Diversity in Technology Leadership Date:   Wednesday , November 03, 2010 Today, the technology industry has reached a state where the leadership potential is inherent and developed in the discipline itself. With the pressures to ramp up fast, corporates feel less of a need to look at the other industries for a policy to hire and choose the next leader from the existing team. On the other hand, innovation, new practices, and differentiating factors tend to develop when you mix staff from two different disciplines or depute a person from one industry to another. The organizational culture becomes dependent on the leadership style and the leader’s background and hence alignment of the corporate objectives with leadership background becomes more vital than the basic skills. Different facets of an IT project or an operations process may need different type of leadership. 1. Autocratic: An autocratic leadership style becomes important to ensure that the project schedules are met. It leads to an effective supervision with faster decision making, detailed instructions, and orders. It is easier to get work done in an industry where attrition rates are high and lot of fresh engineers have to be absorbed as trainees. The style leads to a more productive output while the leader is watching. This should be balanced while employees are engaged in cultural and bonding activities beyond work to ensure staff morale is not affected. A person from the armed forces background may be included to inculcate this practice among the rest of the management team. 2. Bureaucratic: To keep the project costs under control, it would need a bureaucratic leadership. All the costs are approved as per the procedure or policy although it may allow room for exceptions in specific circumstances. The costs need to be approved in pre-set templates and forms and as per the precise rules set in. A public sector background person would infuse the practice of going by the rule book among the rest of the organization. 3. Democratic: At the project inception stage and at specific intervals of project review, it is good to have a democratic style of leadership, as this would allow the end product to be more innovative and have its own differentiating factors. This would allow the staff to have a high sense of personal growth and participation. Most of the IT companies have a young workforce that in itself brings in the democratic culture. 4. Transformational: While leading a large project or a program with hundreds of staff, transformational leadership would be more effective. The leader has integrity, sets clear goals, communicates the vision, inspires, and expects the best from the team that acts in a Liassez-Faire manner. This would be applicable when the staff is trustworthy and experienced. A person with lots of tenacity and patience to make change fits here. 5. Transactional: For BPO delivery management, a transactional leadership style ensures a better compliance to the service level agreements or the key performance indicators that have been set in for the process. 6. Creative: While developing a new IT product that is expected to be the Intellectual Property (IP) of the company or re-engineering a business process, it is necessary to provide a creative leadership. This would need a highly diverse team across cultural and national boundaries to be more effective. Encourage people from the advertising or music industry to be part of such creative groups. 7. Corrective: Agile being a buzzword in the IT industry, corrective leadership is an asset when a product or a project is being developed in an iterative manner, allowing the team to work with freedom and correcting the output at regular intervals. 8. Intelligent: A consulting team in an IT organization would need intelligence leadership that can embrace the future by navigating ambiguity and reframe problems as opportunities. 9. Bridging: While multiple modules may be developed by different module or project leaders, a bridging leadership style is needed to integrate all the components together and make sure that the integrated whole brings more value than its individual parts. 10. Purposeful: An IT organization also needs a purposeful leadership that brings the leader and the rest of the employees together on a common social cause for the community or the society that the organization is working in, thus ensuring greater harmony with its larger stakeholders and the environment around. As the IT market picks up again and organizations find it difficult to hire resources, we should ask ourselves whether we are looking at too shallow a pool. Hiring is one of the most difficult decisions a manager faces and a wrong decision can cause a serious setback. This means that we end up selecting a candidate with a disposition just like ours – including personality, sensibility, and work style. In an organization with people of similar backgrounds working together for long periods, it closes the organization culture and the management’s attitude towards outside ideas and the organization may lose out in the long run. All facets of leadership are important in today’s IT organization. We must embrace diversity to empower people and capitalize on their strengths. It is difficult for the existing staff to embrace diversity as bias and prejudice are deeply rooted within us and the organization culture must allow a respect for the difference. All leaders in the organization must be visibly involved in programs affecting cultural change and articulate policies that govern diversity. While playing an advisory role for set-up of a garment retailing shop at Bangalore, I realized how important it is to have sales executives who speak English, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu to address the different customers visiting the place. Furthermore, the diverse staff understood the different festivals, and specific products and schemes could be launched with their inputs. Also, it was important to have both male and female staff – female staff tend to be better at customer service, while male staff are important to handle some other tasks. More so, it was essential to have a younger and more experienced sales force, as they could correlate easily with a similar customer group and facilitate cost management. These are the same diversity elements that become important in an IT industry. Multicultural and multinational teams increase the ability to increase sales, account management, and customer satisfaction across continents. At the same time, gender diversity is important to look at managing teams working in 24x7 shifts in a BPO. Varied experience in the team allows making a more competitive quote in comparison with the other providers. In a nutshell, today’s leader needs to encompass different styles of leadership and adapt the leadership style to the organizational context. Build a diverse team, identify the strengths of each individual in the management team and let it be known to others in the group, so as to best deploy the talents for the corporate objectives to be achieved. A highly flexible style of leadership would allow faster achievement of goals and a more satisfied employee and customer base. The author is VP, Société Générale