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Date: 1 June 2008 |
Inspired by Mr. M. Sathya Kumar |
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How to Nurture
Talent - Kumar Managalam Birla
Few would argue with the statement, "It's tough
being a Birla." Expectations are high, the stakes even higher. Yet over
the past few years, Kumar Mangalam Birla, Chairman of the Aditya Birla Group,
one of India's largest business houses, has earned his kudos. He is both a
chartered accountant and an MBA. Kumar Mangalam Birla focuses on two pertinent questions:
In this article, I want to share some thoughts with you on
'talent', given that it is a subject presently occupying the attention of
managers the world over, given that it is in extremely short supply, and
given that the need to attract it and nurture it in sufficient numbers, is
very real. It is a management problem that is immediate, here and now. A key resource In any attempt to define our times, words and phrases such as
'accelerating pace of change', 'discontinuity' and 'complexity' figure often.
Everything however somehow boils down to change and speed, mixed with a
generous dose of confusion and chaos. Conventional truths and guideposts are
now meeting their nemesis. In such conditions, business survival and prosperity are clearly
not a function of capital resources alone. Nor are they as dependent
critically on scale or technology or labour, in the conventional sense of the
word. Even the newer strategic models do not give us sufficiently
clear bearings on how to run our business. The point is, that when everyone
in a Grand Prix drives a Ferrari, it is clearly the driver -- and his skills,
attitude, temperament and sense of purpose -- that make the difference! The one, single dominant force that has then emerged is talent.
Management means attracting talented people, nurturing them, developing them,
and giving them space. People no longer want to just work, but are equally engaged in a
search for their own identity and for a holistic meaning to their life. The sharp focus on talent today stands out clearly. Microsoft
employs around 200 full time recruiters. A recent survey by a leading
international consulting firm (Amrop) revealed that 40 per cent of top
management's time is spent on HR or talent related issues. Another survey by the Harvard Business School identified the
ability to spot talent and develop it as being the third most sought after
attribute for a successful CEO. Customers, yes. Shareholders, yes. But businesses will also have
to embrace this stakeholder just as well -- the employee, the talent pool,
the intellectual capital, the resource that is the most fungible, the one
that can easily walk out the door. Every organisation has to create a sense of ownership among
people who will not be owned. A business of any worth today has to grapple
with this compulsion. Talent is, in fact, central in the new paradigm.
Without 'people power' even the best of operational and strategic thinking
will come to naught. What is talent? Let's reflect a bit about what exactly 'talent' means. I believe
the term has become too complex to define. Instead, let me quote from the
book Excellence, written by John W Gardner, the American social reformer.
According to him, 'There are those who perform great deeds and those that
make it possible for others to perform great deeds. There are pathfinders and
path preservers. There are those who nurture and those who inspire. There are
those whose excellence involves doing something well and those whose
excellence lies in being the kind of people they are, lies in their kindness
or honesty or courage.' Going a step further, the term 'talent' has developed some
broader connotations. Earlier 'talented' might have referred to a person with
expertise in a given functional area or a given business, or even a person
who had achieved a pre-determined objective. Today, these 'talents' are almost taken for granted. We now take
stock of a person's managerial and leadership potential, the ability to
straddle different functional areas, businesses, cultures and geographic
boundaries -- all in a seamless manner. We need to assess not only
intellectual skills, but also softer skills such as emotional intelligence,
values, creativity, the ability to work in teams, to think out of the box,
entrepreneurial abilities, and also, importantly, the willingness to learn
and share. A recent study by Janice McCormack, Professor at Harvard
Business School, aptly describes topnotch talent today as someone 'having the
vision of an architect, the theoretical mindset of a physicist, the attention
to detail of an engineer and the financial acumen of an investment banker. In short, the ability to not get cowed down by 'competing
imperatives.' Why now? People have always been important, so one may legitimately ask,
why all this commotion now? Let us try to answer this question. First, there is no doubt that the supply-demand imbalance in the
talent area has become acute, not only in India, but also globally, and is
getting more so. In India, a host of new industries -- information
technology, financial services, media and entertainment -- are vying for the
best people. A flood of multinational companies is out to attract the best
brains, not just for their operations in India, but for their overseas needs.
