Great leaders take “calculated” risk Date:   Thursday , December 09, 2010 Taking risks is not necessarily about dealing with uncertainty, which most of us tend to believe. Risk is an opportunity, an opportunity to grow, an opportunity to prove ourselves. And being a leader, a person needs to find out the right kind of people to take risks with, this is what Sridhar Jayanthi, Vice President of Engineering and Head of India Operations, McAfee truly believes and follows. After working for 14 to 15 years in the U.S., when Sridhar moved back to India, his boss decided to take a risk with him. Though Sridhar had not been employed in India before, his boss took a chance with him and decided to start McAfee in India. That was a risk that somebody took with Sridhar, which proved to be a turning point in his whole career. But why do people take risks, while there are alternatives? “According to my own personal belief, all leaders inherently do take calculated risks all the time. Sometimes it is according to the nature of the person and sometimes it’s the nature of the position he is in that makes the person take risks,” says Sridhar. As a person, a leader may take a lot of risks, but coming back to the organization, there are certain risks that he is not ready to take. Sridhar, who has worked for startups pretty much his whole career, has not done a startup in life, and this, in his own words, is one of the biggest risks in the industry that he hasn’t taken yet. Inherently even though there is so much of entrepreneurial spirit in India, risk is still not a very common thing within organizations. Somebody who is an out of box thinker, quite often is subdued, telling him, “that’s totally crazy, you can’t do such crazy things.” So when somebody decides to start up a new company, that’s actually a huge risk that one can take, because we all have come from a background of conformity, says Sridhar. Organizations in India, which is the hub of emerging market and where startups are coming up every other day, have almost everything undefined. Hence, companies here in India need to open new doors and thereby taking risks in order to achieve their desired goals. “Risk is a necessity. It’s not even an option, everybody has to take risks if he wants move ahead,” he adds. When it comes to taking risk in an organization, a significant aspect is that what kind of a culture to be set up in the organization that supports risk taking decisions. “Taking risks with somebody in the organization is not only about giving them responsibility, it’s also a matter of trust. While the leader should show his trust on the people he hires, the employees, at the same time, should be bold, genuine and should have visibility, so that their employer can take risk on them without any sort of hesitation”, says Rakesh Singh, Vice-President, Products and Managing Director, Citrix R&D India. There was a time when Rakesh was heading the product marketing department at NetScaler and when he joined Citrix after that, he was asked by his CEO to head the R&D center in India. At that point of time almost all the R&D centers in India were headed by people from engineering track, but despite from being a marketing head, Rakesh’s CEO decided to take the risk and it worked well for them. Rakesh recalled this incident as one of the biggest risk that somebody has ever taken with him. From a leader’s perspective, according to Rakesh, a person should have certain traits in him to win the respect of his peers as well as his seniors. They have to showcase some key characteristics that will put them in such a situation that their CEOs would like to take risk on them. Rakesh said if a person wants to be seen as a risk taker and a bold person, he got to be a risk taker and a bold person. After that comes visibility, which means that the person should come forward to take responsibilities. These are traits, said Rakesh that employees in an organization need to have if they want to be looked upon by their bosses. While taking risk is necessary for both individual and organizational growth, it doesn’t mean that we should step in to something without having a look at it. One has to assess what kind of a risk he is going to take, which means that it has to be a calculated one, and if it’s not, it’s just negligence. As Sridhar often believes, “Risk taking doesn’t mean that you go jump headlong into something that you don’t know. You have to assess what you are jumping into for sure.”