Breeding Leadership Within an Organization..

Here is an email discussion that i was having with a group of friends on why building leaders and managers from within the organization is much better than bringing someone from outside.

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JIgs,
I obviously do not have the experience of running a business like you and some others in this group so would love to know why you think that in-bred people do a better job at leading a company/dept.

I would agree with your statement in cases where the company and department are functioning really well and just need to continue to build on it. But if the department/co is struggling I would think that an outsider can serve as a much better leader as he/she can bring a newer/fresher perspective to the group.
What do you guys think?

Kushal

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MY REPLY:

First and foremost a clarification that the article (http://ibnlive.in.com/news/mukesh-ambani-ranked-5th-best-ceo-in-the-world/107357-7.html?from=tn
)itself shows and which I do not dispute, is that the in-breeding thing is not 100% a surety, it only suggests that there are more cases and chances of an in-bred manager or CEO building up an organization better than an outsider. If you pull out the history of major success stories, you will see that in a lot of cases companies have tried to build up a “CEO in the making” internally from their organization.

A new person coming into the organization at the top spot brings a lot of baggage (good and bad) along with him/her. While I agree that a new leader brings in a fresh perspective to the organization, new systems and a different culture. But at times, the negatives outweigh these positives.

A new person coming in as the head of a dept or organization needs to re-establish chemistry in the team under him/her that he/she is starting to work with for the first time. There is a lot of tentiveness (if that is a word) among the team because they don’t know much about the new person in charge and what is his/her style of working. A lot of politics also starts to play out because there are a lot of suckers who try to get on the right side of the new boss who himself doesn’t know until later who the suckers are. It further sends the signal to the employees that no matter how hard they work or how smart they are there are limited chances of growing in the organization.

There are way too many uncertainties that a new person brings in to the organization and so unless that person is well worth the risk, it most cases its better to go with a known evil than an unknown evil.

Compared to that, if you have a manager or employee worthy enough of being elevated and you elevate him/her, it sends out a positive signal for everyone. Yes, there might still be some who would not like it, but to me the advantages (in terms of financial – salary structure and operational know-how) here are more than the disadvantages. There are a lot of times that I have observed in the past couple of years, when I have realized that my engineers are better than they are (there are times when it has been the other way around as well ;). when they are working under someone they don’t open up easily and don’t express their new style of working because in india from the school level we breed the idea of never challenging your superiors. But when that same person is given the independence he/she shows you they have better ways of doing something. So even an in-bred manager can bring a fresh perspective if given the liberty to think freely.

Besides, if you look at history, a lot of times companies who are struggling go for an outsider or a big-time name because it has a lot to do with image change in the market. They want to send out a strong signal to their shareholder/market/employees/promoters that they are trying to change the culture of the organization to stop it from bleeding. So it has more to do with an image make-over rather than operational advantages.

Can give more details on my individual views but will spare all those who took the effort to read till this point.

Disclaimer: these are my personal views/opinions and don’t have to be agreeable to everyone. The views and opinions are up for debate. lol