How To Become The Leader Your Team Craves For

It doesn't matter if you run a business or manage a team, leadership qualities are extremely important. Some people seem to be born knowing what to do to inspire and lead people, but that's not normal for most of us. So what are the things that leaders can naturally create to build happy workers who perform at a high level? What are the skills that you must have to become the leader your team craves for?

Susmita Sarma: Hello everyone, this is Susmita from the Vantage HR Influencers Podcast, and today we have with us Mr. Manish Khanolkar, an HR consultant with Leap2Excel Consulting. He has worked as a trainer and public speaker with core experience of training senior management on leadership skills, supporting employee engagement, and coaching for senior management, assisting employee rewards and recognition initiatives, and there's a lot more on the list. Welcome, Manish.

Manish Khanolkar: Thank you, thank you very much.

Susmita Sarma: So before we start, please tell us more about your journey in the corporate world.

Manish Khanolkar: I started my journey right after my MBA, which I did in marketing. Marketing interested me a lot as a subject, but the kind of roles I was getting weren't quite the right fit, so I ended up on my own and started out with training. This was back in 2004, when doing an MBA was a really hot career choice, and entrance exam coaching was in huge demand. I had already conducted some sessions for junior students at my own college and they liked it, so a couple of business schools asked me to train their students in communication and public speaking. That was my first brush with training.

I did that for a couple of years, and then I realized that if you want to go beyond training students and start training working employees, you need to join a training company. At the time there were only a handful of them, and I joined a global training company based out of Delhi, where I operated for a couple of years. That was a great experience. Training companies work across a number of organizations conducting workshops, and I did training on time management, customer service, office management, sales, and, in part, leadership. That was my first real experience with leadership development.

After that, I realized I had a lot of experience training employees but I'd never actually sat inside an organization to see how training plays out over time. As a consultant, you go in, conduct a session, and then you leave without really knowing what happened afterward. So I joined the HR team at a large travel company to understand exactly that: how change unfolds and how development plays out over time. I handled everything from induction to ongoing development programs there, and we built strong induction and development programs for very different groups within the same organization, from the customer-facing teams selling travel packages, to the IT teams, to the broader leadership. Different groups needed very different kinds of training, and that's where my own development as an HR and learning-and-development professional really happened.

The next chapter was spending around five years in learning and development at a manufacturing company, because after service-industry and consulting experience, I wanted to understand how the manufacturing sector operates and how organizational growth looks in that context. After that, having seen consulting, services, and manufacturing, I decided it was time to focus on what I really wanted to do, and that's how I moved to Leap2Excel. It's a consulting company, but the focus isn't training for its own sake, it's helping organizations grow, largely in the SME segment, with human resources and leadership development as one of the core levers we use to help organizations and their HR teams grow.

Susmita Sarma: Right, okay. So Manish, going by the topic "How To Become The Leader Your Team Craves For," the first thing I'd like to ask you is, what according to you is leadership?

Manish Khanolkar: I've been thinking a lot about what leadership really is, trying to find one simple definition, and I'd say leadership is the ability to inspire people to achieve something worthwhile. That definition covers a lot: as a leader, you're looking at the ability to inspire people, and you can do that in various ways, you can empathize with them, communicate with them, listen to them, but the ability to inspire is the key. And what do you inspire people toward? Something worthwhile, whether that's worthwhile for them individually or for the greater good, and that's where the ethics of leadership come in too. When we ask whether someone was a good or bad leader, that's actually the wrong question. The real question is whether they practiced leadership: did they inspire people to achieve something worthwhile? If yes, that's leadership.

Susmita Sarma: Yeah, so although you're mostly into leadership training, I'd still like to ask, do you think leaders are born or are they made?

Manish Khanolkar: This is an eternal question, and the real answer is a mixture of both. There are certain qualities that come through genetics, so no matter what we say, some part of it, maybe 20 to 30%, is innate. But a much larger part, almost 70 to 80%, is something that can be developed, and that shaping starts right from birth, even before birth, and the first 15 to 20 years are very important in forming certain leadership behaviors. After that, you're building on those behaviors. That doesn't mean leadership can't be taught or shaped after 20, you can keep working on it right up until the day you die, but a major part of it gets shaped in those early years, which is why environment matters so much. Leaders can be developed through the right environment, training, and coaching, especially early on, but also later in life. So it's a mixture: some qualities are born, but the majority are made.

