Leadership is
well researched and well written about. The ability to lead teams and
organizations, or even lead oneself, in terms of vision, strategy and execution
to accomplish sustainable, and in some cases transformational, business growth defines
leadership. Leadership involves proactive recognition of opportunities and
diligent overcoming of challenges. Leadership involves convincing, motivating
and inspiring the team to follow his or her articulation, enabling the
organization to move from the charted to the uncharted, and from the known to
the unknown. Leadership rarely is singular; a leader typically requires a team
of leaders to support him in the vision-strategy-execution paradigm. Typically,
the leader contributes the most on an individual basis in sculpting a vision,
but draws upon his leaders largely for crafting the strategy and relies upon
them almost wholly to execute the strategy.
Given the huge
responsibility and accountability of leadership, the qualities of leaders and
leadership have been extensively studied and modelled. Several technical and
behavioral competencies detail the desired characteristics of a leader, positioning
leadership in management folklore as almost a superhuman capability. Equally,
there is a theory that leadership is largely contextual and the required
competencies could vary based on the organizational and business contexts; for
example, leadership required for turnaround and growth needs could be vastly
different, as would the needs for companies in generic space and innovation
arena. The author has posted a number of posts in his Blog “Strategy Musings”
in the past focusing on the different standalone and contextual aspects of
leadership. One of the important components of true leadership is the
development of leaders who can take on the leadership mantle but more
importantly to persevere to grow the institutions.
Leadership dynamics
It is for this
reason that leadership development has become a very important component of talent
management in large organizations. Reputed organizations go an extra mile to
showcase their leadership teams, executive councils or management groups by
whatever name they are called. Such teams or councils are seen an
institutionalized way of enabling leadership succession. Companies like GE were
able to have leaders in-house. In several cases, however, the leaders in
several organizations tend to come from other organizations. The cases of Tata
Conglomerate or Infosys which had to scout for and zero in on external
leadership talent in Cyrus Mistry and Vishal Sikka respectively are cases in
point. That probably is not bad in itself. Had Steve Jobs not hired Tim Cook a
few years ago and given him significant leadership responsibilities, Apple
would have been without a timely leader upon the unfortunate demise of Jobs. At
the same time, emergence of multiple internal leaders in an organization leads
to succession tussles and eventual movement of the denied leaders to other
firms, the case of GSK leadership succession being a classic case in point.
The role of an
apex leader, the chief executive officer or the CEO, in preparing the other
leaders in his or her leadership team to assume higher responsibilities of apex
leadership is significant. Typically, the leadership team tends to be diverse
in terms of key businesses, functions or regions depending on how the
organization is structured. In the middle levels of an organization leadership development
seems to be one of natural selection; however, at leadership team level which
comprises leaders with well-honed capabilities and well demonstrated
accomplishments, leadership selection tends to be synthetic and complex. In
addition, the relations between members of the leadership team tend to be taut
with competitive pressures, even though they may work collaboratively in
pursuance of organizational goals and strategies. The role of the apex leader
optimizing leadership dynamics to support current performance while enabling
competitive superiority for leadership succession is easier said than done. The
CEO is expected to be not only a leader but also a mentor to his team. N R
Narayana Murthy popularized the title of Chief Mentor when he was at the helm
of Infosys (that has not, however, helped in internal development of an apex
leader in Infosys).
Mentoring
Mentoring is
the process by which an experienced person advises a less experienced person
over a period of time. Mentoring is mentioned in the organizational leadership
practice as an excellent process by which the wisdom and expertise of senior
leaders is passed on to young professionals who tend to be capable but are yet
to be attuned to the rigours and challenges of industrial and business life.
Thomas J. DeLong et al in a Harvard Business Review (January 2008) article
(“Why Mentoring Matters in a Hypercompetitive World”) extoll the virtues of
mentoring not only for leadership development but more fundamentally to help
young leaders develop roots to the organization. They propose that mentoring is
a personal customized process, which is well merited. In the contemporary
world, a full six years later, the concept of reverse mentoring whereby leaders
can be mentored by youngsters having new and agile approaches has also come
about. The core of mentoring is provision of positive and constructive feedback
to transform others and the acceptance of the feedback to transform oneself.
That said, it
has been a moot point if mentoring is effective in the C suite, which tends to
be a leadership bench of equals, by and large. The experience with Infosys
where N R Narayana Murthy being the Chief Mentor by title (and a mentor anyways
regardless of a formal title) has not helped the other C suite founders adapt
new styles or the ones below scale up to C suite positions. It seems a fair
hypothesis to consider that mentoring is most effective when the knowledge,
experience, expertise and wisdom levels of the mentor lead those of the mentee
by a clear margin. The concept of mentor-mentee with the wise senior leaders
anchoring and shaping the development of young aspirant leaders is well
established in the Japanese system (‘senpai’ being the mentor or senior and
‘kohai’ being the protégé or junior). The seniority and experienced based
Japanese organizational system seems to be particularly well suited to
mentoring. The number of leaders who have the time and inclination to mentor
seems to be reducing across the globe, unfortunately.
