The Hindu Business Line : Beyond responsibility

To lead an organisation, a leader needs to be a combination of team builder, coach, mentor, delegator, decision maker, consensus builder, a taskmaster and a role model!

He/she also needs to be well equipped with the right skill sets and attitude – in short, the leader must always set the standards in terms of acceptable behaviour.

He must demonstrate the values of the organisation at all times.

Not surprisingly, the attributes listed above are not always inbuilt but can be learned over time and depends on exposure to the right environment, training and experience garnered over the years.

In many ways, being a junior in an organisation is far easier than a leadership role. Generally, junior staff members just have to take responsibility for their specific tasks and then they move on.

At that level, it is easy to micromanage, check, re-check and eliminate the possibility of errors. In other words, the entire task is under control.

Junior staff are also protected against error to some extent because they tend to be more heavily supervised.

Things change as one scales higher levels, the tasks multiply in both number and complexity and there are always several deadlines to meet at the same time.

In addition, a leader is answerable to more people and thus accountability becomes even more crucial.

Micromanagement then not only becomes a daunting task but an impossible one.

So then how does one manage the change from being responsible to being accountable?

As one gets accountable for the performance of the business, it is time to firmly and fairly give responsibility to others.

It becomes essential to build a team, which is well equipped to meet the challenge and which also shares the vision of the leader.

The team is expected to deliver the desired results with or without close mentoring. The key here is to eliminate the ‘How to deliver aspect’, and to encourage the team to develop decision-making abilities. Further, the system s hould have an element of flexibility, which would prove advantageous in achieving the set goals.

The leader thus moves away from the role of a doer to a director and an influencer.

It is essential for the leader to make his team realise the fact that it is impossible to meet the leader’s business goals without their efforts. At Aviva, our objective is to focus on the training and development of each individual.

We try to ensure that our people are empowered so that they can act appropriately and get the job done. Bert Paterson, Managing Director, Aviva Life Insurance Company India Pvt. Ltd

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