Exclusive Trusted Magazine Q&A with Karan Chopra, Consultant- Project Manager
What’s the most important key success factor for you based on your experience ?
It’s difficult to narrow down success to one factor; but if I were to choose one, I firmly believe the most important success factor for any individual is Perseverance. More often than not we tend to give up too early as we are bogged down by our own insecurities, comparing ourselves with others or an unreasonable expectation to experience instant results. Having a trust in the process, your capabilities and setting up valid reasonable timely goals is a recipe for success for any career. Incremental steps lead to bigger results, having said that it’s equally important to be versatile enough to adapt as per rapidly changing dynamic work needs and uncertain life situations.
What would be the major pitfall that may undermine the success of a leader ?
I believe the most common pitfall lies in gauging success of a leader in a unidimensional manner-say in terms of business objectives alone. A true leadership empowers the team members from the bottom of hierarchy to the very top. I believe you can be extremely good at what you do but if at the end of the day if the team that reports to you doesn’t feel empowered to take ay decisions, voice their ideas or growing in their own way it’s not really a sustainable way to lead. So from leadership perspective, having a multidimensional mindset in terms of gauging one’s success becomes ever so important and ignoring it becomes a major pitfall. Fortunately for me, I have had the opportunity to work with people on both ends of the spectrum which has helped me a lot professionally and imbibe those values.
When you get surprised by an unusual or uncertain context, what do you think ?
My first reaction to anything unusual or uncertain is to first understand the situation from a complete 360-degree perspective, how It got to the situation, anything that could have been done earlier to avoid the uncertain situation. It’s a sort of precursor to identify If the context or situation was actually by default or by design. As a second step, I usually ponder on how any further step would impact others involved in that situation or context and try to take the best course of action keeping in mind the same. Uncertainties are anomalies/outliers even though rare are part of life, professional or private; so it's important not to get too carried away or be perturbed by them. It’s important to learn the right lessons from each situation. if something was really out of hand, it’s wise to soldier on and be mindful of the future.
What was your most challenging experience and has it changed your mindset?
The most challenging experience for me was an unexpected loss of a loved one a few years back. It changes you in a way that reflects in all aspects of your life- professional or personal. It taught me that it’s important not to plan too far ahead in life, it’s good to have a tentative roadmap in life but it’s okay to be not certain about some things in life. Sometimes the only plausible solution is to embrace change, it’s equally important to reflect on the journey than fixating yourself on the destination. Plan, but do keep spaces for these blots of fate intervention at the back of your mind.
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