Mumbai: Leadership failures at a strategic level primarily at the CEO level in India, is at an alarming 50 per cent because of wrong selections. This is true of both family and non-family owned companies.
“A choice of one wrong decision is so immense, as CEOs of reputed organisations fail to perform and then walk away with hundreds of millions in severance pay, or they simply don’t listen to their advisor warnings as is well documented in the Lehman Brothers debacle,” said Amogh Deshmukh, sales and marketing head, Development Dimen-sions International (DDI).
DDI is a talent management firm that has trained over 5,000 leaders on a yearly basis and assessed hundreds of senior leaders during the last seven years. For instance it helped Infosys in developing a global sales force to grow revenue from $1 billion to $4 billion in just four years.
Indian CEOs or leaders are far behind in execution of three global leadership trends namely risk aversion, innovation and global acumen.
This also makes them unsuited for handling assignments abroad which is a challenge since many Indian companies are going global and have to deal with a totally different environment.
Mr Deshmukh said “whether in the case of risk aversion or innovation the Indian promoters do not reward failures.” He says “I have interviewed many CEOs who say they are driving innovation, but maybe just one in 30 says they reward failures too.” Innovation can give them a million dollars but still few think it is important to reward failures, he adds. However many organisations are growingly aware of the need to do external assessment for the top leadership positions.
