Kishore Borra

Mr Kishore Borra holds dual Masters in Physics and Energy Systems with gold medals. He is a father of two boys, husband to a superwoman. A lecturer turned software Engineer, now Managing Director of a successful and fast-growing IT company. He is also a Leadership Evangelist and a certified member of John Maxwell Team (JMT) of Coaches, Speakers and Trainers.

Inside Out Leadership

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Let me share what I learned from my mentor John C Maxwell this week.  This week John taught us about Inside Out Leadership.

The inside influences the outside. Great leadership is always an inside job. 

When you’re better on the inside than the outside, and when you’re bigger on the inside than the outside, over time, you will become greater on the outside. In other words, when you’re better on the outside than the inside, and bigger on the outside than the inside, over time, you will become less on the outside. 

Better on the inside deals with character, integrity, authenticity, honesty, trustworthiness, walk your talk, showing more than telling, being more than doing. With a better inside, we may have a slow start, but it eventually shows up. 

The number one criterion for success is the ability to connect with people. Connecting is the ability to identify with people and relate to them to increase our influence with them.

Characteristics of inside-out leaders: 

  1. Inside-out leaders value more than position. 
  2. Inside-out leaders inspire others because others inspire them. You cannot inspire others unless you get inspired yourself.
  3. Inside-out leaders are secure enough to appreciate and acknowledge others.
  4. Inside-out leaders do not abuse power. 
  5. Inside-out leaders extend grace and forgiveness to others.
  6. Inside out, leaders acknowledge and apologize for their mistakes. 

Often, leaders mistakenly believe that they must be considered great to do only the right things. Apologizing is an act of humility. Humility attracts and inspires. Arrogance does not. 

Connectors live what they communicate. During the first six months, your communication overrides credibility, and after six months, your credibility overrides communication.

Skillful leaders constantly uncover their true selves, manage their emotions, achieve great goals, and are conscious of their unique talents and how to maximize them.

John C. Maxwell offers these eight questions to assess one’s level of self-leadership:

  1. Are you investing in yourself?  This question is all about your personal growth.  How can you teach what you do not know and take others to where you have not been?
  2. Are you genuinely interested in others?  Are you more concerned about other’s agendas than your own? There is nothing worse than a self-centered leader.
  3. Are you doing what you love, and do you love what you do?  Passion provides the fuel that provides you with the energy to be a great leader.
  4. Are you investing time with the right people?  Leaders surround themselves with talented, inspired people who want to make a difference.
  5. Are you working in your strength zone?  Leaders are keenly aware of what they are great at and what they love to do, and they spend most of their time doing these things.
  6. Are you taking others to a higher level?  Leaders help others unleash their inner talents.
  7. Are you taking care of today?  Leaders are natural visionaries, and they also know how to focus on the daily agenda and priorities at hand.
  8. Are you taking the time to think?  Great leaders love action.  However, they also are talented at disciplining themselves to stop every day and think creatively.

Change the world around you by changing yourself. Regularly retrospect your self-leadership abilities to grow and evolve.

 

An Unpredictable Leader

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I had the misfortune of working with a leader for some time who is quite moody, inconsistent, and unpredictable. You never know what he is going to say or do the very next moment. Since you don’t know what to expect, you surely become hesitant, fearful, and nervous. In addition to that, quite contrary to my nature, I remember always going to him with the problems instead of the proposed solutions that I have in my mind.

My colleagues and I struggled to figure out how to navigate his leadership and predict what he wants and had a severe impact on our productivity. One minute he will ask you about your kids, and the next minute he will threaten you. Sometimes he will help us with the solution, and other times he is angry that there is a problem. Often as a team, when we planned to celebrate small wins, we are not sure whether to invite him or not. When we request a minute of his time, sometimes he will hug us, and other times he will push you away. When you greet him in the office or the cafeteria, sometimes, he will smile and say hello, and other times he will ignore you. We always looked at him as a self-centered leader because he is always focused on his feelings, thoughts, priorities, and plan. He intentionally or unintentionally never had room to focus on the team he is leading and always puts his needs and wants ahead of his team members and everyone else.

Sometimes as a leader, you want to remain as unpredictable for a certain period on certain policies but certainly not with your people in your day to day interactions. Psychologists have proved that being unable to predict what happens in a team environment is extremely stressful and requires complex coping skills to deal with. Unfortunately, being unpredictable was a life and leadership strategy for my manager. He took a lot of pride in his unpredictable nature and often thought about it as a strategy to keep his team on their toes whenever they think they have figured out how to work with him. He ended up creating a lot of noise at the workplace.

