Three months into a one-year assignment in India for my organization, a leader in the wireless space, has left me wondering about organization design in the India context.
A quick Google search on “organization design in India” on Google India turned up few hits. In every case, the search corrected me to “organizational structure” and provided me with links to lots of websites detailing the organizational structure of various Indian organizations including the Government of India, the Police, and Telecom Authority. This concern with structure and hierarchy shows up in lots of places. My own organization, for example, has two additional title levels in India compared to the US, so our employees in India have a greater sense of career progression. I hear from colleagues in peer companies that this is common practice in India. The career ladder, and its concerns with upward progression, vs. the career lattice with its lateral moves, is alive and well here
Formal hierarchy is an enduring social structure that puts the focus on managing up. Yet innovation typically comes from the periphery and is fueled by lateral collaboration and connections. This ability to work laterally is an important facto in organizations such as my current one where development of intellectual property in the wireless space, is a critical element in our success.
A recent article on organization design in emerging markets on the Alignorg Solutions site charted the evolutionary shift from essential work to strategic work that creates differentiation and enables an organization to win in the market. In my organization, we have moved from doing only sustaining work on established products in India to shifting key parts of our development for the China market to the teams here. A shift, it turns out that is an intensely social process with an increased focus on relationships, a greater need for higher levels of coordination and collaboration, and an increased requirement that the groups involved trust one another. The shift has also been accompanied by an increased level of internal complexity as work must be accomplished by teams located in multiple locations and time zones in the US, India, and China. This presents a very real navigation challenge for many of the engineers in India who are relatively new to the organization and who have not yet established relationships with key individuals at our US headquarters. One of the key roles I fulfill here for my India team is to act as a “connector” back to the US.
A core theme in evolving organizational forms is the acceptance of contradiction and paradox. One such paradox highlighted by John Child and Rita McGrath[1] is the allocation of responsibility where economic rationality can be supplanted by relationships and trust considerations. I have witnessed this firsthand in local staff meetings where we learn that a product has been moved back to the US from the site road map. A decision often based as much on the level of trust executive management in the US has for local leadership to deliver rather than the actual capacity of the site. Part of the work here with our India leadership teams is to increase their ability to influence leaders in the US and gain their trust.
This raises a question that Naomi Stanford asked recently on her blog about the skills and leadership and management capabilities that organizations will need for the future. What does this look like in the India context? Naomi cites statistics from Manpower Group’s 2013 “Talent Shortage Survey “ that notes Indian employers are among those reporting the most acute talent shortages with 61 percent of employers reporting difficulties in filling positions with engineering positions, the majority of our hiring in India, being cited as the second most challenging job category to fill.
Again, India presents us with a paradox. According to The Economist’s recent briefing on business education, India has more business schools (2,000) than any other country. Similarly, there has been a significant increase in the number of engineering faculties. This explosion in higher education co-exists with massive under-education and under-skilling of vast sections of the population, particularly in rural areas. I witness this paradox daily with the security guard whose entire job is to watch to make sure that we all swipe our badges as we enter the building. At lunch, I hand my pre-loaded meal card (90 rupees a day) to a young man who places it in the card reader and then hands it back to me. Clearly this represents a huge challenge for India’s future growth and development.
Meanwhile, in our global flagship leadership and management development programs, we discuss notions of leadership and management skills that are very different from the traditional roles associated with hierarchy and seniority with which most of our Indian employees are familiar and comfortable. As Naomi notes, our immediate challenge may be “how to design organizations that successfully integrate traditional and new concepts of leadership/management” and that enable leaders who are strong both in local markets and in corporate relations.
Nuala Campany, Director, Organization Development