Circa 1800, India counted among the richest nations in the world in terms of GDP, which was why the Dutch, the English and the French, were all eager to trade with India. Recall what led to colonisation. Textiles, spices, ivory and agricultural commodities were all hugely valuable trading items. The Industrial Revolution in England led to employment generation in mining, manufacturing, railways and the postal system, among many other areas. Apart from workers, the tribe of managers started to develop too. In their own interests, the British colonialists introduced infrastructure activities in their most prized colony. In the initial decades, experienced British workers and technicians worked in India as supervisors or managers. The activity reserved for the natives within India or other colonies in Africa, West Indies, Guyana or Fiji was that of unskilled labour.
Historians credit Dadabhai Naoroji with mooting and advocating the idea that “natives” had to be trained and deployed to tackle the administrative challenges in a complex country like India. As a British Parliamentarian, Naoroji lobbied for the ICS cadre to admit suitable Indians. His mission met with initial success, when Indians were allowed to sit for the ICS exam. But the exam was conducted only in London. Naoroji then pushed for the ICS entrance exam to be held in India, concurrently with the exam in London. Several years later, ICS exams started to be held concurrently in Britain and India.
It was in this manner that Indians were groomed to be ICS officers in India. Meanwhile, railways and postal services started to be established in India. Progressively, Indians started to enter the defence forces as juniors. Private entrepreneurs took to modern industry, particularly in the domains of textiles, jute, coal, steel and tea. All such activities required administrative and management talent. Indians joined firms as junior staff members, and a few grew into junior managerial roles. This was largely true right into the 1930s, by which time Jamsetji’s enterprises – textiles, steel, hydropower – were up and running.
International companies started to take deliberate steps to develop Indian management talent. Indian entrepreneurs started to develop their own ambitions. Textile mills came up in Bombay and Ahmedabad. Jute mills were set up in undivided Bengal. Tea plantations and factories were established in Assam, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. The Tatas set up a steel plant and hydroelectric power stations. All of them either recruited foreigners for technical help or trained their own manpower. These Indian entrepreneurs were focused on developing Indian managerial talent.
As can be seen from this brief review, talent building has been a complex and long journey, demanding great persistence and patience. Talent building represents the infinite game and has no quick-fix solutions.
Efficient factories are daunting to build. First, there is land assessment, acquisition and preparation to be done. Then comes technology selection, equipment purchase, layout and installation. The third and toughest part consists of manpower planning, employee recruitment and, most importantly, skilling, training and motivating employees to deliver. Fourth comes the grand concertino of assembling the parts of the jigsaw before commissioning the factory. Finally comes the operation of the new plant on an optimum basis for efficiency and effectiveness. All this can take a decade, maybe more.
To build and sustain a company management cadre from the top leadership downwards is even more difficult and time-consuming. The talent process follows the rather imprecise art of judging how to develop human beings – from recruitment to evaluation, from the creation of talent density to achievement of talent portability, from defining what a manager’s responsibility is to hold the manager accountable and finally, to advancing the best talent out of well-honed bench strength. These processes do not bear a direct cause-and-effect connection, unlike action and reaction in physics. Rather, the response occurs quite iteratively, to a series of events over long periods of time.
These events do not proceed linearly and often have unintended consequences. But such is the nature of the art of developing leadership, because it deals not with physical objects but with human beings.
The two toughest jobs in the world are perhaps parenting and building leadership talent for the long term. Just as parenting cannot and should not be left to just one parent or to the grandparents, talent development cannot and must not be left exclusively to either the HR department or the CEO. Talent development is a core responsibility of all leaders.
The distinguishing mark of a fine company is the glorious jugalbandi (duet) of its operations and human resources management.
A rigorous discipline of planning and pursuit of talent excellence is either weak or absent in many Indian companies. Quite often there exists no defined process. Where there is a semblance of process, it tends to be personality-driven rather than process-driven. It is worthwhile for Indian corporations to work on this potential weak spot. Benchmarking processes against the best in class, just as management would do for total quality or productivity, is a good way forward. Too often, the chief executive officer leaves this complex task to personnel/HR, and deploys his or her personal energies on other equally important corporate issues. The comparison of talent management and parenting imaginatively highlights why excellence in talent management is among the toughest of corporate jobs.
Both require a rigorous and sustained process discipline soaked in a warm soup of empathy and emotion.
A few years ago, Gopal got involved in a piece of research on “Shapers of Business Institutions”. Six companies participated in the research: L&T, HDFC, Kotak, Marico, TCS and Biocon. One question asked of the chief executive officers and leaders of these companies was about how much of their time went into “reflecting, thinking and planning of management talent”. Their answers ranged from 25 per cent to 40 per cent.
Those numbers are astonishingly high, but they offer a clue as to how much top leaders value their own contribution to developing other leaders. When an individual becomes a top leader, one of his or her principal responsibilities is to develop other leaders for the organisation.
The authors have experienced the ways in which talent management was nurtured in, for example, Tata Consultancy Services, Tata Steel and Titan. They are certainly impressed by the care and time leaders and HR bestow on nurturing and coaching talent within these companies. One measure of their success and capability is that, over several decades and leader successions, these companies can present more than one internal candidate to take over a vacancy so that it is filled without hesitation and without pause.
India is blessed to possess great leadership talent, but organisations must figure out how to cultivate and curate that talent.
To summarise our observations, for a long-standing corporation like the Tatas, it is essential to rely on distributed and professional leadership over generations of leaders. The Tatas have not been able to do this perfectly. But on the whole, with some exceptions, the Group has attracted and retained outstanding professionals over the decades, many of whom have been iconic in the Indian environment.
The first story in this chapter illustrates the approach of founder Jamsetji in the 1890s towards leadership and talent; the second story describes JRD Tata’s approach from the 1940s onwards and the last story by Harish Bhat is, if we may say so, a “worm’s eye view” of talent from a recruit’s perspective.
Excerpted with permission from Jamsetji Tata: Powerful Learnings for Corporate Success, Harish Bhat and R Gopalakrishnan, Penguin India.
