The Twelve Absolutes of Leadership by Gary Burnison

Author:Gary Burnison [Burnison, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Published: 2012-02-01T14:00:00+00:00

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To lead means to be in charge of the “care and feeding” of those who follow.

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Vineet Nayar, who is CEO of HCL Technologies Limited, believes it is nothing less than revolutionary to recognize that the employee is the core differentiator and value-creator of the company. As he sees it, handing the baton to the employees is perhaps one of the highest forms of acknowledgement of the worth of the team.

When Nayar became CEO of HCL in 2005, the company was rapidly losing its luster. A pioneer in India’s emerging information technology (IT) services sector at its inception in 1976, HCL was among India’s top five IT companies. By 2005, however, it had become stagnant, with slowing growth and a declining market share. The company needed a shake-up.

Nayar injected new life with an overhaul of the company’s culture, putting employees at the top of the value pyramid, rather than at the bottom. His philosophy “Employees First, Customers Second,” was viewed as aberrant in conservative corporate cultures. But Nayar, who had graduated from one of India’s top business schools and joined HCL as a young MBA, is a self-proclaimed “believer in the power of transformation.” He had long believed that command-and-control, top-down leadership was ineffective and suffocating for employees.

“I have always believed that organizational focus and structures should be inverted to focus on the ‘value zone’—the place where frontline employees interact with customers and create real value for them. All rewards, recognitions, and corporate priorities should be focused on this value zone,” Nayar says.

His approach worked. In the five years after Nayar took over as CEO in 2005, revenues and operating income more than tripled, the number of HCL customers grew fivefold, attrition among the 58,000-plus employees in 26 countries dropped by 50 percent, and HCL was named “Best Employer” in India and Asia by Hewitt Associates.

Many CEOs claim that their people are the company’s most important asset, but how many of them actually walk the talk? By recognizing the strengths and talents of their team members—an important component of reward and celebrate—leaders are able to unleash the potential of others. In turn, when their efforts are recognized, people will stretch themselves to see a brighter future, a bigger tomorrow than the status quo of today.

“When you think about great leaders, heroes like Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, what they did was, they created dissatisfaction with today. There are lots of companies that are not growing, but I don’t think they’re unhappy with themselves,” Nayar says. “So the first thing you need to do is make [a company] unhappy with[ itself,]and then you need to create the romance of tomorrow, where you can be free or you can be great or you can be number one. And then you must tie those strategies together.”

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