News1st Exclusive with Leadership Guru Roger Konopasek: Transforming leaders and reaching higher...

Wednesday, May 27, 2015 - newsfirst.lk

Roger Konopasek, is an Austrian born, who grew up in various countries and currently works and lives in Singapore where he supports his global customer base. Over the past 12 years, Roger has managed to work with big global brands like HP, Phillips and Citibank and transform their leaders and work culture to work at a higher efficient level that is dictated by today’s markets.

Leadership is a word thrown around in all fields. From businesses and corporate cultures to education and arts, every occupation looks for leaders to spearhead there projects or targets. With the current pace of the world and the speed of information being communicated, leaders must be well versed in subject matter and ready to work and set a the pace and be examples to the rest of the team or workers.

A member of a business place or company or co-operate culture will at have at least heard of the word leadership training. But these training sessions come and go, and it is only a ‘dump of information’ according to Roger, who prides himself on the way his programme takes workers and changes them rather than just being “another” leadership programme.

“We know that actually change is a huge but much needed concept. What happens is people get little or no guidance on how to achieve that change”

According to Roger, his programm is based on transformation of individuals and this can be done once two simple facts are taken and analysed. That is the predictability of human behaviour and the level of influence that is needed to create a change. “Training works in a technical realm” he said and he believes this is not enough.

He also made clear that the stakeholders must have a goal otherwise there is nothing to be achieved. “We sit down with the stake holder and say give us a target, may it be increase in sales or productivity, you have no goal we wont work with you”

When asked about the difference in his procedure and other leadership programmes he said “You can’t train leadership; it is a transformation immersion”.

Roger states that in order to influence, someone enough, to change their ways, you must ‘break their walls’. These include the walls of culture and up-bringing and the roles that individuals have created for themselves and all these have to be broken down a bit in order to reshape them. He recalled that most of his sessions there has been friction between Roger and the employees, but “Friction is needed to bring about tension and to create drama”.

Questions have to be raised in order to achieve this tension. But this is all pretend and just to show the employees the areas of personality improvement, and how sometimes truthfulness gets punished in the work place. Most work places, according to Roger, have a lot of unspoken tension and this has to be brought out in order to be eliminated. This is done in order to achieve a level of conscience maturity among team member or workers.

“We start to push buttons from the start, its a game, where the moment I play the villain and everyone else will show their cards”

According to Roger, there are three predictable roles seen in a work place, the hero, the victim and the villain – and a company must try to shed these egoistical roles so that they can achieve their targets.

He then explained the process that takes place and the sort of events that occur to bring out this tension.

In order to help an individual to shed that role of victim or villain or hero, the procedure must be catered to each individual role. A victim must be given a chance to voice their concerns or opinions and the opportunity to solve or execute those said situations. A hero must be shown that his actions create victims and that he or she must let team members become mature by solving their own problems and support them rather than just solving their problems. The villains must be made aware of their behaviour and they must be supported to work towards being better team players.

The finality in the programme is not a notice of an approval or certificate but offering a team, in a working environment, the opportunity to achieve a goal and leave them with the tools and transparency to achieve these goals.