Shyamal Majumdar: Tapping the leadership pool

HUMAN FACTOR

The Tata Management Training Centre has tied up with a global institution to study leadership processes in Indian companies.

Ten researchers are currently undergoing rigorous training at the Tata Management Training Centre (TMTC) in Pune on how to conduct interviews and then do qualitative research based on the data available through these interviews. The aim is to develop the ability to cull out the human resource angle from a mass of hard data. Helping the researchers are faculty members of the Centre for Creative Leadership (CCL), founded in 1970 in North Carolina, and one of the best-known business-education providers in the world.

Within a few weeks, the researchers would be ready for CCL's first-of-its kind endeavour on leadership development in India, in association with the Tata Group. Under the alliance, CCL will, for the first time, undertake the India leg of its research on leadership development paradigms. Though there are reams of papers available on Western leadership models, hardly any methodical research has been done as far as Indian companies are concerned.

Also, there is a growing realisation that Western leadership styles may not necessarily bring corporate success in countries like India. For example, Jack Welch's Rank & Yank theory of compulsory sacking of the bottom 10 per cent in an organisation may have been a huge success in the US, but would be a disaster in Indian companies.

One area where the Tata-CCL alliance will work is the perceived generation gap between younger and older leaders. Initiated five years ago, this project began to find answers to questions on the differences among generations in areas related to leadership. As of December 2005, CCL has got more than 5,000 respondents "" but only 80 of them were both born and are currently living in Asian countries. CCL now wants to use its alliance with the Tatas to extend this research to Asia in a substantive way and get a large enough feedback (around 5,000) which will help it to analyse trends, similarities and differences among the generations within India.

Satish Pradhan, executive vice president, group human resources of Tata Sons, and one of the main movers behind CCL's India leg of research, says many leadership programmes are still heavily predicated on a Western view of the world and it is important to look at leadership development from a non-Western perspective.

Pradhan has enough reasons to feel happy with the partner the Tatas have chosen. CCL, a non-profit educational institution, annually serves leaders from more than 2,000 organisations "" both public and private "" including two-thirds of the Fortune 500. In a 2005 Financial Times survey, the Centre earned an overall Top 10 ranking worldwide among providers of executive education.

Michael Jenkins, managing director, CCL, Singapore, says the institute believes that there are untapped pools of knowledge about leadership in India. "We are excited to work with our Tata colleagues to uncover this knowledge and share it with leaders around the world. Our partnership with TMTC will be an invaluable element in our future plans for India."

The CCL-Tata alliance has identified an initial suite of research projects that will develop models and processes that can be used globally. This cutting edge Asian research will be directly applied to solving complex leadership challenges for companies around the world.

To begin with, it will focus on three aspects: lessons of experience in Asian countries, understanding the leadership gap, and bridging cultural boundaries. The research on lessons of experience will identify what unique factors contribute to leader development and effectiveness in Asian countries. Two key research questions have been a core focus of CCL research for nearly 30 years: what are the processes by which executives learn, grow, and change over the course of their careers? What factors differentiate successful executives from those who derail at senior levels? Face-to-face and telephonic interviews of about 60-90 minutes will take place with senior managers and will be used to secure data on key developmental events.

The second area of research on leadership gap will identify the leadership skills and perspectives that are critical for success in countries like India. CCL will employ content from BENCHMARK, a multi-rater assessment system based on more than 20 years of research that measures skills and perspectives of successful executives and potential career problems of areas that may lead to derailment. A questionnaire would be given to around 100-200 managers and their bosses in a selected number of Asian countries.

The third area "" bridging cultural boundaries "" would seek to find an answer to the question, "What types of leadership practices are effective in bridging cultural boundaries in diverse and multicultural Asian work contexts?" The approach is to use a triangulation strategy to collect and analyse data in select Asian countries. Respondents will be sampled from different levels, functions, and cultural backgrounds in organisations. The approach would be to give scenario questionnaire to approximately 100 employees at multiple levels and interviews with around 10 employees housed in a single organisational unit.

The Tata-CCL alliance is all set to start rolling, Pradhan says, and Indian companies will shortly be invited to taking part in the project. This is pioneering work given the fact that leadership cannot be the executive right of a rarefied club only.