Before I even begin to think/describe myself as a leader, I believe it is more appropriate to talk about how I am also a follower and a Team Player. For this, according to me, is the first step towards becoming a leader.
I am a good team player and even though I have been this way since childhood, I have only recently discovered how important an element this is. As a kid I played for my school's basketball team and quickly understood(without any conscious realisation) how to perform as a part of a team. Just like for a sport team, it is important to adapt to the other members of the team in business/official scenarios too for achieving good results.
I derive inspiration from certain people, these may not be people who are leading others but are leading in their domains and I find them worthy of learning from. A few of the people that I follow/read about are Joe Satriani, Eric Clapton and Rene Descartes. Along with this I also think that it is important to lead a team by standing behind them or in other words by following what they are doing. In case there is any glitch it needs to be covered up and for that the team member should feel free to come and talk to you about it.
Leadership to me stems from mutual respect. Only when there is mutual respect can a true leader flourish. The leader has to gain respect by certain attributes of his. To me these attributes have been my creativity/innovation and my knowledge. For instance, while working at BHEL I was faced with many challenges, one of which was the necessity of reducing the time taken for calibration of temperature sensors along with my team. For this the solution that I had proposed(and which was finally adopted) was to change the range in which the sensors were calibrated to only one that lay over close proximity to the range of temperatures that it would be used to sense. Although the solution made sensors non generic and very specific, the time taken to calibrate was reduced to an acceptable level.
Leadership to me is also about taking initiatives and standing for what you believe to be correct. A recent initiative that I took in NITIE was to start a culture club. Since NITIE did not have its own culture club and looking at the problems that were faced at last year's Denovo, Me along with two cultural secretaries decided to start a culture club which would be comprised of people who were involved in the various activities last year and also the ones who showed interest in doing so this year. The culture club(although unofficial) is up and running and this time they have also been able to form their own music band and are getting ready to give a series of seamless performances during this year, both within NITIE and in competitions from other colleges. Another initiative that was taken by us was for CIE. We organise an event called Enflammer and we made a decision to take it to an international scale this year. It required meticulous planning and effort but now we are seeing some entries coming in from other countries too and this has been quite an experience.
According to me another very important part of a leader is that he should be able to understand people and what they need. A sound understanding of this makes it easier to work with them. This too I learnt during my experience at BHEL. I was given a team of 7 labourers to work with and I found that the kind of problems that these people faced/ the kind of motivations they had were very different from what we normally see at offices. To them a simple meal, together with the team, at the end of the week seemed to be the greatest motivator and I made it a point to do this for them every week even though the money came out of my own pocket.
The last but definitely the most important part of being a leader is having a vision for myself. My Vision is to be happy, healthy and successful. I am working towards these goals by excelling at things that I like(chess, writing, music etc), making more friends and meeting new people, by running everyday and by learning as much as I can at this point of time.