Susmita Sarma: So when we talk about organizational leadership, can leadership be taught through training programs?

Manish Khanolkar: The answer is yes, and also no. There are things you can teach or make people aware of through a training program, and things you can't. Many people think that if you send someone with a "problem" to a two-day training program, they'll come back fixed. That's not how it works. A training program isn't magic. What happens in those two or three days is that the person becomes aware of what they're supposed to do, and they then have to go back and practice what they've learned. That practice is where the actual development happens, not in the classroom. In the classroom, what gets built is awareness: an understanding of what you need to do if you want to grow, develop, or change. You can teach that, you can build awareness around listening, around decision-making. The best leadership development programs aren't one-day workshops; they're spread across three to six months and follow a structured journey, because leadership development is needed at every step of the employee lifecycle. A well-structured leadership program typically starts with a psychometric assessment to understand who you are as a person, and from there identifies what would help you become a strong leader, and trains or coaches you on those specific traits and behaviors.

Susmita Sarma: So what are some of the behaviors that you focus on developing in your leadership development programs?

Manish Khanolkar: Any leadership development program has to start with mindset. Whatever else is said and done, mindset is the most important thing when it comes to developing a leader. If you don't have the right mindset, no matter what kind of training you do, nothing will really be achieved. One of the most powerful examples of a mindset shift I've come across is the story of a warrior who, in the middle of a battle, puts down his weapons and says he can't fight anymore, and then, after a shift in mindset, picks them back up and goes on to win the war. He had all the qualities of a leader, but at that critical moment, it was the mindset shift that determined whether he could actually perform. And mindset can be developed. It isn't fixed purely in the first few years of life the way some psychology suggests; those years play a big role, but you can keep developing your mindset over time. After mindset, the next thing for a leader is trust. Trust is one of the most important qualities a leader has to build with their followers. If followers don't trust the leader, nothing can really be achieved, because leadership isn't a one-person job, you need teams, and you need to know how to communicate effectively with them. The ability to communicate is arguably the most important skill of this century. It's always mattered, but today it matters even more. Beyond that, there's influencing, conflict, negotiation, and several other areas, but mindset, trust, and communication are some of the most critical behaviors we focus on when developing a leader.

Susmita Sarma: So in the same vein, as leaders, what qualities do they need to focus on to become a leader that people love to follow?

Manish Khanolkar: If you want to become a leader people love to follow, you need to develop the quality of listening. A leader is someone who understands the pain their followers are going through and helps to ease it. So along with mindset, trust, and the ability to communicate, you also need the ability to listen. A lot of people think communication is about speaking. It isn't. Communication is about listening: can I listen to the other person, not just to what they're saying, but to what isn't being said? Can I understand not just the facts but the feeling and the pain behind them, and can I work toward easing that pain? If a manager can understand the problems their team is facing and help remove what's holding them back, the team will perform for that manager in return. That's really the manager's role: understand your team's problems and help solve them, and the team delivers for you. That's one of the key qualities you need if you want to become a leader people genuinely crave to follow.

Susmita Sarma: So when people think about leadership, there's a stereotype of an extroverted, outgoing, heroic, and masculine figure. You've worked so much in developing and training leaders and managers across organizations, so how do you help people get beyond that stereotype?

Manish Khanolkar: That's the unfortunate part. People assume a leader has to be flamboyant, extroverted, and outgoing. Films have created that image, but a leader, in an organizational context or otherwise, doesn't have to be extroverted, outgoing, or heroic at all. Take a leader like Nelson Mandela: not someone who was particularly extroverted or theatrically heroic, a simple man who went to prison, and even after he came out, forgave the people who put him there. That's why he's respected as a leader, he walked the path he taught. He practiced what he preached, and that consistency between words and actions is one of the most important qualities of a leader. Unfortunately, in the corporate world, that often doesn't happen. Many of the companies I've worked with or consulted for have different rules for different people, and that's simply not leadership. If you want people to follow you, it doesn't matter how many inspirational speeches you give, when it comes to action, people are watching whether you actually do it. Let me give you a simple example from an organization I worked with. There was a cost-cutting measure introduced during an economic downturn, and leadership told everyone to save money wherever they could. After a few days, employees noticed that the same leaders were still flying business class on their own trips. That's where the real problem is: people judge you by whether you're doing what you're asking them to do. If you're telling employees to cut costs, are you cutting your own? Walking the talk matters far more than being extroverted, outgoing, heroic, or masculine. You just need to practice what you preach.

