Leadership Developing Vision to Transforming Organizations

Like Kamath of ICICI Bank, there are well-known business leaders in India: Narayan Murthy in the IT industry, Sunil Mittal in Telecom, Kiran Mazumdar in Biotech, Ambani in Oil and natural gas and Rahul Bajaj, Anand Mahindra and Ratan Tata in Automobiles. In the previous chapters, we discussed the capabilities and the roles of these leaders in leading their respective organizations. Tulsi Tanti of suzlon has also shown his leadership qualities by growing very fast and becoming one of the largest players in the wind energy market in the world. For a leader, challenges and crisis keep on coming. The effectiveness of the leader lies in stearing their organization through these challenges and crises successfully. For instance, in the case of Tulsi Tanti, the present challenge is to turn around the company to survive. His true test of leadership is yet to be seen. Exhibit 29.1 presents the challenges Suzlon is currently facing. It is the leader of an organization who makes things happen. The success or failure of an organization is, to a great extent, determined by the functioning of its leader. Top IT companies such as Infosys, Wipro and TCS are investing in leadership training and personality development of their employees. These investments are of three general categories: assigning people such tasks as would enable them to learn leadership qualities, offering assistance through coaching and mentoring and conducting formal leadership assessment and training programmes 1 for employees. This chapter focuses on the following points: ‘What makes leaders different from non-leaders?'; ‘What is the most efficient style of leadership?' and ‘What can make a person a good leader?'