Joining Forces: Collaborative Leadership for Sustainability

Corporate sustainability is evolving towards transformational initiatives

that engage multiple entities.

The missing piece of that puzzle was that, other than Gandhi and a few others, nobody truly wanted to be independent.

So, the first learning for us was, before we could get to the execution stage, we had to put in place the ‘architecture’ for change. This was a three-step process. The first step was to create in our people the desire and need for change. As indicated, unless there is dissatisfaction with the status quo, nobody is going to change their behaviour. So, we went across our company and exposed our dirty linen, saying, “This is broken; and so is that.” A lot of people got scared, and left; but we soon started to attract ‘potters’ — people who get excited by the very notion of working with ‘rough clay’.

The second step in building our cultural architecture entailed defining a vision for tomorrow that was so compelling that people would jump out of bed each day to come and work for us. On my first day, at an open house with 5,000 people, I was asked, “What is your vision for this company?” When I admitted I didn’t have one yet, the employee replied, “That is stupid.” I said, “I know that; but you have to stick with me, because I do have a vision for you.” I then asked the audience, “When you meet someone at a party, and they ask where you work, do you say, ‘I work for an IT services company’, or do you say ‘I work at HCL’? Ninety per cent of the employees admitted that they never mentioned HCL. So, I said, “My vision is that in five years’ time, when someone asks this question, 90 per cent of you will say ‘I work for HCL’.”

The third aspect was very important for us: experimentation. The journey from Point A to Point B is never a straight line: it is a series of experiments. As an Engineering graduate, I learned early on that great inventions are the result of many incorrect hypotheses. Every initiative we launched started out as an experiment, and everybody shared in the process.