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Identifying leadership early Success

Kukil Bora
Friday, December 3, 2010
Kukil Bora
Speaking at the Siliconindia Leadership Summit, Balaji. E, Director & President, Ma Foi Randstad threw great light on identifying leadership, role of leadership, competencies of leadership and proper recruitment methods. He spoke extensively on how the business is letting young people down. He detailed about the dangers of business blindness, advancement limitations, and intellectual disenchantment by which the young people get distracted.
“It is very difficult to spot leaders in the millennial generation who come with different orientations and aspirations” he said. The classical portraits of these people are many such as they are ambitious, they exhibit what is called as a healing the planet kind of an approach i.e. more conscious about community and society, they seek instant and micro feedbacks, the multicultural ease and are a nomadic work force. The management should be competent enough to identify leadership from such a complex work force.

Spotting the leadership also should be based on their competencies. Firstly, leaders should have a dream, vision, or focus that attracts others. Leaders are good communicators who exchange their vision well and make it meaningful for others. Leaders should know themselves and their skills, and use them effectively. Balaji feels that they should focus upon their strengths and view setbacks as mistakes to be learned from, not failures.
In addition, he also gave 12 early signs of leadership. They are initiative, ownership, listen to others and seek advice, independent mind, passionate and opinionated, share their knowledge, recognize their limitations, seek help, accept mistakes, avoid blaming others, assume informal leadership roles and inspire performance. Organizations need to create emotional infrastructure where these kinds of skills can be detected early in one’s career and can be nurtured.

The CEOs, the board of directors and such people in management level have the responsibly of spotting the best talents and getting them on board. So, the role of leadership mainly is a choice making - to ‘make or buy’ when it comes to talent. It is all about making a decision on the company’s philosophy - to make talent or to buy talent. Making high potential list is another role which also includes the choice of keeping it private or public. The leadership is also advised to do the inter-generational coaching and reverse mentoring so that the relationship between the different generations of work force is smooth.
He explained that leadership can be identified mainly by performance and potential. Identifying by performance has to be by measurement of outcome, leadership competency and values. Leadership can also be identified through potential by evaluating the experience, education, leadership bench strength, professionalism etc.

Despite all these, at the end of the day, one has to have the recruiter’s toolkit to get the best talents on board, although it cannot guarantee the 100 percent fit recruitment. The best advisable methodologies that many companies use nowadays for hiring process are assessment centers, behavioral event interviews and psychometric tests. Interestingly, Balaji feels interview is one of the least reliable tools in selecting people as it has only less than 10 percent reliability.
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