Leadership coach Udayakumar Gopalakrishnan has trained 27,000 corporate professionals. The list includes CEOs and those in top-level management. Over the last 23 years, as he worked closely with leaders, he realised that all of them, despite being in diverse fields, possessed a few common traits — “a tremendous sense of sensitivity, a sense of ownership, extreme focus, and the courage to follow one’s heart…”
Udayakumar’s maiden book, What It Takes To Be A Leader With Passion , elaborates all the traits across 33 chapters and 400 pages, with anecdotes that form the “nuts and bolts of human resource management”.
He recalls one of them: “The late K.R. Kamath of Rane Limited, while doing the rounds in his office, was once given feedback from an employee that they were getting birthday chocolates days later. Instead of ignoring it, Kamath decided to take up the challenge of making sure that every employee – and there were a good 1,200 of them – got chocolates personally from him. A small act, but it says a lot about employee engagement.”
Udayakumar lets on another anecdote: “B. Santhanam, president and MD, Flat Glass — South Asia, Malaysia and Egypt, Saint Gobain India, interviews every single graduate engineering trainee after he/she clears the aptitude test, technical test and group discussion. In one case, a civil engineering graduate requested that he quiz him about anything but civil engineering. Santhanam asked him what he was passionate about. The interviewee proudly told him that he had reduced almost 30 kg in a few months by gymming. Santhanam made him do push-ups right there in his office for almost 10 minutes, and selected him.” The moral is that a good leader knows how to look for that feverish drive among his employees.
Sitting in his office, Core Mind, Udayakumar leafs through the pages of his freshly-printed book, and talks about its journey, from its conception 10 years ago. “While I trained people to realise their dreams, a few smart ones asked me: ‘What about your dreams?’” says Udayakumar. “I have a fair share of dreams that I have accomplished. I became an international trainer in 2000, and an NTL faculty in the U.S. in 2012,” he says. Next up on the list was writing a book, a dream that had settled quietly inside his head.
In 2012, Udayakumar conceived a programme focussing on passion in the corporate world. “How do you discover, ignite, internalise, and practise passion?” He explored these questions in the workshops held across nine cities in India. “I combined them with the dreaming process, for which I’d received training abroad,” he says.
Udayakumar has attended 25 training programmes worldwide, in the arenas of leadership, mentoring and coaching, with Tavistock Institute of HR, U.K., NTL Institute, and University of Michigan, among others. During the course of the ‘Passion’ workshop, he touched the lives of many. “One of them realised her passion for zumba and is pursuing becoming a trainer; another, who had lost his job, decided to focus on his childhood love for fountain pens. He now runs an online pen company that provides customised solutions for pens,” he says.
These interactions nudged Udayakumar to take the leap, and start shaping his dream of writing a book. “In 2013, I told my learning community about it, and fixed the date of its launch two years ago, and the venue a year ago. I wanted it to be on the day I started freelance consulting,” he says.
Last weekend, on October 15, Udayakumar’s book was released in the presence of Raj Raghavan, head-HR, Amazon; and R. Ramakrishnan, vice-chairman and joint managing director of Polycab Group, among others.
There were times when Udayakumar felt he was walking in deep sand. He says that it was challenging to find a publisher, and find one who would get it ready in time. So, he decided to self-publish through Notion Press. But, to get the draft out, Udayakumar took sabbaticals, where he would go on a reading marathon. “And this year, between March and July, I took 50-odd days off from work to finish the book,” he says. It was possible only because of his passion for it, he asserts.
“When you have the passion, it shows. To all readers, and those who I train, I quote Michael Schumacher: ‘Life is about passions, thank you for sharing mine’,” he says.
