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RadhaKrishnan Venkataramani

What it takes to be a great leader?

I work in tech startup called @Zenefits in SanFrancisco as a Software Engineer. Today, my CEO Parker Conrad has stepped down from his role and has been replaced by COO David Sacks. This came as big shock to all the Zenefits employees today.

Why did he leave? It’s all around the media. I don’t want to speculate on the reasons. Anyways, I think this is the right time for me to learn about how to be a great leader. It takes time. Isn’t it? I have never been a leader before and yes, it’s not a requirement to learn and exhibit leadership skills. So i’m planning to go through a large set of materials/podcasts to understand and learn about what it takes to be a great leader and what key-traits differentiate great leaders from the normal bosses.

  1. Leadership can be learned. It’s not a magic gift given to a baby when it was born. Each and everyone of us can learn how to lead.
  2. Leadership is a combo of skills and values. You can’t lead without having any skills but just with values. Also, You can’t lead with just skills but not having values. If you don’t have values, people are not going to follow you.
  3. You don’t really need to have a manager/Director*/Chief* title to lead. You can lead from wherever you are. Strength, integrity and influence are the key traits which can make anyone as a leader.
  4. Leadership style is defined by the behavior a leader uses. The best leaders know change is the only constant in this world and they keep changing their behavior to lead different situations and different set of people.
  5. Leadership is determined by those who choose to follow you. The only time it matters when others apply that description to you.
  6. Best leaders read people and situations accurately and respond in a way to improve the status quo.
  7. Leaders absorb shock, pain and dis-comfort of others without others even knowing it.
  8. It’s harder for a tough leader to learn empathy and compassion but a compassionate leader with empathy can easily learn to toughen up.
  9. Leadership and integrity are in-separable. You can’t be a leader if people cannot trust you.
  10. True leaders know when to be followers. There are never enough leaders.

Reference to this podcast: https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/what-great-bosses-know/id380130790?mt=10.

I have worked at Facebook before and i have attended almost all of the Friday Q&A sessions as well as quarterly all-hands of Mark Zuckerberg and I can clearly see how he fits into all these 10 points.

P.S:

I have started getting some constructive feedback about my english from my my best friends. My best friends are awesome. They never agree with me and make me feel happy when I’m wrong. They just say `Rad, You are so wrong. Please fix your English.`

So i’m looking to improve my english as much as i can this year. I’m not ashamed to admit that my english is bad openly as well. I believe all skills can be learnt with adequate amount of practice and determination to learn. Atleast 100M people in the world talks and writes good english. Why can’t I do it? I can see it’s very simple skill to learn. If you find any grammatical mistakes over the posts, feel free to comment on it :)

I have chosen leadership and startups as the two topics which i will be constantly writing about all through this year till i write 10 essays without any grammatical mistake.