[MUSIC] Welcome to the course on leadership and emotional intelligence for professionals in frontline leadership roles. My name is Ram, and I'm a member of the faculty at the Indian School of Business. I've been a manager, a consultant, and a professor at different stages of my career. And like you, I too have experienced the fun as well as the frustration, the heady feelings as well as the heart breaks of trying to work with and lead people. As a professional, you're selected on the basis of your specialist expertise. When you're an individual contributor, your performance and effectiveness are largely determined by your knowledge, skills, and efforts. Over time, when you get promoted to managerial roles, you're required to step out of the confines of your domain expertise. Your performance now also depends on skills, attitudes, and efforts of your team members, your peers, your superiors, and even external stakeholders. For example, there may be new demands and expectations from your superiors or your clients, but you find that you're short of skills and motivation in your team. You have to introduce a new approach, yet your colleagues are skeptical. You have to work through relationship difficulties and are expected to listen not only to the spoken words but also to unspoken emotions. And there are times when you feel that your own moods and feelings are at low ebb. During those periods, you're expected to draw on your inner resources to motivate yourself and exhibit resilience. When there is relentless stress of work pressure, such difficulties become even more taxing. We have a huge body of knowledge arising from research and practice on effective ways of dealing with such challenges. There is conclusive evidence that the so-called soft skills that seem and sound unbusinesslike are absolutely crucial for stellar work performance, outstanding leadership, and happy and motivated workforce. In this course, we'll bring you key insights on a range of issues that are important for frontline leaders. For example, how do you strengthen teamwork, what are effective ways of dealing with conflict? How do you develop your own leadership development plan to enhance your future readiness? How do you create ownership for change, and how do you ensure effective execution? The course is organized Into four modules, leader as individual, leader as relationship builder, leader as influencer and collaborator, and leader as change agent. In each of these areas, our effort will be to distill important insights from the field of organizational behavior into simple, practical lessons. That you can apply to your workplace challenges and improve your leadership forms. We'll bring in short illustrations of real-life dilemmas to help you see the linkage between theory and practice. We'll have interviews with a few outstanding practitioners to find out what tactical approaches have worked for them. I invite you to join the exciting journey of exploring a range of leadership topics of utmost relevance to frontline leadership roles. My hope is that the distilled wisdom from theory and practice will help you see your challenge and dilemmas with new eyes, that you'll choose the ideas and lessons of utmost relevance to you. And that you'll apply them to your work situations to become more productive, innovative, and happy leader. A warm welcome to you, I wish you a very pleasant and productive learning. [MUSIC]