Fluency

This happened about ten years ago. The scene is the senior executive committee meeting of a large Multinational Company. Those assembled are the select group who are being groomed for taking up top management positions. The discussion is on future trends in the FMCG sector in developing countries. Many ideas are being thrown up and seriously discussed, including those on new products and innovative packaging.

Rajeev mehra, (fictional name) is somewhat silent. A great performer on the job, he believes that actions speak louder than words. His last quarter sales figures are stupendous. Suddenly, this 38 year old Engineer and MBA from reputed B School has a flash of inspiration. He realizes that developing countries like India and Pakistan have a huge rural segment who are not yet aware of toothpaste and soap. Hitherto all FMCG companies including his own had concentrated on urban markets which were essentially saturated. Moreover brand loyalties were high among urban customers and weaning t hem away from competitors was simply impossible or needed high adspend and publicity budgets. So…attack the rural customer and expand the pie. A great idea? But Rajeev suddenly had second thoughts, then third thoughts and finally decided that the idea was too silly to be mentioned to this elite group of seasoned Managers. So he kept quiet.

Hardly, half an hour later, Sunil Vohra (fictional name), another younger manager who was in the shortlist for a promotion along with Rajeev stood up and propounded the Rural Market penetration theory! This was received with acclamation and applause. Sunil was asked to give a presentation in the afternoon and then made the Team Leader of a task force for implementing the concept. He finally moved on to become VP.

Fluency is the ability to convert ideas and thoughts from the conceptual to the verbal dimension. People who have this ability succeed simply because they speak up!

Let me end this post with a quote from an essay titled Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) a great and profound thinker and writer:

“A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within…Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humoured inflexibility…Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.”

The Four Secrets of Inspirational Leaders

Inspirational Leaders have been able to consistently influence their teams and others. They have been able to

1. Communicate their vision to others,
2. Convert it into executable plans of action,
3. Identify the right people for each task and finally
4. Review progress and monitor the plan till the attainment of the final goal.

What I have described above is the approach. Successful application of this approach requires the development of four crucial abilities. A manager who is taught the above approach (well, most of us know them already!) would assume that mechanically going through the motions of this approach should automatically result in success! Well, I wish it were that simple!

What great Inspirational Leaders bring to the table are four ingredients that make the difference. These are four abilities. These are essential in the same way that knowledge of Trigonometry is essential for engineering and Compounding is for Finance. These subjects, unfortunately, are not (yet!) being taught systematically in schools in the same way that math and basic science are being drilled into our children. Think about it… your son or daughter is going to need these abilities most after the age of twenty-five and what they are learning in school today is really doing nothing to help them then. Their employers are going to spend a huge amount of money teaching them and trainers like me are going to have to design newer and newer methods to help adult learners internalize these concepts which are easily taught and absorbed at the primary school level. What are these abilities?

• Fluency

o The ability to express concepts and abstract ideas in a way that makes it easier for the other person to understand them and talk about them. We are not talking about oratory or rhetoric here. This is about more mundane issues like clarity, brevity and using a pleasant tone of voice and (you are not going to believe this!) smiling.

• Listening
• Too much importance cannot be given to this ability which also one of the three crucial “skills” that managers do not learn but Leaders do. Listening demands a slowing down and cooling down that is seen in today’s aggressive world as a weakness. Possibly why managers easily forget their vital lessons on listening and slip back to their easier and obviously impressive “fast” approaches.”
• Feedback
• The ability to accept that we are not perfect and that there is always scope for improvement. The further realization that the best way to improve is to listen to what others have to say about us and, like the proverbial swan take the good suggestions for improvement and ignore, forget or forgive the rest. Finally, having the maturity to learn how to give effective, useful, non-emotive feedback to others thus helping them perform better.
• Empathy
• The ability to feel and understand the feelings of others. A sensitization to others feelings is a sign of leadership and also a condition for its attainment. Does this mean that we have to be “weak” and always concerned about others? No! This is NOT a way of living. This is a drill-down capability; a tool that you use on need basis. You use it to pause and understand totally what the other person is saying “from their point of view”. Thereafter you go ahead and use the other tool (Remember the first ability?) of Fluency to help them understand why what you are proposing is as better for them as it is for you.