Changes fail due to Lack of ownership
From teaching kids at a primary School at Bhutan to Training dogs, Santhosh Babu has a pet fetish. While this 39 year old HR change artist loves dogs, he has fascination for top dogs too. Babu started Training Alternatives eight years ago to focuss on “Business Linked People Intervention”. Having served World Wildlife Fund for nature for nine years, he started looking at corporates as complex living organism, constantly changing, adapting and deconstructing influenced by external and internal environments. He decodes every animal instincts of this organism in a conversation with Moinak Mitra.
These days M&As are spawning cultural conflicts and high challenges. How do you integrate diversity?
Any forced Change without taking care of the cultural sensitivities of the parties involved will fail, involving every stake holder and creating an exciting future collective should be the CEO’s role in any M&A. Because the biggest problem in any M&A is uncertainty, it’s the role of the internal communication to clear such ambiguity. We create change leaders and change agents within an organization whose role is to reach out to every corner of their organisation and communicate a compelling future for everyone to get involved.
| Our Transformation support programme helps at creating ownership, engage-ement and escape velocity for the client’s transformation initiative. Therefore our work complements a strategy consultant’s work. |
For instance, in the Sterlite-owned Konkola Copper Mines of Zambia, we are now creating 100 Change Agents and working with 1000 workers to create Cultural Change in the way they function. When Sterlite took over these mines four years back, it spawned huge cultural differences affecting bottomlines and the gross lack of leadership bandwidth among the local populace.
| Any forced change without taking care of the cultural sensitivities of the parties involved will result in the failure of M&A. To involve every stakeholder should be role of CEO. |
How Receptive are top-notch consultants to such Training?
Every strategic consultancy understands the importance of people engagement. Transformation and change initiatives many a times fail due to lack of ownership among all the stakeholders. So, our transformation support programme helps at creating ownership, engagement and escape velocity for the client’s transformation initiative. So, our work complements a strategy consultant’s work.
What is your roadmap for such training in the future? How do you see the market evolve for such outsourced training?
I see more and more organisations emphasizing on business – linked training interventions, rather than stand-alone products in this space. I see more CEOs paying attention to the people factor when it comes to change and transformation initiatives. Organisational development will evolve as an important area, the future will see constant changes and require a new style of leadership.
When Training Alternatives kicked off in 1999, how competitive was the market for outsourced organizational training?
When we started Training Alternative, we saw a lot of well structured products. Training companies like NIS and Hero Mindmine had a bouquet of products. It was indeed a very product driven environment. So we designed a USP claiming that we didn’t have a product. This being our differentiator, we asked the corporate world about their challenges and developed a process consultation model in which the client and us take equal responsibility in solving the problems a process.
What are the key HR issues confronting small and large caps today?
In SMEs, the real challenge lies in creating a professional culture as some of them lack a basic framework for organizational excellence. So we built a six step model for them which provides a professional organizational frame work. For large organizations, first we do a diverse stake-holder meet for three days for a specific issues they are facing. For example, when Airtel in Mumbai asked us to increase their customer focus, instead of working with their customer people, we chose to work with their Marketing team, Sales team, COO, CFO, Zonal Heads and Representatives from the Corporate Office. Then we explore the influencers of customer orientation from an organizational perspective. Then we created an action plans and handheld the organization in implementing them.
| I see more CEO paying attention to the people factor when it comes to change and transformation initiatives. Development in organization will evolve as an important area and a new style of leadership will emerge. |
THE ECONOMICS TIMES NEW DELHI THURSDAY 31 MAY 2007
