What Kind Of A Leader Are You - A Maker Or A Breaker?

The author is a Hospitality & Feature Writer and Columnist for some of the world’s highest ranked Hospitality publications. Her industry writings are used as references in case studies and hotel schools. She is a recognised and national-poll winning Corporate Communications specialist, PR Strategist and Writer. A seasoned hotelier, she loves to present hospitality industry watch, insights, case studies and analysis to her ever-increasing base of global readership. She has over two decades of experience in Hospitality Communications and Brand Management and has worked with some of the best global hotel companies - The Imperial New Delhi, The Oberoi, New Delhi, Hyatt Regency Delhi. Aruna was appointed to the Board of Association of Emerging Leaders Dialogues (AELD), as the second Indian representative and the only woman leader from India.

- l. Aruna Dhir

The dominant traits of the top most leader in any organisation, unarguably, define the shape and personality of the organisation as a whole. So whether the top dog is fair, biased, aggressive, assimilative, open-minded and inclusive or clique and coterie centered, insecure or confident, the organisation tends to take on similar features and harbour the climate that screams of the same defining set of behavioural facets.

A Balanced Leader is the backbone of a Healthy Organisation

In one’s career history, while growth and better opportunity are often the crucial reasons for moving out from one and into another organisation, the other main reason that seldom gets talked about openly is a huge sense of disenchantment or dissatisfaction or unhappiness stemming from a sour equation with an immediate boss or the super boss or the politically charged peer group that makes it difficult for one to perform optimally. Complicated and unreasonable bosses or a set of ogre-like colleagues is in fact a bigger, often unspoken reason for people to move and seek greener pastures elsewhere. Several HR studies, globally, have proved this fact time and again.

In the early 1990s, as a young, sprightly fresher with rose-tinted glasses I joined the Public Affairs Section of a Diplomatic Mission in Delhi. This was my second job and I had often heard that it was Asians who were more clique-y, gossipy, with inherent biases and prone to apple-polishing. So, imagine my astonishment when I found some of my Western colleagues as guilty as their Asian counterparts. My first reaction was, “Hell, Here too!” And the second reaction post some thought, “We all are the same beneath the veneer.”