Team And Leadership Effectiveness In The Workplace

Leadership is defined as the process of influencing the activities of an individual or a group in efforts toward goal achievement in a given situation. In essence, leadership involves accomplishing goals with and through people (Hersey and Blanchard, 1993). Leaders envisage the future; they motivate organisation members and impart values-whether they are concerned for honesty, hard work, quality and taking calculated risk or concern for customers and employees. It seems there is no common definition of leadership , perhaps it is because the leadership concept is complicated and fuzzy. According to Robert Tannenbaum, Irving R. Weschler and Fred Massarik leadership is defined as “interpersonal influence exercised in a situation and directed, through the communication process, toward the attainment of a specialized goal or goals. “Leadership is about showing the way, by going in advance, and influencing the behaviour of others. It refers to introducing new business behaviour, practices, or technologies, which demonstrate that sustainable development is possible” (Sommer, 2003)

Today’s business leaders have identified two important factors that could drive success in organisations of world class cadre- continually enhancing performance by becoming faster, better and more effective, and including all employees in Performance improvement can be achieved only by enhancing the processes within an organisation. Since the processes are created and operated by the people, the only way to enhance performance would be through people. Therefore continuous effective improvement depends on the capability of managers to guarantee that each and every one becomes involved in enhancing performance, work efficaciously in teams in order to analyse processes, and study problems to implement solutions.

Leadership

Under the leadership of Mr. Narayan Murthy, the ex-chairman of the Infosys, the company has ended up being one of the most successful IT companies in the world. Infosys Technologies Ltd is one of the leading IT companies In India and worldwide. It is now a global leader in the “Next Generation” of IT and Consulting.

Starting in 1981, Infosys witnessed its corporate success in a short time. Although the company started functioning almost twenty five years ago, it is in the recent times that it experienced strong growth. Ever since it started the company has had a remarkable growth in terms of revenue. Revenue in 1994 was only US$9.5million but in 2005 Infosys revenue touched US$2billion which was only half this revenue in 2004. There is a saying that “Great companies can neither be built nor their greatness sustained without great leaders”, the above results clearly proves that Mr. Murthy is one such great leader who lead the company to the success path.

According to the Hay group review, a global management consulting firm, of 1249 leaders from prominent organisations functioning in the Indian market, about 60% create a de-motivating climate and do not employ those who can lead. It also found only 18% develop an engaging climate that promotes high performance.

So today it is so very much necessary for many organisations to create motivating climate and engage people who can lead effectively. “The successful organisation has one major attribute that sets it apart from unsuccessful organisations: dynamic and effective leadership” (Hersey and Blanchard, 1993). Infosys took an initiative in this direction and opened ‘Infosys leadership institute’ where it intends to grow leaders. The Leadership development program at Infosys Leadership Institute targets to produce a collective pool of leaders and shape them to take on present and future challenges in business. The Infosys Leadership Institute offers a wide range of organisational and individual development sessions to expound business problems.

At Infosys they believe that a good leader can be only one who uses all different styles of leadership with one of them usually dominating and a bad leader is one who sticks to one style. At Infosys it is not that only the top management gives suggestions to support its vision and manage agility, uncertainty and ambiguity at all circumstances.

Courtesy: http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/swami_lalita-161501-infosys-leadership-ob-education-ppt-powerpoint/

The leadership believes in taking valuable suggestions from its young achievers in the company. The Chairman diagnosed that young achievers in the company were wavering to come forth with their ideas. These people had a great value to add to the company but could not give in to the discussions feeling in secured of infracting hierarchy. Mr. Murthy communicated to be open minded and encouraged the young achievers to speak. He found that the suggestions and thoughts given by them had a lot of substance and can significantly help the company. The leaders at Infosys are so very much adaptable, bothered significantly over the above issue they built a leadership institute where they can develop and groom leaders from its promising employees irrespective of the hierarchy and provide them the opportunity to help build the company.

Today many organisations are facing talent problem, where people are being rushed into activities they are unaware of or assigned to jobs for which they have inadequate preparations. Due to the phenomenal growth of India in last 5 to 10 years people were getting promoted before their time and these people held a wrong perception of empowerment. Even though they had the authority, they lacked in terms of experience and credence to be true leaders.

