“Time has come for organisations to focus less on intellectuality, analysis and strategy and more on implementation and making it work,” he urges, during a recent interaction with Business Line.

Mr Kandula — whose doctoral thesis in XLRI, Jamshedpur, was on ‘Alignment between corporate restructuring strategies and human resource intervention in BT-Top 500 companies’ — is extremely positive that execution excellence is achievable. His company, with about 6500 people, was ranked ‘the top IT employer in India’ in Dataquest-IDC’s (DQ-IDC) 8th annual survey this year.

Excerpts from the interview:

Can you give us your HR perspective of the current meltdown in the US?

I believe, we have created the kind of environment that we have stylishly dubbed as competitive culture rather than creating a collaborative culture. Organisations have grown to a size and stage where they have conveniently forgotten their end-users.

In such organisations, middle and senior management would have typically concentrated on their own career growth. Once the manager’s focus is solely on his growth, he will mortgage the whole interest of the organisation.

It is very likely that more and more such mortgages would have been happening in these organisations for the last decade but some of these managers, since their ends are also tied with some of these selfish interests, may have compromised and stayed silent. Over a period of time, more and more such managers who grow up the ladder in the organisations themselves become enemies of the institution.

That is where the HR managers have to play a key role — in the culture of the organisation.

One of the key deliverables of a HR manager should be to ensure that the employees do not forget the purpose of their institution in order to achieve their self-interested career goals and never allow them to work for counterproductive purpose.

No longer is the role of HR just hiring people, working out compensation packages or creating hierarchical career ladders. The key HR role now is to build the right kind of culture where all employees live through the purpose for which the institution has been created.

There is a tendency to focus on strategy all the time. What should be the key focus areas in organisations?

Most of the organisations talk about strategy as a more important element than execution. According to me, strategy is a commodity whereas execution is an art. Whenever an organisation fails, it tends to review the strategy rather than the execution culture, the critical component of which is the management of people.

Regardless of technology, human contribution and significance of human effort will remain, and people management will be critical. That is what the modern management need to focus on.

When you come to execution excellence, you need to deal with hundreds and thousands of employees and ensure that there is flawless execution. This is quite complex, as you need to work with various people. You need to convince others and sometimes you need to get convinced by others. Most of the managers find it extremely difficult to get convinced by others, in spite of their robust thinking.

You will find that the real success stories in the corporate world have been those where the management has focussed on execution and working with people rather than just strategy.

Time has come for organisations to focus less on intellectuality, analysis and strategy and more on implementation and making it work.

How does one achieve execution excellence within an organisation?

Execution excellence lies in implementation and the following can help create a culture of execution excellence:

Minimise meetings within organisations: Out of 8 hours daily at the workplace, employees should be encouraged to work for 5 hours without talking to one another. We should bring a code of conduct within organisations on this front. Even the task which has high degree of interdependence can be done without much of verbal interaction.

Minimise writing and email culture: 40 per cent of the workforce in organisations spends its time in functions such as planning, monitoring, strategising, creating processes and templates, coordinating meetings. They not only waste their own time but also contribute to another 20-30 per cent of the workforce wasting their time.

These people spend their time only creating ideas and strategies. These may be very good strategies but if there is no time for implementation, these ideas will not be of any use. One must remember that generally organisations are in the business of creating certain products and services and not in the business of publishing or creating poetry. It is better for organisations to have dearth of ideas than dearth of implementation capabilities.

Recognise and reward people who implement rather than just suggest: Whoever comes with an idea or suggestion, make him guilty of not implementing the idea.

Make everyone — at all levels — responsible for implementation.

What is your definition of ‘leadership’ and what is the role of leaders in building longstanding organisations?

Leadership worldwide as understood till the 1960s and the 1970s was about having a sound character, great positive attitude and working for the society and people. It was an ethical way of living and managing.

In the last 30-40 years, dominated by Western literature, leadership has now come to be more a set of tools and techniques — communication, managerial effectiveness, analytical tools, scientific management, and so on. Some of these tools have been misunderstood to be the core of leadership.

Merely having high proficiency in certain jargon will not make one a good communicator. Religious literature has presented leaders as the epitomes of moral values who sacrifice own life and needs for the benefit of others. Leader is one who can accommodate divergent views and still be functional.

However, in the new scheme of things, it seems that a leader is one who can optimise himself for own wealth and benefits and one who can assert one’s own rights. The great leader now seems to be one who has created wealth for a set of people at the cost of millions of people and one who can communicate in a language that can be understood by very few people rather than the mass. That has brought lot of strife and sadness not only to the corporate organisations but also to the society in general.

Time has come for us to look at leadership as more of character-building and a leader as one who sacrifices rather than a celebrity or a personality or someone who can present himself differently keeping oneself on a high pedestal.

How do you get rid of the ‘cribbing’ malice that seems to be a worldwide phenomenon in organisations?

Cribbing is universal but we need to discourage cribbing in organisations and society at large because cribbing is proportionate to negative energy that flows in these institutions. Organisations need to build a positive psychological capital in the workplace. If someone has a suggestion, they should go about executing it. Replace ‘suggestions’ with ‘execution’ and replace ‘cribbing’ with elements that have an ‘implementation’ flavour.

What about the oft-heard concept of ‘bonding’ in organisations?

The core of bonding comes for a common cause which all the employees are committed to. The camaraderie and teamwork will not come just because we create group activities within an organisation. Without having a common cause, such kind of bonding will only be counterproductive.

People tend to use this common bonding platform to crib further, resulting in collective cribbing than individual cribbing. Often the most powerful messages are spread through non-verbal means rather than verbal communication.

Organisations need to create a common cause and this has to be imbibed and made an integral part of their job rather than bringing them into a classroom kind of situation or taking them on an outbound training or making them climb a hill or getting them to do exercises with a rope.

What is your view on communication as a tool?

Communication has been the most misused and misunderstood mechanism or system within an organisation. Most of our organisations are biased towards those who are supposed to have good communication. Good communication does not mean good performance. Often, the so-called good communication results in dysfunctional implications for organisation. A person with good communication will very quickly be able to create within the company an image of what he is not. Some of the organisations have gone to the extent of equating performance with communication capabilities.

My message is that one should not fall prey to smart people who everyday sell impressions and perceptions to you. Companies may sometimes have to believe in ‘dumb people’ who may not be communicating but who are working hard to create real value in the organisation.

D. MURALI

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