|
A couple of years ago I had this interesting conversation with a co-passenger
on a San FranciscoBangalore flight, Kumar. Id asked him what he did and he
mentioned that he was with one of the major Indian IT services companies based
in the US, as an account manager. He was positioned in the IT group of a very
large insurance company and added that he was bored after being on the same
account for over three years. So I asked him what kind of work he did and what
he thought of the insurance industry and how it was shaping up. He said that in
his accounts he had done a lot of Corba, Java and .Net, and even some IBM
mainframe projects. What about the businesses they were supporting? I asked.
He talked briefly about the claims processing division, but didnt seem to want
to take that further. When I probed about the domain and what difference they
make to the business, he hemmed and hawed and seemed pretty vague, almost
uncomfortable with the direction of the conversation
His company, like many others, is trying to move up the value chain to higher
value added services, providing a combination of technology and business
solutions and not just better quality at a lower price point. And account
managers like Kumar, who are the face of Indian IT to their clients, are at the
forefront of this transition. The increasing complexity of projects coupled with
the increasing maturity of customers and their expectations means that IT
companies now expect account managers to not only understand technologies but
also the customers business. This is so that they are able to use their
technology understanding to help with broader business needs. While Kumar, like
many others, would have honed his skills on solving technical problems and come
up with creative solutions to coding and design issues, he had now reached the
level where these abilities were considered basic, or hygiene abilities.
 |
|
Devapriyo Ghose
Head, Leadership Development
Practice (India), Mercer |
What then is the Hour-glass
The paradox is that all the skills that got him to where he is, may now be
conspiring to hold him back. Narrow focused with high attention to detail,
driving tight processes and controlshe epitomizes the great Indian software
dreamone that has moved companies from being viewed as suppliers of warm bodies
to people who are seen as changing the dynamics of how business is done in this
industry. To make a difference and do well at their current level, suddenly the
Kumars are being asked to go beyond and engage with the customer, understand
customer and business issues and utilize what should be a deep perspective of
the customers business to proactively suggest solutions. This creates an
hourglass shape for growth and development of these middle managersnarrowing in
focus and intensity as they reach the middle but widening out again once they
do.
This is probably true of many professionsconsulting for onewhere there is
need for depth in the early stages of ones career followed by a need for
breadth to complement the depth which is then taken as hygiene. However, the
sheer scale of the IT services industry and the numbers that need to be able to
squeeze through to the upper section of the hourglass is what makes this a
challenge. This middle management layer is the group who translate strategy into
implementation, who manage change on the ground and are the pipe through which
all communication must flow. More importantly they are the prime source of
future executive talent and thus crucial to the continued success of these
organizations. Against this need are pitted the issues of lack of time, remote
working, work-life balance and maybe even a little bit of the success syndrome.
| A
Case File |
Ashish Mehra
was looking out of the window of his cabin in the plush, glass and chrome
building of Iridescent Technologies. It was just a couple of hours before
the senior management meet.
A meeting which would decide his fate in the firm along with several other
middle level managers who were awaiting promotion. A promotion to the senior
echelons, which they presumed were being groomed for. But which, looked
doubtful nowA couple of months back,
faced with a resurgent rupee and declining business from the USA, their most
lucrative market, Iridescent decided to ramp up operations and reshape its
strategy. It needed to in order to survive. Revenues were falling and costs
spiralled through the roof. Employee costs, which formed a chunk of the
costs, had to be controlled immediately. The firm decided to reshape its HR
strategy, re-look at its priorities and, most importantly, assess what was
affecting the productivity and performance of its resources. They set up a
cross functional team of senior executives to do a diagnostic study and
recommend potential areas of focus to the firm. The study started with
having extensive interviews and feedback from a cross-section of employees
and clients.
The study seemed to point to the fact that
the organization was going horribly wrong in areas like leadership
development, career planning and coaching. These were areas which the
management prided itself on. Areas which they felt were carefully thought
about and clearly articulated. Apparently, there was a disconnect between
the HR strategy and the implementation.
Iridescent was known to focus on technical
expertise and skills, engineers were hired fresh from engineering schools
and trained to be the best in the industry. This was common knowledge. Hence
even though they did not pay much at the junior levels, there was always an
eager bunch of techies wanting to join the firm. The freshers were trained
in specific technologies which the firm worked with and were later given the
choice to specialize further if they so wished. Once they completed a few
years in the firm, based on their inherent competencies, they were trained,
coached and nurtured to take on further responsibilities, both on the
technical and the management front. This seemed to be working well till now.
But now the diagnostic brought forward some
startling facts. The firm was unable to train its technical stars to take on
management responsibilities. The high performers often had a narrow view of
the companys overall strategy and vision limited to their team/technology.
Few were capable of making the jump from being a technology expert or even a
group head to more senior responsibilities which involved less of technical
skill and more of people skills and business acumen.
The challenge lay in getting them to take a
broader view of the business and lead the firm onto newer frontiers.
