Episode 8 on Leadership

Hi. This is episode number eight of spontaneous Conversations.

Thank you for listening to us. This is Ravi Kundlapalli, founder, CEO of Mentor Cloud.

And this is Rajesh Sethi. I'm a serial entrepreneur.

So, Rajesh, what was the topic we just picked before we hit the record button today?

It's one of our favorite topics. It's going to be leadership.

Leadership. So what does leadership mean to you?

Yeah, for me, it's about creating possibilities for the people that you lead in.

Alignment with taking them on a journey to where the organization is wanting to go.

So creating possibilities for others.

The word leadership really means to me is the person who takes action that creates positive results for the organization, for the team.

And sometimes it's kind of ironical that a leader is actually a follower. A leader is actually a servant. Leader is not a doer. Sometimes you have to follow your team and make sure they have all the performance tools and the resources available that they can do a very good job. And leadership almost seems to me like a servant. Leadership.

Yeah. So if I have to use the word which is my favorite word is leader is like a choreographer. He may be behind the scenes, but he is making the magic happen while making the people feel that they are actually making that magic happen. But they have been choreographed and people are growing while magic is happening. So at the end of a project or a journey or a milestone or anything, people. People think, oh, my God, this was an amazing experience. We had so much fun. And I grow so much. And leader almost is invisible because he is like in Hindi or Canada, they say sutra dhari. That means they are the person who is pulling the strings. But he may not even be in the limelight.

You know, that's a good leading to a thought that I had. You know, our former president of India, who is sort of the chief mentor of India, Dr. Abdul Kalam, told this story once when India was working on this space program, he was the person in charge of putting the first satellite into space.

And of course, he had a boss who was head of defense. And the first space rocket fell in the ocean. So Dr. Kalam was the person who was supposed to address the press and say, oh, my God, this was a big failure. He just took the first step to address the press. But that was arranged. The press meet was arranged. And his boss, his manager, his leader tapped on his shoulder and said, wait. And he went up and said, I take full responsibility for my team failing in this very, very expensive mission. And he did not allow Dr. Kalam to speak. Now, eight months later, when the team really went back to the drawing board, redesigned the whole thing and they did the second launch, which was a super success. And then they had a press meet and Dr. Kalam was just waiting because he thought, the leader will get up and talk. And he looked at and said, you take the breast meat. And Dr. Kalam went and talked. And the lesson that Dr. Kalam, which is the former president of India with one of the few presidents who has a PhD, he said, a true leader takes responsibility when things don't go well. And a true leader gives the credit to the team when things go very well.

What an inspiring story. I'm already getting goosebumps just hearing the story. Right.

I just love the guy. He talks about leadership and he is an embodiment of leadership. His responsibility is leadership.

This is amazing. No wonder he was very successful as the president. And I'm sure people who were working with him when he was the leader, they all cherished those moments because I can only imagine how powerful he was, what kind of an impact he made in their lives.

Absolutely. And the other thing with Dr. Kalam, again, talking about him and his leadership lessons, he says any person who takes an action is a leader. He says, very interesting, because it is only a result can be achieved only by taking action. So in a team, everybody has to take action.

Yeah, correct. Basically, what he is telling, if I am interpreting it right, is that everyone has the opportunity to become a leader. Whether they will take it up or they can just sit and sit quietly and wait for somebody else to make a mistake and say that this leader does not know anything. It's their choice.

Correct. In fact, one of my other favorite authors, again, I just thought about this book, A Leader who had no Title by Robin Sharma. Oh, my God. That's the other guy I want to meet one day in my life. In his examples of the two leaders, he talks about this in a woman.

Who cleans hotel rooms and kind of sets up the bed and everything. So he talks about the people who actually do things out of passion. Because she's not thinking that she is a hotel room cleaner. She is thinking that my job is to give the guest a super experience when they come into the room. So the way you look at your job makes you a good leader or a bad leader. If you look at your job saying, I'm just doing this, you then it becomes a job. But if you think about the impact of the job on other people and you're thinking, my job is when they come in, they should find the room so Beautiful, nice smell. And all the beds are done nicely. It's that experience that gives me joy of what I'm doing.

