English novelist Charles Dickens would have never known that the epigrammatic statement with which he had started his novel A Tale of Two Cities would go on to describe the 21^st century as well. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”, written by Dickens fits well with the age that we live and breathe in since this age poses challenges to our minds like never before and at the same time, has opened the floodgates of opportunities like never before. If there is a struggle to become cut-above-the-rest, or to maintain the position of pelf that has been achieved, the deluge of information with thousands of remedial points has facilitated this rat race. Hence, there is stress, there is anxiety, there is a chance that one may continually sit on the tenterhooks. And when we talk of stress management in the context of business leaders, the whole idea gets a different hue altogether.

Business leaders and entrepreneurs are the people who are the pivots of their enterprises. They are the key decision-makers upon whose judgement and discretion the existence of their business lies. They are the people whom others look up to for their living and to draw inspiration. A leader is expected to be infallible; someone who has the solutions to all the problems that arise; someone who is not vulnerable and definitely does not give in to weaknesses. With so much of expectations saddled upon them, leaders find it very difficult to hold on to composure. To keep the mask of a strong person on, to be the icon of inspiration are daunting tasks and it is very natural that they fall prey to the duress of image cult. It is extremely imperative that the business leaders stay grounded to the reality, keep their minds fresh and agile so that their cognitive faculties of inference and decision-making do not beat the dust.

If we are to enumerate the means in which a business leader can keep his/her mind agile and resilient, one has to resort to the most simplistic methods. Although it may sound hackneyed, the idea of leading a healthy life indeed has a positive impact on the brain. Streamlining activities and binding ourselves in a fixed routine are tried-and-tested formulae of having a healthy brain. In the quest of complex solutions, we sometimes overlook the simple remedies that lie close and thus, something as basic as staying hydrated or eating healthy or having a good sleep in the night can work wonders for us.

Another easy way of addressing issues can be looking at the concern from different perspectives. The way we look at things can definitely impact the opinion we form or the decision we make. If we are to shift our glance from being critical to being creative or from being logical to being intuitive, we have a kaleidoscopic purview of the object. The practice of switching perspective switches the perception. Hence, business leaders must extend this practice by putting up teams wherein their members also have divergent impressions and angles to offer. It is particularly effective in this modern work culture, when leaders and executives are expected to be proficient multitaskers. However, psychologists brush this phenomenon of multitasking as a myth, claiming that while human brain attaches more importance to a particular work, the other functions are bound to be subsumed. Thus, a team which comprises of people who have motley of impressions can be a fitting response to an increasingly complex world of business.

Furthermore, the key to having an agile brain lies in keeping the mind busy with novel ideas and habits. More often than not, we tend to become accustomed with the impressions that we have formed over the years. Everything that we see, experience and grow with creates indelible impacts upon our brains and makes us what we are. To stick vociferously to what we see and believe makes us stagnated. It makes us trapped in a loop where we resist change in perceptions. Instead of acquiring talent and skills through diligence, we find ourselves to be firmly affixed to the old conventions. The process of learning and un-learning stops and we stop being well-rounded personalities. Hence, it is advised that we stretch the extend of our minds; put those faculties of brain into practice that have been hitherto untapped. Learning has no age and limit and we must acknowledge this and keep on acquiring new habits and skills so that the worn out routines are merged with the background and we come up with relevant skills that can help us stay abreast in the dynamic situation. Faith and knowledge of the dynamism of human mind indeed help us stay updated, be resilient and address issues from a fresh outlook.

Finally, it is the job of the leaders to ensure a happy work environment where the employees do not feel threatened. It is only when the workers feel heard and included, the business ventures flourish. Thus, good leaders not only practise the healthy lifestyle and challenging themselves to bring out latent potentials, but also urge their subordinates to follow suit. They must ensure that his employees are ready to make themselves flexible enough to learn new lessons and upgrade themselves to do away with old habits. They must create a work culture wherein different branches of function cross their roads so that interactions happen, ideas get exchanged and new pathways of minds are unraveled. It is only when the horizons of the brain would remain distant and elusive; leaders and their endeavours to sustain their ventures would be deemed fruitful.

