Ten tips to UPGRADE your Leadership approach – Being PRIMITIVE to Being PASSIONATE …

This weekend, I was in a binge-watching mode and bumped into Maniratnam’s classic, Guru (2007-Hindi film), ended up watching it again. A gem of a movie with lot of leadership lessons!

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As we understand, most successful movies follow the leading character or protagonist journey. This transformative journey captures the interest of the audience like us where the journey moves from a familiar territory to crisis situations / challenges, eventually culminating into the path of success for the protagonist. This is summarized perfectly by Joseph Campbell in his ‘Hero with A Thousand Faces’ book.

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Leadership likewise is a transformative journey, resulting in profound self-discovery and personal growth.

Like software applications developed a while ago, must be upgraded with the passage of time, so does the Leadership practices of a practitioner. For practitioners, this could be a great learning experience from moving from the theoretical or primitive leadership behavior to a more passionate leadership behavior.

?Here are TEN behaviors shifts / upgrades that help leaders to elevate their presence as passionate leaders.

?·??????? Firstly, primitive leadership style approach always thrived in managing with a 100% compliance mindset. Passionate Leadership behavior looks to create an impact by questioning the status quo, while keeping an eye on compliance needs, as part of the management style.

·??????? Finding solutions for a given problem is natural for primitive leadership, while passionate leaders continuously and consciously seek to 'find the problems' that they can solve.

·??????? Primitive leaders are quick in finding excuses when they hit a roadblock – they call this ‘RCA’; Passionate leaders thriving on problem solving and make things happen, beyond the RCA.

·??????? Leaders with primitive leadership behavior, if they reach a threshold point, will not hesitate to play victim-of-circumstances card, whereas passionate leaders accept the failures, seek support and align energies to figure a way-forward.

·??????? Primitive leaders thrive on driving their team to perform house-cleaning/ house-keeping activities while passionate leaders focus on the house-building and renaissance initiatives.

·??????? As part of People Management, primitive Leaders focus on the tasks and activities carried out by their team. Passionate leaders drive on People Building with a focus on the Talents and Skills of their team.

·??????? Primitive leaders always seek ‘accountable’ people in their teams, while passionate leaders are always in search of ‘capable’ people in their teams, along with accountability.

·??????? A primitive leader planning horizon for his / her team is always short-lived and ends by the current engagement, Whereas, a passionate leader takes responsibilities of careers of his/her team, beyond the current.

·??????? The team communication or responses of primitive leaders is another noteworthy aspect. For Ex: the stock reaction to any crisis by a primitive leader will always start with “I told you so….”. A passionate leader will start with a more positive phrase,”Okay. Let’s analyze this….”

• Another classic communication style of primitive leaders is often observed during large team meetings or gatherings. The team address in these meetings by a primitive leader might be laced with phrases like “The problem with us is.." or "The challenge with our approach is...”. A passionate leader addresses the gathering with an elegant “We certainly have an opportunity to improve…”, reinforcing the imperatives of the expected improvement.

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Well. With all these, an upgrade seems to be due and round the corner :)

Let’s embrace the transformative journey to become an impactful Leader – from being primitive to being passionate!