How can we distinguish great leaders from good leaders? What kind of leaders
can drive the organizations to the path of sustained growth and incredible success? What skills are of paramount importance to lead the organizations and followers to accomplish the goals? In this era of spiraling globalization and stiff competition, these are some of the challenging questions that are eloquently discussed and debated. Trends across the world indicate that soft skills among leaders are slowly and steadily displacing harder edge technical skills in making great leaders. In this complex world, those who reach and excel at the upper echelons of corporate ladders are those who have a perfect blend of hard and soft skills. Unlike managers who merely use the hard skills of planning, organizing, directing and controlling, great leaders need to be adept in the process of influencing and inspiring followers towards accomplishing the goals. There is a growing realization that leading people is much different from managing processes and things, that success need not be influenced by mere pushing of the tasks but by motivating people towards the goals. In today’s world which has the luxury of abundant talent and colossal amount of knowledge about leadership practices, extraordinary leaders exhibit widely different behavior and possess exceptional soft skills to guide the followers to success. Besides, a growing number of managers today possess sound technical skills but fail to interact, inspire and deal effectively with customers, subordinates, peers and bosses, and thus do not seem to make a mark in their career. Mediocre performance among employees with sound hard skills seems to be the result of a major deficiency of soft skills in themselves and the leaders. Hence, regardless of the position, the industry places great emphasis on soft skills and makes great efforts to develop such skills among leaders, managers and employees alike. The present issue focuses on some of the vital themes in soft skills.

Conflicts are a prerequisite and inevitable in the path of growth and change. Conflicts are part of any dynamic and vibrant organization and individuals. As the reasons that fuel conflict are many, the strategies to deal with such sources are innumerable. Transactional analysis effectively attempts to understand the ego states that cause conflict and offers insights to bring about changes in behavior. The first paper, “The Effect of Transactional Analysis Ego States on Conflict Management Styles”, by Bhavna Jaiswal and Praveen Srivastava, attempts to understand the influence of ego states of the banking employees on their conflict management approaches.

Trust is the firm foundation on which the success of the team is built. Team leader and members have to inspire trust in each other through openness, communication and commitment. When team members really trust each other, any task would look easy to achieve. In the second paper, “Building Trust in Teams: A Leader’s Role”, the author, Revathi Turaga, traces the stages of team development and presents the ways in which trust can be developed at every stage to accomplish the goals of the team.

Soft skills have become imperative to become a successful and effective individual. Hence, a lot of companies place great emphasis on communication skills, personality development and leadership skills. Such skills can be effectively honed through training programs. In the third paper, “Facilitating the Acquisition of Soft Skills Through Training”, the authors, Samta Jain and Afreen S Syed Anjuman, show how soft skills training provides the much-needed impetus to bring about a change in the managerial and employee behavior to become more effective.

Thinking is a far more complex process of cognition than sensation, perception and memory. It involves systematic analysis and synthesis of conflicting data. Woodworth regards reasoning as a typical thinking process and explains it as a mental exploration of finding new relationship using the data. By using the logic behind deductive and inductive reasoning, we can adapt the Minto pyramid principle process of thinking to become systematic and scientific in our understanding of a phenomenon on the basis of the data. In the fourth paper, “Building Logic into Communication Using the Minto Pyramid Principle”, the author, Padmashree Radha Swamy, aims to help readers understand the importance of building logic into communication in order to make it clear and effective. The paper deals with the use of Minto pyramid principle to make communication more scientific and logical.

Trust is the foundation of any relationship. In addition to open communication and understanding, honesty is vital for any relationship to grow, survive and make a person happy. Importance of honesty can best be understood from the stories of great successes and failures in relationships. Against the backdrop of declining honesty and trust, the fifth paper, “Creating Radical Honesty in Organizations”, by Hyma Ch, contends that the element of truth acts as a two-edged sword in any interpersonal relationship, either in personal or professional life. Individuals may establish a basis for cooperation by being truthful that paves way for a strong foundation for everlasting relationships.

The lessons taught by the epic, The Mahabharata, are endless. From leadership to motivation, The Mahabharata has a lot of insight and wisdom to offer to the modern organizations and employees. The last paper, “Are You a Kaurava or a Pandava at Work?: Management Lessons from the Mahabharata”, by Prema Ramachandran and Rachna Sharma, highlights some of the strategies that can help us overcome defeat and emerge triumphant despite all odds.

-- M Showry
Consulting Editor