The outstanding success of India's leading educational institutions,
especially the IITs and IIMs, has drawn them to take a pick from our brains
and capabilities. India has, in effect, become the world's scouting ground
for talent. Second, the desire to 'be one's own boss' is more common. More
and more talented people want to strike out on their own, or work in a
company which offers a significant entrepreneurial environment. So the pool
of people from which to select is contracting, relative to the demand for
them. There is a third factor behind the scarcity of talent. Until
recently, our preoccupation with talent was confined largely to the higher
levels of an organisation. Today, every level of a company's operations
requires talented people. In the wake of intense competition, and the
consequent need for speed, the top-down approach to managing is increasingly
proving ineffective. Dispersal of decision-making is also being driven by complexity
-- the sheer geographic spread of companies, the diversity of product lines
and the need to be close to the customer. Decisions need to be made at every
level and decisions need to be quick. So, we have to spot, incubate and groom
talent at every level of the organisation, because more people need to be
making high quality decisions. And finally, much higher degrees of business complexity result in
a much larger premium on talent. Complexity calls for an integrated approach,
the ability to look at a problem from different perspectives, and a high
degree of creative and non-linear thinking. Coupled with that, there is the need for heightened cultural
sensitivity as national boundaries are becoming hazy and business is becoming
truly global. India well placed to nurture talent I have tried to identify some of the key factors driving the
demand for talent, which has now come to be the strategic resource. However,
despite the scarcity, we are fortunate that India has many of the right
ingredients that help to nurture talent. We just have to look at our present times to realise the
considerable advantages we possess as regards talented people. I am sure we
all must have been taken aback with the surge in the globalisation of Indian
talent. We all knew it was there -- but today the entire world recognises it,
and how. As the joke in Silicon Valley runs, if a person's name is
Shreedhar, don't bother checking his IT skills! Across a range of areas --
engineering, computer programming and financial services -- the Indian brain
has begun to command the highest brand equity. Indians are breaking the glass ceiling and staking their claim
at the upper levels of global firms, in increasing numbers. How did this happen? Unlikely as this may seem, India does seem
to have some of the prerequisites that can be leveraged to nurture talent. We
have the much sought after facility with today's Lingua Franca, the English
language, as also a relatively high degree of numerical aptitude. And, we have an innate capacity to adapt, without which it would
not have been possible for Indians to strike roots overseas and become among
the more successful of the immigrant communities, in a number of countries. Of course, competition also does much to nurture talent. And we
in India, work in a very competitive environment, pretty much from childhood.
We even have interviews to get admitted to a nursery school! Even leaving aside this extreme, we are constantly being graded,
scored, evaluated and ranked. The admissions-to-applicants ratio at our
premier educational institutes is more demanding than that of even the most
elite universities abroad. The same is true of our Civil Service. What retards talent in India? On the flip side, we need to recognise and deal with some of the
powerful attitudes and forces that not only retard talent, but also are
hostile to it. For one, there is the fear of failure. There is an almost
indelible stigma attached to failure, much more than in the West. The family,
the peer group, the society, the banker -- all still frown on failure -- of
any sort, no matter how heroic and daring the effort that preceded it. This attitude thwarts experimentation and stifles innovation.
Better to be 'mediocrely' right than 'stunningly' wrong. The possibility of
getting a second chance is rare. It is difficult to think of the exploits of a Thomas Alva Edison
happening here: the daring experiments, the failures, the bankruptcy, and
then the success, the most well known of which is the electric bulb. A second obstacle to talent is conformity. There is less
acceptance of the offbeat. Dissidence is not looked upon too favorably: it's
the nail that sticks out that invariably gets hammered down. Conformity is
all around us: in the dress code, in the jargon of our times, in our patterns
of strategic thinking, at a point in time. The herd instinct is evident even in the way we invest, with
everyone running after the same scrips, in the same industries, at a
particular moment. Being different is difficult. Where are the contrarians? Finally, I believe that our educational system contributes, in
substantial measure, to our inability to draw out the store of talent latent
in us. Students at the school level are overburdened with rote learning.