What would you do if you worked for a moody boss who yelled and cursed you regularly? The answer is simple; you would work hard to find another job because life is way too short to work with fools. If you think you are an unpredictable leader, then its time that you should start working on consistency. It would help if you made it easy for your team to meet your expectations because unpredictability is a nightmare for people trying to manage upwards. The question is, how do you know whether you are displaying unpredictable nature or not? Simple; check if you have any one of the below qualities.

  1. Do you get angry about small mistakes and problems?
  2. Do you find it difficult to control your emotions or mood?
  3. Do you treat people with disrespect?
  4. Do you withhold information from the team and thereby making them incapable to take the right decisions?
  5. Do you struggle to recognize people’s contributions or success?
  6. Do you jump to conclusions and pass judgment without having all the facts?
  7. Do you lack listening skills?
  8. Do you feel insecure and unwilling to allow the team to decide without your involvement?
  9. Do you say something, meaning the other and doing the third one altogether?

Pastor, best selling author, and leadership evangelist Craig Groeschel says that when we say the same thing repeatedly as a leader, and your actions are consistent with your words, that builds trust. Consistency matters in leadership. People would follow a leader rather with a consistently average plan than a leader with a great plan, bad plan, or a mediocre plan that changes all the time.  When you are predictable and consistent, your team knows what is important to you and how you decide on priorities.

The below actions can help you make consistent in your decisions and makes you predictable.

  1. Be intentional to respond instead of reacting.
  2. Firstly thank people for bringing problems or concerns to your attention. Do not forget to ask questions, get their perspectives, and evaluate their feedback for any solution proposals.
  3. When in doubt, refer to your organization’s purpose and values, which always act as a guiding light and help you make correct decisions.
  4. Take time to discuss with the team and explain how you arrived at decisions for recurring situations.
  5. Do not hesitate to admit when you’re wrong or when you do not have all the answers.
  6. Connecting with the team requires energy. Make an effort to greet your team pleasantly.
  7. If you conform to a course of action, follow up and see it through to the end.
  8. Do not hesitate to remove yourself from the situation and seek advice.
  9. Never make a decision when you are angry and never make a promise when you are happy.
  10. Let every conversation to be a constructive conversation rather than an emotional dump.
  11. Finally, take more blame than you deserve and less credit than you deserve.

Remember you don’t have to know it all to be a great leader. Be yourself, because people would rather follow a leader who is always real than one who is always right.

Growth comes from discomfort !!

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There is a wonderful story that I heard about lobsters. Do you know how lobsters grow? A lobster is a very soft tissue animal, and it forms a hard shell for its protection. But the hardshell does not grow. As the lobster grows, the shell gets tighter and tighter. What happens is the lobster gets to the point where it is uncomfortable in its shell because the shell is too small and it is stuck in that constricting shell. It climbs under a rock or someplace safe and sheds the shell and start growing a new one and finally comes out of the rock. Later, when it grows more, its again gets uncomfortable, goes to a safe place and sheds the shell and grows a new shell. The stimulus for the lobster to grow new shell is its discomfort. Lobster waits until it is uncomfortable, and then it decides to grow, and it repeats it multiple times as it grows bigger and bigger.

Growth and comfort do not coexist. Comfort zones are most often expanded through discomfort. Therefore we have to make ourselves uncomfortable to grow. T. Harv Eker said “Nobody ever died of discomfort, yet living in the name of comfort has killed more ideas, more opportunities, more actions, and more growth than everything else combined. Comfort kills!”. Too many of us are so afraid of being uncomfortable that we don’t grow as much as we could. When I was asked to leave my well-paying job with awesome international travel opportunities, I took a massive risk to do something that would potentially make me very uncomfortable. It was my willingness to being uncomfortable that led to my growth. My willingness to grow has continuously opened up a lot of doors for me in life. I have made growth as the number one priority in my life.

Call to action …

Few people enjoy the feeling of being uncomfortable. The challenge is to get past that initial feeling of wanting to return to the norm, so you can grow and benefit from that discomfort. Are you willing to put yourselves in an uncomfortable position? Most of us find ourselves in an uncomfortable position all the time by accident. We all know that we don’t learn anything when things go right, and we only learn things when they go wrong. Things go wrong for all of us all the time, and we all say we would never want to go through that pain again. However, we all agree that its a growth opportunity.  What if you willingly put yourself in those positions. Imagine the speed of growth that could be achieved when you direct yourself into discomfort. Realise that times of stress are signals for growth.

Before you go…

If you enjoyed this post, you will love my new book, “Don’t Coast: Accelerate Your Personal and Professional Growth”.

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Do you have a shark in your tank?

