Panel Discussion at the CFI–MMA Manufacturing Leadership Forum, “Realising India’s Manufacturing Ambitions: Capabilities and Mindsets that Matter”
Saroja Kannan
Executive and Leadership Coach; Panelist and Moderator
I began my career as a management trainee with Usha, part of the Shri Ram group. I am a Delhi-born girl, educated at Shri Ram College of Commerce, and I joined as something of an aberration, because they had never hired women. I was posted to Madras after they checked which city I disliked most in the country, and I said Madras. The zonal manager had never seen a woman employee in a manufacturing company. He worried how he could send someone like me to a shop floor, where the bulk of the action was. Over eighteen months I showed some grit and overcame some barriers in their minds about what a woman cannot do. That was my first brush, in a career of more than three decades, with leadership mindset and the self-limiting beliefs leaders carry about what is correct, prevalent and ideal.
What I am usually called in to solve is the needle Mr Ganesh spoke about. How do we move an execution-focused leader to a strategic focus, a command-and-control leader to a collaborative one, a high-IQ leader to a more EQ-focused one? Dig deep, and it boils down to an inability to manage emotions at work, to delegate effectively, and to overcome their attitude toward hierarchy and what authority means. Management teams are realising these are real challenges, because the next generation of employees is no longer settling for what mid-generation employees settle for.
How do we move from an expert mindset to a curious, learning one? From rigid, “I know how to do this,” to adaptive and open to global thinking and newer practices? Coaching can help, and I would leave you with this: bring leaders to coaching early. Too often it is too little, too late, when they are almost at the end of their career runway.
Q: Why do successful manufacturing leaders often find it difficult to move from directive leadership towards coaching, empowerment and psychological safety?
I wish I had the right answer. Circumstances, the culture of the organisation, the length of their stay and the opportunities their own leaders gave them all play a part. My experience, and I can speak for the fraternity of CFI coaches, is that coaching has proved a helpful intervention. For many leaders it is the first safe space to talk about their mental models. Why do they behave the way they do? What were their earliest exposures to leadership and authority? Many grew up in command-and-control structures and assumed that was the best way to lead. Coaching, different perspectives and 360-degree feedback on what their teams think of them have shaped their style. The earlier we reach them, the greater the impact. I am working with two manufacturing leaders in their late thirties who are extremely open to change.
Premendra
Chief Strategy Officer, ELGi Equipments Limited
I work with ELGi Equipments, an industrial compressor manufacturer based in Coimbatore. We are a global player with manufacturing facilities in India, Italy and the US, and we sell compressors in more than 120 countries.
What must endure are the basics of manufacturing wherever you go: operational discipline and rhythm, a focus on the customer that stays no matter what technology comes and goes, reliability and quality, and the integration of digital and AI into our operating systems. These are the core pillars. What must change is how people act around them.
We need to make manufacturing more aspirational, and we are all to blame for that. At ELGi, we ask why the quality of life of a factory-floor employee should differ between Italy and India. With automation, the work content of an individual will improve over time. We must also get away from the cost-arbitrage mindset, start producing value, sell in overseas markets where value sells better, and move up the value chain.
A lot of Indian manufacturing started with individuals who set up shops, grew, and employed people who looked up to them for decisions. Decision-making evolved into a command style. Every problem comes to you, and the top leadership gets absorbed in firefighting, moving from one quarter to the next. Top leaders should focus three quarters ahead, and the next level should focus on the current quarter. That means decentralising authority. There are risks, and you don’t want value compromised, so Toyota applies respect, one of the five pillars of the Toyota Way, as a filter wherever it decides globally. It is a maturity curve.
Today there is too much data, geopolitical disruption, new competition and shifting customer requirements. Making a judgment is difficult. Leaders who have done this day in and day out have a framework. Enabling the next layer to decide in ambiguity is a skill, because at that level nothing is right or wrong, only different. They must be made aware of their biases, assumptions and blind spots. At ELGi we ran a programme called Leaders as Coach, where chosen leaders coach the next level, who coach the next. It is early days, but a leader should not be coached on leadership only when ready. It must be the whole experience of growing in the organisation.
Q: How can manufacturing leaders balance the pressure to deliver today’s performance with the need to invest in future technologies, capabilities and new business models?
The leaders at the very top must move away from day-to-day man management to thinking a few quarters, even a few years, ahead. Today’s results should have been worked on a few quarters back. We also need to be more outward-focused, because new business models and technology innovations are happening in other industries. We don’t need to innovate every time, and there is a lot around us to learn from. So free up capacity at the top and make future-building a full-time activity, not something limited to offsite workshops.
Shyam C Raman
Chief Human Resources Officer, Carborundum Universal Ltd (CUMI), Murugappa Group
I am not a manufacturing person. I am from HR, and for most of my life I have been in HR in financial services. From my anecdotal experience, I see three layers of ambition for manufacturing: the government’s, the enterprise’s and the manufacturing leadership’s. A lot of alignment is required between them. The government’s ambition is laudable. But I don’t think any industry’s vision or mission statement uses the word manufacturing. Companies want to be the globally preferred maker of soap or TVs, but “globally preferred manufacturer of” is not necessarily a statement.
When our economy opened up in the nineties, we had very little in manufacturing systems, so we readily embraced ideas, standards and systems from elsewhere. Japanese innovation arrived, and venerable professors told us how to go about it. If I may go out on a limb, are we now at risk of having our ambition replaced by methodologies? Ask a plant head for his aspirations and he may say to be the best QRM shop or to be ISO certified. Those are methodologies and tools. What is the purpose of manufacturing for that company? What is its source of competitive advantage? I am happy to be proved wrong, but I believe we are outsourcing our manufacturing ambitions to methodologies in a crude way. The first part of manufacturing leadership is a vision and ambition separate from the tools and certifications that enable it.
On what must endure and what must change, my answer may sound formulaic: principles should endure and practices must change. Customer intimacy, quality and waste reduction are principles. The question is how clearly our leaders separate principle from the practices they are so devoted to today. Those practices we must keep challenging and improving.
There is a saying that you are not wasting time, time is wasting you. In the same way, are you using your experience, or is your experience using you? What is the best use of your experience for the vision you want to achieve? Is it day-to-day problem solving and firefighting, or something bigger? It sounds like a LinkedIn statement, but it is the key question for manufacturing leaders. Often experience works at a surface level: “I saw this twenty years ago, so it should work now.” But leaving a legacy, an institution built around that experience, happens less often than we would like. Coaching can give leaders the space to reflect on their own legacy.
Q: Beyond technical competence and strong performance, what qualities should organisations look for in the next generation of manufacturing leaders?
In today’s context, it is learnability. Look not just at what this person has done, but at what he or she has learned from it. Is there a sense of having learned something and moved on, or is it “I’ve done this, I’ve done that,” as an event that has been completed? That would be the number one thing I would look for.
