People; Leadership :The era of the Multi-faceted Leaders

TRIMILLENNIUM MANAGEMENT : LEADERSHIP
The Era of the Multi faceted Leader

By Y.C. Deveshwar

Change is the challenge for the leader of tomorrow. The quantum, complexity, and the rate of change are all mind-boggling. Bill Gates refers to this phenomenon as Business @ Speed Of Thought. Peter Drucker calls it the task of ''abandoning yesterday'' and ''making the future.'' Business leaders, even as they grapple with their present realities, have to keep one foot firmly planted in the future if they do not wish to be blown away by the continuous hailstorm of change that will characterise this millennium. The only survivors of this onslaught will be corporations headed by leaders endowed with the ability to see what lies ahead, and to create in their organisations the necessary resilience to deal with the future. Clearly, the profile of the leader of the millennium depends on the factors that will drive change in this century. There are 5 factors that I see:

One, technology is transforming the context in which we do business. It radically affects industries, markets, and consumers. The Net will ensure that the customer has the dominant position in most transactions. Making and marketing products and services to a segment-of-one-every marketers dream and nightmare rolled into one-will become possible. Imagine. What will this do to efforts at differentiation? Communication and distribution too will become highly focused as marketers gain direct electronic access to most homes. And the product development function will suddenly find itself keeping pace with a very fickle consumer.

Two, companies-all companies-will strive to be globally competitive. Consumers who constitute the Indian global market will demand world-class quality. Thus, irrespective of whether they operate in the global market or not, Indian companies will have to benchmark themselves against the best in the world. Their cost, quality, and productivity will have to match those of industry-leaders no matter where the latter are located.

Three, shareholder value will become the universal metric. Good corporate governance practices will become imperative. Consequently, managements will find their ability to innovate stretched by the need to balance short-term shareholder expectations with long-term growth-strategies.

Four, leaders will increasingly discover that managing a large corporation means managing a knowledge society. Companies will be peopled by knowledge workers and knowledge managers who need to be motivated by a combination of meaningful challenges and competitively superior compensation.

Five, the most intense competition will not be for capital or technology, but people. Corporate battles will be won (or lost) on the strength of superior human capital. Compensation will be but a part of a company's efforts to attract the best. Knowledge workers will flock to those companies that offer them a high degree of autonomy, allow them determine their roles and responsibilities, and help them strike the best work-life balance. Consequently, companies may feel the need to segment their hr strategies to suit different kinds of employees (or associates, as they are likely to be called).

To cope with these 5 change-drivers, the millennial leader will have to be a visionary, a change-agent, a change-leader, and a knowledge-manager. The most important task of the leader will be creating the organisation's vision and backing it up with the right corporate strategy. The vision will serve as a vehicle that shares the company's customer-centric value proposition with employees at all levels of the organisation, and help facilitate internal cohesiveness. Significantly, the leader needs to strive towards achieving strategic alignment by integrating the shared vision and the strategy with performance-objectives.

To be both a change-agent and a change-leader, the CEO must be flexible and adaptable. He should be able to identify and take advantage of emerging opportunities well before the competition. He should be capable of creating a culture conducive to change within the organisation: this will lead to a mindset which facilitates the continuous abandonment of yesterday, and a rapid adoption of the morrow.

A knowledge organisation requires a knowledge-CEO. Leaders will have to develop knowledge management systems within their organisations. Business processes will need to be re-defined around knowledge, which, and not materials or capital, will be the most critical resource. The CKO (in some cases this role too will have to be filled in by the CEO) will have to create knowledge-centres that capture knowledge, disseminate it across the organisation, and use it as a competitive weapon. Thus, the leader's success in actualising the organisation's vision and strategy will be a function of his ability to build and nurture a learning organisation.

The millennial leader will have a critical role to play in the emerging discipline-or function-of talent management. The talent market will look not just at the company's track-record, but also at the CEO, in both his professional and personal capacity. His personal credibility and professional reputation will constitute a large part of the organisation's brand equity. Through the process of visioning, the CEO will have to provide the context and the meaning necessary to inspire a large team of knowledge-professionals. In effect, he has to create and sustain an over-riding corporate cause around which organisational teams can coalesce to deliver consistently superior performance.

At the same time, the CEO should also set exemplary standards of personal behaviour and attitude. His leadership should always remain anchored on some key personal attributes: courage, integrity, sensitivity, creativity, and a crusader-like commitment to creating wealth for both the micro-society and the macro-society of which he is a part.

This, I believe, is the millennial leader. However, he will not succeed if he is the only island of leadership in the organisation. He will have to introduce the organisation to the concept of distributed leadership. He should make sure that the quality of thought-leadership at all levels of the organisation is reinforced, and that each and every department in his organisation supports his vision and strategy for the organisation. In the absence of this spread of leadership, the CEO will not be able to muster the organisational vitality required to succeed in the era of change that this century will be.

Y.C. Deveshwar is the CEO of ITC

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