The Hindu Business Line : Managers... the supply shortage

At a rough estimate, India today needs 15 million additional managers. Where and how are we going to find them? How can we create a base of managers who can channel and direct all this talent and energy towards creating breakthrough results?

Before we jump in to address the issue of generating managers, it may be worthwhile to explore the whole idea of management.

The need for management

Mary Parker Follet, in the early 20th century, described management as "the art of getting things done through people". The process of management involves planning, organising, leading, coordinating and controlling. Management as a discipline evolved over the last 200 years of the industrial revolution, with its focus on division of labour, mechanisation and large-scale manufacturing. In fact, one can argue that management is only required when there is scale and, conversely, without management it is impossible to scale efficiently.

Let me illustrate this point with a music example — by contrasting a Carnatic music recital with a Western symphony orchestra. A Carnatic music recital is typically led by a vocalist and accompanied by a few instrumentalists playing, say, a violin, mridangam, ghatam and maybe, a tambura. The singer does not rely on a fixed sheet of music and improvisation is rampant.

The accompanists effortlessly follow the lead singer, and the team manages to produce flawless music.

A symphony orchestra, on the other hand, often has over a hundred players. Although they play according to a structured sheet of music, they still need a conductor, to lead the orchestra and bring out the harmony.

A Carnatic music band requires no management. However, if you were to scale that model to a 50-person band, the output may be more cacophony than music. In contrast, a symphony orchestra recognises the need for management upfront — hence the conductor — who gets the music out through the people. And it's a model that can scale quite efficiently and effortlessly, even if the size of the orchestra were to double.

Having seen Mastek grow from a dozen people to over 3,000 people in the past 24 years, I can clearly experience the fact that the need for management has grown significantly over these years. Whenever we have not paid attention to filling this need, it has created a major impact in terms of productivity. We can also see this in the projects that we execute. Project teams of 10-20 people can perform with little or no management; but the moment we have teams of over 50 people working on the same project, we need very strong management to keep it on time and within budget.

And there's the rub.

A severe shortage of managers

A country like the US has around six million managers in a workforce of 130 million. It has built up this pool of managers over the last 200 years of industrialisation, spanning several generations of people who have worked in large organisations.

Our history of industrialisation goes back less than 50 years. More than half our workforce is still agricultural. Even our industrial workforce has, at best, been working in large industry for two or three generations. It is not surprising, therefore, that we do not have a large pool of management talent.

In every industry, one hears laments about lack of middle management. If the US metric were to be used as a benchmark, with a workforce of over 400 million people, we will need at least 20 million managers. Although I could not find data about the number of managers in India, I'd be surprised if it was anywhere above 4 million — less than 20 per cent of what we require.

How do we fill the gap?

When I reflect back on where I learnt management, I find that an MBA did not actually equip me to be a manager. One gets a great perspective on business in an MBA programme, and a fair amount of expertise in different functional areas such as marketing, finance, operations and HR. However, there is little in the course that prepares you for real life — the art of getting things done through people. This is because management is an art or, at best, a craft; it can only be learnt on the job, with the support of a mentor or master.

So how do we generate 20 million managers? As always, there is no silver bullet. We can generate them through every organisation creating management development programmes to grow their own managers. We can generate them through specialist organisations such as management schools, designing innovative programmes and curricula that can be leveraged by industry to accelerate this process.

There is also the element of how we organise each function within an entity to make it more manageable, as well as the focus on creating a system that will ensure uniformity and predictability. Having worked with organisations in India and in the West, my feeling is that Indian companies are yet to master the systems approach — the cookie-cutter model to scale. Somehow we still tend to encourage the Carnatic music style of improvisations, which can lead to huge inefficiencies in a large organisation.

Here are a few short-term fixes to the management pool problem:

There is a huge pool of management talent available in public sector undertakings as well as the government — while a few private-sector organisations have identified and leveraged this in a systematic manner, I'm sure there are many more competent managers within the banks, PSUs, railways and the bureaucracy. Using this talent judiciously could lead to a thinner and more efficient public sector and more management bandwidth for the private sector

Using retired professionals and managers on a part-time basis

Providing incentives for non-resident Indians to relocate to India

Providing expatriate managers an attractive environment in India, on a par with that in West Asia.

Good management can lead to quantum increases in the quality and quantity of output. If we want to get full value from our huge workforce, we desperately need to fill up the management shortage. This calls for innovative ideas and urgent actions across government and industry. Let's move fast to make our dreams of a world-class India a reality.

(The author is CEO, Mastek Group. He can be contacted at sudhakarr@mastek.com)

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