1. Story of a Breakthrough Performance

CHR Global, earlier known as Consindia, was one of the earliest Executive search companies in India, set up by a group of distinguished senior business leaders in corporate India, with a mission to fill in the void of specialized talent hunting for businesses. In 1996 it was taken over by a well-known Executive search specialist, Mr. Tapash Sengupta, who became its CEO. Helped by favorable business headwinds in the country, the new CEO expanded the business to include management/HR consulting services, forged a partnership with Ward Howell International Group (the 5th largest non-integrated executive search firm for India and Sri Lanka), and took the company to a growth trajectory. Originally based in Mumbai, branches were gradually opened up in Bangalore, Delhi, and Kolkata as the business expanded. Its clientele is Tata Sons, Essar Group, Birla Group, RPG, GSK, HDFC, and Unilever Corporation, among others. The employees’ strength grew from a handful of single-digit numbers to around 35 junior and senior consultants, and the turnover reached a peak of around 15 crores.

Mr. SK Srivastava (SKS), a young mechanical engineer, joined the company in the year 2008 with prior experience as a shop floor supervisor in a pharmaceutical company and no prior experience in consulting. At CHR Global, he was initially assigned back-end work in executive search to slowly get him to learn the ropes of Executive search. SKS, however, harbored an aspiration to lead a big consulting project someday.

At this point Mr. P. Bhattacharya (PB) joined the company as a vice president to grow the management consulting business, which, since its inception, was on the back burner. PB immediately brought in some consulting projects from some of his erstwhile organizations. One of the assignments brought in by PB was a mega compensation benchmarking and talent acquisition project for a large joint venture petroleum refinery. The project posed several challenges for a consulting firm that had zero credentials for doing such specialized HR consultancy work, but it also held exciting opportunities for learning and growth.

PB and SKS constituted the project team, with PB being the project lead and SKS as the consultant. PB, aware of SKS’ secret dream, used this project to build the capability of SKS to execute a big project while taking care to cover up for costly mistakes. Before the initial client meeting, PB decided to test the strength of SKS’ aspiration with a simple test. He asked SKS to indicate in the following Leadership Involvement matrix (Mastering Strategy, Rigsby and Greco, McGraw-Hill, 2003, Page 256) what role he would like to take in doing the project:

SKS chose box 3, as PB had anticipated. PB then went about taking SKS through the steps in how to envision and execute such a project. To help SKS master the technical capability and the domain knowledge compensation, PB arranged briefing sessions with (a) a faculty specializing in compensation management at Tata Institute of Social Sciences and connected him with experienced consultants in several consulting companies specializing in the compensation benchmarking field. He also gifted SKS a Compensation Manual by Worldat Work publishers. Finally, PB handheld him through project planning processes, including the creation of a PERT chart.

SKS handled the project with a great sense of urgency and motivation, as if his life depended on it, and pulled off the project so well that the satisfied client gave a repeat order for a second project.

2. A leader also needs to teach

John Maxwell, the leadership expert, advised good leaders to invest their time, energy, money, and thinking into ‘growing others as leaders.’. This practice of identifying and developing people compounds the positives of their organization because bringing out the best in a person is often a catalyst for bringing out the best in the team. Developing one person for leadership and success lays the foundation for developing others for success. Leaders who develop people around them know that effective learning entails a pursuit of excellence. The philosophy underlying this approach is described in this manner: ‘If you want something to grow, pour champagne on it.’. They focus on the effect they are trying to create, not on the set of tasks they are supposed to “check off.” It’s much like empowerment. Leaders don’t embed power; they remove the barriers to power. They don’t motivate; they create conditions that help employees motivate themselves. In much the same way, great leaders become teachers: they don’t merely recognize or appreciate; they nourish the spirit by whatever means necessary. The by-product of growth is enhanced employee self-esteem, confidence, pride, and commitment.

3. Leader as a Teacher

As part of a plan to introduce a diversity and inclusion project in Latin America, Johnson & Johnson got a consultant to design a presentation and the script and then dry-ran it with some of J&J’s senior Latin leaders, who conducted three 20-minute modules on “Micro-Inequities,” “Unconscious Bias,” and “What Diversity Means to Me” for participants of Town Hall meetings across South America. The showcasing of the enthusiasm and passion of the leaders to champion and engage in discussion on diversity and inclusion had a salutary impact on establishing the credibility of the subject and J&J’s commitment to the cause. (Leaders as teachers: the next generation. Neale Goodman. https://trainingmag.com/trgmag-article).

