Dr Taimur Sharif delivers international talk on ‘Leadership in a Crisis Period’
Head of Business at Newman University, Dr Taimur Sharif, gave an international lecture on Leadership in a Crisis Period to the International School of Business in Tunisia this week.
The Business School were looking to focus on shedding light on fostering the entrepreneurial skills needed to becoming an inspiring and successful leader and asked Dr Sharif to relate this topic to the current COVID-19 situation.
Dr Sharif commented “During crisis situations like COVID-19, usual leadership styles do not best address the situational demands from various stakeholders of companies, communities and countries. Leaders and teams are required to behave differently, not following their usual playbooks and rather acting out of their comfort zones and trying new or unusual approaches to build trust among their stakeholders.”
The lecture Dr Sharif delivered addressed these issues and introduced four behavioural approaches that Harvard Business Review (HBR) published in April 2020. Dr Sharif used his experience of teaching and research in Strategic Management and Leadership, and contextualised the HBR behavioural approaches using relevant examples from the corporate world and national level experiences.
He also referred to the established link between these approaches with ‘Transformational Leadership (TL)’ – one of the prominent leadership models he teaches to Business students at Newman University and showed how cultivating the features of TL may enable a leader to address issues in a crisis situation like COVID-19, remaining within his/her comfort zone of the TL style.
Dr Shairf is currently supervising various groups of students at Newman on developing an extended TL model, incorporating features of two other leadership models of their choice, as part of the fulfilment of requirement of a research-based assignment in Leadership and Change Management module in Level 6. He intends to deliver a sequel of this lecture, based on the summative findings of these research outcomes of Newman students, who are going to be benefitted with the opportunity to flourish their profile as a ‘transformational leader’. Wider audience outside Newman will also be benefitted to build their profile with the outcomes of these research-informed lectures.