Leadership Experiential Project:
Karma-Yoga

 

Course Facilitator: Venkat R. Krishnan

Great Lakes Institute of Management, May 2011-Apr 2012

 

Required Text:

 

Overview

Success in every walk of life depends the most on how well you can interact with others. "Few people consider their lives failures if they have not mastered the calculus, memorized Chinese ideograms, or learned how to play chess at a championship level. Instead, what we all struggle with -- and gut-wrenchingly so -- are our relationships with other people" (O'Toole, 1999: 54). You could of course acquire interpersonal skill through trial and error by learning from your own experiences in life. However, this could involve a huge cost for you and others. For example, learning through trial and error how to build a harmonious relationship with one's spouse or one's boss may be expensive for the person as well as for others in terms of emotional energy drained, career failure, or broken relationships. This course will take you through the accumulated wisdom on interpersonal skill. After all, wise people learn from others' experience and from the accumulated wisdom.

Leadership is the most challenging of all relationships. Trying to learn leadership in a classroom is like trying to learn swimming in a classroom. Just as a swimming pool is required to learn swimming, a live setting with actual potential followers is needed to learn leadership. Great Lakes Institute of Management incorporates a Leadership Experiential Project (LEP) as an integral part of its Post-Graduate Program in Management (PGPM) curriculum. This experiential project at Great Lakes is called Karma-Yoga.

Creating followers is the essence of leadership, and transforming those followers is the most potent form of leadership. "The transforming leader recognizes and exploits an existing need or demand of a potential follower. But, beyond that, the transforming leader looks for potential motives in followers, seeks to satisfy higher needs, and engages the full person of the follower. The result of transforming leadership is a relationship of mutual stimulation and elevation that converts followers into leaders and may convert leaders into moral agents" (Burns, 1978, "Leadership," p. 4). The LEP is an exercise in transformational leadership.

There are 20 villages surrounding the institute's campus that have been adopted by Great Lakes for the LEP. Students visit these Karma-Yoga villages every week. The mission is to enhance the self- esteem and self-efficacy of the villagers (i.e., to empower them), so that they are able to lead a better quality life. "That people can be lifted into their better selves is the secret of transforming leadership" (Burns, 1978, "Leadership," p. 462).

The Karma-Yoga project is a unique medium for students to connect with ground realities and experientially learn transformational leadership. The LEP creates a mutual win-win situation for both the students and the villages. While the villages get budding managers to enable the villagers to lift themselves into their better selves, the students acquire a first-hand understanding of what it means to create followers and transform them. The project provides an experiential learning of transformational leadership.

Being totally devoted to our duties toward others and being really concerned about others are the foundations of authentic leadership. "Karma-Yoga is the attaining through unselfish work of that freedom which is the goal of all human nature" (Swami Vivekananda, Complete Works, Vol. 1, p. 110). Practice of Karma-Yoga would help realize the near-universal values that could form the foundation of authentic leadership. It will help you better understand what a human being really is and what the life goals should truly be. Understanding your and others' true nature will not only enhance your interpersonal effectiveness, but will also enrich your life by making it multi-faceted, more balanced, and less stressful. Comprehending that human beings are not merely sheep, but that they are in reality lions, will enable you to work wonders in every walk of life.

 

Pedagogy

This course follows the method of education and not training (O'Toole, 1999); emphasis will be on 'why' and not 'how'. Training focuses on how to do something, providing cookbook recipes for achieving specific predictable outcomes. Education, on the other hand, focuses on why people do something, helping you learn to ponder why people like to achieve various outcomes, so that you can yourself identify, if and when needed, the appropriate means for achieving those outcomes. Education is thus not application-oriented and immediate usefulness is not the main objective. It focuses on developing your capacity to think independently and thereby reach your own solutions to various problems.

The learning method that we will use will be one of interactive discussion that evolves out of questions and answers drawn from a thorough reading of the assigned materials for every session. Skimming through the readings in a superficial manner will not help in this regard. It is expected that you will come fully prepared to every session to engage in a fruitful discussion. My role in this interaction is that of a guide and facilitator, inserting useful additional material at times, but seldom interpreting the readings for you or lecturing about them.

 

Project

The class will be divided into 20 teams of equal size and each team will be assigned one village. The project will involve each student doing at least 3 hours of service per week to a group of people in the assigned village. The objective will be to enhance their self-efficacy and self-esteem (i.e., empower them) and to bring about enduring change in their lives by addressing their real needs.

(1) Each team will maintain a diary of fieldwork done. The diary of each team for each week, in less than 500 words, should be sent every Sunday through e-mail in HTML or text format to ky@greatlakes.edu.in. For each activity, the diary should necessarily include date, time, hours spent, place, names of members involved in the work, work description, and reflection on the village interaction.

(2) Each team will submit a final report on the project in not more than 3000 words through e-mail in HTML or text format by the last day of the term to ky@greatlakes.edu.in.

 

 

Time Line

 

[01]

Bies, R. J. (1996). "Down and out" in D.C.: How Georgetown M.B.A. students learn about leadership through service to others. Journal of Business Ethics, 15 (1), 103-110.

[02]

Karma-Yoga: Ch. 1 (Karma in its effect on character).

[03]

Karma-Yoga: Ch. 4 (What is duty?).

[04]

Karma-Yoga: Ch. 5 (We help ourselves, not the world).

[05]

Karma-Yoga: Ch. 8 (The ideal of Karma-Yoga).

[06]

Karma-Yoga: Ch. 2 (Each is great in his own place).

[07]

Karma-Yoga: Ch. 3 (The secret of work).

[08]

Karma-Yoga: Ch. 6 (Non-attachment is complete self-abnegation).

[09]

Karma-Yoga: Ch. 7 (Freedom).

 

 

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