Gagan Kaul Blog

I have been reading a couple of books on strategy and management, with the most recent one being Dynamic Competitive Strategy. I have come to understand that for every business, there are three key fundamentals. These are People, Working Environment, and Strategic Focus.

People are the most important asset for an organization. No matter what strategic plans and operational restructuring a company decides to undertake, if there are no right-minded people to execute these, the whole exercise becomes futile. At the same time, being right-minded is not the only criteria. A successful company’s key personnel are talented and open to change. Team work is the key to execution and a good leader always gives equal importance to the suggestions of his peers, subordinates and seniors. Undermining the importance of any one group of people is extremely perilous. A recent Harvard Business Review article (needs subscription) also articulates thoughts on what the leaders expect from their subordinates - stressing on the importance of ideas generation and collaboration. All in all, the whole interaction has to be highly productive and mutually beneficial.

We need to consistently challenge our future leaders by giving them greater responsibilities and more challenging work assignments. It keeps them motivated and every new challenge gives them something to learn and improve on. Failure to improvise and create such assignments inevitably would result in disillusioned and demotivated employees, resulting in attrition in worst cases.

I strongly believe in a three-pronged strategy that I personally follow in the course of my work at Netscribes. I call it the 3PLD, i.e. 3-Pronged Leadership Development. The first component of this strategy is to identify potential future leaders through regular feedback and appraisal process. This is different from the company-wide appraisals that are conducted in fixed cyclical formats. Instead of getting stuck in the myopic trend of annual appraisals, an ideal modus operandi is to conduct mini-appraisals for each project and identify the best performers. This would prove to be extremely useful in the longer run and also saves a lot of evaluation time during the annual appraisals process.

The second component of the strategy is to put the identified leaders in decision-making roles and give them newer responsibilities. The magnitude of these roles might vary depending on the complexity of the role and the risk factor associated with decisions. If you feel that a wrong decision might place the project in jeopardy, take constant feedback on their thought process and explain the rationale behind their decisions. This would give them insights on how to take situational decisions and evaluate the implications of their decisions. Needless to say, decision-making is one of the most important functions of a leader.

The final component of 3PLD is to monitor the performance of these future leaders in various situations and identify positions that can now be offered to them. The best possible scenario is where an existing project manager moves out of the project and the identified leader takes his place. The outgoing project manager can move on to a bigger role that could vary from handling a more complex project, or setting up a new project from scratch.

All this has worked for me and my teams. I hope that this works for others as well. If anyone ever follows this methodology, I would love to hear your comments about the same. I will continue with my thoughts on the other two topics, viz. Work Environment and Strategic Focus, in future posts.