Elements Of A Good Leader
"An ability to control your emotions, to regulate your emotions, to be emotionally intelligent, to be ethical and being a continuous learner at all times is a very important requirement for leaders," says Bharat Wakhlu, Founder and President, The Wakhlu Advisory and Former Resident Director, Tata Group India.
He was speaking at the Pune chapter of Indian Business Literature Festival, a 21-city forum, organised by BW Businessworld, on Sunday.
While talking about his book 'Tata’s Leadership Experiment: The Story of the Tata Administrative Service', Wakhlu underlined the future of leadership. "The first and foremost quality any leader should have is that a leader has to be emotionally intelligent. I have seen a bunch of extremely capable people who cannot regulate their emotions and then everything is lost," he states.
"If they will speak harshly, they will not assess situations and get annoyed at the smallest of matters - such leaders, even though they will be domain experts, will wreck any good organisation and therefore will have to be kept at an arm's distance," adds Wakhlu.
"Leaders have to operate with an ethical mindset. You cannot put the company or yourself at risk by behaving in a way that is illegal," he shares.
"The person has to be self-aware and willing to learn throughout his or her life," Wakhlu suggests. He believes that this is a quality that leaders need to have, specially in this age when everything is so uncertain. "You might learn something today and by tomorrow it's not useful anymore because everything has changed," says Wakhlu.
