Free Conquering the Chaos: Win in India, Win Everywhere by Ravi Venkatesan Page B

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     a problem because of a relationship. A politician might help during a labor dispute.
     An industry association might take up your policy issue with the government. And so
     on. Without relationships, every one of these can become a problem, so the country
     manager’s responsibility is to build a network of important relationships.
    It’s also necessary to manage people at headquarters. Despite the professionalism
     of multinationals and their organization charts, job descriptions, and processes,
     ultimately things are done because of relationships, trust, and goodwill. Many country
     managers view managing the global matrix as a frustrating part of the job and quickly
     tire of it. Successful country managers understand the importance of having a strong
     internal network, so they invest a fair amount of time building personal relationships
     with the CEO and senior leaders as well as middle managers, who have the power to
     thwart or enable decisions. They build relationships across functions, especially
     risk management functions that have a lot of veto power, such as finance, legal, taxation,
     and real estate. They share many meals, they educate, they invite people to visit
     India, and they are sure to thank, praise, and recognize good work and help. That’s
     not an act; it is simply part of their nature.
    Finally, managing an organization within India itself also requires terrific people
     skills. Employees in India have a high need to feel an emotional connection with their
     leaders. Leaders of Indian family businesses understand this all too well, but professionally
     run companies turn out to be impersonal places, leaving employees hungry for connection.
     Effective country managers find many ways, spontaneous and planned, to connect with
     their people. They are also good teachers. In an emerging market like India, capabilities
     and maturity are often modest; a good leader has to use every interaction as a teaching
     moment to build the culture.
    Successful country managers build great teams around themselves. They expend extraordinary
     effort in creating a passionate and cohesive leadership team. They hold the bar high
     on performance and even higher on values and make difficult decisions about who should
     stay or go. They show no reluctance in hiring people smarter than they are, give them
     big jobs, and offer them huge challenges. They invest heavily in building trust, creating
     cohesion, and instilling a sense of mission.
    Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, a senior leader in search firm Egon Zehnder’s Buenos Aires
     office, has compared 227 highly successful executives with 23 who failed in their
     jobs. He found that the managers who failed usually had high expertise and IQs, but
     in every case, their fatal weakness was in emotional intelligence—arrogance, overreliance
     on IQ, inability to adapt, and disdain for collaboration or teamwork, and a very cold
     transactional approach with people. 4 Many leaders in India, rising through a quasi-Darwinian intellectual culling of the
     weak, can be high in IQ and drive but have limited emotional intelligence. It is easy
     for them to fall into these traps.
    There is also another risk. In a hierarchical and sycophantic society like India,
     it’s easy for such a leader to start feeling like a god and see leadership as a set
     of entitlements, rather than responsibilities. Over fifteen years, I have seen many
     talented leaders crash and burn because things went to their heads, impairing judgment,
     making them arrogant and out of touch, and costing them trust, followership, and,
     eventually, their careers.
    Growing Global Leaders in India
    People often ask me why these qualities—courage, high ambition, entrepreneurship,
     learning agility, and good people skills—are unique to country managers in India.
     They are not; these are essential ingredients of leadership everywhere. It’s just
     that India is such a demanding place that the