Learning The Ropes

Front line leaders, often the largest leader population, play an incredibly important role in the organisation—impacting areas such as team productivity, employee engagement, and customer satisfaction.

- Amogh Deshmukh

When a country like India has strong GDP growth rate, organisations—large or small—also enjoy hyper growth. And that is what the country has been witnessing for many years. In the early ‘70s and ‘80s, a person had to spend considerable time in a role before he/she moved on to the next role. That gave people exposure and the time to develop themselves. But since the mid-90s different sectors in India grew at unprecedented rates not in any particular order. In the last two-and-a-half decades we have seen massive growth in industries such as IT/ ITES, BFSI, telecom, automotive, healthcare, media, and startups. Not to mention that manufacturing and pharma too have seen some solid growth. This growth has crunched the timelines for promoting leaders. Most organisations that have survived since the mid90s have grown, both in terms of revenue and employee strengths, multiple times.

The new-age startups have shown aggressive growth over the last five to eight years and have employee strengths in thousands. Obviously, organisations have to promote their employees quickly to manage large workforces, which means that many young employees who are stepping into leadership or managerial roles for the first time are not ready enough, or are not ready at all. But still, organisations have to take some risks, promote such employees, and hope they do the job well. In fact, this unprecedented growth has given birth to a new concept altogether—we know this as ‘employee engagement’. This term, made way into the talent management discipline only in the mid-90s. The reason was simple—larger managerial teams were required to manage larger workforces. As a result, inexperienced managers—with poor readiness or no readiness at all—decide the fate of employees. This not just impacts the morale of the employees but also quality and customer engagement. In fact, a few other terms that became popular were attrition rate and retention me