India is part of the globalised world as an economic superpower today. The leadership style required here needs to be relevant to our culture. While a participative and collaborative style of leadership can achieve great results, to accomplish long-term benefits out of leadership skills requires a little more than that. Having trust in the employees’ abilities and guiding those to harness their full capabilities for mutual benefit comes from the practice of putting ‘Employees First’. With this belief, leadership needs to invert the pyramid so employees have the autonomy to seed, nurture and harvest their ideas. This approach creates a work environment that is self-directed and multiplies collective contribution with the workplace becoming a cradle for future leaders, an attribute which elevates a good company to a great one.
Be a global leader
In the global world today, countries and companies need to co-exist as they are impacted by each other given their interdependence. The need of the hour is for ‘global leaders’ rather than ‘geography-specific leaders’ who can understand and direct these global macroeconomic dynamics.
It is important for enterprise executives to acknowledge that a Global Leader is one who demonstrates competencies in the areas of vision, risk taking, influence and creativity. People who succeed demonstrate an understanding of the context their business operates in globally, an ability to balance and synthesise global as well as a local perspectives with empathy and a passion for diversity and cultures valuing variety in life experiences.Roles within an organisation need to be recast and every employee needs to take ownership — by inverting the organisational pyramid to have each leader accountable for the success of the people they work with.
Enabling, engaging and empowering employees to work in culturally diverse and global environment will have them come out of this experience richer in terms of capabilities and commitment to implement newer ways of working. This approach will enable an organisation to create a cultural architecture in a work environment that is employee-led, where people add value to their client and communities in every interaction.
Promote talent planning
Developing employees into globally competitive leaders requires an environment that puts ‘Employees First’. An organisation needs to believe in the potential of each individual and commit to investing in improving leadership skills demonstrated by each person — with the onus of empowering, engaging and enabling employees to reach their true potential being their primary responsibility. Talent Planning is a process of identifying and building potential talent in an organisation as a pipeline for key roles within the organisation. Employers need to provide an integrated and comprehensive professional learning strategy to enable transition to desired roles.
The talent development & management teams across the organisation should create and deliver role-specific learning programs and facilitate assignment of individuals to new roles within the business that serve as opportunities to strengthen the required competencies for progression. The learning strategy within an organisation needs to be relevant and work across generations, which means that it should cater equally to the younger generation (the Gen Y) as well as more tenured/ experienced people to help both groups channel their creative energy and become better professionals. This should also pave the way for employees to build horizontal networks that span organisational boundaries and provides access to diverse areas of expertise thereby generating value and growth.
Ensure leaders teach leaders
If an organisation is to look at developing a strategy to create leaders at different levels, it needs to recognise that leadership is not a role but a capability. This needs to be invested in by individuals who assume a stewardship role to support programmes that are aimed at building competencies and skills for leaders transitioning into new roles with higher responsibilities in the future. These individuals should anchor the programmes to help future leaders to learn how to diagnose different, complex situations in an efficient manner and apply skills and competencies developed through real time experiences. Via the medium of their personal participation, senior leadership can impart knowledge of how they faced certain business situations that encouraged them to innovate and in turn helped them unlock skills that added to their competencies and assisted them in meeting future personal aspirations in their career. This kind of informal interaction within a formal framework, paves the way for a much more effective, role-specific action in the various emergent scenarios people will face and offer possibilities for innovating as work is done with the benefit of history.
Build intrapreneurs
Intrapreneurship, in every organisation, needs to be the core of its cultural architecture — to accelerate the impact of innovation. There needs to be conviction in the organisation that by inverting the pyramid to support employees enhance value in the interactions we create intrapreneurs, who provide the company a competitive edge among peers.
Organisations need to cultivate an environment where ideas can be put to test with calculated risks. This will not only make the employee realise that she/he is being accorded space to grow and autonomy to ideate, decide and act, but will also transform him into a thinker and a leader with an appetite for growth. In this arrangement, it will be acknowledged that failure is sometimes the first step to success. Employees performing well will automatically gain the confidence to step ahead as they trust their organisation to have the flexibility that enables them to put their ideas into practice which are seen as an investment for the future.
Fostering intrapreneurship requires senior management to take accountability to sense opportunity and create options for people to demonstrate their courage, capability and commitment by creating a strategy that enables a culture of challenging the orthodox which becomes an unparalleled catalyst for a company. True leaders are identified when they serve as the invisible hand that empowers an employee to think out of the box to add value for the customers and communities operated in.
(Prithvi Shergill is Chief Human Resources Officer at HCL Technologies)
