The Hindu Business Line : Metrics do not make a leader

What is needed is leadership, but what is available is management with all its tools, techniques, process and analyses. Leadership development demands investment of time, effort and money in creating people-related insights and care.

V. K. Madhav Mohan

If we monitor corporate suites with a secretly installed CCTV we’d find that most top managers are doing the same thing most of the time! Despite all the hoopla about high-faulting strategy, they’re actually engaged in something pretty basic: Solving people problems. The lion’s share of their time and energy is accounted for by issues relating to interpersonal relationships, personal and professional aspirations, confidence-building, listening and perceptions (mostly of hurt).

Discomfort With Emotions

Strangely enough, this is the one area most top managers are least competent to handle! So their discomfort is extreme in situations involving feelings, emotions, fears and unspoken concerns.

It’s almost as if the analytical engine that they are supposed to be is disempowered. Rational thinking, logic, optimisation algorithms, mathematical and financial models, strategising, prioritisation…nothing seems to work. Square pegs in a round hole!

Organisational Toxicity

Consequently, organisations are a seething mass of discontent. Below the hype you can feel the cynicism, desperation, unhappiness, feelings of being let down and taken for granted, shattered dreams and loss of faith. Organograms conceal the negative energy that lurks behind desks and offices. Many, many organisations have become toxic wastelands emitting fumes of human dissatisfaction. The stench of a collective despondency permeates the corporate air.

Not by default

This may be a rather extreme portrayal of organisational life; but anyone who is familiar with the ground situation will recognise the reality that people are the least important priority in the relentless battle to save the bottomline.

Despite all the promises and grandstanding, human beings come last. The point is that all this does not happen by default. The entire system and process of management has somehow been pointed in the wrong direction!

Let’s begin at the beginning. Just look at management education in this country. Every business school puts such a premium on quantitative abilities as though only number crunching, logical thinking and data interpretation matters. Every MBA (PGDM included) entrance exam is heavily loaded in favour of people with highly developed math and quantitative abilities (engineers, science students and others who have slogged for a year in various coaching programs to build these skills).

People with an arts or humanities background have as much chance of getting a look-in as a snowball in hell (unless of course they invest a year of preparation in the coaching program). Granted, quantitative abilities are important and necessary. But the evaluation process cannot be so lopsided that only quantitative specialists have a chance of getting selected. Intelligence and competence have many dimensions; quantitative intelligence is merely one dimension.

By ignoring the right-brain capabilities of candidates, we hare populating our best institutions with uni-dimensional left brain wizards.

Easy way out for b- schools

For business schools, swamped as they are with huge numbers of applicants for limited seats, quantitative evaluations are an easy option. Testing (and test-coaching) has today become a huge industry with every kind of cost-effective automated, IT-driven solution available. Processing and evaluating the qualitative capabilities of applicants, on the other hand, is time-consuming and costly.

So, invariably, the path chosen is quantitative testing. The challenge is to design a new system that embeds the importance of right-brain in the testing system. Such a system can certainly be developed by a multidisciplinary team of experts from diverse fields.

Imbalanced Curricula

The curriculum in the 1,700-odd business schools in India is highly quantitative in nature. Again the dice is heavily loaded in favour of maths and its derivatives. Over two years, the aspiring managers are trained with intensity on analysis, interpretation and decision-making based on number crunching.

Many, many institutions neglect the development of people skills, in particular, and humanity, in general. Very few business schools are committed to balanced development through personal growth labs and similar processes. Most of the time, training in making presentations is considered as the panacea for all problems.

Robots as Managers

It is really quite scary to witness the legions of robotic MBA graduates armed with quantitative tools and techniques swarming into the ranks of Corporate India. Management is surely becoming a set of rule-based non-discretionary optimisation algorithms powered by IT. Leadership seems to have fallen off the radar. In this context, Warren Bennis’ comment about corporations being over-managed and under-led was prophetic.

When managers progress through the hierarchy, their logical skills are honed by the technology-enabled environment.

However, people sensitivities are not developed in the same way. And, yet, when they arrive at senior positions, those very same people skills are vital for them to succeed in those positions. That’s because leadership takes precedence over managerial capabilities as you go higher and higher up the totem pole. Leadership is all about seeing ahead and then taking people there with you.

Mismatch of competencies

So you have a mismatch of competencies at the top. What is needed is leadership but what is available is management with all its tools, techniques, process and analyses. The gap is guaranteed to create organisational mayhem.

Short-term band-aid solutions are automatically chosen over sagacious long-term organisation-building solutions. Leadership development demands investment of time, effort and money in creating people-related insights and care. Metrics alone doth not make a leader!

Ultimately, the finger points back at the top. If the CEO is sensitive and humane, his approach to the business will be balanced and nuanced. He will undoubtedly lead by reconciling information, strategy, profitability, cash and opportunities with people and their needs. If he does anything else, an unprofitable toxic dump of human emotions is what he will leave as a legacy.

TheLonelyCEO@gmail.com

http://TheLonelyCEO.blogspot.com

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