Once upon a time, in a distant fairytale land, lived a king. He was loved and dreaded by his men alike. The stringent approach of the king towards the governance of his kingdom was a unique thing in itself. He was even-handed; minced no words; called spade a spade and flinched no time in delivering the most ruthless of the judgements for the benefit of his state. He was prudent, wise, judicious and to put all attributes together, he was an extremely capable administrator. The kingdom flourished under the watchful eyes of his sceptre and the countrymen dared not do anything aberrant. One day, the ministers and the emissaries conveyed the warning signs of an imminent war to the king as the news of the neighbouring state hoarding ammunitions become rife. The king, known for being a just man, surprisingly did not pay heed to the counsels of his own men and remained complicit. Flabbergasted as they were, the ministers realise that the success, love and fear that the king had evoked in his years have gone to his head. The king had fallen prey to conceit and his ego had made him insurmountably complacent. As the days rolled on, the neighbouring state, which had been suppressed by the king, kept on going strong by leaps and bounds. The ministers were helpless, they tried blowing whistle but the king, drunk with power failed to see the actuality and could not fathom the loopholes that he himself had created in being unapproachable. By the time the neighbour waged a horrific war on the king, it was all too late. The kingdom as well as its ruler was brought to the knees and the latter was sentenced to be executed. When he was being brought to the gallows before the curious eyes of his subjects who loathed him by then for bringing downfall with his arrogance, the clergy asked him if he harboured any remorse for any sin that he had committed. The king, with tear welling in his eyes, could only say with his voice getting chocked, “I wish I could listen to my own men!”

The king, his kingdom, his ministers and his foes are all a part of an obliterated page of history that nobody cares to turn. But the sin of pride persists and will do so as long as mankind treads the earth. In this modern world of business and finances, where success and money are elusive as well as easy, we don’t have kings and queens but we do have business leaders, the CEOs, the VPs whose sensibility and sensitivity have a bearing on the stability and longevity of their enterprise. A leader must not assume the conventional role of a frightful, omniscient ‘boss’ who is light-years away from the mundane of the ground-level works, sneers at the prospect of interacting with his subordinates, shifting blames for all the foibles running in the veins of the system and creates the halo around him, making him an ivory-tower prince, thrice away from reality. To come out of the cobwebs of ego, to salvage the company in difficult times and to be prepared for the bad weather days, our business leaders must practise one simple task which no business school would perhaps teach them: listening.

To be a good leader, one must be a good listener first. One really cannot qualify to be a good leader if he/she carries the latent agenda of intervening in the midst of conversation, denies the arguments against him and creates a bubble around him with the habit of looking at his company with pink-tinted glasses, not acknowledging any of the faults that may lie in the ambits of his business. A leader must admit that out of the several problems that arise within and without the dynamics of their organisations, some are perilous enough to threaten their existence, howsoever small they may seem to be in germination. A CEO has the onus of steering the company out of these problems and he cannot distance himself from it. More often than not, due to the terror that they impose with their demeanour, the leaders get to see a lopsided view of the companies. The reports and the data that are brought to their table are given positive tweaks, negative news is tamed down. Welled off from the operations of their organisations, such leaders end up becoming intellectually hollow, physically lazy and bring disaster upon their business ventures.  In this blog update, we bring to you some of the usual tips of being a better leader who is not only at the helm of his company like a guide and mentor but is also acutely self-aware and critical of his own self.

Hierarchy is said to be the negative evil in the complex network of businesses. You need them but it is a mistake of humongous proportion if one attributes the best of the ideas only from the higher rung of the ladder. The most groundbreaking ideas may come your way from anywhere, from any distant cue. Thus a leader has to be open to receive ideas from any end and smart enough to ideate the indications. Eventually, intelligence is a merit which is not based on how much of salary one draws from the company or how big one’s office is!

