Were You Born To Lead or To Follow ?

With My Love & Life ^KanchiniSekaran^

I do come across meeting up many people, particularly people from the corporate world. I observed few elements along my journey and it is interesting to know that there are many leaders out there.


Sadly, not many leaders have effective skills as they are bound to Follow instead of taking the Lead. Now, to define Lead is something more than giving someone an order, or pointing finger, or isn't just bossing people around. It is more than this !


To Lead, it demands a lot of responsibilities, dedication, managing the team well, and top of all is staff engagement or I would spelled it as understanding. 


Many leaders fail to understand that workplace engagement do plays a major role in resulting excellent output/results by keeping the employees happy. Sometimes, dollar & cents is not the issue. It backs to understanding each and other. I mean management-staff relationship. When such environment takes place, clearly shows the Leader were born to Follow and not To Lead. 


Follow, as in getting instructions and redirecting the instruction to the employees, which every Tom, Dick & Harry could practice that. I don't have to work for years to be there, probably, 1 week training will do.!


Get down, hands on, manage, communicate, troubleshoot together, investigate, identify, resolving issues, seek for solution, and all the mentioned above is related to staff welfare not work pertaining issues.


Leaders are meant to keep the team happy and the team's duty is to resolved the jobs problem/issues. Now if the team is Not well taken care, the Leader's will need to do the staff's job. So, now I see the point why there are so many inefficient leaders around claiming that they have a lot of works to do. When they actually don't have to.


Leadership abilities comes naturally to some, but for many, it has to be Honed and Developed. I truly understand that Leaders are Made not Born! Leadership skills are acquired  over a period of time based on several factors:


Seven Leadership Skills:

1. Leaders come in all different shapes and sizes. It is interesting to study effective leaders. At face value they are all different. They all have developed their own style based on their own personality and what works for them. 

2. A true leader accepts responsibility. Everything from how they speak to how they act is part of being responsible. It is easy to follow them because you know where they are going and know they will lead you as well. 

3. Leaders work at being leaders. They are always improving their skills and learning from the situations they are in. They study people and have learned how to effectively interact with them to get what they want. 

4. Leadership starts at the top, but is best achieved when developing a team atmosphere. Leaders know they can do better when people are working together for one common goal. Sharing in leadership is part of this process. Making everyone accountable for what they do, but judging success on the overall efforts of everyone. 

5. Situations call for different types of leadership. A well-rounded leader is able to adapt to their surroundings and lead accordingly. Coaching a football team is an example of this. Sometimes the players need a kick in the rear and other times they need a pat on the back. 

6. Leaders are respected for what they have accomplished in the past. A real leader can speak from a position of practical experience and know they will be listened to because they speak from that vantage point. A respected leader is able to command more from his people than a leader who is not. 

7. Leaders seek opinions and compile ideas before forming a game plan. Good leaders know that they cannot come up with every idea that will work. By allowing input they are able to make a more responsible decision. 

Highlighted in blue, is my strong points for leadership. 

We all know from the beginning, the days when the Great Mohandas Gandhi quoted " I suppose leadership at one time meant Muscles; but today it means getting along with people" 

That's all for today....Cheers to all Leaders and future leaders.

When Money Needs Time and Begged for Quality Life

Living in this fast pace world, we probably do not know the purpose of our own existence. It has been years that we are living for the same common purposes. It all started when we attend pre-school, primary school, high school, college, university then fall into a job.  It sounds like the LIFE is taking us a RIDE. Now the question is, are we in control or we are controlling our own life?

During learning days in school, everyone will get the same old question, what will you be when you grow up? Or what is your ambition? The same old answers were given either doctor or engineer.  Looking at all this, none of us understand the needs of the future for each individual. Nor our parents or the society should decide what we should be when we grow up.

Teachers are trained to teach students on their subjects. Parents are trained to educate us to be a better person with the right character, but, is there anyone to guide us or let us know, what it takes to be a successful human being?  I refer successful being WEALTHY not RICH.

All these years, we were told to study very hard, so that we would have a bright future and have an easy life. I do agree with the statement ‘bright future’ but not ‘easy life’. 

If we look at our lifestyle right now, there are two major factors contributing to QUALITY LIFESTYLE, its TIME & MONEY. Was there any topic on TIME & MONEY during our days in school? I bet till date, no one has spoken this agenda in school to actually prepare the adolescent to face the current fast pace world.  Of course, time isn't free. It is the least free of all assets. It is non-renewable. Once spent, it's gone forever. Yet it's the form in which we want to take a great deal of our potential income from time.

If it was taught in school, I am sure the numbers of jobless and ignorant people out there will be reduced. Not only that, we will create more knowledgeable people in the country to understand the world’s inflation and its effect towards socio economics.

Let’s look in the profession Project Management point of view, the goal is to have the project finish on time, within the budget and of course be quality. The same goals can be applied to life; everybody would like to make best use of their time, their money, and their quality of life. With your money, you would rather not have it spent on frivolous things. And if you do put your time and money towards anything it better be at least rewarding.

The reason, I, wrote on this topic is because not many people understand and even if they do, most of them are ignorant. Most people fail to understand on the number years they have and time needed to be settled. Remember! We only have approximately 7 to 8 of ten years in one life cycle, where half  the number of ten years gone while studying and looking for a right career. How ignorant can a person be when it is too late to realize as the years never look back and human do not stop ageing.

Benjamin Franklin wrote this in a letter to a young man over 250 years ago. It works both ways: money can buy you time, which is why we pay physicians and pharmaceutical companies after we have heart attacks. We can trade one for the other. But we can buy more money with time than we can buy time with money. The system is asymmetrical. There are people who are worth a billion dollars. No one I know is going to live 300 years unless a major breakthrough in medicine takes place. (If it does, Social Security's "trust fund" will take another hit.)

It’s time for us to educate and guide our younger generation to have quality life perhaps balance with TIME & MONEY.