Greetings to all of you!
And thank you for joining to make this day more special for me.
When I am at loss of words, I always rely on a quote that helps me start my speech and make it more interesting for the audience.
We all are leaders in our own way. At home, we are leaders to our children and young brothers and sisters. They look upto us for inspiration and guidance and hence this makes our role more responsible. Nelson Mandela had a profound take on leadership, I am sharing it here for you all. This has remained a guiding force for me and at #HeartyMart I have tried my best to follow the message as far as possible. Mandela has said :
“A leader…is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind.”
Let us take this as an opportunity to reflect upon our behaviour with subordinates and those who are below our ranks.
- Do we encourage them to take independent decisions?
- Do we encourage them to take bold decisions and not to fear failure in case the decision back fires?
- Are we ready to take the blame on ourselves if a decision goes wrong?
If we are doing all the above, we are the role models and I am sure our companies would grow further with such leaders around. But if, we aren’t doing all this and are keeping every decision close to our chest, we need to change our leadership style. Leaders need to win the trust of their subordinates, empower them, back them and see the magic unfurl. We might see a miraculous change in the attitude of our team and which might fetch us wonderful results.
As a young entrepreneur, I started #HeartyMart in early 30s. We all know the journey and I don’t want to talk about that all over again here. But I did learn a wonderful lesson as I moved ahead in the journey of 18 years of ups and downs. I interacted with experts in media and academia and I realised that they were enamoured of our rural foraying. They appreciated our model of creating a rural entrepreneur through the franchisee model and our method of hand-holding them and helping them grow impressed them. This made me realise that just like IQ, EQ is equally important or perhaps more important for an organization like us to thrive and grow. A senior HR Professional once told me that he loved #HeartyMart because it is a venture not so much profit driven but more people driven. This separates us from others. This is the goodwill we could create after years of hard work.
It is our duty as the owners of different ventures of #HeartyMart, to work diligently and uphold this image and make it even better. Today, #HeartyMart is a huge family of close to more than 140 employees and 22+ promoters working under the umbrella brand #HeartyMart. We at #HeartyMart believe in collaboration and not competition within our different companies. For example, a company that is making breads, is different than the company that makes #Aata. A company that makes spices is different than the company that makes tea. In case if market demands, we should connect the right company to the market, rather than manufacturing or trading a product which competes with our own network company. I hope this is clear to all of us. Let us collaborate and not compete. Let us help and not pull down each other. Hearty Mart Brands in coming days plans to work with you more closely by having periodic monthly meets. Hope, we have seen the worst of COVID 19, and from now onwards things would get better and better InshaAllah.
Thank you once again for honouring me with this wonderful celebrations. I wish you all good-luck for coming times.
(My address to my team members on the occasion of my 50th birthday celebrations at Hearty Mart)
