How Sapient Leaders Use Context!

How often have we wondered about the strong traits of successful leaders!

There is a lot of research on whether leaders are born or made. Beliefs around pedigree, past experience and upbringing abound. Hence everyone who aspires to be a leader looks up to someone he admired and tries to emulate him/her.  

We are now putting out a different hypothesis for the success of leaders across the world.  

We believe that the primary driver of performance for leaders is vision and clarity of goals and the hunger to achieve the same! Also most of us are driven by monetary and non-monetary incentives like promotion, status, perquisites etc.  However, often we give less credit to the “context” in which leaders succeed or fail.

“Context” is the lay of the land … the “environment” and the “operating system” in the organisation.

This includes not only clarity of vision and goals but more importantly the understanding of and adapting to the people and nature of the organisation. This is a crucial factor for leadership to succeed or fail.

This factor becomes more pronounced particularly when we have a lateral hire at the leadership level who is parachuted into a role assuming that his past credentials will automatically play out in the new environment. It may well be true that great leaders carry their competencies wherever they go. Nonetheless, whether domain knowledge or leadership skills alone help them succeed at every level, is a point of a larger debate.

We have had occasions to hire great leaders who have an unmatched track record of performance in one organisation but when they are put in a different environment, they struggle to adapt.  

For that matter there are cases where a leader coming from a great organisation like P&G may struggle to succeed in Unilever. Similarly, Coke and Unilever have different work ethos.  We have also observed people coming from great companies like GSK, Reckitt, Mondelez and similar companies, finding it hard to switch between American, British and European cultures in their ways of working.  

This challenge becomes even more amplified when a leader switches from an MNC to an Indian promoter company where navigating through the legacies of erstwhile successful leaders becomes a major challenge.

We, therefore, argue that success of leaders is relative and not absolute.

It depends on multiple factors:

*THE PITCH:

 As in cricket, even seasoned great players and coaches first worry about the pitch. Is it meant for pace or spin? Often, even veteran batsmen get bewildered by the bounce or the spin and this is entirely due to the pitch condition!

*THE ADVERSARY:

Every organisation is an aggregation of vintage leaders, naysayers and some open minded individuals.  So a leader will have to first know the mindset of the system as a whole rather than assume that his past successes will give him the right to win in the present.  Some employees welcome newcomers or even internal promotees as good for the change while some others are constantly waiting for the new incumbent to fail. Hence understanding the adversary is very critical to the success of a leader

*CLIMATE:

 As in any game, be it cricket or football, the understanding of the climate of the day plays an important part in determining the way the game is to be played. In the context of an organisation, climate is equivalent to the mood in the system, reflected by employee morale and engagement.  Hence leaders need to be mindful to understand the underlying sentiments of the system, to accept new initiatives, understand the appetite for change and collective readiness. When we accelerate change or transformation, it creates cynicism, positivity and anxiety, depending on the vantage point of each employee.  

Over years of experience, we find that most leadership hiring errors are due to one or all of the above factors! It’s primarily because the organisation and the leader misses to take cognisance of these aspects!

In conclusion, while many will say Content is King, Context is certainly the Crown Prince!

K. A. Narayan, President -HR, Raymond, is fondly known as KAN in industry for his well-known ‘Can Do’ attitude.  Sunandan Bhanja Chaudhury, Client Partner, Pedersen & Partners, is known as SU by friends and family, both off and on the golf course!