Gen Y and Leadership in the Organisation
A lot of people stop me and ask: Vineet, has the leadership model of today become obsolete? My answer is a big Yes.
The reason I say is that I met a friend of mine about 25 years after we graduated from school. And I looked at him saying "Oh God, you've aged!” Little did I realize that I too would have aged. But my ageing has been gradual because I have been seeing it in the mirror everyday whereas there was a sudden impact of seeing my friend age after 25 years.
The reason I'm telling you this story is because leadership models, which were discovered hundreds of years ago have become obsolete year by year, day by day. We have not noticed their irrelevance and there is a very strong need today for us to rediscover a new leadership model for the new paradigm in which we live today.
Why I'm saying that? There are three or four mega trends, which we should be aware of. The first is that the manufacturing industry, which was the corner stone of industrial revolution, has given way to the services industry. Now what’s so unique about the services industry? What is unique about the services industry is where the value gets created. In the manufacturing industry, the value was being created in the R & D or the manufacturing units far away from the customers. In the services industry, the value zone is actually in the interface of the customers and the company, or the employees of the company. So as the value zone has moved closer to the customers, the question is: Is the leadership model, the management model, still relevant which was more command and control oriented and very relevant for armies and manufacturing industries?
The second change which has happened is that the Generation Y, which is fifty percent of worldwide population now, is there in all organizations. Now what is so unique about Generation Y? I think two things of relevance. Number one, their ability to do multitasking - they can do eight tasks simultaneously. Number two, because of Facebook and all those social networking technologies that we have, their view towards more collaborative work style, more open and transparent work style. When these people unstructured thinking come in to our workplace, they are actually square pegs in round holes because the organization is more command and control oriented. So the day when they come, we say "Welcome to our organization." And you know you are going to not collaborate but compete with each other because we have this bell curve in which you will be the top ten percent or you will be the balance 30 percent, and therefore there is a sense of obsolescence to the business model and leadership model we have for the Generation Y coming in.
The third I think is a very critical aspect of change - that customers worldwide are looking for value for money. What does that mean? The value centricity in proposition is increasing and therefore away from quality of goods, which is taken for granted. More and more value is being discovered. So if you combine that with the fact that the value is being created in the interface of the customers and the company and its employees, and the fact that the customers are more and more focused on value, you start asking the question if value is being created away from organization and the employees are creating the value, then what leadership model is going to be relevant for us?
So I believe that because of these three or four mega trends, the leadership model has slowly aged. It is looking old. It is not that relevant for today as it was for yesterday. So I think the answer is a big yes, that we need to relook at it very, very closely.
