The High Task Imperative

At

a recent seminar in New Delhi organized by the National Foundations of

Engineers, there was an absorbing discussion on the ‘Leadership Challenge for

Continuing Value Creation’ in today’s tough business environment. This

discussion, featuring some leading academicians as well as consultants and IT

professionals, inevitably veered to the less optimistic projections for the

software industry that are now being tossed around by Gartner and other

thinktanks.

The consensus that emerged was that now is the time, as never before, when

tough leadership is called for to ensure that business results are achieved and

teams energized to meet new challenges. The previous decade was lucky to see

four waves of technology changes that continued to provide opportunities for

software businesses. The decade started with the move from mainframe to client

server and networked systems; careened frenetically to the implementation of ERP

packages in various industry sectors; made way for the big offshore legitimizing

opportunity that was the Y2K bug fix; and closed on a high with more and more

dot-coms, flush with VC funding and urgency, to get to the market offering large

fees to e-commerce solution developers.

In these times, particularly the second half of the nineties, nothing could

go wrong. Body shoppers thrived, so did ERP implementers, Y2K and offshore

maintenance providers and every form of software exporter. And then, within the

space of less than a year, the bottom seems to have fallen out of the infotech

industry, with the dot-com fiasco bringing even the Internet and e-commerce into

the realm of doubt, the only superpower plunging into a near recessionary

slowdown and no revolutionary technology in sight to provide succor to software

exporters.

In such times, the only organizations that will succeed, even survive, are

those where leaders are prepared to take tough decisions. In an industry where

the biggest challenge was to manage attrition, and organizations and their CEOs

bent over backwards to pander to every whim of their software prima donnas, this

new environment–which needs much more attention to sales and delivery

management–is calling for a new style of leadership at all levels. This style

could and should continue the high relationships that have characterized

successful software organizations in India, but now also need elements of a high

task-oriented approach that shows the entire organizational spectrum that the

CEO means business and will not condone slackers or weak team players as he goes

about addressing new market and customer challenges.

The Hthr approach for industry segments

The ‘high-task high-relationship’ approach is valid not just for the

software exports industry struggling to maintain its growth records, but also

for other segments in the Indian information technology industry. The user

segment will inevitably feel the pinch of dwindling IT budgets and will have to

maximize productivity from available resources to ensure that information

systems goals are met without exceeding budgets. High-task orientation at the

team level and high relationships with peer departments and functions will be

essential to meet these aggressive goals. Service providers in the cybercafe or

hardware maintenance trade may have to maintain extremely strong relationships

with their customers.

The computer education industry is probably the one where the HTHR approach

is needed most acutely. In the environment of general pessimism that pervades IT

today–especially with newspapers and magazines falling over each other to

report the impact of the US slowdown and thousands of youngsters staring

unemployment in the face in the US–it is little wonder that the appetite for

computer training is at its lowest level in the last 20 years. In such a market

situation, it is not just the 18-year-old who thinks many times before asking

his parents to cough up tens of thousands of rupees in fees for a career course,

even the wannabe US or Europe aspirants shy away from doing the three-week or

three-month short technology courses that are normally seen as the passport to

instant success!

The recent fiasco of a well-known name in computer education reneging on its

promises to students and franchisees alike has brought up the old bogey of

government control on private training institutes. While this would clearly be

counter-productive and slow down the pace of curriculum design and deployment in

a compulsorily dynamic technological environment, incidents like this bring into

focus the lack of uniform quality that plagues large and small computer training

companies.

How should HTHR deployment take place in the training sector? There are many

areas asking for strong task focus, from counseling quality to curriculum design

and new course rollout, from franchise management to faculty training and

certification. At the same time, relationships with individual students and

batches, as well as potential enrolments and their families, becomes crucial to

assuage fears for the future and ensure that they get the quality they deserve,

not just in the course delivery process but also in career guidance, placement

and every aspect in the value enhancement chain from the first visit of the

prospective student to the counseling desk.

Building the HTHR culture

The recent seminar also came up with an interesting hypothesis for making the

new leadership paradigm work in new economy companies. This hypothesis looked at

three steps to build new success stories:

• Moving the CEO from the top of
  
  the organizational pyramid to the center of the action. The days have gone
  
  when leadership could be exercised through systems, directives and control
  
  mechanisms. The true leader has to be out in the field with the troops,
  
  shaping the organization’s destiny rather than sitting at the top, barking
  
  orders;

• Revitalizing planning, monitoring
  
  and control systems across the organization. Continuing with normal
  
  fortnightly or monthly reviews would be akin to locking the stable door
  
  after the horse has bolted. In a tough market situation, reaction times tend
  
  to be extremely short and it is crucial to shorten planning and control
  
  cycles to capitalize on every possible opportunity and minimize the
  
  likelihood of slip-ups; and

• Building style flexibility in
  
  leaders and managers across the board to enable them to deal with each
  
  situation in an appropriate and not a premeditated manner. This may well be
  
  the toughest step, since most managers have had their responses conditioned
  
  by a decade of plenty and will need to sharpen their senses and develop new
  
  skill-sets to become task-focused and demanding without losing the respect
  
  and goodwill of their teams and peers.

The information technology industry in India is going through a tough phase

at present, but this is no different from the cycles that most industries and

even countries have experienced before. The newness lies not in the problem, but

in the responses that follow. There is little doubt that India is a resilient

country and all of us are capable of providing an adequate response to any

situation–otherwise, the software industry would not have grown in less than a

decade from a few million dollars to its current status of $6 billion-plus.

There are a number of steps to be taken to continue without wavering on the

$80-billion path, and building the HTHR organization is just one of those steps.

Ganesh Natarajan is deputy chairman

and managing director of Zensar Technologies.