Susmita Sarma: So when leaders set their own standard of leadership around the innate skills of a listener, a great questioner, a more empathetic personality, these characteristics may not always be accepted as strengths. Instead, they can be seen as a limitation, and this is more common when women take on leadership roles. How can this be handled?

Manish Khanolkar: Unfortunately, what worked in the past doesn't always work in the future, and that's a mistake a lot of people make: they assume that because a certain set of characteristics worked once, it will always work. This typically happens with people who were successful in one organization because their skill set matched that organization's culture. When they move to a different organization, they sometimes fail badly, because the same traits that worked in one culture simply don't translate to another. So being agile and adaptable is very important for a leader. You can't say "this is how I am and this is how I'll always operate," because the environment changes, and it changes fast. We've all seen that over the past few months: nobody imagined everyone would be working from home for so long, and the people who did well were the ones who adapted, who asked what could be done differently if the old approach wasn't working anymore. So the real question, for anyone, not specifically women, is whether they have the ability to adapt. It isn't about men versus women; it's about whether a person can adjust to whatever circumstances come their way. If you can adapt, you'll do well in almost any situation. But if you box yourself into a fixed identity, "these are my strengths and this is exactly how I operate," that becomes a limitation. So the thing to really pay attention to is how adaptable and agile you're being in the current scenario.

Susmita Sarma: Again, failures are very much a part of organizations, and they're required for growth. But people fear failure and pull back the moment there's even a slight chance of it. What are the things you include in your leadership training and development programs around the question, "what if we fail as leaders?"

Manish Khanolkar: That's the unfortunate part, and it connects back to what I said earlier about leadership being mostly developed rather than born. Our education system teaches people that failure is something bad, and society reinforces that, but failure is a real part of life, and we should be okay with failing. I always think of Thomas Edison, who said he hadn't failed, he'd simply found ten thousand ways that didn't work while inventing the light bulb. That's the attitude to have: it's fine not to succeed on the first try, and it's fine to try again. A more recent example is Elon Musk's push toward reusable rockets, an idea that seemed unrealistic at the time, since no private company had ever pulled it off. He failed several times before it finally worked. If he'd gone bankrupt after an early failure, people would have written him off completely, but he kept going, and eventually it worked. It isn't about worrying what people will say; it's about staying focused on what you're trying to achieve. In our development programs, we work on making people comfortable with vulnerability. Are you willing to put things on the table and say, "this is what I understand, this is what I don't, these are my strengths, and these are the areas where I've failed"? People who allow themselves to be vulnerable are actually far stronger than people who wall themselves off, it's the walled-off people who struggle to connect with others. When we run sessions where people bring their real experiences, including their fears and failures, to the table, we see the respect for that person, and for their leadership, grow noticeably. That shift happens because people are sharing their real selves. So in our leadership development programs, we teach people that it's okay to say you don't know something, and it's okay to be vulnerable.

Susmita Sarma: So Manish, you've already mentioned that trust is a very important factor in leadership. Why is trust so essential for leaders, and how do they unconsciously damage it?

Manish Khanolkar: Think about it this way: why would you do something for someone? Because you trust that they'll help you achieve what you want, or a shared goal. That belief is what trust is, and it matters in every kind of relationship, personal, family, or organizational. Think about soldiers going into battle: they trust their leader, and that's why they're willing to risk their lives, because they believe their leader's decisions are for the good of their country. That's how deep trust runs, and it starts right there. To build trust, you have to be trustworthy yourself. There's a story I once heard about Mahatma Gandhi that illustrates this well. A woman brought her young son to Gandhi and explained that the boy had a habit of eating too much sugar, which was causing painful boils on his body. The doctor had warned him, she had warned him, but he wouldn't listen to anyone, except he admired Gandhi. So she asked Gandhi if he could tell the boy to stop eating sugar. Gandhi told her to come back after a month. She did, and by then the boy had given up sugar entirely after just a short conversation with Gandhi. Amazed, she asked what he had said to convince her son. Gandhi told her he had simply explained that sugar was bad for his health. She asked why it took a full month to say something so simple, he could have told him on the very first day. Gandhi replied that he himself loved sugar, and he needed that month to give it up himself before he could honestly ask someone else to do the same. That's what builds trustworthiness: are you actually doing what you're asking others to do? Because he had built that trustworthiness first, the boy listened to him. Trust works the same way everywhere: it takes years to build and can break in a single moment. That's what we cover in our leadership development programs, the elements of trust and how to build it with your team, so the team performs for you and for the organization.

