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Team Building: Corporate Lessons from the Indian Premier League
--R Venkatesan Iyengar
India-born Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, in a recent interview, revealed that he had got his early leadership lessons while playing for his school’s cricket team. The leadership lesson was about when to intervene and when to build the confidence of the team. In fact, sports teams are a perfect example of how people with varied skill sets and experiences can work together in harmony to achieve a common goal. While sports teams can provide examples to employees on working as a part of a team, sports franchises have much to give organizations in terms of building and managing successful work teams. This paper takes a close look at the object lessons on team building—an essential management skill—that the highly successful Indian Premier League (IPL), an Indian cricket league conceived and crafted in 2008, has got to offer corporates. © 2014 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Self-Awareness – Key to Effective Leadership
--Mendemu Showry and K V L Manasa
Many theories and thinkers have attempted to explore what truly makes a person emerge as a leader. Successful leadership often surfaces when people become aware of critical personal experiences in their life, understand the driving forces, respond by rethinking about self, redirect their moves and reshape their actions. Stanford rates soft skill like self- awareness as one of the pillars of managerial capabilities that predicts managerial effectiveness and leadership success. It suggests that IQ and technical skills are far less important to leadership success than self-awareness. In a world of unprecedented business complexities, leaders, besides explicit knowledge, need an inner compass of self-awareness to walk the tight rope of leadership. The paper explores the concept self-awareness and traces the two essential components of self-awareness. The paper dwells on the reasons for self-ignorance arising out of individual’s inability to exploit two components. It also underlines how self-awareness contributes to self-actualization and managerial effectiveness. © 2014 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Bridging the Skills Gap: Strategies and Solutions
--Mahima Singh and M K Sharma
The paper aims at shedding some light on the complexity of finding the right talent from the perspective of both the institutions producing the talent force and the organizations looking to hire. Even though the numbers are ever increasing due to lack of synchronization, there exists a huge talent crunch in the employment market today. This seems to be a double-edged sword and needs careful analysis of the causes and mechanisms to deal with it. The paper aims at providing direction to this complex problem. © 2014 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
E-Soft Skills Training: Challenges and Opportunities
--Vasundara Tadimeti
Corporate e-learning is not a new concept anymore. Employers and training professionals recommend e-learning technologies in teaching ‘hard skills’. But soft skills were not seen in this training list until recently. The radical change in corporate training is that companies are now intelligently opting for e-learning technologies to teach soft skills to their employees. Even the classroom purists acknowledge the fact that e-learning provides cheaper, better and faster training than traditional classrooms. E-learning exploits the power of web networking and capitalizes on corporate technology infrastructures in providing soft skills training. More and more organizations are experimenting with some form of e-learning methods. The question is not whether they implement an e-learning program or not, but whether it is rightly done and gives the desired outcome. This paper throws light on some of the challenges that are involved in e-soft skills training and why the traditional method is still the way. © 2014 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Self-Assessment: A Tool to Boost Career Prospects
--Chethana G Krishna
Competition plays an important role for a student in acquiring academic excellence. Today, competition towards professional excellence is as imperative as academic excellence. Gone are the days where you dwelled on one career. Jobs are becoming complex, leading to higher corporate expectations. People who are open to new responsibilities, opportunities, and change should diligently keep their slate blank to unlearn, learn and relearn. This paper intends to act as a self-assessment tool to unearth the person in you, your knowledge, assets and values. It attempts to draw attention to those attributes that need to be polished, and acts as a career planner to recharge your career. © 2014 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Case Study
Project Parivartan:
State Bank of India’s Internal Communication Initiative
--Debapratim Purkayastha
Though State Bank of India (SBI) was the market leader, it was facing tough competition from private players such as ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, etc. It was looking at a steady erosion in market share and its growth was slower than that of its competitors. The company was unable to attract young or affluent customers and its brand image was perceived to be old and staid. The top management team led by Bhatt recognized the need for a transformation. They identified areas that needed to be transformed and communicated the new transformation agenda to all the people in the organization. The top management realized that to achieve the transformation they sought, getting the grassroots level employees on board was extremely important. So a massive internal communication initiative called Parivartan (which means transformation/change) was launched. The initiative was aimed at obtaining the support and acceptance of employees for the change initiatives undertaken by the bank, and explaining to them why change was necessary. The project also sought to bring about a change in the attitude and approach of the employees and to help them develop a more customer-centric approach. © 2014 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
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