Traditionally, when the senior leadership in an organization felt that employees needed to learn something, they tried out either of two methods: one, send people off to training, either in a classroom or perhaps at an off-site location, with an external faculty or a learning & development specialist from the human resources function HR; or, give employees access to CBT, get learning modules, videos, or downloadable lessons, with the presumption of self-paced personalized learning. Both approaches are flawed; many employees respond poorly to self-paced learning. The limitations of classroom education, once considered ideal and irreplaceable, are gradually becoming obvious. Great teaching points, received in the congenial environment of the classroom, fade out faster than expected when the employee returns to the shop floor. But what if, in place of an unknown and unknowing outsider, it is the manager who anchors employee learning-embedding corporate education into their interactions with direct reports?

Teaching really is a part of the core work of a leader. Warren Bennis, in his book Learning to Lead’ (Executive Excellence. January 1996 13(1), 7), stated that ‘the basis of leadership is the capacity of the leader to change the mindset, the framework of another person.’ The most powerful method of changing the mindset of another is teaching. Teaching is the soul of leading. Leading has long been held as the strength of command only. But leading is not dictating specific behavior. It is not issuing orders and commanding compliance. Leading is getting others to see a situation as it really is and to understand what responses will be appropriate so that they will act in ways that will propel the organization toward the desired goal. The teaching could be about something as simple as prioritizing tasks or something more complex, like how to make difficult decisions while taking care to embed necessary values while doing so.

Becton, Dickinson, and Company (BD) created and deployed a leadership development program that relies on all its top leaders (even the CEO) to train other leaders. Finkelstein S, in an article (The Best Leaders are Great Teachers’ in the Harvard Business Review (January-February. 2018), narrated the example of Kundapur Vaman Kamath, who delivered lessons at the office to the employees who served under him for four decades as a senior executive and then as a CEO of India’s ICICI Bank. Whether he was offering tips on stakeholder communication or explaining the importance of ambitious goals, he treated each day as an opportunity to provide each of his direct reports with a customized master class in management. The characteristic differentiating great leader teachers from conventional leaders is identified as the focus on ‘ongoing, intensive one-on-one tutoring of their direct reports, either in person or virtually in the course of daily work’. (Finkelstein S. Ibid).

4. The Virtuous Teaching Cycle

Noel Tichy, in his book “The Cycle of Leadership,’ presents leadership teaching as a distinctive, two-way, even multi-way process. In this process, teachers and students at all levels teach and learn from each other, and their interactions create what he describes as a Virtuous Teaching Cycle.’. This ever-expanding cycle keeps generating more learning, more teaching, and the creation of more new knowledge. Most of the time, the spirals found in organizations hinder learning. Command and control hierarchies, with their cram-down, one-way communication, create vicious cycles in which information is hidden, gamesmanship is raised to high art, and trust is destroyed. As a result, the leader learns nothing, the organization gets dumber, and there is an ever-expanding cycle of knowledge destruction and misalignment.

5. The erosion of trust in leadership

In the world of business, the need for leaders has never been more acute. The picture is no better in the business area. The Enron debacle, the demise of Arthur Anderson, the questionable practices of Tyco, Sotheby’s, and, nearer home, the raging controversies around Vijay Mallya of Kingfisher and Chandra Kocher of ICICI, among others, have pushed public regard for business and business leaders to new lows. The resulting lack of trust and perception of greedy self-dealing among CEOs, on Wall Street, and by accounting firms has driven investors out of the stock market in record numbers.

According to the World Economic Forum, ‘A startling 86% of respondents to the Survey on the Global Agenda agree that we have a leadership crisis in the world today.’ (Five reasons why leadership is in crisis. Chris Pearse. Nov 7, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/site). It is felt that there is an alarmingly weak correspondence between power and competency and that those in power are not necessarily up to the job of discharging their responsibilities to the benefit of those they lead. What the various reports indicate is that while tightening systems, there is an equally important work of rebuilding trust and confidence, developing world-class leaders with unyielding integrity, ready to transform their organizations and develop a new generation of leaders.

But the leadership reservoir is low; there is a scarcity of leaders at all levels, especially at the senior and CEO levels. This is evident from a survey of the blue-chip companies in the past decade that have had to find external candidates to replace their existing CEOs. The long list includes Merck, IBM, AT&T, HP, 3M, and Kodak. Consider the CEO crisis in Tata House and Infosys in recent times. And even instances where the chosen leaders (internal or external) for the top spot proved to be deficient in the necessary competencies of the leadership role in the perception of the critical stakeholders.

