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If things seem to go according to pre-defined plan, leading a growing business seems much simpler and much easier. But managing a business in challenging situations is always tough and true leadership qualities are tested. In such situations, everything falls on shoulders of a leader to look out for his/her team and business. In such situations, you need to create an environment of openness and constant support for your people. It’s important to be empathetic, but also be honest with your team and employees about the situation at hand. Be open about what it means realistically for the organisation, and how you intend to tackle it.
Express a positive attitude towards the business and its future. The only way to lead in such situations is to lead by example. Support your team and inspire them to do great work. Encourage teams and align them with the immediate goals. Give them the opportunity to come to you for anything they need, and be accessible to them. Having a leader who is easy to approach and work with, makes your teams much more productive and efficient. They can then work with clear directives instead of deliberating on which path to take.
It is also important to do effective and clear communication. It is always important to let your teams know the reality of the situation, and how to overcome the challenging situations as a team. Open and honest communication on a regular basis also helps in creating a sense of transparency and normalcy specially in challenging times.
So, true leadership is always based on honesty, authenticity, meaningful relationships and effective communication.
Sometimes the biggest challenges come when the unexpected happens – may be because of a natural disaster, economic upheaval or even a global pandemic. In the last ten years, we faced three major challenging situations because of natural calamity (two super cyclones and pandemic) apart from a number of other business challenges. In all these situations, we realized that if you have a good team, you can overcome any such difficult situation. So, people are the most important resource that one needs to have. A cohesive team with a positive attitude can overcome any adverse situation. May be it is because of natural calamity or man-made.
Adverse situations are common by-products of internal and external change. To overcome these adverse situations, develop a strong team of employees who have strong character. They need to be open-minded and communicative. Besides quality leadership values, they should have diverse experience and emotional intelligence so that they can take on a variety of responsibilities and help you lead to the best of your ability in such challenging situations.
It’s quite an interesting and encouraging journey of setting-up a new campus of IMI Bhubaneswar and building a brand. I started identifying the requirements of setting-up a world-class institution and started working on each one of them. To build a brand, you need good faculty, quality students, great infrastructure, perfect product positioning, strong industry connect, government support and international recognition. We worked on each one of these and built IMI Bhubaneswar.
Nested in an ecologically invigorating ambience and sculpted by a renowned architect, IMI Bhubaneswar epitomizes a “gurukul.” In spite of such a beautiful and large campus, we started our journey in 2011 with 12 students and 4 faculty members and have grown steadily to its present stature. Today we have over 240 students across multiple programmes and 18 full-time faculty members. We strive to grow as we continue to increase our competitiveness both locally and internationally. In the last ten years of our existence, we have become one of the most preferred Business Schools in this part of India. IMI Bhubaneswar is the youngest school to be ranked 62nd (in the management category) by National Institute Ranking Framework 2021, NIRF, Ministry of HRD, Government of India.
To remain competitive, we believed in creation of knowledge (through quality research); dissemination of knowledge (through teaching and training) and application of knowledge (through consultancy and entrepreneurial initiatives), all these integrate seamlessly with each other to translate into research, teaching, training and consultancy for our stakeholders – the four pillars of our philosophy.
An educational institution is known for its intellectual capital. So, we attracted faculty and staff from some of the best institutions with diverse backgrounds. Diversity is one of the biggest sources of learning and directly contributes to growth.
Another challenge for building IMI Bhubaneswar was how to stay ahead of the curve in terms of knowledge creation and dissemination. To address this, we collaborated with some of the top industries to offer quality industry-oriented education. IMI continuously invested in intellectual capability building by sponsoring faculty for various training & developmental programmes. This is what differentiated IMI-Bhubaneswar from others and helped us to emerge as one of the fastest growing Business Schools.
IMI Bhubaneswar has a research focus and we have significantly enhanced research funding, to ensure our faculty members are in the flow of cutting edge research, by participating in conferences, interacting with world class academics, and publishing in the best of journals on topics of relevance and impact. Research also contributes to knowledge creation.
IMI Bhubaneswar is a people-centric institution where all members are encouraged to take ownership of their purpose. As a young institution, we are uniquely positioned to bring about changes in our courses to reflect the evolving needs of the industry so that our teaching and research does not occur in silos but is rather oriented toward creating successful and well-integrated management professionals for the future.
Our student-run placement service places graduating students in positions where they can continue to learn and contribute effectively. Since inception we have achieved 100% placements every year with average salary growing by 15-20% on year-on-year basis.
In a discussion based inductive learning institution, learning is better if the participants come from diverse life-experiences. Consequently, the proportion of women and students with diverse educational backgrounds has been increasing significantly. The same principle of integrating diversity holds true in recruiting faculty and staff. We seek the best, irrespective of geographies, disciplines, and levels. We encourage interaction in inter & intra-disciplinary areas.
IMI Bhubaneswar programmes are accredited by National Board of Accreditation (NBA), Government of India; Association of MBA (AMBA), UK and United States Board For Education Standardization, USA. It prides itself in being a student-driven institution. The students are at the forefront of every activity.
The institution is run like an entrepreneurial venture, which helps in inculcating in them corporate readiness even before they pass out of the campus. The students are part of most of the decision-making processes through various committees. Being an institution sensitive to its social commitments, the students frequently organize number of social events like blood donation camps, consumer awareness drives and women empowerment initiatives through their Prayaas Club.
Brand IMI Bhubaneswar has started attracting some of the great Business & Government Leaders to visit our Institution.
