Charted Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) organized an engaging forum to explore what business leaders and senior management need to do in order to achieve and maximize organizational success. 

Rajeev Peshawaria, well known international speaker and author spoke on values based methodologies that promise to galvanize executives, whilst remaining grounded in bottom-line realities and objectives in this forum, under the title “Too many bosses, too few leaders.”

Peshawaria defines leadership as the art of harnessing human energy towards the creation of a better future. He says that leadership has nothing to do with personality, authority or power but with character and energy. The greatest leaders the world has ever known such as Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, for instance, had none of the above but character and an energetic soul.

Leaders cannot be created through case studies or theories and cannot be checked via psychometric tests. Leaders are born by making own decisions, failing and getting up again learning from those mistakes. 

Leaders who strive for a better future, hence initiating a change are prone to face ample resistance from all sides. The feature of a non-leader is giving up in the face of resistance. Thus the main ingredient of leadership is the energy for achieving the cause.

Further, Peshawaria explained the growth of leadership in an organization in four steps. The first is energizing oneself which needs to have clarity of purpose and uncompromisable values. The second stage is enlisting and energizing co- leaders, which means treating one’s direct reporters as co-leaders, simply moving from ‘I’ to ‘We.’ An ideal example for it is Starbucks which runs under the motto “Inclusion and Respect”. The third is, energizing the whole organizational body; brains, bones and nerves. The fourth and the final level is, sustainable growth and success.

CIMA allocates eighty billion annually to implement leadership programs such as workshops, forums and case studies at schools, CIMA students and corporate levels. 

Rajeev Peshawaria is a sought after international speaker, widely featured in international media platforms, the current the CEO of Iclif Leadership and Governance Centre in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and the author of “Too many bosses, too few leaders.