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S. Ramachander

Sharing ideas and thoughts, Mr N. R. Narayana Murthy, the mentor on the move.

THE news that Mr N. R. Narayana Murthy, Chairman and CEO of Infosys has decided to hand over the reins to his co-founder and managing director was no surprise, except possibly for the timing of the announcement. What was more worthy of comment was the title that Mr Narayana Murthy chose to give for his new role. In other circumstances, companies have tended to honour some retiring chairmen with positions such as Chairman Emeritus, as happened with ITC, for example, which is typically a reward for life-long contribution and reflects a desire to keep the person in a position of some public visibility for some more time to come.

Most executive chairmen when they hand over the reins just go out of the office and presumably continue with their lives in the normal fashion. For professional managers turned chairmen, this is not a particularly significant movement and would have happened to them in any case. Coping with the shift in gears in their personal lives, especially the falling away of the halo and the trappings of office is nevertheless an individual crisis!

The situation of the part-owner and founder, however, is different. He is personally responsible for conceiving the idea of starting the business and has played no small part in actually seeing to it that the fledgling institution grew and developed into something much bigger. In most family-influenced companies, this position is retained by the patriarch or the head of the family long after he has ceased to contribute to the running of the business on a day-to-day basis. He is still consulted but he does not actively deal with anyone other than his immediate colleagues and erstwhile fellow directors on the board, an arrangement that seems to suit everyone except a particularly difficult son or daughter!

The description of a chairman turned mentor, on the other hand, raises a number of interesting possibilities. The first is that unlike most operating CEOs, Mr Narayana Murthy will now be available to a larger number of people in the company than his immediate senior colleagues. Thus, his rich experience and vast storehouse of knowledge of the company's history can all be drawn upon by even the young. One can imagine him regularly addressing groups of new recruits and helping to mould them in the `Infosys way', talking to groups of new recruits for a few hours or having a lunch meeting with smaller groups. This is not just a ceremonial function. Steve Jobs used to say that the one inalienable duty of a CEO is to endlessly reiterate the vision and goals. With mentors, it is the underlying values rather than goals.

Further, with the growing emphasis on the need to reiterate ethics and with values in corporate life being recognised, people such as Mr Narayana Murthy can serve a laudable national purpose by personally inculcating these values in the young future leaders of the enterprise. This is all the more important because values, in particular, are best imbibed from those who were instrumental in establishing them. Values are so personal and deep-rooted and communicated best by personal example. They form the basis of culture — a very tenuous term rather difficult to define. It is like the wind, it has been said, in that you can feel it on your face but cannot catch it!

Mentoring is a process by which the baton of organisational culture can be passed on and take on a tangible reality. The dissemination of culture is a diffusion process that takes place through anecdotes, stories, myths and rituals, everything from the kind of uniforms one wears to the usual form of address as well as dress and so on. And no one has a better fund of such stories than the oldest members.

Culture is the core character of the company, which informs everything significant that takes place there. The rich folklore of Indian society itself is a very good illustration of the fact that one imbibes the best of values and culture from elders through their experiences as we have all done through childhood. The larger and older the organisation, the more the number of such anecdotes and the richer the content of the culture.

Today, culture is recognised all over the world as an important reflection of the uniqueness of a company — indeed a major element in building sustainable competitive advantage. In the end, it is this which makes for the lasting and inimitable differences between companies. If you peel off all the peripherals of an organisation such as its structure, its technology, its products and its customers — most of which can be copied or cloned by rivals — what is left of it is the centre, or its heart, which is a unique or special way of doing things.

This is what companies are proud to refer to as the IBM way, the Honda way, the Toyota way, or the Ford way. Some of this talk, of course, is merely the sizzle on the corporate steak and no doubt contains an element of hype. And yet a great deal of this indefinable culture is dependent on those tacit and powerful assumption and beliefs ingrained deeply in the individuals who run the business and lead the major functions. If someone tells you that something "is just not done here" you may be sure that he is speaking from a tacit perception of this vague and somewhat nebulous thing called the corporate culture. And who better to transmit this other than the mentor who is also a founder?

Mentoring, in fact, could go far beyond just the single individual. In some respects, in most companies, the roles of all senior management should involve a significant element of mentoring of those within their reach. There have been of course references in recent literature to the manager's many roles as a coach, a trainer or a mentor and so on. There are indeed some important differences amongst these somewhat similar sounding words. Suffice it to say, that a mentor is one who acts as an example, as well as an advisor but is not directly involved in problem-solving or decisions. The coach, on the other hand, is someone who stays with you to train you in a skill or act as a continuing sounding board (as with a cricket team) until you become more skillful yourself. It is important to recognise that a mentor is normally not the line boss or the person who evaluates your performance or decides your annual increments and promotion. In the sense in which we are using it, a mentor is someone that you can have for life even if the actual interaction ceases after a few years. For such is the lasting impact of the direct face-to-face learning. When we look back on our careers, many of us can recall someone whom we worked with for two or three years whose ways we have imbibed including some mannerisms.

A new twist on mentoring in more recent times is what is called reverse mentoring. Apparently some organisations have practised this process, which involves the younger, more junior but more professionally qualified employee helping a senior to learn certain skills better. Reverse mentoring, obviously, does not include the sort of indirect and prolonged process of personal example — or indeed such qualitative aspects as ethics, values and beliefs. And yet mentoring by the young is an excellent opportunity to make the learning and knowledge that is of a specialised or technical kind more widely available across the organisation.

CEOs, as they contemplate the more far-reaching implications of mentorship in the sense in which I have referred to it earlier, could think seriously of empowering such bright talent within. Perhaps encouraging the reverse mentoring and making it happen could be one of the chief mentor's roles!

They can thus retire from the firing line and become hands-off executives yet remaining as a significant, non-evaluative, non-competitive influence on their organisations.

(The author is Director, Academy for Management Excellence, Chennai.)

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