Susmita Sarma: Really nicely explained, Manish. So when we talk about the leadership cycle, it includes five stages: awareness, development, maturity, reinvention, and decline. It's a continuous improvement journey, leading yourself, leading others, and leading change, until it starts showing warning signs of leadership decline. What are these warning signs?

Manish Khanolkar: The warning sign of leadership decline is really comfort. Once you start accepting things as they are, without pushing for any development or trying anything new, once you start enjoying that comfort, that's the warning sign, that's actually the beginning of decline. A lot of people feel that if everything seems to be going fine, why worry? But that's exactly when you should be paying attention. Look at the stages: awareness typically happens in a classroom setting, in a training program, where awareness gets built. Development happens afterward, when you go back and practice repeatedly. Then you reach maturity, where you've practiced long enough to be comfortable with it. That's the real fork in the road: once you're comfortable, you either reinvent or you decline, and more often than not, it's decline, because people don't push themselves toward the next level. That's when people settle into a comfort zone. To break out of that cycle, you need to reinvent, take on challenges you haven't faced before. In a typical organization, that might mean moving from being a strong individual contributor into a people-management role, then from managing people to managing other managers, then eventually to managing an entire business. Every time you get comfortable, the question is whether you can take on a bigger role and reinvent yourself. From reinvention, you cycle back into awareness, then development, then maturity again, and instead of declining, you reinvent once more. That's what real, ongoing development looks like.

Susmita Sarma: So it seems like there's no retirement for leaders.

Manish Khanolkar: There isn't, and why would you want to retire? You might retire from a position, step down officially as a CEO, for instance, but then you move into other areas. You've led within a formal organizational structure, so can you now lead in an unorganized structure, in a setting without formal authority? For example, I'm part of a global public-speaking and leadership development organization that's been running successfully for close to 90 years, structured a bit like the Lions Club or Rotary, except focused on communication and leadership rather than broader societal development. These clubs are entirely run by their own members. There's no formal head; people are elected into roles like club president or vice president for six-month terms, and everyone involved is a volunteer, nobody gets paid. So the question becomes, can you influence people who don't report to you and have no obligation to listen to you at all? That's a different kind of leadership challenge. You've retired from formal authority and now you're operating in an informal setup, in a community-development kind of role. Once you reach one pinnacle, it's not the end. There are always new areas to explore and new roles to grow into.

Susmita Sarma: So Manish, do you have any favorite business book, or a favorite leader?

Manish Khanolkar: My favorite business book is "The Inner Game of Work." It's really about mindset, not just for leaders, but for anyone who wants to perform well. The book lays out a simple idea about performance: your performance should ideally equal your ability or potential, but in reality it never quite does, because something always gets in the way. It describes two kinds of interference, external, things outside your control, like circumstances or constraints, and internal, your own mindset, fears, or beliefs. Your job, first as an individual, and as someone leading yourself, is to reduce that internal interference as close to zero as possible so your performance can actually rise to meet your potential. I found that idea incredibly profound: if you want to grow, look first at what's stopping you on the inside and address that. As for a favorite leader, I really admire the great warrior Shivaji. I've read a lot about him and studied him closely as a leader. He was someone who was trained and shaped into leadership rather than simply born into it. He deeply understood warfare at a time when different rulers controlled different parts of India, and he recognized that his army's real strength wasn't in open battlefield combat but in using terrain and small, agile forces to outmaneuver much larger armies. He built an empire out of a comparatively small force because he understood his people and what motivated them. He was a great communicator and a visionary who saw the possibility of building something lasting when very few others did. That vision is exactly why I admire him.

Susmita Sarma: Okay, last but not least, how can our listeners reach out to you?

Manish Khanolkar: They can reach me on LinkedIn, or write to me over email. I'm happy to connect.

Susmita Sarma: That was a really insightful conversation with you, Manish. Thanks for your time and your inputs, and thanks a lot for joining me.

Thanks for listening to the Vantage Influencers Podcast. Do subscribe to the Vantage Influencers Podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify for new episodes.