Growing Global Executives. Sylvia Ann Hewlett

3: Mastering Virtual Communication

      cHAPTER 4: Winning Sponsorship, Developing Talent

      cHAPTER 5: Global Initiatives

       Endnotes

       Methodology

       Acknowledgments

      Index

      Foreword

      When I became Genpact’s chief executive officer in 2011, one of the first things I did was relocate our leadership to the countries where our clients were headquartered. We’d been operating from Gurgaon, India since our inception as a business unit of GE in 1998. But after we spun off in 2005, during the years that I was heading up sales and marketing, I realized that running a global services business was, for all practical purposes, serving our clients’ strategic needs. I didn’t need to be “at the factory;” I needed to be sitting in the markets. And if that was true for me, then it was true for my leaders.

      Today, with more than sixty-five thousand employees serving clients in twenty-five countries, we are a truly global corporation. Half of our leadership sits in key markets around the world, up from 23 percent merely four years ago. Seven of us live and work in the US, as 60 percent of our revenue derives from multinationals headquartered here. That’s a tremendous change given that four years ago we were considered an “Indian” company.

      In fact, our evolution is one of our calling cards: because we’re on this transformational journey, our clients look to us to guide their own. As international as they are, they look to us for new ideas on how to work globally. They’re contending with constraints on growth that prompt them to reconsider their own operating models. To become more nimble, more responsive to shifting market dynamics, they wonder: Should they, too, shift their centers of gravity? What might be the optimal global business model? And what competencies might that model demand of both its teams and its leaders?

      If we’re able to show them the way, then it’s because of our multicultural DNA. The company I joined in 1998 had a predominantly Indian workforce with leadership that grew up in India but whose culture was American. It bore the imprint of Jack Welch, whose books—particularly Control Your Destiny—had a profound impact on me (and, clearly, on my destiny). While known as a command-and-control leader, Jack was way ahead of the curve in terms of the culture he built, both at GE and its global subsidiaries. GE was one of the first American companies to enter growth markets with the intent of sourcing, developing, and empowering local talent; GE Capital recruited me, after all. And Jack was among the first to perceive the power of crowd-sourcing. He would get people into a room from ten different businesses who literally had no business talking to each other—an aircraft engine developer who had a PhD in materials science talking to an analyst who built risk models for credit cards—and by the end of the day, every one of those people would walk away having learned something. He called it “boundary-lessness,” but it’s what we recognize today as diversity of thought and perspective.

      Whether our differences are functional or cultural, Jack intuited that harnessing them was the key to sustaining innovation and solving thorny problems.

      Furthermore, Jack understood that building an innovative culture depended on people not just coming up with great ideas, but sharing them and copying them. He had no patience for leaders who suffered what he called NIH (“not invented here”) syndrome, people who stonewalled innovation because the idea behind it didn’t come from them or their team. So at GE Capital, if a leader hit upon an idea that wound up delivering value to the business, she’d be recognized, but if she took that idea and evangelized it across businesses so that every other leader copied it, she’d be rewarded. As a result, we had teams from different businesses who functioned as one team sharing a lot of best practices and learning from each other, boosting revenues for the firm overall. We drove that value hard; as CEO of our business, I drive it even harder, because being able to collaborate across business units serves us well as we seek to unlock value across cultures and time zones for our clients.

      One of the more valuable lessons I took from my early career was the notion that a great leader is a great learner, and that what makes someone a great learner is curiosity. We have always moved young leaders across businesses, across functions, and across experiences, confident that if they were hungry enough to learn, they’d acquire what they needed to know in order to succeed. This is what allowed me, in fact, to go from sales to risk management. I came in to interview for the marketing job and halfway through the interview was offered a risk job. During the interview, I was asked, “How can you accept a job that’s the opposite of what you came in for?” I said, “I am not here to interview for a job, I am here to interview for a career. I thought the entry point was marketing, but you’ve made clear the entry point is risk.” That was the first of many job changes I was offered within GE Capital until I landed in the role that put me in charge of our global services business, which gave me exposure to all of GE’s businesses and the diversity of its portfolio. One day I was working with aircraft engines, the next day with credit cards, then with leasing, and the fourth day with NBC. That cross-unit exposure, coupled with my own insatiable curiosity, is what ultimately prepared me to be a key leader at Genpact as an independent company in 2005 and to take it public in 2007.

      Genpact’s approach to global expansion isn’t dissimilar: we source talent locally for our delivery centers, and groom these men and women to assume leadership beyond their borders in a few years. When we set up operations in Hungary, China, and Mexico, for example, we recruited people who understood that space—the talent available, the local culture—and knew how to scale it and make it successful. Then I moved leaders who had proven capable of driving value in other places (namely India) to oversee the new operation, seed our best practices, and develop the people we recruited. Today, some of those recruits are running those delivery centers; others have moved out of their markets into bigger roles in the firm. It’s critical, I’ve learned, to grow leaders we identify in emerging markets by giving them platforms bigger than their markets, exposing them to people and leaders who operate in mature markets so they might learn from their experience and benefit from their sponsorship. We make a point, despite the cost, of rotating our leaders from small markets into bigger ones. From Romania, or from China, they pack their bags and move to India for a few months. That ensures, when they go back, that they have much better networks. You can’t insist that an emerging leader build a network when you haven’t provided the platform.

      This holds true at the highest levels of our firm: each of my market leaders, irrespective of the size of their markets, has equal standing in the firm and equal voice at my table. On the face of it, this doesn’t make sense: for us, the US market is three times the size of the European market. But I’ve learned that to grow our client base in places like Europe, Japan, and Australia, I’ve got to bring in big leaders who’ve established sizeable networks there, make them my direct reports, and give them the stature and attention they need to grow those markets.

      Our journey, with regard to growing our pipeline of global executives, is far from over. We are not as diverse as we should be, nor as I would like us to be. We have enough programs to provide women in emerging markets the ladder they need to grow into senior leader positions: 70 percent of my Chinese leadership team are women, as are 60 percent to 70 percent of my eastern European leadership team. The US and India, however, are proving more difficult. The next frontier for us is making sure more of our highly qualified women in these markets get the platform, the visibility, and the sponsorship they need to grow beyond mid-senior levels.

      Yet in terms of our evolution to a truly global company—one