Developing Nurturant-Task Leaders: The Indian Context and the Role of Leadership Coaching

Pandemic has forced everyone to move out of the traditional approach of thinking and behaving and go deeper to unveil the cultural values and the context within which things would work. As Krish Shankar wrote “As the world becomes more volatile, being aware of the ‘Indian-ness’ side is critical for all of us as people leaders to be successful.” One of the most critical business practices especially in the covid struck new world order is to develop an effective leadership framework for making things work. One of the key leadership practices found effective in the Indian context has been of Nurturant Task leader. Nurturant-task leader is a task oriented leader who structures his own task as well that of subordinates’ tasks clearly to ensure structured communications that are task relevant. Also, his task orientation has a flavour of nurturance as he cares for his subordinates, shows interest in their well-being, concern and affection for them and has a commitment for their development and growth. Leader's personal touch and warmth enables creation of a climate of assurance and trust amongst subordinates and various organizational processes such as goal setting, decision making, monitoring and controlling are handled in a more effective way by leaders as well as subordinates. Today, in the uncertainty led and pandemic driven environment, in Indian Context there is a need to develop leaders who may nurture subordinates ensuring well-being, empathy and concern towards them along with effective task orientation. This requires a planned intervention by the organisation to develop leaders with such competencies. Organizations need to cultivate leadership coaching to create leadership pipeline aligning with the organisational leadership framework to ensure potential leaders are building competencies to meet strategic objectives of organisation and to ensure mental well being and nurturance of their team members. One of the vital phases in leadership coaching may involve identification of leadership growth areas. These areas of leadership growth could be in the area of behaviour change or leadership competency development specific to the organisation needs. Paper attempts to explore through case studies how planned leadership coaching may develop competencies of nurturant task leaders in individuals in the Indian Context.