Leadership Recipe
Imagine you are a pilot flying a twin-engine jet plane in the sky. As you ascend towards the clouds, all of a sudden you see a flock of birds approaching towards you. In a split second, both your engines are destroyed.
You are now just flying a glider!
What do you think must have happened to your airplane, what would you have done?
Friends this is the true story which took place over the skies of New York, on January 15, 2009, US Airways flight #1549. Captain Chesley Sullenberger quickly realized that he would not be able to make it back to the airport.
From his quick decision-making skills, he along with his co-pilot landed the aircraft the Hudson River.
Hence saving the lives of 155 passengers and crew on board. Now that is one heck of a leader in action, taking the responsibility in his hands and delivering the impossible.
Let us now discover the styles of leadership and see where do you fit in them.
Our 1st leader is Bill Gates. During his years in Microsoft, he focused on monopolizing the PC operating system market. He encouraged PC makers like Dell and Compaq to bundle Microsoft’s software with their hardware. Here Bill gates followed an authoritative leadership style. With this, he provided long-term direction and focus on end-goals.
How many of you watch movies on Netflix? Netflix basically runs on the cloud servers of one of the most innovative company of this decade, Amazon.
So Jeff Bezos Amazon’s founder, our 2nd leader; follows a style of Innovative leadership. One of his motto which I like is “Fail fast, fail often”. In this way, innovative ideas were nurtured and brought to life. Here Bezos shares a vision of the future and pursues excellence.
Five years back, I got an opportunity to lead an event along with 50 members. So the first task was to bring together the team. So we had an incredible icebreaking session. Next was to make each and every member responsible for his/her task. This was accomplished by assigning a team lead to from each year as well as making sure each event team comprises of artists, orators, creative pros, and most importantly eager to learn. And finally, meetings were held regularly to update everyone about the status of their tasks. After going through the various leadership styles, I discovered that I majored in Affiliative leadership. My focus was on creating a cohesive unit by emphasizing teamwork and harmony.
Other styles like democratic leadership where members are allowed to take lead and are involved on a deeper level on the decision-making process, coaching leadership which helps members realize and develop the skillset for the future and pacesetting leadership which helps focus on productivity and hence high-performance standards are set for the team.
So to achieve greater heights, All you need is 2 cups of authoritative leadership, 1 cup of innovative, 1 cup of affiliative, few spoons of democratic, pacesetting and coaching leadership and voila! You have a perfect recipe to handle any situation or circumstance and lead any team to success.
So in the case our Captain Sullenberger,
How was he able to pull off the impossible?
What were his leadership traits?
His 42 years of experience were put into test. And boy, he aced it!