A leader must come out of the bubble of misinformation and half-truth. He must allow his employees a space wherein they do not feel intimidated in sharing a bad news. To handle good and bad news both with equal composure is the sign of a level-headed individual and that bears well for the CEOs also. While communicating with the ones working under the leaders, the vanity of being their employer must not come one’s way. The feeling of compassion and camaraderie wherein the employees are not visualised as slaves and rather co-workers who are all doing their own bits for their institution must be upheld at any cost. And to ensure this, the leaders must contemplate over hauling their image and creating such a business ambience where the employees feel comfortable, heard, included and not neglected or insulted. From the pulpit of deifying, they must humanise themselves and assume the role that they are actually assigned with: mentors, guides, counsellors, stakeholders.

As a leader of the pack, one must work readily and steadily upon the alarms and encourage his employees to go beyond the confines of the corporate offices, expand their visions and identify early signs of problems. It is the task o the leaders to feed the minds of the others with ideas to shake them out of their comfort zones and to change their policies to cope up with an ever-fleeting business world. Regular field-trips to plants, inspection outside the snug chambers and creating a pool of networks should be in the to-do lists of the CEOs. In this way, the leaders don the garb of a motivator who can go to the grimes to detect stumbling blocks or to know how to improve.

The most difficult task that emerges when one becomes high and mighty are accepting criticism, handling failure and knowing that might is not always right. If a leader does not feel challenged, does not feel the hitch and is experiencing a submissive bow from his employees, them something is horribly wrong with the organisation. To overcome this, a leader must reflect upon his own thoughts and actions. He must be kept on loop regarding his individual decisions and policies through questionnaires and continual prodding.

English philosopher John Locke had propounded the ‘Tabula Rasa’ theory wherein the human mind is compared with a blank slate, ready for new impressions to be written. A CEO must carry this blank slate aura with himself to become non-judgemental, bereft of any prior insinuation. Having certain fixed images and agendas in mind while listening to a person clouds the good discernment of the former and the leader must come out of this trap. It is only when a leader creates a business ecosystem where not only he but others listen and feels listened that a company would stay afloat, earn loyalty of its people and stay strong together even under leaky roofs.

Stories are meant to teach, preach and change. The fictional king of the distant land may have died long ago but his fool-hardiness will forever teach the onlookers of his story what not to do and what not to assume. And if there is an aberration, reality is cruel enough to weave a similar tale around a leader and would make him a protagonist of a lore where everything tasted the dust due to the latter’s vanity and self-absorption.

While this article is being written, India is going through a horrific wave of a fatal pandemic, killing thousands of people, infecting millions and affecting the whole nation, leaving people from each strata of the society in a quagmire of uncertainty. Fear looms large on all; fear that is unprecedented; fear that knows no limit; fear that leaves all in cold shudders. Loss of lives, loss of health, and loss of livelihood have pushed an entire nation in the jaws of all-permeating depression. More than ever, the people are feeling the need and importance of a guardian figure that they would look up to, who would extend a helping hand and would lend a shoulder to cry on. And it is exactly in these times of abysmal hopelessness, the business leaders are assuming the role of the messiah and are emerging to be the guarding angels one would fall back upon. It is through their unwavering support, astute decision-making skills to adapt themselves and the companies to the changed scenario and staunch leadership qualities, they are proving themselves to be strong buttresses who can egg on others to hold each other tight in the raging storm and rendering them hope that there will be an end to a nightmare and we all will wake up in a new dawn, crooning to the tunes of positivity on the other side of the rainbow.

In this article we would try to recount a few lines of work that the company leaders are doing and must do to keep the businesses adrift at a time when they have to deal with a financial slowdown, changed customer behaviour and employees who are weary of the dance of death are cooped up in homes, helpless and bereft of the warmth that any social animals need. It is a time full of twofold challenges; personal and professional. To deal with one’s own distresses while thousand others are looking up to you with waning morale is a daunting task. On top of that, apart from preserving, protecting and upholding the rights of all the stakeholders, one needs to consistently learn and un-learn so as to evolve, for the benefit of the individual, for the benefit of the institution. Hence, it can be securely said that these are times when the true worth of a business leader will go through an arduous litmus test.