Yeah, beautifully said. Now, I don't remember the exact names of these companies, but I heard a story that was so inspiring. This was somewhere in the Midwest, there is a company that is in the cleaning services. The employees clean toilets and all those things. Now there is a huge turnover because who wants to say that I am there? My job is to go and clean toilets. So this turnover problem was really, really big and it messes up everything because they need to give a service that is dependable. So the leader who took over the company, he just wanted to find out what is the reason anybody does anything. There is a why for them, right? Somebody wants to come and take up a cleaning job, they still have a why. I want to do this so that I can become that. And this happens to be a means to an end. But this so happens that toilet cleaning is not a means to in any end. But he found out that most of these people were college dropouts and anything because they didn't have money to go to the college. So he instituted a program that, on his own money, that based on whatever calculations he did, he started funding their education on the side. So now the why is very, very strong. And he said, and then people can grow and they can expand into other cleaning services. Not just toilet cleaning, but something else. Suddenly the rate of attrition rate dropped to the rock bottom because people said, I am here, this is my job, right? But I am becoming a better person.

So what's the example of leadership that kind of comes to you? What did this person do that made him a great leader?

He went to the core of the person who is working for them and what is their true aspiration? That there is a reason why somebody is doing a job, but their reason is, I don't have the money to go to college. What can I do?

So I have to do something. So what made him a good leader is he didn't look at his people as doers, looked at why they are doing it. And if he can somehow make that why more meaningful and that they're drawing value from the job they're doing, then they naturally come and do it, right? So I think that's very, very excellent quality of a leader is to look at their people not as doers, as machines, but people with some needs. They have needs. They have children, they have families, they have aspirations. A true leader looks at the big picture and whole. It's a holistic person, Right? Not just a job.

Exactly. You might have heard of John Maxwell. He wrote this.

He is another favorite I want to meet one day.

Yeah, he is very amazing. So his definition of leader is very, very simple. A leader is a lid lifter. That's what he says. Everybody has an invisible lid on top of their head thinking, I'm stuck here. I can't grow anywhere. Leader comes and lifts the lid and suddenly they grow 2 inches taller, 2ft taller. And then he lifts the lid again because everybody thinks I'm stuck. There's a glass ceiling kind of thing. There is a lid there.

So I think to our listeners, it is as a leader, in your home to begin with and in your community, in the company you work for, look around and focus on what you can do to kind of remove the leads of other people so when they grow, they look at you as it happened because of that person.

Totally agreed. Totally agreed. See, in fact, if I can think of, how do you know whether somebody was a good leader or not? If somebody has to make a self assessment or they want to make an assessment of their brother or their colleague whether they're a good leader, it's not what they do, but what happened to the people that they led? What are they doing now? It's like the resumes of the people that they led are a good indicator of how good a leader this person was.

So the word inspiration comes to me. A good leader is a very inspiring person. Right. He or she makes the other people become better at what they do.

Yeah, yeah. They make them grow.

They make them grow and then they don't know what they do. In fact, I've met some amazing people. They seem so humble. They rarely speak more than 10 words. They speak more than what I'm doing right now. But for some reason, magical reason, people rally around them. I always wondered. There is a sense of aura and the inspiration that people naturally want to follow.

I just remember you are familiar with Guru Raj Desh Deshpande, of course, the.

Founder of Sycamore Networks, Cascade Networks and many other billion dollar companies.

Yeah. He is just so inspiring. I have an opportunity to work with him and I always just so inspired by his work. And now that I am working with him, every conversation he has, there is something to learn from him. Every conversation it is a random conversation, just checking in on something. I think I will feel good about myself at the end of the day. Now forget about him because he is always super inspirational. But I feel, oh my God, I grow a little bit. One millimeter taller, one inch taller. And then he's so clear in where he is going that you almost feel like, this is the path. The journey will be amazing. And I will feel, oh, my God. I will also be growing like crazy. So that's why if you see his model, the people that helped him with Cascade Networks, they followed him to Sycamore Networks. It's almost like a tribe.