It is, therefore, imperative that to win, to be successful, organizations have to have great talent, and they should be willing to invest in developing that. It implies leaders specifically spending the time working hand in hand, sometimes very personally, being a teacher to their direct reports. “…if you have five or 10 or 15 direct reports, you can’t possibly be spending all your time with everyone else. But periodically, and they value it, and they recognize it, and at the same time what they’re doing is they’re pushing people, they’re forcing people, to kind of raise their own game. And so, it’s one of the best ways to not only motivate people but also get them to perhaps a different place and a higher level than they might otherwise be” (Sydney Finkelstein in conversation with Sarah Green Carmichael, Why should leaders make a habit of teaching? JANUARY 09, 2018).

6. What should the leaders teach?

Leaders learn and acquire experience from many places, but often when successful leaders are asked how they became successful, the answer is that they learned from other great leaders. The most effective leadership teaching consists of continuous, rigorous one-on-one tutoring of direct reports at the workplace. The impact of personalized instruction cannot be overemphasized. In the considered opinions of cognitive psychologists, teachers, and educational consultants, such teaching has multiple benefits: the development of competence, compliance, skill, and, most importantly, critical thinking and initiative. Ironically, when imparting lessons to their successors, many leaders struggle to articulate what the essence of their leadership insights is. According to Finkelstein, the teaching falls into three baskets:

a. Professionalism: It is about attitudes, attributes, specialized knowledge, as well as many other qualities that define a person as a professional. It could cover values like integrity and care, how to prepare for a meeting, how to envision and communicate it, or how to mentor subordinates. b. Points of craft: The lessons could be on the nuts and bolts of the business or about building expertise in the key areas of the business. c. Life lessons: Going beyond work to the deeper wisdom about life.

7. Conclusion: The Leader’s ‘teachable point of view’

Noel Tichy, in his book “The Cycle of Leadership’ (Harper, 2002, Pages 73-95), talks about the ‘teachable point of view(TPV), which has been turning leaders into teachers and their students into teachers and leaders in organizations like GE, Ford, AlliedSignal, PepsiCo, and others. It is an articulation of what a person knows and believes about what it takes to succeed in his or her own business as well as in business. generally. For example, what do consumers truly look for? How to out-compete the competition? What kind of employees should be selected to achieve its vision? How to make judicious use of the emerging technology, et al.?

According to Tichy, the TPV is not, however, just a ‘how-to manual.’. It is a ‘why manual’ as well. The sequence suggested is that first, the leaders make their TPV, and then align the others to it through discussions and debates. At Ford, Nasser and his team created their teachable points of view during four off-site meetings over a four-month period. The formulation of TPV is followed by teaching. The leaders share their TPV with the next level of executives, and after debate and discussion, they write their own TPV. And thus teaching continues in an organization-wide cascade. A Teachable Point of View: A Primer. An interview with Nasser

There are four building blocks of Teachable Point of View:

1. Ideas- A leader’s key idea lays out his/her belief in what is going to work for the organization and help it to succeed. For example, Tom Monahan visualized Domino’s Pizza delivering a hot pizza to one’s house or office in thirty minutes or less. Leaders pass their ideas to others and teach them how to generate great ideas themselves. The ideas could provide directions for the company or provide elements of vision.
2. Values- Values guide behavior, and organizations can choose values that support the business. Jack Welch talked about the value of ‘boundarylessness’ to facilitate speed in serving the customer and idea creation throughout the organization. Tata Steel is driven by the core values of integrity, excellence, unity, responsibility, and pioneering.
3. Emotional Energy- Leaders also need to have a great level of motivation themselves and are therefore able to infect others with the same level of motivation and energy. Employees become energetic and eager when five conditions exist: a sense of urgent need shared by all, an inspiring mission, stretch goals, a spirit of teamwork, and confidence that the goals are achievable.
4. Edge- The ability to make hard decisions about people, processes, products, etc. Leaders with an edge will make painful decisions in the organization’s interest. Jack Welch, known to be a leader with an edge, urged leaders to shun soft avoidance strategies and ‘the sharing the pain approach’ and learn to differentiate.

Author: Prof. Amitabha Sengupta

About the Author

Prof. Amitabha Sengupta, an XLRI alumnus, is an industry veteran with 35+ years of experience across steel, FMCG, oil, and consulting sectors. He teaches Leadership, Negotiations, Consulting, HRM, and Industrial Relations at IIM-Mumbai, Mahindra University, NMIMS, KJ Somaiya, and MIL.

Holding a Master’s from Calcutta University, a PGDPM from XLRI, and a Diploma in HRM from Cornell, he is also a Master Trainer in NLP (USA), an Executive Coach (ICC, Sao Paolo), and a Business Excellence Auditor. He has authored books and cases on HRM and Leadership, with publications on Harvard/Ivy portals and Routledge.