Once someone asked me these questions:
Who is the leader?
How can we become a good leader?
Describe three of your biggest strengths as a leader.
Please give examples where you have demonstrated decisive and creative leadership skills. Please state your 3 key achievements as a leader in the last 5 years.
So I answered him:
Leadership is quite similar to parenting the children. We can not teach them, or give lectures, children are so observant and what you do they follow instead of what you say to them.
As a Leader, you must believe in the philosophy of creating the next leaders. We need to demonstrate the same skills while with them. If we are not good leaders, how we can make others?
As a leader you must acknowledge that if your outcome is affirmative means your team did a splendid job, if your outcome is negative or poor, does means you failed as a leader.
If you have purity in heart, clarity in mind, and sincerity in your actions you can be a good leader.
So I believe these three key strengths of a leader could be:
1. Forward-Thinking Vision: A strong leader possesses a unique ability to foresee the future landscape. They craft a compelling vision, rallying their team around a shared purpose. This visionary perspective guides the team through obstacles, instilling motivation and direction. Simply get the big picture of the problem, break it down into smaller chunks, and only focus on achieving the small milestone with the team. As a leader, you also need some part of the task on your plate to make the team confident that our leader is also working on the stuff that is not important to him. When the team is stuck, give them the 4-5 approach to solve the same problem to build their problem-solving skills.
2. Exceptional Communication Prowess: A hallmark of effective leadership is superb communication. Leaders adept at articulating ideas, actively engaging with their team, providing constructive feedback, and fostering an environment of open dialogue empower their team for success. Until the clarity of mind is not available to each team member for their tasks, the team can’t function as expected. So it is very important that each chunk of tasks must be clearly and elaborately discussed before work starts and halfway analysis meeting to check all good towards the target, if not take the lead as a leader to fix the problem.
3. Empathy and Emotional Intelligence: Empathy is a cornerstone trait in a leader’s arsenal. Understanding and valuing the emotions, viewpoints, and needs of team members cultivates trust and a supportive work atmosphere. Emotional intelligence further equips leaders to navigate complexities, enhancing relationships and problem-solving abilities. We all are after all humans, trust in each other, especially in our leader must be the strongest. Sometimes as a leader, taking care of human is not expected personally, team relation builds strong and all the members meet the expectation.
Please give examples where you have demonstrated decisive and creative leadership skills:
1. Product Innovation: Leading a team in a tech company, faced with a sudden market shift, I encouraged brainstorming sessions that led to a groundbreaking product pivot. By swiftly analyzing market trends and customer feedback, we reimagined our product, making it more user-centric and adaptable. Decisive action in reallocating resources and creatively reengineering the product ensured our company’s relevance and growth in the evolving market.
2. Crisis Management: In a scenario where a natural disaster disrupted operations, decisive leadership involved swiftly organizing resources for recovery. Simultaneously, creative problem-solving was crucial; for instance, developing temporary solutions to maintain services, collaborating with other organizations for shared resources, and implementing unconventional methods to ensure business continuity.
3. Team Motivation and Goal Attainment: As a leader in a creative agency facing a productivity slump, decisive action involved restructuring workflows and roles to streamline processes. Creativity came into play by introducing innovative incentive programs tailored to individual team members’ preferences, sparking renewed enthusiasm and boosting productivity, ultimately meeting and surpassing project goals.
In each instance, the fusion of decisiveness with creative thinking allowed for agile responses to challenges, fostering innovative solutions and maintaining momentum toward achieving objectives.
Please state your 3 key achievements as a leader in the last 5 years
1. Organizational Restructuring for Efficiency: Recognizing the need for technology evolution, I spearheaded a restructuring effort within the company. A few years ago we had only native developers dedicated to working on either iOS or Android, and we didn’t want to hire more people for growth, so for the same efficiency we needed to increase the productivity and team size. So I chose React-Native(cross-platform dev tool) as the tech stack change, With this decision we can achieve double the team size and half the time to develop the app time, which is theoretically 400%, but practically we thought at least we can achieve 200%. As you know by this decision I can clearly classify the team: one team in favor of the decision, the second one in a neutral state, and the third team strongly opposing the decision not wanting to switch their profiles. So I decided to start working with the first team to move on react-native and let the current operations be handled by the rest of the team. When we get measurable results from the first team, I make this as an ideal point to move and then the second(neutral team) to move to the new tech stack. After successfully transitioning with the first and second part of the team, the third team automatically adopts the change. And after one year we achieved almost 250-275% growth.
2. Innovation and Product Development: Let’s take the same above example to carry forward, I thought why is our mobile team working on the factory method, why not we automate all manual human methods to the machine and our team must work on either to improvise the automation product or new tech innovation on the mobile side, instead of repetitive work. So I proposed to build a UI-based mobile app creator portal called AppCenter to create and maintain the app stack. Soon we realized, we are a B2B model and our AppCenter idea could be a good choice for exploring the uncharted territories where our sales and marketing team is not available. Customer can sign up and create their own app to leverage our core product(selected features). With this innovation, without investing to set up new operations in any country we can test and trail the response from target countries level to make the decisions, where expansion is a better choice to invest.
3. Revenue Growth and Market Expansion: Let’s take another example, We are creating accounting and compliance software, who are the target customers, the answer is businesses, and currently businesses do this by outsourcing to any legal consultancy firms(CA, CS, Lawyers, etc.). So we built another product that helps the legal consultancy firms to do their job efficiently and ecosystem with business data(actual product) at very cheap prices. This is the same philosophy, if you are a pharma company and created a wonderful drug, to sell this you need doctors to recommend it, so in our case, doctors are legal consultants. If they like the product, our main customers(Businesses) are ready to pay. And in the B2B market, it’s a little tricky to board big giants, by our this way of culture, we can actually target the TAM easily.
In the last words, I added, In the race to chase money and profitability, most people forget that we are humans and dealing with humans as a team, we never say my team is this machine or that machine, we always mention team means these humans, so It is very important to treat them as human instead of machine. You can make money anyhow, but if you cannot make a healthy relationship with the team, you can’t feel confident to chase the fast-changing market trends. One more important thing to digest is, that the people will come and go, but if you are stable, pure, and clear with your leadership thoughts, you can build many teams again and again.