If organisations have to maintain conservative growth estimates, much of today’s leaders need to motivate the employees who work for them. If not able to successfully motivate, it would be difficult to keep employees sticking around long enough to progress them into competent leaders. So it becomes very important to have motivating climate in any company in order to enhance its own performance.

According to Hersey and Blanchard(1993), in leading or influencing there are three competencies of Leadership: Diagnosing-being able to understand the situation you are trying to influence, Adapting-being able to adapt your behaviour and other resources you have available to meet the contingencies of the situation, Communicating-being able to communicate in a way that people can easily understand and accept. The soul of leadership competencies in Infosys rest in their vision statement which reads as: “We will be a globally respected corporation that provides best of breed business solutions, leveraging technology, delivered by best in Class people”.

To achieve their vision, leadership competencies have been marked along four dimensions: Work, people, technology and business. Each of these is further exaggerated into smaller functional terms in the graphic shown below.

Courtesy: http://www.thehindu.com/businessline/praxis/pr0304/03040380.pdf

The Infosys leadership institute’s primary goal is to assist the company to counter the explicit challenges of now and in the future. They believe that by improving the quality of leadership they can handle its phenomenal growth, with stand the complexities of the market and swiftly changing environment, and through ‘thought leadership’ they can develop higher customer value.

Courtesy: http://www.thehindu.com/businessline/praxis/pr0304/03040380.pdf

At Infosys in order to increase their quality of leadership they use a ‘Nine pillar’ model of leadership development. At Infosys, for leadership development these nine pillars are functional elements. For the development of leadership competencies at discrete level each pillar has its own distinct importance.

360-degree appraisal: It is method of consistently collecting data about an individual’s performance and potential from a broad range of co-workers. This may include the manager, direct reportees, peers and both internal and external customers. It is an organised method of gathering and processing data and gives the employee an opportunity to express on his valuable information. The response received from 360-degree feedback is used as a foundation to direct the person in gaining new skills and improving existing skills all arranged to the leadership competencies model.

Development assignments: They are a traditional and powerful form of leadership development. Potential employees are allowed to have experience in various functions through Cross functional assignments and internal job rotations. Development assignments help an employee to gain practical leadership skills outside their zone of experience.

Development relationships: Mentoring is viewed as a developmental relationship in the framework of leadership development. In order to transfer and share knowledge and experience, one-on-one relationships in work scenes are facilitated. This mentoring for leadership program is functional and learning from this course will be utilized to refine and broaden the element of leadership development throughout the organisation.

Leadership skills training: It is a process by which individuals in the organisation go through a sequence of learning interventions on matter relevant to leadership. A ‘Leaders teach series’ was formed in which the board of directors including the chairman, the Managing director, and the Chief Executive Officer hold a workshop with help of leadership institute faculty for the development of future leaders.

Feedback Intensive program: These are comprehensive behavioural interventions based on informal and formal feedback taken from people that the individual interfaces with. These programs are structured in a way that individuals give and receive feedback in an environment that is non-threatening and could generate a workable plan for goal setting for progressive professional and personal development.

Action Learning: It is a real time experience which is time based used to crack systematic, unresolved and real organisational problems. It is termed as a pragmatic process directed at producing a resolution a problem that has been identified by the organisation and a workable plan is designed for goal setting and strategies for progressive development to attain them.

Systematic process Learn: It is an intervention that will enable individuals to view the organisation as system in whole which consists of many interacting sub systems. It is intended to yield plan for continuous advancement in systematic processes and details as to how a participant will initiate such an improvement.

Community Empathy: The organisation holds a fundamental belief the social conscience requires to be nurtured and improved in each of its potential leaders. And the value of this community empathy aligns with the above fundamental belief. The Infosys leadership holds an ambition to opportunities for potential candidates on a regular structured basis to enrol themselves in cause outside the company that contribute to good of the less fortunate.

Infosys culture workshop: These workshops are intended to help individuals to understand the purpose processes and the core values in ambience of leadership development. These workshops have been designed to in a way that allows expansive interaction among the individuals leading to strengthening of the Infosys culture and ensuring enough authorization to assure adherence to the culture of the company.

Leadership traits:

According to Warren Bennis, leaders should empower their organisations to develop an environment where people feel important, competence and learning matter, people are part of the team, and work is interesting. Leaders should also be creating an environment where standard matters and dedication to work enthuses effort.

