Leaders need to take responsibility for attrition

MUMBAI: “Attrition occurs because of crisis of leadership. People don’t leave companies but leave bosses. Leaders have to take responsibility for the way they treat their employees,” said Stephen J Rohledar, COO, Accenture.

He was speaking at the CEO spotlight session on the Mind of the Leader, What Makes Them Tick, at the Nasscom 2007 Leadership Summit, here today.

Lakshmi Narayanan, vice chairman, board of directors, of IT services company Cognizant Technology Solutions, said that people join companies since they hope that their aspirations would be fulfilled and leaders would need to take a great share of this responsibility.

Tingeing his views with military speak - owing to his years in the army - Patrick Snowball, group executive director, Aviva plc., spoke on the traits that make for a good leader.

“A leader has to have absolute clarity of vision and goals. Allow people some space or in other words tell them to do it and not how to do it and make sure you are easily understood.”

He also added leaders had to have the knack of anticipating change before it happened.

Rohledar felt that leaders have to be voracious learners, be listeners, have integrity and courage of conviction and be sensitive to interactions with people.

Narayanan added that apart from the characteristics pointed out by the other two speakers, the one touchstone that determined a leader’s success is delivery of results.

“A leader is someone who achieves results no matter what his style is,” he said.

The panelists also touched upon how globalization was changing the face of their businesses today.

“Accenture will have more people in India than the US by the end of the year. I feel that cross-cultural training would be crucial to business success in the next 5-10 years,” said Rohledar.

On difference in cultures, Snowball spoke of an issue peculiar to the Indian scenario: Indians don’t speak out.

“It’s a struggle sometimes since you don’t hear the issue. People in India are very polite and the biggest problem we have is in the noise levels between UK and India. I often tell my management team in India – ‘Shout.’”

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