IIM-K initiates team building programme

Tarun Narayan in Mumbai

In a pioneering initiative towards sharpening the leadership focus amongst the middle and senior corporate managers and inspiring them towards becoming strategic leaders of corporate India, IIM-Kozhikode has initiated a leadership and team-building programme under the series on “Management Development Programme (MDP)”, starting November 21 to 24, 2001.

For the institute, this is an academic initiative towards lending a proactive industry support in enriching leadership talent by making the middle and senior-level managers appreciate and enforce the qualities of a corporate leader.

“Middle and senior-level managers from corporates are well trained in functional expertise like marketing and HR with around 10 to 15 years of their professional input in the industry. Then arrives the time for these corporate professionals to comprehend the varied complications and interpretations to interpersonal relationships, dominant styles in getting a successful and coherent people management systems and knitting the concept of team-building as an essential step towards internalising the pathfinders to becoming a leader,” explains Prof. Unnikrishnan Nair, associate professor, organisational behaviour, IIM-K.

The programme, therefore, lays little emphasis on classroom confined lectures. There will be more of case discussions, psychometric inventories, and case studies that will enable the corporate participants to appreciate and apply in the marketplace, their own innate human resource management (HRM) capabilites to emerge as leaders in the competitive corporate world.

“Leadership is about proactively actualising the inherent resourcefulness, dynamism and emotional vibrancy that lies dormant within an individual when it comes to dealing with a group of people. We structure circumstances that can facilitate these professionals to display their inherent potential which, when best exploited, can make them frontrunning leaders,” explains Prof Nair.

The system of cultivating leadership has been structured parallel to the service selection board processes often applied in defence institutions.

The programme enables the professionals to reflect their internal personality potentials in a given context at the corporate workplace. “Many of them are not only efficient co-ordinators, but fetch resources imaginatively in times of dire demand, and encourage team-building. They can individually create a sense of dedication and like-mindedness amongst their group towards attaining a strategised objective.”

According to Prof Nair: “Our effort would be to mobilise these individual competencies and ingrain these as a collective human asset for every participant attending the programme.”

“The leadership programme will arrive as a building block to make these professionals strategic leaders who can chart out a more forward-looking mission and visions for corporate enterprise. This also arrives as a motivator for professionals towards growing as future CEOs and managing directors of business enterprises,” adds Prof Nair.

The institute is also conducting a similar leadership-inculcating drive for students of IIM-K. “In this case, novel and classic literature will be utilised to drive home the diverse manifestations that can project a person as a succesful leader,” informs Prof. Nair.