jealous of people who churn out paintings, sculptures, stories, songs with ease.

Of all the pictures and real pieces of art that I've seen, one that I go back to time and often are the 'Willow Tree' figurines and plaques. The grace and poise of these sculptures are to be seen to be believed.

The first time I came across one of them was on my visit to a client location in the US, in a small shop dealing mainly with Christian artefacts. I stood there dumbstruck and wanted to buy the whole range. The next day we went to the client Main Office and there were a few more in their shopping center. The look of joy and longing on my face must have been very evident. Next day morning, there was a small gift box on my table and thus came the first angel into my life and the angel collection is my favorite till date (thanks J for that wonderful gift).

The family collection conveys so many feelings and emotions without as much as a word. Especially touching are the 'mother and child 'ones.

Each original sculpture is handcrafted by the artist Susan Lordi. Pieces are then cast from the original carving and individually painted by hand. The amazing thing is how each one resembles, yet is so different from the other.

Makes me marvel about how God created each of us with so much and love and care and with an individuality of our own.

Three Wishes

Yesterday's story was 'Three Wishes'.

There was this old man and his wife sitting around the fire one cold evening talking about how life was tough and how they wished a fairy would appear and grant them some wishes. And lo, there appeared a fairy and told them, "Well, I'll grant you three wishes and not one more nor one less. Be careful what you wish for, for you won't get it back again. The story goes on as usual about how they wasted the wishes on something silly etc. etc.

After the session is over,

"Georgie, if you had three wishes what would you wish for?"

Pat came the reply, "Money" (omg, have we created a monster? ok, leave it for now, will come back to it later)

"The second one?"

"I want to be a Power Ranger"

"Third?"

"I want to be Aaron Stone*"

Thank God, he is still a 7 year old boy at heart.

Now back to the first question, "Why would you wish for money, don't you want to study well?"

"If I have money, can't I study well?"

"It does not work out that way. If you have money and not educated and wise(he is too young to know that the two need not necessarily go hand in hand. anyway..), money will be of no use. See, your achachan and amma studied well and that's how we got good jobs and we have money now."

"But whenever I ask for certain things, you say we don't have money for that. That's why I wished for money"

Uh Oh!!

(*for those of you who don't have kids, Aaron Stone is an action series aired on Jetix. It is about a teenaged boy who takes up the role of his favorite video game character to protect his family)

Friends and Friendships

Preethi's post about friends set me thinking again about friends and friendships. She has mentioned about different kinds - ones you can't live without, ones you can live without and the ones whom you should live without.

What happens when a friend whom you thought is for life, one day turns out to be someone you should avoid?

I have noticed that as you grow old, you just don't feel like taking that extra effort to make and maintain friendships. If you find someone whom you like, good for you. If you find someone who is on the same wavelength, better still. And if you find someone as crazy or even crazier than you, it is nothing short of a lottery.

She was someone like that. We gauged each other intially, made some small talk for days. Both of us do not remember when we actually started hitting it off. She could find a joke in anything or anyone. I was like the sister she never had, or so she claimed. For me she was a gift straight from God in a new place and through some of the most difficult times in my life. Even after moving to another place, we called each other to talk about the silliest of and the most serious of things. I have discussed things in my life with her which I've never told anyone before or after.

One day, I get to know just by chance, that behind my back, she is someone else. And she betrayed my faith in the cruelest of ways.

It's been more than two years now, I have not been able to talk about it with anyone and I still cannot. While going through the contact list on my phone, I have thought about deleting her name many times, but always decided against. Probably because the good times we have spent with each other were too many. Did it yesterday, finally.

The most beautiful feeling in the world!

Father and son normally bonds over 'Autocar' every night. Yesterday it was an Audi Q7. The fact there was one of these chasing us last week on our way back from Kochi added more interest to it. I pretended to be asleep listening to their conversation.
"Achacha, can we buy an Audi Q7 next?"
"It's very expensive, mone. Only people like film stars and big businessmen can afford it."
Son, after thinking for a while,"You are not good looking, so you cannot be a film star. Amma is beautiful, we can ask her to act in movies and get her to buy one!"
I shot up from the bed and hugged my son tight. Who else but a 7 year old can think that his fat old mother is beautiful enough to be a film star?
Got him an extra 'Kinderjoy' today :-)

After an year and a city away

A Christmas and an Easter have gone by since I posted my last blog. Life has gone through so many twists and turns and a very painful loss over this period. And here I am in Bangalore, after four years.

My friends back in Kochi keeps asking 'How is Bangalore?" What do I say, "Ok", "Good", "Crowded", "Colourful"? I guess, it is a mixture of everything. The one thing I love absolutely about the city - its trees. They are so divine. In Cubbon Park, you can't see the sun, they form a benevolent canopy over you. In Lal Bagh, you see them all shapes and sizes, the trunk of one is almost as big as our apartment. And the ones that line the roads, they are such a pleasure. I particularly love the ones in Jaya Nagar. In the busier parts of the city, there is a stretch on the old airport road where you are suddenly transported into a surreal world you almost don't hear the incessant honking from the drivers behind you.

Then there is the shopping (can you see that excited and wicked gleam in my eyes?). I am a compulsive shopper and ardent mall-o-maniac. Every road you take, there is a mall and there is some sale or other going on. The little bit of bank balance that I have dwindles day by day, but who cares!

The best part about the city - the people. Don't raise your eyebrows. No one cares what you do and how you look. Absolute "bindaas" is the way to be here. Walk around in your pajamas right out of your bed, no one bothers. Maybe the only thing that might get a second look might be a two-piece bikini. Sometimes I wonder about that too.

Yes, the weather too. Extremely hot during day, you feel as if you are roasted alive, dry. The slight breeze that comes in every evening is heavenly, especially after the sultry Kochi evenings.

Not everything is picture perfect and hunky dory, but today I am in a mood for good things only. And I promise myself to blog more often.