Nurturing Future-ready Leaders: Learning through doing and reflecting

The toughest transformation to undertake is the one of self. As parents with a son approaching his teens, one of our constant struggles is how to play a meaningful role in helping him discover and achieve his potential without trying to apply the template of how it worked for me or my wife back then. The style of learning, the opportunities today, and knowing it will only change further, makes this quite a perplexing conundrum. This made us realise that we need to start changing our perspective on parenting and get with the present i.e., transform ourselves as parents if we want to be valuable and effective enablers for our son. In fact, our role as leaders in the workplace would need to move along the same lines.

The role of leadership is constantly evolving with everything around us changing at breakneck speed. I believe the new style of leadership is about being a player-coach and leading by role modelling and not just by top-down messaging. But how do organizations build such leaders for the now and the future? To address this and turn the concept of leadership training on its head, in India Publicis Sapient has introduced the India Leadership Academy (PSILA). Through this 9-12 month personalised program, we focus on strategic leadership capability development, and building and elevating leadership maturity. Here, each participant undergoes a unique program curated just for them according to their prominent leadership style, role expectations, aspirations, and experiences.

While learning styles differ for each person, the one thing that cannot be ignored is that everyone needs to be on a continuous journey of learning and unlearning. You cannot afford to get comfortable with what you already know since it will soon be irrelevant. Through my experience I’ve deduced that the one effective way to progress is to ‘learn – do – reflect’ in shorter loops rather than only learn and assume that the ‘doing’ happens in the future. Learning through reflection ensures that the change in behaviour takes place by doing. This concept is what we’ve put in practice in the PSILA program. All modules were action learning oriented, vastly differing from the classroom training model that most of us are accustomed to. 

The culmination of the PSILA program of 2019 was a Leadership Alchemy event, where 80 participants graduated. As I sat in a room filled with our company’s current and future leaders, I felt the energy electrify the whole space! The program was envisioned to facilitate the perspective gain needed for senior leaders to make their journey of change and I was so proud to see that start to take effect. I saw the desire to create impact, and heard about their journeys and experiences of unlearning and relearning. Today, many of these leaders who worked on action learning projects are now translating them into actual service propositions for the company and looking to expand their zone of impact within the company as they work towards their professional and our collective NEXT. And the best part of this journey? Your opportunities to learn, to grow and succeed, and to make an impact are limitless.

How are you growing leaders of tomorrow?