Steadfast Leadership

I believe and try to live by “STEADFAST LEADERSHIP” (Sincerity, Training, Excellence, Attitude, Discipline, Family (and Friends), Accountability, Scrupulousness, and Teamwork). It has helped me a great deal during my tenure as Corporate Relations and Placement Committee Member. Methodical and incessant interactions with 100 plus companies and regular campus engagement activities enabled me to foster a strong relationship with corporates and helped me gain exposure to the nuances of preparation that goes into building a robust team with a shared vision. We put in meticulous efforts over months together and through regular deliberation and coordinated planning to the minute level, facilitated the culmination of a successful Final Placements season for the PGP batch of 2013-15 in record time of 10 days. Below are some expressions of same: a. Sincerity: My diligent conduct, helps me in completing the assigned activity without many follow-ups. I am committed to deadlines despite challenges. b. Training: Training is maintaining! I focus on self–development, reflection and education to turn weaknesses into strengths. c. Excellence: Excellence is not an act, it’s a habit. I believe in seizing the initiative to push limits to set high, achievable goals and not just meet the minimum requirements. d. Attitude: The one thing in life we can control is our attitude. When I see a problem, I try and become part of solution! e. Discipline: I am able to choose the harder right over the easier wrong, accept risk and go the extra mile to “Talk the Walk and Walk the Talk.” f. Family and Friends: It is rewarding for me to get involved with family and friends out of desire, not out of obligation. g. Accountability: On both personal and professional fronts, I hold myself accountable for my actions and for the care and keeping of those entrusted under my leadership position. 1. Scrupulousness: I analyze, correlate data points and use past experience and learning, in order to make effective decisions; understand every situation completely w.r.t people, processes, structure, etc. before taking step forward, as opposed to accepting without reasoning. 2. Teamwork: Together Everyone Achieves More and disagreement does not equal disrespect. I perform well as an individual and better as a member of a team. I sincerely acknowledge the efforts and opinions of fellow colleagues & share credit, building positive team morale. Bottom line, I enjoy life, I love people around me, I love to laugh and I love to work hard!

A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way - John Maxwell In my last project at Mindtree, the person who handled operational activities earlier went on emergency leave, leaving us with very little time for knowledge transfer sessions. Though I had meagre understanding of concepts; I took the ownership of tasks allocated with an appetite for learning in challenging environment. My diligent and meticulous conduct enabled me to pick up fast and soon deliver independently. After adequate understanding of activities, I focused on streamlining existing processes. My technical background helped me a great deal. I was quickly able to assemble a team of 3 to develop an online portal to automate majority of tasks; enhancing performance by 30% to further simplify the extensive analysis processes. After walking my manager through use cases considered and features of the application, he was certain of the overall support it would provide to address the major issue of resource bandwidth that we faced. Impressed with the analysis, he agreed to present the new model to senior management, and together we convinced them to adopt it. Evidently, in today’s global business arena, ability to seize opportunities is the hallmark of effective leadership. Using the portal resolved most of our mainstream concerns and we were able to bring in additional engagements within a year growing the account strength from 225 to 560 plus members, with 12 new projects. Clearly, we needed more members in operations team to share the mounting responsibilities. As per requirements we brought together a team of 4 from diverse geographies, with varied work background across industry groups. Though they did not have significant client facing scenarios, the main difficulty I faced was to break them from their steady work practices in a short period of time and keep up with the tight delivery schedule. To bring in accountability I restructured the roles and responsibilities as per region, industry group and deliverable recipients. In next 3 months, through closely tracked knowledge transfer sessions, we together got the team up and running to deliver independently. The most important aspect of my team was the elevated morale among all of us. This experience is meaningful as it revealed to me, my strength in communicating my vision to the team to keep them focused on our objective. Indeed, a shared vision is essential to motivate a team to take strategic risks and perform beyond expectations.

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