Read Conquering the Chaos: Win in India, Win Everywhere Online
Authors: Ravi Venkatesan
Courage
may be the most important, scarce, and overlooked leadership characteristic. People
often emphasize authenticity and integrity, but courage seems more fundamental. By
courage, I mean the ability to think through complex situations and do what is right
rather than what is convenient or expedient. It is the ability to take calculated
risks and ask for forgiveness rather than permission. It is taking personal responsibility
for decisions and results, rather than blaming circumstances or others.
Such courage is a central characteristic of outstanding country managers and, indeed,
all leaders. That’s particularly important in India, because situations will arise
almost every week to test a country head. I recall several occasions when, in retrospect,
I wish I had shown greater courage. For instance, early in my career, I was the head
of a joint venture in which the agreement was one-sided; all start-up losses were
the responsibility of one partner, while profits were equally shared. The agreement
was wrong, it rankled our Indian partner, and it was therefore untenable in the long
run. Had I shown more leadership in calling this a bad agreement and renegotiating
it, I would have won more trust and respect from our partner. Instead, I took no responsibility
for it and allowed matters to come to a head. We recovered from that, rebuilt trust,
and the joint venture has been successful ever since. But my own behavior bothered
me. Why did I hesitate? Because it would have been extremely unpopular in the organization
I worked for; my managers might have concluded that I had gone native and trusted
me less, which might have affected my career. These worldly considerations took precedence
over doing what in my heart I knew to be right.
That taught me a powerful lesson, which I tried to absorb. Many years later, another
situation arose when one of our senior leaders concluded a deal with a major Indian
customer. The global business refused to honor the deal because the Indian executive
had exceeded her empowerment. This quickly became an issue of trust; how could the
customer trust a company that wouldn’t stand behind a commitment from a senior manager?
It would have been easy to hide behind the usual smokescreen of policies, empowerment
limits, and so on. However, the old lesson was fresh in my mind and I summoned the
courage to cut through the bureaucracy and appeal to the global CEO. Thanks to his
intervention, the company eventually stood by the agreement, which laid the foundation
of a major partnership in India.
There are many instances like this when country managers have to put their careers
on the line and do what is right. For instance, they may have to stand up to headquarters
and resist global edicts that make no sense in India, such as cutting 10 percent of
the workforce when the local market is growing at double-digit rates or refusing to
hire a candidate recommended by a senior politician. They may also have to stand up
for employees who may have angered visiting executives or terminated competent leaders
whose values didn’t fit those of the organization.
How do you look for evidence of courage? It’s a huge advantage if the person is already
an employee; you can observe behavior and know what his or her peers and subordinates
think. In external hiring, the interview and reference checks must zero in on the
issue with questions such as: Can you tell me about a situation where you showed uncommon
courage? What choices did you face? What was your dilemma? How did you act? Why did
that require courage? What were the consequences? What did you learn? The depth and
realism of the answers will be revealing.
Higher ambition
is the second key trait of a country manager—the extraordinary inner drive to create
something larger than oneself. In hiring leaders, we invariably look for traits like
passion, hunger, and drive for results. The absence of passion and drive is a dampener,
but the drive for results by itself is not enough. It often turns out to be little
more than a vehicle for personal ambition, which can have disastrous impacts on people
and the culture and, in extreme cases, may result in fraud and wrongdoing.
Passion must emanate from a desire to create something bigger than oneself, one’s
career, and short-term business results—what academics call higher ambition.
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The ambition can simply be to create a wonderful workplace that unleashes human spirit
and the potential of employees, to become the best factory in India, or to solve tough
societal problems through innovation. Such ambition connects the day-to-day activities
of employees with a higher purpose that inspires people, especially the younger generation.
The millennials (those born between 1980 and 2000) supposedly lack loyalty, focusing
on entitlements and rewards, but I find many young Indians hungry for meaning and
purpose. For instance, Microsoft India’s computer literacy program, one of the initiatives
constructed as part of the company’s mission to transform society through computers,
was a source of inspiration to most employees. Higher ambition therefore matters when
it comes to hiring talent and unleashing commitment. It is also critical for building
trust with government, nongovernmental organizations, media, and other stakeholders
that are suspicious of business in general and the motivations of multinational companies
in particular. A country leader who sees business as a vehicle for changing people
and transforming society will be able to establish trust more quickly.
Finally, higher ambition is a vital source of energy and affirmation for the leader.
Building an important presence in India is a mission that can take a country manager
five to ten years to accomplish. Longevity and tenure are therefore critical. Tedjarati
of Honeywell says, “You want executives who are thrilled to have this job and see
the job in India as the endgame. You want a leader who sees this as the Big Job, not
someone who is impatient to tick the box and sees India merely as a ticket to the
Big Job.”
However, being a country manager in India isn’t easy. It is enormously draining to
be sandwiched between the bureaucracy of the country and the company. Many country
managers therefore see the role as a three-year assignment: In year one, goes the
joke, they unpack. In year two, they deliver an unsustainable spike in performance.
In year three, they pack and head off to their next job, leaving a mess that their
successor has to clean up. Spending five or ten years in the same role involves short-term
career sacrifices, as peers, who stay close to headquarters or change roles frequently,
will move faster up the ladder. The motivation that comes from serving a higher purpose
then becomes important and enables country managers to stay and build institutions
and leave a legacy.