Beyond mentoring
There is a need
to develop a construct beyond mentoring; not merely because mentoring may not
impact peers with close competencies but because mentoring does not go beyond
developing personal leadership competencies. Exceptional Indian leaders like V
Krishnamurthy, S V S Raghavan, A N Haksar, N Vaghul and H C Parekh mentored
many young professionals who served as their executive assistants or young
managers in their respective companies and helped them become better leaders.
Evidently, but for the mentoring by such stalwarts their successors would not
have been able to scale up their competencies and in some cases even step into
their shoes. However, not every leader so developed continued in the parent
organizations. A classic case is that of ICICI Bank where following the
elevation of Chanda Kochhar to the CEO position to succeed K V Kamath, the
other two mentees of Kamath, Shikha Sharma and Kalpana Morparia left the Bank
to become CEOs of Axis Bank and JP Morgan India respectively. In contrast, the
entire C Suite of Infosys headed by NRN Murthy preferred to be associated with
only Infosys or be on their own (but not join any other firm).
The insight is
that mentoring can make a lot happen in competency related development but
there is something beyond mentoring that can make leaders and managers stay
together. Aggressive mentoring can make firms CEO factories but may not create
an ecosystem of high-competency peer co-habitation in a firm. Such a phenomenon
of continuous co-habitation is mostly visible in the academia where scholarly
professors tend to spend their full careers in their institutes whether or not
they become deans, directors, rectors or chancellors and whether or not they
deserved Nobel Prizes better than their co-Professors who received. There are
four variables in any ecosystem; the individual, the institution, the respective
values and the respective performance. Exceptional leadership does not merely
mentor the individual but more importantly nurtures the relationship amongst
all the four variables. The interesting aspect of nurturing is that unlike
mentoring which is highly selective, nurturing can be, and needs to be, a more
inclusive and natural process of organizational ecology.
About nurturing
Nurturing is
the process of caring for and protecting something or someone as they are
developing or growing. Nurturing also involves enabling a feeling, idea, plan
or relationship sustain for a long time and encouraging it to develop
continuously. Mentoring enables development of individual leadership
competencies. Nurturing, in addition, develops the whole gamut of relationships
between the individual and the institution as well as between, and with, the
respective value systems. In a well nurtured leadership model, the institution
(and not any particular leader) remains the anchor around which individual
leaders not only develop themselves but stay united and stay together in the
institution to take it to greater heights. In the newly independent India of
1947, relationships nurtured by Mahatma Gandhi enabled stalwarts such as Pandit
Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Babu Rajendra Prasad and C
Rajagopalachari as well as B R Ambedkar grow not only as leaders in their own
right but stay together to bring the best of their faculties for India’s
governance. It is the love of these
leaders to the nation more than the leadership positions that bound them
together in the governance.
Nurturing, as
contrasted with mentoring, sustains and develops not only competencies but also
relationships. Nurturing facilitates leaders, whether they are mentored or
self-taught, to respect and develop lasting relationships within, and with, the
organizational ecosystem. This involves bonding the individuals and the
institution mutually and inclusively based on certain values which are
distinctive. Values such as serving the customer, acting with integrity, being
a corporate citizen, empowering employees, for example, are generic
foundation values that are, and ought to be, universally applicable. More
precise values such as getting the best to the customer, extending integrity to
all internal and external stakeholder relationships, dedicating part of
business to social service platforms, enabling employees incubate their ideas,
for example, are more differentiated values that nurture lasting
individual-institutional relationships. Institutions such as Stanford and
Karolinska abroad and the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institutes
of Technology (to an extent in India) have succeeded in evolving such higher
purposes as the basis for nurturing of leadership relationships.
Leadership+
Leadership’s
ultimate frontier, therefore, lies in going beyond the
vision-strategy-execution paradigm, and even beyond mentoring of future
leaders; it lies in focusing on nurturing an organizational ecosystem in which
everyone feels attached to the ecosystem with a sense of pride, ownership and
oneness in a culture of competency, performance and mutual relationship. This
is a unique interconnected paradigm. An individual cannot have the pride of
existence in an organization unless he or she has a sense of self-worth, which
in turn cannot come about without competency, which again is of little benefit
if it is not translated into performance. An individual cannot have a sense of
ownership unless he or she becomes a part of the thought, expression and action
processes in a project; integration of strategy and execution helps ownership.
A culture of oneness cannot be institutionalized unless a sense of relational
belonging is first created in the organization, and with the society.
Nurturing as a
leadership task involves increasing proportionality with increasing scale and
scope of organizations. Start-ups and entrepreneurial ventures almost
invariably are founded and scaled up on nurtured relationships. Management
thought (more so, the Western thought), somewhat impersonally and clinically,
advocates substitution of relationships with structures and processes as a firm
evolves and grows. While structures and processes are important as an
institution grows, the relationships remain even more critical. Denying the
importance of relationships in organizational evolution would tantamount to unnatural
self-denial. It is, however, important to reinforce the institution building
relationships (based on growth and service) that are critical, and eliminate
any cartel building relationships (based on biases and cronyism) that are
erosive. The ultimate leadership legacy is an unshakable
individual-institutional relationship that outsmarts competitive needs,
outlives business exigencies, and outlasts career tenures.
Posted by Dr CB
Rao on November 22, 2014
No comments:
Post a Comment