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The Japanese have a great liking for fresh fish.

But the waters close to Japan have not held much fish for decades.

So, to feed the Japanese population, fishing boats got bigger and went farther than ever.

The farther the fishermen went, the longer it took to bring back the fish.

The longer it took them to bring back the fish, the stale they grew.

The fish was not fresh and the Japanese did not like the taste.

To solve this problem, fishing companies installed the freezers on their boats.

They would catch the fish and freeze them at sea.

Freezers allowed the boats to go farther and stay longer.

However, the Japanese could taste the difference between fresh and frozen fish.

And they did not like the taste of frozen fish.

The frozen fish brought a lower price.

So, fishing companies installed fish tanks.

They would catch the fish and stuff them in the tanks, fin to fin.

After a little hashing around, fishes stopped moving.

They were tired and dull, but alive.

Unfortunately, the Japanese could still taste the difference.

Because the fish did not move for days, they lost their fresh-fish taste.

The Japanese preferred the lively taste of fresh fish, not sluggish fish.

The fishing industry faced an impending crisis!

But today, it has got over that crisis and has emerged as one of the most important trades in that country!

How did Japanese fishing companies solve this problem?

How do they get fresh-tasting fish to Japan?

To keep the fish tasting fresh, the Japanese fishing companies still put the fish in the tanks.

But now they add a small shark to each tank.

The shark eats a few fish, but most of the fish arrive in a very lively state.

The fish are challenged and hence are constantly on the move.

And they survive and arrive in a healthy state!

They command a higher price and are most sought-after.

The challenge they face keeps them fresh!

Humans are no different. We thrive oddly enough, only in the presence of a challenging environment. If you‘re the smartest person in the room, you‘re in the wrong room. You need to immediately look out for a new opportunity because you are not in a growth environment. Essentially, if you are not challenged, you will become complacent. You will stop growing and you will become stale or stagnant. There are no great people in the world, only great challenges which ordinary people rise to meet.

What have you done lately to challenge yourself to grow in a specific area of character or in a targeted competence? Press ON !!

About “The Strangest Secret”

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This amazing message was first played for a group of salespeople at Earl Nightingale’s insurance agency. They were utterly electrified. Word of it spread like wildfire and everyone who heard it was positively ignited into action. Requests for a recording of the message came pouring in—thousands of requests per week. Within no time, more than 200,000 people had called, written, or just walked right into Earl’s office to request a copy. As years went by, that number soared above 1,000,000 and became the first Gold Record for the spoken word, which helped launch the fields of business motivation and audio publishing. Our world has significantly changed since Earl shared his principles in the 1950s, but his message is now more relevant than ever. This timeless message about motivation, mindfulness, and character development will impact your life for sure.

Today, more than 50 years later, The Strangest Secret remains one of the most powerful and influential messages ever recorded. It continues to transform the lives of everyone who hears and heeds it. Take this 30-day test, then repeat it … then repeat it again. Each time it will become more a part of you until you’ll wonder how you could have ever have lived any other way. Live this new way and the floodgates of abundance will open and pour over you more riches than you may have dreamed existed. Money? Yes, lots of it. But what’s more important, you’ll have peace … you’ll be in that wonderful minority who lead calm, cheerful, successful lives.

 

Start today. You have nothing to lose. But you have a life to win.

# About Earl Nightingale

As a child, Earl Nightingale was hungry for knowledge. From the time he was a young boy, he would frequent the Long Beach Public Library in California, searching for the answer to the question, “How can a person, starting from scratch, who has no particular advantage in the world, reach the goals that he feels are important to him, and by so doing, make a major contribution to others?” His desire to find an answer, coupled with his natural curiosity about the world and its workings spurred him to become one of the world’s foremost experts on success and what makes people successful.

Earl Nightingale’s early career began when, as a member of the Marine Corps, he volunteered to work at a local radio station as an announcer. The Marines also gave him a chance to travel, although he only got as far as Hawaii when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. Earl managed to be one of the few survivors aboard the battleship Arizona. After five more years in the service, Earl and his wife moved first to Phoenix then Chicago to build what was to be a very fruitful career in network radio.

As the host of his own daily commentary program on WGN, Earl Nightingale arranged a deal that also gave him a commission on his own advertising sales. By 1957, he was so successful, he decided to retire at the age of 35. In the meantime, Earl had bought his own insurance company and had spent many hours motivating its sales force to greater accomplishments. When he decided to go on vacation for an extended period of time, his sales manager begged him to put his inspirational words on record. The result later became the recording entitled The Strangest Secret, the first spoken word message to win a Gold Record by selling over a million copies.