It is amazing that Stephen Covey has to write a book to teach us basic principles of living, loving and leading. The fact remains that he has captured the essence very well and has done a fabulous job of articulating & conceptualizing seven habits and now the eighth. It is one of the most useful books on tools and techniques for any aspiring learner. In today’s world, leadership development has become so jargonized, it is not funny. Leadership Styles, Systems Thinking, Emotional Intelligence, Spiritual Intelligence, Spatial Intelligence and there are endless models to teach leadership or give a view on leadership. The question arises what is the core of leadership development. And why has it become so complex? Typically, people go through a leadership Development program, learn a few skills and go back to work and start doing exactly what they have been doing before for years. What they learn in these workshops are some skills. Perhaps the core within and the intent remains unaffected.

Good leaders act, they do… They not only talk, in fact they may or may not talk but their actions speak for themselves.

Attrition, which is a burning issue especially in IT and ITES sector, is something every HR manager is struggling with. Is it an external (environment, profiles, competition) issue or an internal (manager’s maturity and attitude) issue? As a participant and an observer’s lens for over a decade, I observed that under the same set of external circumstances, which means, the same products, the same markets, the same profiles, two manager’s attrition levels could be very different to the tune of ratio of 1:4. That leads us to think that attrition is after all not a phenomenon which is purely dependent on external factors. Some of these managers were doing few things that were creating stickiness in their environment for their team members. They were perhaps not even aware of it since they were doing it so naturally.

One of the key issues is where your energy and focus is. Is your focus on yourself or on your team? Just like when a child is born, parent’s entire focus shifts to the child, similarly, a good manager’s focus and energy must shift to the team members once he/she becomes responsible for the team performance.

By Uma Arora