The final trait that is important in a successful country head is
entrepreneurship
. Having discussed that earlier in this chapter, I won’t repeat myself. Suffice it
to say that multinational companies must appoint leaders who have a keen sense for
market opportunities and entrepreneurially build profitable businesses by leveraging
the company’s global assets.
Consider the situations that a country leader in India routinely has to deal with:
Given such extraordinary uncertainty and volatility,
learning agility
is an essential leadership competency in India. Organizations such as the Center
for Creative Leadership and Korn/Ferry describe learning agility as the ability, when
thrown into a situation unlike any a person has ever encountered, to learn quickly
from experience, succeed, and then apply the learning to perform successfully in other
radically new situations. It is the ability to learn quickly in real time, combined
with resilience and tenacity to work through big challenges.
Instead of becoming intimidated, agile learners thrive in difficult situations. They
are critical thinkers who examine problems carefully and make fresh connections between
causes. They are reflective, self-aware, and curious. They like to experiment with
change, can deal with the resulting discomfort, and deliver results through team building
and personal drive. Humility in success, courage in the face of failure, and willingness
to learn from failure are hallmarks of such leaders. There is compelling evidence
to show that learning agility, rather than past performance, is the best indicator
of leadership potential. Warren Bennis says: “The signature skill of great leaders
is the ability to process new experiences … and to integrate them into their lives.
They look at the same events that unstring those less capable … and see something
useful.”
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In dynamic environments like India’s, it becomes critical to assess leaders’ learning
agility. Firms like Korn/Ferry have developed assessment tools to measure this ability
on subdimensions, such as mental, people-related, change, and results agility. These
assessments are quite accurate in their diagnostic and predictive powers. I recommend
their use both during hiring and for leadership development. Learning agility is a
capability that can be strengthened by experience, by repeatedly throwing young leaders
into ever more complex and difficult challenges, a point I will pick up in a later
chapter.
People skills
are the second competency country managers must have. Academics like Daniel Goleman
define it more precisely as
emotional intelligence
. People skills are important for every manager, but the country manager in India
has to be, frankly, pretty amazing at handling people. Focusing just on business is
unlikely to produce great results; taking the time to get to know people well matters
for success.
India is a country where an enormous amount is done on the strength of relationships
with customers, with government, and with suppliers and dealers. If there is a personal
relationship, miracles happen. Customers will place an order to help you meet your
budget or release a payment despite a cash crunch. A supplier will prioritize capacity
in a time of shortage. Government officials might go out of their way to help resolve
a problem because of a relationship. A politician might help during a labor dispute.
An industry association might take up your policy issue with the government. And so
on. Without relationships, every one of these can become a problem, so the country
manager’s responsibility is to build a network of important relationships.
It’s also necessary to manage people at headquarters. Despite the professionalism
of multinationals and their organization charts, job descriptions, and processes,
ultimately things are done because of relationships, trust, and goodwill. Many country
managers view managing the global matrix as a frustrating part of the job and quickly
tire of it. Successful country managers understand the importance of having a strong
internal network, so they invest a fair amount of time building personal relationships
with the CEO and senior leaders as well as middle managers, who have the power to
thwart or enable decisions. They build relationships across functions, especially
risk management functions that have a lot of veto power, such as finance, legal, taxation,
and real estate. They share many meals, they educate, they invite people to visit
India, and they are sure to thank, praise, and recognize good work and help. That’s
not an act; it is simply part of their nature.
Finally, managing an organization within India itself also requires terrific people
skills. Employees in India have a high need to feel an emotional connection with their
leaders. Leaders of Indian family businesses understand this all too well, but professionally
run companies turn out to be impersonal places, leaving employees hungry for connection.
Effective country managers find many ways, spontaneous and planned, to connect with
their people. They are also good teachers. In an emerging market like India, capabilities
and maturity are often modest; a good leader has to use every interaction as a teaching
moment to build the culture.
Successful country managers build great teams around themselves. They expend extraordinary
effort in creating a passionate and cohesive leadership team. They hold the bar high
on performance and even higher on values and make difficult decisions about who should
stay or go. They show no reluctance in hiring people smarter than they are, give them
big jobs, and offer them huge challenges. They invest heavily in building trust, creating
cohesion, and instilling a sense of mission.
Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, a senior leader in search firm Egon Zehnder’s Buenos Aires
office, has compared 227 highly successful executives with 23 who failed in their
jobs. He found that the managers who failed usually had high expertise and IQs, but
in every case, their fatal weakness was in emotional intelligence—arrogance, overreliance
on IQ, inability to adapt, and disdain for collaboration or teamwork, and a very cold
transactional approach with people.
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Many leaders in India, rising through a quasi-Darwinian intellectual culling of the
weak, can be high in IQ and drive but have limited emotional intelligence. It is easy
for them to fall into these traps.
There is also another risk. In a hierarchical and sycophantic society like India,
it’s easy for such a leader to start feeling like a god and see leadership as a set
of entitlements, rather than responsibilities. Over fifteen years, I have seen many
talented leaders crash and burn because things went to their heads, impairing judgment,
making them arrogant and out of touch, and costing them trust, followership, and,
eventually, their careers.