The Hindu Business Line : Grooming general managers

THE most important task facing the CEOs of many Indian companies, both of the traditional engineering and manufacturing kind as well as the more modern ones, is how to groom a cadre of business managers very quickly. The raw material they have comprises specialists in manufacturing or accounting — ambitious, well-meaning, and hard-working but essentially not yet managers in the true sense. The wiser top managers also see the need to develop successors for themselves, at the Board level; but the connection between that and the company-wide plan to get more people thinking like business managers and people managers is not always obvious.

My simplistic mantra is that the real role of the organisation is building people and building corporate brands or reputations. And the task of top management is to carefully sift and select and groom a few who appreciate this. If they can then be left to work together to build the two pillars, then the next ten years of the organisation are safe. The change this calls for is neither easy nor quick. Indian industry, therefore, must target those less than 40 today for whom that decade coincides with their careers reaching a peak. One wonders if enough top managers acknowledge or address this issue as a special problem.

Why the general management ability is so thinly spread through the population is really not surprising. Managing is actually an unnatural act. It asks you to get something that you want done, by someone else, exactly as you want it done. And if you can consistently make the other person feel that was what he had always wanted to do as if it were his dream, you are hailed as a brilliant manager, a great motivator. In other words, making people willingly give up their vanity, ego and idiosyncrasies to follow somebody else is the laudable goal for the effective manager. After all, given the emotional value attached to the leadership function, all managers want eventually to be called leaders too. If you did not make a living out of it and carry a high social status, you would call this a con game! And not everyone is comfortable with it.

The simple reason for this discomfort is that managing is a more messy, uncertain and vague process than what engineering and accounting have taught the potential general manager to expect from life. He or she finds the ambiguity, the touchy-feely people issues and the sensitivities of dealing with a wider range of outside interests both unfamiliar and somehow unsettling.

This is the unpalatable truth that chief executives and HR chiefs must remember when they ponder over the difficulties of making general managers out of engineers and accountants. The young men and women who have grown up through a process of professional preparation and training have learnt to attach the highest value to exact knowledge and intellectual ability and learning by memory, which together have enabled them to get where they are, but will have to be put aside if they have to perform in the new role. This tough task has to be handled by the organisation almost on its own because our education system has done nothing in that direction.

School and college teachers primarily want to accumulate stacks of rank holders and award winners. Few would claim as their chief aim the hand-rearing of chairmen and directors of the future. For this reason, the internal management development task of the corporate sector will have to be taken up as a major priority by thinking managers.

(Feedback can be sent to srchander23@netscape.net)