Work for India campaign – Leadership 2.0 Workshops
From the year 2011-12 Gandhi Fellowship Programme is organising Leadership 2.0 Workshops in colleges and universities across the country. The idea is to generate a discourse around leadership and encourage young people to examine what it takes to be a leader.
In August the first such workshop was organised for 45 students of St Xaviers College, Mumbai. The students came with set and patterned ideas of Leadership. They could not imagine anyone less than heros as Leaders. By the end of the workshop there came a significant change in their ideas.
We intend Introducing Leadership Weekends (LW) at college and university levels to make it aspirational for the best kids across the country to go through an introductory leadership weekend programme. We intend going to campuses and drum up conversations with Deans and students to Introduce the idea. We look forward to getting college theatre groups, music bands, and other active groups to hold year-long events around leadership. We want a shift in the jargon, vocabulary and grammar of Leadership.
Prof Neharika Vohra, Senior Faculty, Organisational Behavior, IIM, Ahmedabad, who holds leadership workshops among the top corporate leadership, has volunteered time to develop the Leadership Weekend Curriculum for us.
Professor Vohra feels that a leadership discourse among students will help them realise their own potential and sensitize them towards the need to develop values, systems and empathy.
She believes that the notion that leaders are born and have an innate set of traits or charisma may be untrue. Leadership is not about heroics; it is about doing simple things that ordinary men and women achieve in life. Leadership is not who you are, but what you do, adds Professor Vohra.
The Gandhi Fellowship Programme hopes to achieve the following:
- Change the way youngsters look at life and issues around them by directing them to view their own inclinations and strengths and helping them develop the skills to make themselves relevant for the greater good of society
- Engage with them intensively to present alternative Work for India careers rather than just mainstream ones
- Steer campus conversations through debate and discourse around Leadership. Involve professors and students in these conversations
- Develop a cadre of future leaders of India. Those who will build the new India.
Leadesrhip 2.0 Workships will become a gold standard weekend programme for students. The idea is to nudge their existing notions; challenge them a bit; even disturb them mildly. To make them think. In the process we hope to develop a better wealth of human resource.