Ashish Mehras example fit right into this
problem. A topper from REC, Nagpur he decided to spurn offers from the other
IT majors and joined Iridescent for the learning opportunity and technical
challenge which was promised. He was not disappointed. He built his skills
in java and soon became a technology expert. He was one of the most wanted
resources in the firm. After spending four years in coding and providing
design inputs, he grew to become a middle level manager for a product. His
clients loved the technical expertise he brought with him and he did
modestly well as the product manager. There were certain people management
issues and his lack of ability to build new business was evident but not
worrying. In meetings where technical issues were discussed, he was able to
bring alternative perspectives of how the technical issues should be
resolved, and invariably these worked well. However, if there were
discussions on how to grow the business or how to find ways to use
technology to solve various business challenges the customer was facing, his
manager felt that he was uninterested. In addition, he did not seem to be
doing anything to consciously groom his team members to take on higher
roles.
After spending another four years in the
role, he was expecting to be promoted this year to a senior management role.
His contention was that using technical expertise and the management skills
he had acquired he was all set to be jettisoned to the next level.
But the management felt otherwise. Using the
diagnostic findings and probing deeper into the issues, they felt managers
like Ashish who were so niche focused would find it extremely difficult to
traverse wider management responsibilities. They would be unable to get to
the board the most critical skills required at the senior levels: people
management, client relationship and business acumen. It was not the fault of
managers like Ashish. Iridescent had not paid sufficient heed to the
development of star performers and without the right exposure, the right
experiences, skill development and coaching, they were trapped in roles
where they had no exposure or understanding of the skills they would be
required to demonstrate at the next level. The knife-edge equilibrium that
Iridescent was on had kept them so busy managing transactions that theyd
had no time to focus on longer term issues like career and succession
planning or proactive competency development. So now it was faced with a
decision whether it wanted to lose someone like Ashish or allow him to be
moved up to beyond his level of competence.
They had to make a decision and make it
fastand more importantly, think about what they wanted to do in the
longer term about all the other Ashishs in the company |
Its not just a matter of increased customer expectations alonethere is also
a change in the expectations of the next level employees after middle
managementits no longer were all in this together and so lets mouth off
about the company together. Now the new middle manager is expected to inspire,
to filter, to explain, to support. So for the delivery function, which is
overwhelmingly the largest part of all IT services companies the issues are even
scarier. Somewhere in the transition from being a manager of others to becoming
a manager of managers the need for some critical skills is being felt by many
organizations. The two that are most significant are around developing people to
create succession and acceleration pools and becoming business managers from
being a technical/project manager. Again the hourglass kicks inall the skills
of following and monitoring process, of quality and productivity have become
hygiene and now theyre required to work toward creating a high performing work
ethic, of creating a culture of innovation or learning, of aligning strategy to
implementable road mapsall things that their successes have ill equipped them
for.
Broadening the Mid-management Layer
In fact, while IT services companies have clearly been very successful at
creating informal processes through which the people management function hums
along at the software engineer upto the early project manager levelsyoung
managers take much greater people responsibilities in the IT services industry
than they do in many others and its clearly a tribute to their efficacy that
the industry as a whole has done so well. So as an added wrinkle to the
hourglass shape, it seems paradoxical that those early skills dont seem to be
as much in evidence once the same people reach the middle management layers. The
buddy systems and informal mentoring systems that work so well at early stages
of career somehow dont seem to work as well at more senior levelsevidence from
employee engagement surveys across the spectrum show a decrease in satisfaction
on this dimension. Again, while this is probably true across many industries,
the people intensity of the IT services industry makes this issue more acute
here as highlighted in the apocryphal story of Ashish Mehra below and makes the
search for answers a critical need.
The bad news is there are no easy answers. Looking at a holistic talent
management framework starting with identifying the right sets of competencies,
as applicable in their particular context and drilled down to specific outcomes,
that will contribute to success is the first step. Tying this up to the
performance management systems to ensure that people are judged the way theyre
supposed to behave is the next, and its surprising how often this is not done.
Aligning career progression and succession planning is criticalhaving the right
data and the right processesand being able to follow up with appropriate
developmental interventions including cuing up the right sets of experiences
through stretch assignments or action learning, supporting it through coaching
or mentoring and skill building classroom interventions. Creating feedback
processes and building a culture of learning and empowerment all go a long way.
The good news is companies across the board are rushing to introduce better
skill development opportunities for their middle management layers. Some are
investing in leadership development programs, others at providing the right set
of experiences and yet others are looking at e-learning and other
technology-driven learning for answers. Many companies have begun to detail out
their leadership requirements and drill down into the leadership behaviors that
would be required in the future; those that have started on this road are now
looking at tying different initiatives including leadership assessment and
development career and succession planning, performance management and reward
systems into a more meaningful whole.
Page(s) 1
|
Print
Comment
Email
Digg
Del.icio.us
Reddit
Twitter