It takes much more than just academic degrees to become Great Leaders

Leadership- Influencing Skills Workshop at IFIM by Mr Kalyan Banerjee

As its vision, IFIM B School strives to nurture holistic, socially responsible and continuous employable professionals. The Centre for Personality Development (CPD) in IFIM B School, whose objective is ‘to develop personality and build a positive persona’, conducts ‘Personality Enhancement Program’ or PEP as a core subject to address this objective. It runs courses on health and wellness, communication skills, personal skills; inter-personal skills, team work and leadership skills to enable the students to be become continuously employable and successful human beings in life.

Management students of IFIM B School were uniquely fortunate to undergo a half-day workshop on “Leadership- Influencing Skills” recently conducted by Mr Kalyan Banerjee, Head Leadership Development of Bangalore based MindTree Ltd. The highly inter-active session had the students completely engaged in animated discussions and debates. Leadership traits of world famous personalities, both past and present as also lesser known persons who have impacted and inspired the students in their daily lives were analysed. It was heartening to see that names of at least a couple of professors from IFIM B School also figured in the list.

At the end of the workshop, (an initiative of CPD) the students learnt and realized that it takes much more than just academic degrees to become great leaders. Passion, commitment to excellence, selflessness, concern for society, challenging status quo, excellent communication and inter-personal skills, positivity, high degree of enthusiasm and never-say-die attitude were perhaps some of the major influencing skills which transformed individuals into truly great leaders.
Mr Kalyan Banerjee seemed visibly impressed with the enthusiasm and level of participation of the students.

About Mr Kalyan Banerjee: He is one of the ten co-founders of MindTree Ltd (formerly MindTree Consulting) and presently heads the Leadership Development in MindTree. He is credited with the setting up of the Knowledge Management function and later the Culture and Competence Initiative amongst many others responsibilities in MindTree. Teaching being his passion, he is conceiving practical courses of industry relevance, and bridging the gap between industry and academics is his particular area of interest. Kalyan believes in multi-dimensional and holistic growth of the individual as a responsible part of society.