According to Huczynski and Buchanan, a charismatic leader holds the following characteristics: Visioning- providing a luxurious and extraordinary ‘total dining experience’ that delights customers, empowering- giving staff a voice, showing confidence and trust, allowing staff to influence what they do, experiencing high standards,energizing- communicating vision, making staff feel part of something special, aiming for perfection, excitement, joy, passion in the work.

“The transactional leader – a leader who treats relationships with followers in terms of an exchange, giving followers what they want in return for what the leaders desires, following prescribed tasks to pursue established goals”( Huczynski and Buchanan, 2007)

“Transformational leader- a leader who treats relationships with followers in terms of motivation and commitment influencing and inspiring followers to give more than mere compliance to improve organizational performance”( Huczynski and Buchanan, 2007)

Traits that are found most often to be feature of successful leaders as per Yukl are: Assertive, cooperative, dependable, decisive, dominant, persistent, energetic, self-confident, willingness to assume responsibility, tolerant to stress, alert to social environment, adaptable to situations, achievement oriented and ambitious.

“Empirical research studies suggest that leadership is a dynamic process, varying from situation to situation with changes in the leader, the followers and the situation. Because of this, while there may be helping or hindering traits in a given situation, there is no universal set of traits that will ensure leadership success” (Hersey and Blanchard, 1993)

Team Work:

Teams that can bring and stick employees together to investigate problems to implement solutions would be one of the best ways to increase productivity and product quality. And teams which can continually improve can be considered as powerful tools any organisation can use to ensure employees remain firmly focussed on meeting business goals and customer needs. Employers emphasis the significance of employees working as a team and apprise for people who hold the quality to work in such a way. Team work comes into consideration when there is a need to utilize different strengths of employees and goodness of cooperation.

Principles of team work:

Understanding the team is very important, as a team member he/she should know the following things:

Roles and responsibilities

operations of a team

advantages of working as a team for individuals(motivation, job satisfaction, pride, external qualification)

advantages of working as a team for the organisation (improved results due to increases in quality and productivity)

Probable disadvantages of teams(Conflicts, domination)

Working relations:

Characteristics of a good team member

Different working relationship problems with members and colleagues in other groups

Team and leadership activities in order to improve team work success

Team activities:

The team should contribute to constant improvement activities, brainstorm activities, performance reviews, team briefings, problem resolution sessions, question and answer sessions, and team and individual appraisals.

The team should be reading and contribute to team boards.

The team should use internal network systems or e-mail to support communication.

The team must keep displays and visuals updated.

Leadership activities:

Setting team objectives and goals, action planning, and recognising achievable business targets.

Distribution and monitoring of team members, deciding on employee role and responsibilities, team work-load prioritization to make sure targets are met efficiently and effectively.

Supervising the team performance against the objectives and goals, managing ineffective and poor performance, encouraging and motivating team members, developing a cohesive work-team through teambuilding approaches, analysis the training needs, creation of skills matrix, mentoring, team and individual appraisals, communication and consultation with management, peers and sub-ordinates and subject specialists, successfully managing conflict and tensions, grievance and disciplinary procedures.

Conclusion:

This paper shows the leadership in Infosys, one of the most successful IT Company in the world. Mr. Narayan Murthy, the Ex-chairman of the company has been a true leader and shows what a brilliant visionary he is. Under his leadership the company has grown tremendously within twenty five years of its existence. At Infosys they believed that a good leader can only be one who uses all different styles of leadership with one of them usually dominating. At Infosys, in order to improve the quality of leadership a leadership development program was initiated by opening the ‘Infosys Leadership institute’. This leadership Institute offers a wide range of organisational and individual development sessions to expound business problems and targets to produce a collective pool of leaders and shape them to take on present and future challenges in business. In order to achieve their vision, leadership competencies are marked along four dimensions of Work, people, technology and business. The Infosys believe that by improving the quality of leadership they can handle its phenomenal growth, with stand the complexities of the market and swiftly changing environment, and through ‘thought leadership’ they can develop higher customer value. The ‘Nine Pillar’ model of leadership development is used to improve the quality of leadership and as a consultant I would suggest the other company to use the ‘Nine Pillar’ model as a basis to develop a similar model to improve their quality of leadership. About the team work it is now evident that it comes into consideration when there is a need to virtue of cooperation and use various strengths of employees. By understanding the principles of team work, and the team and leadership activities to be carried out properly could result in improvement in teamwork success.