Navigating Success Through Self-Awareness, Team Empowerment, and Continuous Improvement
By Satish Sundaresan, VP-Global Strategy and Managing Director, Elektrobit India
‘Lead the way you want to be led’ has always been my mantra. For me, leadership is broken down into leading myself, my people, and my business. Hence, my starting point regarding my leadership style is characterized by being myself, living my values, and acting with integrity as I lead by example.
- Leading myself revolves around my behavior, integrity, empathy, and social awareness. The relationship with myself, my self-awareness, and how I manage my emotions are the foundation of all leadership principles.
- Leading others requires being able to communicate assertively and clearly; coaching and conflict management; and embracing diversity and differences while ensuring that I can empower the teams – all this while creating impact.
- Leading my business is about managing change and influencing others without resorting to hierarchical authority. Setting a vision and strategizing about the choices to be made and risks to manage as well as creating our proposition to win are the elements required to fulfill the role of the leader.
However, playing a leader is only the starting point. The true measure of leadership is to continuously assess your effectiveness and your ability to influence and change the environment and people to achieve the desired business outcomes. There are various ways to evaluate one’s own effectiveness, although I personally rely on the following aspects:
- Workforce attitudes – This is both a qualitative and at the same time, the most important measure around the cultural aspects, as people’s attitudes reflect the effectiveness of your leadership.
- Growth of the team – This is my personal favorite and I use it to evaluate myself. Maintaining a metric on employees who have progressed across roles (e.g.: local to global); keeping tabs on how the team makes their own decisions; failing and learning from those failures, and more. I keep count of the occasions where I am being looped in on decisions for my tacit or explicit approval, using it as a check that I might be limiting my team’s growth.
- Employee confidence – I believe we are only as good as the people we work with. So, I constantly ask myself if we have the right employees in roles that celebrate their strengths. I measure instances when my team members shine, and we feel confident enough to be hands-off and allow them to manage on their own while being accessible.
- Feedback – This is continuous feedback from all relevant stakeholders and not just my team. The objective of such conversations is to have candid dialogues that provide insights into my behavior and my ability to empower and lead.
All of the above is only possible if the environment we enable is psychologically safe. So “living the vision” is my most basic ideal that is hopefully shared by my team and by all the organization’s stakeholders in a consistent and sustainable manner. It’s the leader’s duty to ensure that the most important stakeholders breathing life into the vision are enabled and empowered adequately by creating a psychologically safe environment for them to make brave decisions.
