Managing Teams and Leading People for Social Impact

Mr. Deepak Menon’s topic for the day was “Managing Teams and Leading People for Social Impact.” He started the session by explaining the nuances of Managing and Leading teams on a general perspective and gave a brief about organizational culture archetypes; Customer Focus, Employee Focus, Team Focus, Innovation Focus, Achievement Focus, and Greater Good Focus. He also got in to the details of effective teams and its symptoms and elaborated on points such as; Achievement, Clear Common Purpose, Esprit de corps, Ownership & Responsibility, Empathy, Fairness, and democratic.

In the next segment he spoke about the areas that a leader should focus on once the team culture is created in an organization. He continued by explaining about some of the key areas of focus for a leader; Fairness, Integrity, Compassion, Positive Bias, Trust-Ask-Listen-Acknowledge, Routines, Rituals, Repetition, Coach & Mentoring the staff.

In the concluding segment he spoke about the concept of “The ‘VUCA’ World”, which stands for Volatility,

Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguous which was prevailing 20-25 years back and current scenario ‘VUCA’ which represents Vulnerability, Understanding, Community, and Authenticity.

About: Deepak Menon

Deepak Menon is the hub manager for Akvo in South Asia. In this role he oversees programmes and partnerships, as well as the Akvo team in South Asia and the Caddisfly team.

Deepak has a number of years experience in information technology and communications, having worked in sales and marketing roles at Oracle, and as a research analyst at Frost and Sullivan. In 2008, he moved to the charitable foundation Arghyam, where he was head of the India Water Portal and was part of a team of early advocates of open data, social media participation and large scale volunteering. In recent years, he has also had his own consulting business, been involved in fund raising for a start up venture and has taught Sustainability Management at Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, and Business Communication at Indo-German Training Centre. He has also acts as a mentor to the founders at OnlineRTI.com

Deepak has degree in engineering and an MBA from the University of Mumbai, as well as a diploma in environmental law from National Law School, Bangalore. Deepak is based in Bangalore