A foreign filmmaker who was following the progress of the students in Super 30, an institute that coaches underprivileged students for IIT, made a telling observation. How was it, he asked, that students at the institute help each other out as if they were collaborators instead of the competitors that they were.

In his question lay the answer to the institute’s success.

Making a group work towards a common goal is the most basic leadership process taught and practiced all over the world. What makes the process at Super 30 different is the fact that here the members of the group are not working towards a common cause. In fact, individually they are pitted against each other. If one of them qualifies in the IIT JEE, it cuts into the chances of others. Yet, anyone visiting the institute will observe how readily the students help each other.

I call this phenomenon ‘collaboration vs competition’. This is a managerial feat in which there is an attempt to create a sense of unison in a mutually competitive group. A normal coaching class that teaches a large number of students after charging a hefty package creates an array of competitors. Super 30, on the other hand, creates avid collaborators for free.

One day one of the Super 30 students came to me in one of my informal sessions with them. He had a seemingly difficult electrostatic problem, taken from a popular competitive magazine in physics. Instead of solving the problem for him, I shot back a few questions. The student went into a ‘thought-shell’. When he emerged from the shell, glee was writ large on his face. He had seen the problem through. The style of teaching at Super 30 is not to solve the problems of the students but only to help them solve these themselves. My definition of a good teacher is one who doesn’t give answers but keeps asking the right questions, thereby helping the students to get to their own answers.

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