Leadership is hardwork, says T&F Boss
Article published in April 2015 issue of Book Link Publishing Magazine
Nitasha Devasar is Managing Director, Taylor & Francis India. T&F India showcases the entire global range of products and India is the group's third largest print market after the US and UK. A seasoned academic publisher, Devasar has worked in a range of publishing areas. As Academic Publishing Director at Oxford University Press for over a decade, she oversaw the development and publication of over 2000 books, contributing substantively to outreach of scholarship on India/South Asia. She has been a publishing consultant with the Government of Sikkim, Population Foundation of India and Ambedkar University of Delhi.
We asked Nitasha to share her her leadership lessons with the young readers of Book Link, as leadership is a quality one develops from young adulthood and this stays with people throughout their lives, as many biographies and autobiographies tell us. She says 'leadership is a choice and lots of hard work.' These lessons are applicable to any sphere of work.
How does one grow into leadership? What is it that people who lead learn along their path of leadership? Is there a moment when you feel like a leader? What are the unexpected twists in this journey of learning? Do the lessons ever stop?
For me, it all started in the year 2000. I was appointed to lead a team of 25 disparate individuals spread over several work groups in a situation where my organization was facing many challenges from all sides. Murphy’s Law was in full play. Whatever could go wrong did and multiple times over this period.
When I look back at those turbulent 3-4 years and at the subsequent 8 years when I lead that team (later expanded to 35), I can attribute many of my life’s significant insights to this experience. Never, during those rocky years, did I ever imagine that 15 years later I would still be profiting from those learnings.
When I finally decided to explore new landscapes after 12 years in a leadership role, to be an entrepreneur, I called my direct reports for an informal chat, before the formal announcement was made. Each came for what they thought was an impromptu 11am meeting with their usual paraphernalia: coffee mugs, water bottles, scribbling pads, mobile phones and sheaves of papers that they just had to show me. They waited, in some cases, with pens poised to take notes, for whatever discussions we were about to have. When I announced I was moving on to a new challenge, they seemed immobilized. No one moved or spoke for several seconds. Then two people started crying quietly and one let out a gusty sigh and expressed the team’s sentiments: “It is like a change of religion!” he said, “the end of an era!”
Strangely enough it was at that moment that I felt the full impact of being a leader. Leadership is indeed a team sport with all the spirit of kinship and bonding that team events generate.
Part of this has to do with the new pressures on leadership today that did not exist in the past. People today have different experiences, different vocabularies and often different skill sets from their leaders. What do I as a leader then bring to this dynamic mix? A shared vision and purpose. An open mind. A willingness to be ‘reverse mentored’ for the skills gaps I perceive.
Some lessons I picked up along the way seem obvious in hindsight, others crept up on me in a more subtle manner:
- Leadership is a choice not a position or rank. And it’s hard work
- Change offers opportunity, grab it
- Embrace problems, they offer opportunities too
- Trust your intuition: if you feel something/someone isn’t right, it probably isn’t
- It’s not about balance, it is about prioritizing. And your priorities will change over time
- Don’t be too hard on yourself: accept that you will make errors. And when you do, apologize, course correct and move on
- Dress the part. It usually works
- And finally, one piece of advice my boss and my mother both give: Be yourself! Authenticity is leadership’s most potent tool
