In the second of our series on lessons entrepreneurs learn, Adi Godrej, chairman of the Godrej group, talks about his experience with bottom-up feedback. When young executives have to learn in an organisation they look up to their senior managers. But how do CEOs learn? Simple. They learn from employees below the line. The Godrej group prefers to call this process reverse mentoring.
From 2001 onwards, for nearly two years Adi B Godrej, chairman of the Godrej group, has taken lessons on information technology, sales and marketing from two young managers "" Saugata Saha, an area sales manager with Godrej Consumer Products Ltd (GCPL), and Sheetal Shirke, a marketing manager with Godrej Sara Lee.
These 20-something managers were chosen as mentors because of their front-line contact with customers, which kept them informed of current best practices.
They offered Godrej feedback on a variety of issues, from new ideas for existing processes to updates on the latest techniques in marketing, advertising and market research, for two to four hours every month.
As the mentors listed out a variety of ideas in their monthly interactions with the ultimate authority in the group, some of their suggestions soon found a place among the group's best practices.
Shirke's update on latest market research techniques ensured that the group took market research more seriously, while Saha's suggestion on sales-related issues also found takers.
For instance, some of the changes in the Godrej distribution network, like the appointment of super-stockists and sub-stockists, can be linked in some ways to what transpired in the mentoring sessions.
Other areas, too, benefited from the interaction "" like the management training programme where employees from all functions are put on a forced job-rotation in sales; everybody has to perform a customer-facing job for some time in order to empathise with the system.
Even ideas that would normally have been shot down at the middle management stage, got a patient hearing and were discussed in detail. One example is the idea of closing monthly accounts on the 20th of every month instead of the 31st.
This would help salesmen be in the field when they needed to be present, instead of completing sales records in the office. But because of the financial complexities involved, the suggestion could not be implemented.
However, Saha's biggest recognition came when he was selected as Godrej's executive assistant soon after. In a discussion with The Strategist, Godrej talks about his experience with reverse mentoring. Excerpts:
"Reverse mentoring is an excellent process because senior managers need to learn certain aspects of business from young managers. At the same time senior managers can impart a lot of knowledge and inspiration to young managers.
"Saha was my mentor for two things (information technology, or IT, and sales), while Shirke was keeping me updated on marketing.
"At the same time, I was mentoring them on leadership. For instance, I taught them things like how to continuously learn, how to distinguish between managing and leading and so on.
"I did not take any applications when I chose them. I just asked my group management committee who would fit the bill. After receiving feedback I approached them. They were eager.
"These mentors were not necessarily experts. If they did not know enough on a given subject, they would find out. I strongly recommend that the mentor need not be an expert. Choosing any young high-flier in the organisation is good enough.
"I chose young people because in areas like IT, the skills of younger people are far stronger than older people. When I was young, IT hardly existed. As a result of mentoring I am now comfortable dealing with technology and even use a palm-top.
"Basically, I could harness IT to improve productivity. And my relationship with the mentors developed so well that Saha has now become my executive assistant. Shirke, meanwhile, has relocated to the US for further studies.
"Reverse mentoring has been used by others but I do not remember where I got this idea. This is not a common practice but not unknown either. But this is a technique specifically used by senior managers to update their skills.
"While I used IT mentoring to update personal skills, for marketing and sales I needed a young person who would let us know what are the new things the group could do to add value.
"While I have a lot of experience in marketing and sales over the years, I needed to understand what young people, who are hands-on, find in the market, what they are suggesting and what could be changed.
"But reverse mentoring is not the only method. In the past, I have used other techniques. Two years ago, with an initiative called Chairman's Tea, I met every manager from the group in batches of 10.
"In this session, a mix of managers from different groups and levels and handling different functions would be invited to a one-and-a-half hour tea with me to openly discuss their suggestions and what the group could do to change, whether it was strategy or operations.
"It was a good forum to meet the managers and I learnt a lot. Many of these talks would be taken up for discussions in the group management committee and executive committee.
"Then we had the Young Executive Board (YEB) and the Think-tank. The YEB consists of 10 people who are in their late-twenties and early-thirties.
"They operate in the same way a senior board would and look at important issues in corporate governance, strategy and human resource development and advice the group management committee, which consists of the heads of each business on a quarterly basis.
"This helps in a lot of bottom-up feedback. It also exposes these youngsters to issues that senior executives have to deal with. They get all the information about all the companies in the group.
"The Think-tank consists of seven senior people "" general managers, vice presidents from across the group companies and across functions.
"They look at threats and opportunities from new developments to the group as a whole. They also look at issues like technology, new management ideas, new opportunities and so on. All these activities co-exist.
"Seeing the success of Chairman's Tea, I have asked every business head to have a managing director's tea or president's tea in their group companies. So that they meet not only the managers but also the officers, which has been found useful.
"I think the main realisation from all these activities is that bottom-up feedback is extremely important. In India we tend to be top-down.
"While Chairman's Tea gave me a more extensive bottom-up feedback, reverse mentoring gave me intensive bottom-up feedback. Indian businesses are hierarchical. Bottom-up feedback is an important requirement for success.
"However, I feel that seniors should be willing to learn. I spend a lot of time learning in any case. I spend nearly 30 days in a year going to seminars, the World Economic Forum, lectures by experts and so on.
"Learning is something to which I apply myself seriously. If you are not convinced of the improvement that you or your organisation needs, then this process is not recommended.
"And I prefer to use the word "learning" because training is more top-down while learning is interactive. Training assumes that there are some people who are knowledgeable and others who do not know much.
"It's perhaps semantics, but learning is a better process. I feel you also need a sense of confidence to be a good learner. If I were a diffident person, then learning would be difficult. But I knew my IT skills were limited. So I am not embarrassed about asking what might be an obvious question.
"The mentoring experience was extremely good and from what I heard from my mentors, they also found it useful. Unlike Chairman's Tea, which I mandated across the group companies, reverse mentoring is not a process that must be mandated. It should come naturally."
