Sowing The Right Seeds

Today, India has embraced the fact that start-ups shall accelerate the next phase of growth, but in fact, it is corporate India that shall continue to fuel this growth, and therefore, needs to look at creating structures for driven individuals who remain untouched by the decedent system that ails this country.

- Pradeep Prabhu

It is the universal complaint among many CEOs that though they have numerous opportunities to chase, the talent pool before them to select the leaders is very limited. This, despite the fact that leadership development stands as the numero uno priority in an organization, and, investments to the tune of billions of rupees in leadership development programmes are being made to achieve the same. For the record, most of these programmes have failed!

Naturally, this brings into focus the fact that if CEOs of large conglomerates are unable to find leaders to pursue the path of growth, how is it that start-ups have managed to gain rapid growth, and, made extensive and significant contribution to the world today. Does this then imply that start-ups are better at identifying leaders or talent with leadership qualities?

The leadership predicament today is twofold.

- The way we distinguish talent

- The way talent is groomed

Fit-in rather than stand out

The dilemma with distinguishing talent is intrinsic to our education system. The very design of our academics ensures that the high performers stand isolated. The faculty though proficient to educate the average, is simply unaware as to the ways of handling the outliers. It is like a large manufacturing plant augmented with an assembly line to produce average performers, unswervingly and consistently. And, anyone who does not fit-in is automatically rejected as someone who is incapable of doing well in life. By setting high percentage standards and a high rejection rate of CGPA and SAT scores, our education system has mastered the capability to filter, and, over the years, simply managed to improve the average output.