Peace leadership means when as leaders we create a working environment where people are motivated to work individually, free from unwanted work pressure, without any prejudice and perception and work collectively to meet the organizational goals. There be emotional self-control, empathy, forgiveness, and optimism. The goal should be to create an environment such that there is a work-life balance for the employees. Work freedom, forgiveness, and inclusion of all would bring PEACE to the organization and better performance by the individuals.
Another important aspect of peace leadership is empathy. Leaders should practice empathy. They should be able to relate to the team members. Leaders should be able to ask for forgiveness when needed and should forgive others. It helps a lot in peace leadership. Apart from that, leaders should make a system for every process. All the decisions should be process-driven to maintain consistency. Leaders should build the capability among all the functional heads and empower them to take decisions. At the same time, the leader should be accessible to every individual in the organization whosoever needs support in making a decision and resolve any issue on the table. All of this creates a great work environment and transparency in the organization.
However, one of the biggest challenges with peace leadership was to get employees to work as teams and not as individuals. Generally, employees make individual decisions, Leaders need to get them aligned and make them realize the benefits of systems or process-driven decisions.
A leader should consider the below mentioned factors while practicing peace leadership:
- Be good listener
- Be empathetic
- Stay calm while handling issues
- Practice asking forgiveness in case of your mistake and forgive others while they make mistakes
- Design simple processes for every activity and take process-driven decisions
- Build the capability among functional heads and empower them
- Be proactive and identify potential risks in every system
- Learn from failure and implement corrective action to avoid recurrence
- Have fun at the workplace
Practicing peace leadership benefits the organization in multiple ways. A few of the achievements can be as follows:
- Improved employee performance
- Improved employee retention
- Increased productivity
- Improved quality of deliverables
- Higher Customer satisfaction
- Transparency at all levels
Peace leadership takes time and commitment, and it is an ongoing process. As Dalai Lama quotes – “Peace does not mean the absence of conflicts; differences, will always be there. Peace means solving these differences through peaceful means, through dialogue, education, knowledge and through humane ways.”, leaders should keep practicing peace leadership for the growth of the organization and the employees.
About Author
Dr. Sanjay Kumar Jain – President India – Amneal Pharmaceuticals.
He is an avid writer. Writing poems has been his passion. Recently he launched a song on “Peace”, on YouTube that got 4000 + views in just a few days. It has been very well received by the viewers and it encourages him to write more on peace.
Link to the song – https://youtu.be/mUeh7khlw4Q
