OCROBERASIA BUSINESS OUTLOOK8FROMTHEEXPERTSA LEADERSHIP PARADIGM SHIFT FOR THE NEW NORMALBy Dr.Madana Kumar, VP & Global Head - Leadership Development, UST GlobalDr. Madana Kumar, PhD, is an industry veteran with close to 4 decades of Industry Experience in organisations like Bharti, HCL, IBM etc.. He is a passionate student, thought leader and practitioner of Servant Leadership. His passion is in evangelizing Servant Leadership (a topic he chose for his Doctoral dissertation) in all types of organisations, including Corporates, Educational Institutions and Social Sector organisations. We hear about "New Normal" a lot these days. COVID 19 has disrupted our lives and this has spawned a whole new set of studies and theories about what the future could hold for our lives. We cannot escape this even if we want to. As a student of Leadership, my question always is "How does Leadership matter" in this scenario? How does Leadership matter in the New Normal? John Maxwell gives a crisp but definitive answer to that question. "Everything Rises and Falls on Leadership," he says, and I agree.So what type of leadership will the New Normal require? I am amazed by the response I get when I ask participants in the workshops to put down the first images that come to their minds when they hear the word Leadership. The responses show an innate deep desire in all human beings to see leadership as something good, leaders as people who do glorious things for their followers. This desire has only got stressed by the COVID-19 Pandemic that we are going through. My studies show that there are four specific tenets that drive a paradigm shift in Leadership in the New Normal.1. Tenet No 1: The way Leaders use "Power" will change drastically: We cannot separate Leadership from Power. It is not, and it never was, the absence of power that distinguished admired leaders from poor leaders. It is how the leaders used the powers they had. The old normal of Power Elite, where power was concentrated on a few selected people like Capitalists, or Politicians or Military Leaders will not exist anymore in the New normal. The New Normal will shun the "Power over" syndrome to adapt to the "Power with" syndrome. The new Normal will promote Socialised Power as against Individualized power. Corporate honchos who use power only for profits cannot get
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