Tata Sons signs pact with Center for Creative Leadership, USA

Leadership development has acquired a whole new meaning. Corporates, even leading names in their own industries, are seeking to know more about the art of growing leaders and encouraging leadership qualities in its people. Eager to grow the right kind of leaders, they are not shy about seeking professional help to enhance the leadership capabilities of their people.

The Tata Group is equally anxious about carrying out research in the area of leadership. With this aim in view, Tata Sons recently signed a memorandum of understanding with the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), headquartered in North Carolina, USA. The MoU envisages exploring areas of mutual interest in research, development of publications and providing world-class executive education.

Founded in 1970, the centre is an internationally recognised resource for understanding and expanding the leadership capabilities of individuals and organisations from across the public, private, non-profit, government and education sectors. With campuses in Asia, Europe and North America, the centre recognises that leadership development is crucial for individual and organisational success.

CCL and Tata Sons recently released the early findings of its noted Lessons of Experience (LOE) — India, a joint research study, undertaken by CCL and the Tata Management Training Centre, on the career and life experiences that have shaped leadership development in Asia. The study, building on nearly 30 years of CCL's original research, seeks answers to two key questions:

• What are the processes by which executives learn, grow and change over the course of their careers?
• What factors differentiate successful executives from those who derail at senior levels?

In the past, the LOE research has been conducted across North America, Europe and Asia with CEOs and senior leaders from Fortune 500 companies in the US and their equivalents in Europe and Asia.

In India, the scope of the research covers 150 senior executives from 10 business organisations spanning different industries. The research findings were arrived at following numerous in-depth interviews with senior leaders. Each interview, lasting for an hour, elicited executives’ views on their careers and the significant events or incidents that had led to lasting changes in their management approach and the lessons they had learnt from those experiences.

As part of the success-derailment study, 10 senior leaders, with more than 20 years of industry experience, shared their impressions of two persons whose careers they knew well. They were asked to select managers who were equally competent initially: one who successfully made it to the top management ranks but then lost his effectiveness and derailed, and another who was successful in reaching the top levels of management.

Additionally, the study focused on the challenges faced by Indian leaders today and highlighted experiences and insights related to multinational and cross-cultural experiences.

The challenges were related to people, strategy, cross-cultural issues, handling mergers and acquisitions, understanding the global economy and replicating success in other countries.

Senior executives shared their learnings on leading and being part of multinational teams and selling in a multinational scenario, besides relating their experiences on mergers and acquisitions. This exercise threw up valuable inputs on understanding different cultures and stereotypes, being sensitive to other ways of life, functional skills related to working in a foreign culture and learning to adapt in other cultures.

Based on this feedback, it was observed that successful leaders had four managerial abilities in common:

• Business acumen
• Networking skills
• People management skills
• A developmental work climate.

The findings were corroborated by John Alexander, President, CCL, who says, “Leadership is a bit of a sacred calling. Good leaders must have integrity, besides a good IQ and business acumen. As people rise higher, interpersonal, communication, listening and empathising skills become more important. In this respect, soft skills often turn out to be the hard skills.”

Alexander believes that innate leadership capabilities can be strengthened by the right kind of challenging experiences and the ability and willingness to learn. Good leaders are good learners. A reward and recognition system and an environment that is open to feedback also help to encourage leadership skills.

The collaboration between the Tata Group and CCL holds promise not only for individuals seeking to enhance their own leadership capabilities but also for the prospect of enriching the wealth of information on leadership development with the Tata experience.

<< Back