Listening and being talked to is the norm. Questioning, discourse, the spirit of discovery, curiosity and
inquiry are rare. The curriculum is narrow and outdated and, to a large
extent, 'memory-centric'. Unlike in the West, the options offered are few. Talent issues in Indian organisations At this point, I would like to share my thoughts on some of the
critical talent related issues that we in Indian organisations need to
address. No doubt, many readers are already working to tackle similar issues,
and you would be having your own unique perspectives. In my own organisation, although we have been putting in a lot
of effort, in these and related areas, we are some distance away from having
all the right answers. Perhaps, many of these are fuzzy issues and there are
no definitive answers. Each organisation must chart out its own approach and
course, given the specific context in which it operates. Adrenaline: The first major issue is how to keep the
adrenaline flowing in talented people. The game does not stop at identifying
talent or inducting it. Talented people get bored easily and so they have to
be kept constantly challenged. In our organisation, we address this issue by fast tracking
deserving talent, offering definite career paths, providing cross functional
exposure across different businesses, and second-ments to our operations
abroad. The objective is to offer a high quality of exposure, faster,
thus enabling the manager to increase his overall intrinsic worth and to take
on higher responsibilities, much earlier in his career. Integration: A second issue concerns how best one can
integrate talented people into the organisation, in a way that there is no
undue disruption. I bring this point up because, quite often, mediocrity
tends to drive out talent or make it ineffective. Integrating talented people into the organisation involves
handling a host of sensitive issues and this is a task that will fully test
the leadership abilities of senior management. At the same time, as we move about with the process of
integrating talent, we do need to subject ourselves -- and talented people --
to some kind of a reality check, every now and then. The best of talent has
to operate, ultimately, within the boundaries of organizational objectives,
and talent, no matter how highly regarded, cannot become dysfunctional. Creating an ivory tower is not desirable. In the same vein, we
have to keep in mind that talent means much more than 'white collar'. We
cannot glorify a certain kind of talent, at the cost of talent in other
areas. As always, maintaining the right balance is the challenge. Compensation: The third issue I would like to touch upon
is one very much in the spotlight today: the growing divergence in
compensation and reward levels between the talented and those less so. This
differential is widening by the day -- in absolute and relative terms. How we handle this divergence is again absolutely critical to an
organisation's health. Today, the clamour for stock options runs high.
Incorporating a significant performance-based component in the compensation
package is almost mandatory. Again, there are no clear cut solutions. It goes
much beyond the criteria of affordability. We have to look at larger and fundamental issues such as equity,
value systems and organisational morale. Until we find an answer to this dilemma, let me read out this
very interesting text of an advertisement, which appeared in the London
newspapers in the year 1900. Ernest Shackleton, the famous explorer, inserted
this advertisement when recruiting team members for the National Antarctic
Expedition. The advertisement read as follows: 'MEN WANTED FOR
HAZARDOUS JOURNEY. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete
darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in
case of success.' Shackleton later said of the call for volunteers that, 'It
seemed as though all the men in Great Britain were determined to accompany
me, the response was so overwhelming.' Perhaps, taking the cue from this, the
real challenge lies in striking the right balance between material rewards
and the larger sense of mission. What per cent? In conclusion, I believe that making India talent-friendly will
require actions at the macro level also. Nurturing talent and keeping it here
and putting it to good use requires resolving some tough quality of life
issues. For instance, India ranks low in any human development or
quality of life index. Talent cannot flourish if the enabling social and
physical infrastructure is not in place. Only then can we reverse the brain
drain decisively. This is a task that needs the involvement of all of us --
in business, in government, in our educational institutions, in our
professional bodies. Attracting brains is a lot more difficult than attracting FDI or
portfolio investments. But then that is also what will make us really
competitive. At the end of it all, we have to ask ourselves not only whether
we have talented people, but also whether we have enough of them; and whether
we are doing everything we can to nurture them in greater numbers. We are a billion Indians, about one-sixth of humanity. Do
Indians constitute the universe of talented people, in equal proportion? The
author is the Chairman of Aditya Birla Group, one of India's largest business
houses. Courtesy
: Compiled from the Smart Manager Magazine |
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