‘Organisations can grow great leaders from within’

The Corporate Executive Board (CEB) is the world’s largest business advisory platform that is used by 20,000 CXOs across 5,000+ global companies. It has developed a huge repository of business insights and strategies targeted at CXOs.

Through this series, DNA and CEB attempt to delve into the minds of top executives from India to try and understand what makes them and their companies tick.
DNA met Animesh Kumar, group head-HR, IDFC, for the third interview of the series. Animesh is an Economics graduate from SRCC, Delhi and an alumnus of XLRI Jamshedpur, and has worked with Marico, Thomas Cook, Standard Chartered, Yes Bank and ABN Amro.

What can you tell us about IDFC?
IDFC was set up in 1997 to act as a financial catalyst for the development of private sector-sponsored infrastructure projects in India. Over the last 12 years, IDFC has pursued a focused growth strategy to evolve rapidly into a one-stop shop for infrastructure finance in India, capable of meeting the increasingly complex and ambitious requirements of a expanding client base.

How would you describe your leadership style?
In a nutshell: principle-centered, outcome-focused and consensus-driven

What is your approach to building leadership in your company across the C-Suite and across more junior levels?
We have developed a dual track approach. The first is focused on enhancing the leadership skills of existing leaders, the second is on developing new leaders from within the company.

In enhancing the leadership skills of our C-suite leaders we use executive coaching as the key to the development effort. We have partnered with a leading global firm specialising in this area. The programme provides a confidential and safe environment for C-suite leaders to engage in dialogue with leading coaches and develop their leadership capability. Additionally, the programme provides the additional benefit of the coaches acting as sounding board for the senior leadership team which is very useful given that business leaders are often in need of a professional confidant or advisor.

For developing leaders, we are working towards promoting home-grown talent and are associating with ISB, Hyderabad and SBS, Oxford to enhance leadership capability within the organisation by focusing on creating a pipeline of leadership talent that will be ready to meet our leadership needs in 18-24 months time.

What is the biggest thing that you have learnt about leadership over the years?
Again, two things:

Leadership is an acquired skill and it is possible for organisations to grow great leaders from within.

Good leadership is not replaceable with strengths in other areas. It cannot be “compensated”. You can have the best (of all other) ingredients that go into the making of successful companies and yet, the company will not realise its true potential in absence of a good leader.

What are the most common management mistakes you see peers making?
The frequency with which management concepts and frameworks developed in an alien cultural context (largely, developed western economies) are implemented in India often leads to more problems than solutions. Blindly copying strategies employed within a different culture/ geography and implementing these ideas without adequate “homologation” tends more often than not, to destroy long-term value than create it. Layoffs are a case in point as an overused and much less-understood cost cutting strategy in the Indian context.

Your biggest achievements and priorities for the future…
The IDFC group has grown at a tremendous pace in the last 3-4 years both, organically and through acquisitions. The economic slowdown created a ‘forced opportunity’ for taking stock and evaluating organisational capabilities in terms of our preparedness for the next growth cycle. Among others, a key initiative is the launch of a platform-wide initiative to create a common culture based on the pillars of knowledge expertise, teamwork, nation building and stewardship that helps us create a better aligned and synergised platform that not only delivers to all stakeholders more effectively, but also helps us differentiate IDFC more robustly in the market.