Culture is an experience

Twenty-five-year-old Srinidhi Mehta was hired by a new-age gadget company during campus hiring in B-school. After two years she was poached by a renowned legacy brand, which was building its portfolio in audio gadgets. Within six months Srinidhi chose to go back to her earlier employer. “I wasn’t learning anything new. It was a fuddy-duddy hierarchical firm which had a boss-knows-all culture,” she says.

Organisational culture is something which an employee needs to experience to believe. If a power-point presentation at the time of campus hiring talks about purpose, employee centricity and innovation as key attributes of an organisation’s culture, and it fails to deliver, news travels. Prabir Jha [former CHRO of Tata Motors, Reliance and Cipla], and founder and CEO, Prabir Jha People Advisory, cites the example of a candidate he interviewed being extremely happy with the offer made to him, but who eventually backed out when he found the ideals of his line manager out of sync with what the organisation stood for. “Firms need to articulate their culture from the day they hire. They give a campus PPT pitch, but no company is as perfect as they posture. I would like a lot more authenticity to be at play, both to the external candidate and internally to employees.”

Axis Bank’s Vempati agrees. Walking the culture talk is crucial, she says. “Not being short-term in one’s approach, to be consistent in whatever you do matters to people. I asked a batch three years after Covid why they opted for Axis and the response was that they heard Axis didn’t lay off people during the pandemic and the fact that we focussed on the wellness of our employees. Another batch said our focus on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) struck a chord with them.” Vempati has a cardinal rule for team leaders across the organisation and that is to ensure that a considerable part of the team should look different from them. If the team leader is a man, the team should have a fair representation of women, people from the LGBTQI community as well as people with disabilities. After all, a diverse team is good for business.

Gone are the days when a leader had an I-know-it-all attitude. “Employees are seeking equitable relationships. Most employees expect to work with leaders and not for leaders. There is an increasing shift from a transactional, personal kind of relationship to a larger progressive, mutually beneficial one,” points out N.S. Rajan, former group CHRO, Tata Group.

Sanjiv Mehta, chairman, L. Catterton and former MD, Hindustan Unilever, can’t agree more. He says firms need to understand how to unleash the collective genius of their teams. “The concept of a great leader is a myth. It is the work of a great team that matters. How you unleash the genius of your team and ensure you fulfil the collective good are what matters.”

Not just being profitable

The life of an employee is far more complex today, and to be future-ready, businesses need to take cognisance of it by building an environment where talent can not only experiment, but is allowed to fail, too. A single-minded focus on growth and profitability could be an unsustainable way of doing business. “Life is never going to be linear now, there will be failures. If you don’t fail, you are not stretching yourself. The resilience is about the capacity to bounce back from failures or unexpected events, and what you learn from those experiences,” explains Mehta.

Societal expectations from big businesses have changed significantly. “It is no longer the Milton Freedman approach that the business of business is business. Today, there is a lot more emphasis on responsible and sustainable business practices. You have a responsibility as a business to balance profit generation with ethical, societal and environmental considerations. If one can ensure that besides leading the business effectively, efficiently and competitively you can also make a difference to your stakeholders, then the lustre of your performance gets even better,” Mehta further explains.

Unni Krishnan, founder, The Living Machine Institute, points out about the deep concern of mental burnouts sky-rocketing year-on-year, leading to collective corporate burn-out. “The way business success is portrayed to people is mechanistic. The quarter-on-quarter, linear growth chasing approach has an adverse effect on the mental well-being of employees. They are reduced to cogs in a larger corporate machine and this is substantially impacting the longevity of great organisations.”

Suresh Narayanan, MD and chairman, Nestle India, believes at a time when individual burn-outs are at an all-time high and crisis situations are becoming a way of life, it is important for leaders to listen to their teams and not dictate. “In a crisis you don’t run a company but you serve a family. Things don’t happen by ordering around or passing the buck. It is also important for a leader to recognise what happens to the team is what matters, not what happens to himself.”

Great leadership does matter. But what is more crucial is for firms to partner with their employees for the long-term and not be short-sighted.

Project Thrive

Beyond the now: Crafting organisations that stand the test of time