The pandemic has pushed the business leaders in an arch light where they are not seen as other-worldly entities with halos emitting from them, but usual human beings who have their own set of fears, vulnerabilities, responsibilities and foibles. Remote form of work is the norm and office space has intruded into the homespun life of all and sundry. We all have ended up becoming tiny figures on the screen of the conference calls. Therefore, it is time to be humane. Let the officious formality take a small detour for a while. The very first thing that the business leaders are doing is showing the other side of their faces; the less-formal, more-relatable family persons who too are fighters and survivors in the catastrophe. Taking out time to ask the well-being of the employees, their family members and setting up a crises management team to look after the aids that the employees may need not only solidifies the trust that employees have for their employers but also earns the leaders respect by bringing them a few steps closer. Thus, the long-forgotten, oft-ignored values of empathy and commiseration have made a welcome inroad in the tightly clasped world of professionalism.

The pace and degree in which the corporate world has changed is baffling even for the most progressive minds. Office spaces are mostly deserted and the way service sector used to function has undergone such a seismic change that it is practically unimaginable to think of a business life beyond this. Companies too had to adapt themselves to these changes, train their stuff to embrace a world that never was and transform themselves in all forms of policy, goals and operation and that too in an unthinkably swift way. The magnanimous aspect of leadership comes into being in this very case that while employees are constantly working under grueling circumstances, without a handy help, trying to strike a balance amongst work, health and life and walking the line of fire daily, it is imperative that the leaders are allowing them to take time off, reflect, rejuvenate, sort the thorns of life out and be instrumental in collaborating and bringing about positive changes while situations pull them back.

A good leader always challenges and motivates his subordinates to learn and grow while he himself leads and paves the way. What sets a great leader apart from the other run-of-the-mill executives is his inherent capacity in taking risks. Business, which always sits of the tenterhooks of risk, can only augment if risks are taken at the level of goal setting. We all have seen that all of the giants who stride and bolster in the firmament of finances took baby steps because somebody crazed with the idea of change and novelty had dared to dream and had gambled with life to make the change happen. They stood firm even when the ship had hit rocky terrains, withstood all that came with boldness of mind and steadiness of heart and finally fortune beamed upon them, rewarding them for their resilience. Covid, despite its all-pervading negativity has unleashed an array of possibilities for the businesses. In order to resist redundancy in the current volatile and changed business world, one has to take risks, have a solid vision for a long-term and encourage others to follow suit. Otherwise, success will stay elusive and stagnation will lead to obsolescence. Hence, the leaders must contemplate over the issue of their contribution to the world in the midst of a dreaded pandemic. They must muse and let others muse over the changes companies must make in order to stay adrift. They must learn and let others learn ways in which their dreams may come to fruition.

Pandemic has taught us the importance of having human-like traits more than ever. It has made us comprehend that neither can we live in our imaginary ivory towers nor can we stay in silos. In this world where we are engaged in a collective strife to stay alive, inter-connectedness is the key to survival. Hence, the business leaders have shown the need of having a platform wherein they would share their learning, their plights and would help each other by challenging and motivating each other to learn and grow together. It is only through a curetted repertoire of shared knowledge that leaders can keep abreast with the best practices doing rounds. Furthermore, the need for sparing thoughts for leaving ecological footprints, being conducive to the society beyond the organisational corpus and managing the conflicting demands and dimensions of the multiple stakeholders of a business tests the acumen of the leaders. This has been felt practically in these days when the frontline workers, employees whose functionality has been affected due to the pandemic had to be kept secured. Lay off is not an option. It propels individuals and families into bottomless pits of adversity. It is those leaders who tend to care for the footprints, who secure that the hearth of their employees never get frozen, who are adroit and thoughtful, whose companies are trusted widely across the myriad lines of collaborators.

The roles of the business leaders are complex and variegated even in the regular milieu. And with the sweeping bout of change that is there in the air, the leaders have now donned additional garbs of guardians and change-makers apart from being mentors, policy-makers, decision-makers and employers. Therefore, the seminal place that they have in the pandemic-stricken financial sphere is undeniable and is ever-burgeoning. Their impact is to be felt not only in the power corridors of corporate but also in the homespun life, giving them a tinge of human-like colours.