The Hindu : National : “Nurturing leaders, key to success”

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Friday, Jul 06, 2007
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National

“Nurturing leaders, key to success”

Special Correspondent

Lakshmi Narayanan suggests firms should put in place separate corporate HR team

— Photo: S.S. Kumar

DISCUSSION ON FUTURE LEADERS: (From left) Vineet Nayar, president, HCL Technologies; Lakshmi Narayanan, Chairman, NASSCOM; Kiran Karnik, president, NASSCOM; Jerry Rao, Mphasis chairman; and Subroto Bagchi, Mindtree Consulting founder, at the inauguration of NASSCOM HR Summit in Chennai on Thursday.

CHENNAI: Identifying and nurturing leaders at all levels of the organisation will be a key to success, information technology industry veterans said at the inaugural session of the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) HR Summit here on Thursday.

New areas such as knowledge process outsourcing and legal services outsourcing were emerging. It was imperative that HR teams identified and nurtured leaders who would lead others in the new direction.

Speakers, including NASSCOM chairman C. Lakshmi Narayanan, Mphasis chairman Jerry Rao, HCL Technologies Limited president Vineet Nayar and Mindtree Consulting founder Subroto Bagchi, said companies would have to nurture leaders, even if it meant taking risks.

Manpower

They highlighted the challenges facing the HR department ahead of the big demand for manpower over the next three years. According to statistics provided by the NASSCOM, the Indian IT and IT-enabled services were set to double their manpower from the current 1.6 million to 3.2 million by 2010.

Mr. Lakshmi Narayanan said a separate Corporate HR team could function with the agenda of nurturing and developing potential leaders. Traditional HR policies would not go far, he said. There was a lot to be learnt from other global HR policies. “It is important to recognise that leadership exists at all levels.”

Mr. Jerry Rao said leadership was often situational, and it would be wrong to expect the same person to succeed in different situations. At times, he enrolled as a member of a team in some projects and took orders from others.

Transparency

Mr. Nayar said organisations must look at making all its operations transparent. Several IT companies operated Intranet blogs for the employees to freely exchange their ideas and, at times, even question the superiors.

He urged HR teams not to keep their evaluation of employees a secret and make it transparent.

Mr. Bagchi likened the teams in companies to the Indian families, where each family member shared a vision and the values. He called for constant communication among team members as a means of keeping everyone involved.

NASSCOM president Kiran Karnik moderated the session.

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