Leadership unlimited@GAIL: (From left to right) Rajiv Khanna, Executive Director (Business Development); Shailendra Kumar Singh, Deputy Manager (Operations & Management); and Rajib Mukhopadhyay, Deputy Manager (Finance & Accounting)

Think of public sector enterprises and what's the image that pops up in your head? Sprawling offices, much better looking than government departments, but where only slightly less pot-bellied employees are gossiping over endless cups of tea, while customers and work wait patiently for their attention. Well, guess what? That stereotype is fast fading-at least in more progressive PSUs such as GAIL (India) Ltd., National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC), Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) and Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) of India. Beset by competition, these quasi-monopolies are getting their managers to think and act like their private sector counterparts. Middle- and senior-level managers are being sent to management and technical institutions to re-skill themselves to deal with a vastly more complex market place and industry structure. In other words, the PSU manager, as you know him, is being reinvented.

Take GAIL, for example. Three-and-a-half years ago, when Proshanto Banerjee took over as the Chairman and Managing Director, he walked into an archetypical monopoly (GAIL controls all inter-state gas distribution). Life was unhurried, few knew what being customer-oriented meant, and almost nobody got fired for non-performance. But Banerjee, who had spent nearly three decades in Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), could see the new energy landscape emerging on the horizon. With the industry deregulated, private sector companies from India and elsewhere would be free to eat GAIL's lunch. Recalls Banerjee: "People were growing merely in department silos and lacked cross-functional appreciation to take on competition."

Ergo, all of the 2,000 executives (GAIL's total workforce is 3,400 strong) were segmented into three categories, and individual career development plans drawn up. But like at ONGC and NTPC, GAIL's focus was more on senior management, simply because they were the key decision makers. Top international b-schools such as Harvard, Stanford, Kellogg and MIT were chosen for leadership development programmes. Says Rajiv Khanna, Executive Director (Business Development), GAIL: "Opportunities like these are a leap in knowledge building and help in changing mindsets." Khanna spent 14 days in October 2004 attending an M&A and negotiations programme at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.

At power giant NTPC, which ranked #6 on Business Today-Mercer Best Employers survey of 2004, training is both need-based and part of planned intervention. Under the latter, business unit heads attend fortnight-long workshops on strategic management, change management, and vision and values at Michigan, Harvard and Wharton. The idea: "Promote a culture of creating benchmarks," explains K.K. Sinha, NTPC's Director (HR). ONGC, on the other hand, sends its deputy general managers and above to the Asian School of Management in Manila. Some senior executives, based on their performance, also get to attend an 18-month programme at the Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad. Eight weeks of the programme are spent on campus and the rest at the work centre on projects assigned by the school.

But it's not as if middle-level managers are being glossed over. Under a Young GAIL Unlimited group, comprising managers with at least 25 years to retirement, GAIL gets its junior and middle-level managers trained at IIM Calcutta. That's in addition to the technical and project management skills they are taught at ISB. At NTPC, depending on their location, managers attend three- to four-week capsules at IIM Lucknow and Calcutta, ASCI (Administrative Staff College of India) in Hyderabad, and Amity and IMI in Delhi. IOC, too, puts its young managers through different programmes at IIM Ahmedabad and Calcutta, and MDI, Gurgaon.

Since most of these PSUs are technology intensive, the focus of executive development is as much on upgrading technical skills. ONGC's Unnati Prayas programme offers full-time engineering courses in association with Punjab Technical University. Typically, those with just diplomas in engineering are encouraged to sign up. It also has tie-ups with the Institute of Drilling Technology and the Institute of Oil and Gas Production. Some others like GAIL are equipping their executives with future diversifications in mind. For example, GAIL doesn't yet have any regassification business, but has got some of its key managers trained at Tokyo Gas to learn the technology. Says A.K. Balyan, Director (HR), ONGC: "Our training programmes have resulted in a qualitative change in decision-making."

Vision@NTPC: (From left to right) M.K. Asthana, Senior Manager (Quality Assurance); Sarit Maheshwari, Senior Manager (Fuel Management); and Debasis Panda, Senior Faculty, Power Management Institute

Besides hard-core management issues such as marketing, strategic thinking and change management, the public sector manager is getting trained in softer skills such as emotional intelligence and attitude transformation. Of course, with the PSUs going global, there's emphasis on foreign languages (Russian, Chinese, Arabic and French are some of them). Impressively enough, some top 30 employees at GAIL have even attended self-grooming classes by Sabira Merchant, a well-known grooming specialist based in Mumbai. Merchant offers tips on how to dress, how to schmooze and even how to behave at a formal sit-down dinner.

Re-skilling the PSU manager hasn't been easy though. Banerjee, for instance, says that initially people took it "as an intrusion and thought that I was wasting the company's money". But persistence has paid off Banerjee and the other PSU chiefs. While sacking non-performers is still something these enterprises won't do, they are getting around to making them more accountable. More importantly, employees are now more aware of the strategic issues facing their respective companies and, hence, more willing to make improvements. Says NTPC's Sinha: "We feel we are much more of a learning organisation and flexible to change today."

The difference in attitude is getting noticed not only at work, but also at institute campuses. Says Ranjan Das, Professor of Strategic and International Management at IIM Calcutta: "Earlier, the PSU manager had a very yes-no kind of thinking. Now, they talk the language of business and understand the significance of shaping up for competition." Good for the PSUs. It would be a pity if they were to lose out on their huge headstart just because they couldn't change fast enough.