Ramesh Ramachandra
Singapore

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Rising to the Leadership Challenge

I took on the project to transform the ways people relate to being an entrepreneur. I developed a government funded training program and wrote and published a book about the subject. The courage and focus to do all that came right out of my participating in The Landmark Forum.

Because of the enormous difference The Landmark Forum made in my life, I wanted to make the program available to people in Singapore in a big way. The game I took on playing was to transform the lives of families and communities in Singapore.

I immediately enrolled my sister Poorani Thanusha to do The Landmark Forum in Manila. When she came back, we put together a small team of graduates who also committed to bring The Landmark Forum to Singapore. Some had participated 10 years ago and some just a few months ago, but everyone got breakthrough results out of being on the team.

Although I am an accomplished business woman, I learned a lot about leadership from being part of this team. Spearheading bringing The Landmark Forum to a new country was a big job - one that, in my mind, should warrant a title, position, employees, a budget. But that was not the case. I had to give up my notions that leadership was about domination and control. I had to learn that it was about enrollment and inspiring the best in others. All the things that allowed me to be effective in the past - my ability to delegate, hiring the right people, etc. - that whole world just wasn't working here. I had to invent a new take on leadership - on who I was, who others were, and how together we were going to create the future and fulfill on it.

I started sharing myself - not something I ordinarily would do. I had always considered sharing about breakdowns a sign of weakness. Yet here I found it gave me a lot of space to be myself and gave the team space to be themselves. I had no prior track record with these people, and there were times when the whole team looked like they were not going to support me in my leadership role. But, bit by bit, I learned about empowerment. People started stepping forward. They began to own and take on the vision of what we could make happen as true partners.

Many remarkable rewards come when you're part of something like making The Landmark Forum available to people. You see the program's impact right before your eyes. Seeing the difference a program like this makes in the lives of participants is a great gift.

As just one example, we had a mother and a son do The Landmark Forum. She then enrolled her husband and her kids and her ex-husband and his kids. This mother has spoken about how she was estranged from her older boy because of the divorce. But here they were - this older boy with both his fathers - stepfather and his natural father, and a sister as well as a stepsister. In The Landmark Forum, the son saw what his attitude was costing him and his family. He acknowledged the love he had for both his natural father and his step-dad.

For the first time, the whole family came together from love and joy rather than bitterness and disappointment - this was unimaginable previously. To see a different kind of future become available for each family member made everything we worked for - all the energy we put into it, all the lessons we learned - worthwhile beyond any words I could ever say.

Seeing again and again the enormous difference The Landmark Forum made for people had me realize that I wanted to make an ongoing commitment to having this be available in Singapore and an integral part of my life. I'm thrilled to say that Landmark opened a permanent office in my country and I am now a staff member of Landmark Education, the one heading up the operations here. My life has taken a whole new turn - how fantastic it is to have my work and my life so enriched and to make a difference in the lives of others at the same time.