This group goes with him because they've been inspired by him, they have learned a lot, and they become better because of that. So I think leadership is not about getting a lot of things done. You call them efficient managers.

Leadership is not being an excellent event manager. Leadership is about rallying people around you and making those people do more than what they individually felt they could. Their own capacity to deliver results is more because of this person.

Beautifully said, Shivya. I love it. Basically, their lids get lifted. That means in their belief system, they think, oh, my God, I can do a lot more. And we all know that we use only a small percentage of the capacity that we have. Once the limiting beliefs are gone, they will just be amazing in terms of what they can do and what they can achieve. And with a good leader who can choreograph things for them, like you mentioned, acts like a servant leader rather than a boss, they will blossom to be somebody really awesome.

Exactly. I think we talked about inspiration. We talked about helping other people grow.

And the other thing, I think leadership is also having that compassion. You have to like, again, when you look at other people and what they stand for, why they are working for you, you have to have that compassion. Because compassionate leadership, they will take you places just feeling that there's the other person, also a human being, that there are needs and there are constraints. There are things that they're getting dragged down or kind of pulled up, having a sense of that. And Stephen Covey, against the highly recommended book 7 Habits, starts off with that compassion, which we didn't have. When he saw these kids running around in the train and he was getting mad with these kids.

And tells the dad, hey, these kids are making so much noise in the train. Can you ask them to be silent? And the dad says, yeah, I'm really figuring out how to say that, because they just lost their mom. And that opened up Stephen Covey's eyes. And he talks about compassion. And I think leadership, very key element is to have compassion.

Yeah.

I think we are getting close to the end. So my thinking is that we have to have some closing comment. So my closing comment is.

They have to be masters of having amazing conversations, because ultimately it's a conversation that they are having with the people and they should know how to have a conversation with somebody who is even smarter than them. People say you have to hire people smarter than you. And leaders should not say, oh, I have to compete with my own people. Rather than that I have to be an enabler. And then I will see, he is already better than me. How much more can he grow because of the conversations that I am having with him?

Absolutely. I think that's an excellent comment. I think in closing, I think leaders are chosen. I don't announce myself saying, I'm a leader starting tomorrow.

Right.

It doesn't happen that way. Leadership is something that kind of naturally grows on you. It's like the excellence that you build over time. Other people should not question, why is this guy promoted? Why is this guy a leader? People should say, of course, this person deserves it. So leadership also has to be earned.

Beautifully said. Now I have to say one more comment. So John Maxwell himself said that if you are going somewhere and nobody is following you, you are not leading, you are just taking a walk. So like you said, automatically, if you have the leadership capability and you have an inspiring journey that you want to undertake, there will be some people that will start following you, making you the leader by default.

Exactly. Now, since you mentioned one comment, I have one more comment. I was reminded of when you said that about walking. You know Gandhi, who all of us know, entire world knows, when he embarked on this salt march as a protest, he walked alone. People said, you are crazy. Why are you going against this big British empire? He walked alone for a few miles. People thought, he's not going to do, he's going to come back. And then 10 people followed. Thousand people followed. 10,000, 100,000. So a leadership also is having guts. You got to have guts to get started on something that people are like scared not to follow.

Yeah, beautifully said. So should we close this?

Let's close this. I mean, again, this is a very important topic. We all have to be good leaders at home, in the communities and in companies. So I think we talked about that compassion, that servant leadership, helping other people. So I think all of these are important elements that I would like our audience to kind of remember from this spontaneous conversation. And you can learn more about Ravi at manticloud. Com.

And this is Rajesh signing off. And you can learn more about me at rajeshati. Com Blog.