Leadership Development- The Key for Success
Authored by Kashyap Avashia, Principal & CEO (Mentor Trust) at IvyCap Ventures
As part of our regular Mentor Call series, Mr. Anil Sachdev, Founder and CEO of Grow Talent Academy and Founder of School of Inspired Leadership (SOIL), shared his thoughts on Leadership Development. Given below are the salient features of the discussion:
- Leadership is more about leading/managing one’s self rather than others.
- Good leaders are also good followers (of a cause or solution) and others join the leaders to co-create value.
- As a leader, your value is in creating a team culture/bonding to achieve the common vision. With such a common vision, egos will not become an impediment to success.
Given below are some thoughts on developing others as leaders (i.e., developing a leadership pipeline):
- Creating leaders in an organization is to provide them with relevant experiences.
- Hiring good talent can not be delegated to HR. As a founder, you have to devote your time personally in evaluating candidates including thorough reference checks independently through your network.
- Given below are fundamental capacities that you can look for amongst the people who are hired to identify talent. Evaluating these requires a deeper connection and conversations with your teams:
— Capacity/mindset to learn
— Capacity to harness the power of his/her whole mind (not just analytical but also intuitive/creative aspects)
— Capacity/humility to learn from others who are not like him/her
— Capacity/practice to source wellness/stamina
— What they deeply care about
- As start-ups, there are many initiatives and priorities but creating and empowering the right teams (based on relevant talent) around specific initiatives is an effective way to build internal talent based on meaningful experiences. Founders themselves need to perform this exercise of matching talent with initiatives consciously and with interest.
- Founders have a role to play in breathing oxygen to their team’s dreams so that they are lofty enough.
- While hiring senior team members, it is pertinent to ask open-ended questions (with reasons) about their prior choices (educational and professional), role models, best performances, and value dilemmas that they might have faced with other colleagues.
- It is important to understand why someone is coming to your organization and it should not be running away from his/her prior company.
- Many a time, founders are running against time to recruit their leadership teams. It is worthwhile to have 2 or 3 alternative candidates to choose from, even if it takes some extra time. Psychometric tests can also reveal more insights than regular interviews.
- Doing your due diligence is also quite valuable rather than relying on someone else’s judgement on recruiting candidates.
- It is helpful to have a team mentor or coach when there is a need to enhance trust or respect among team members.
As companies grow, founders sometimes have difficulty in letting go of responsibilities they used to shoulder. There are three primary reasons why founders face this challenge. They doubt their senior leaders’ capability, commitment, or fairness. Founders may find it useful to evaluate it on.
Given below are some thoughts on developing ourselves as leaders:
- There are a few elements you must pay attention to for developing yourself as leader:
— Environmental awareness
— Commercial and organizational acumen
— Self-knowledge (investing in knowing yourself)
— Intercultural literacy (learning from people who are not like you)
About IvyCap Ventures
IvyCap Ventures — an early stage Venture Capital firm that nurtures entrepreneurs and their ideas into sustainable businesses, leveraging our Global Alumni Ecosystem.
