Why Accenture and Infosys are moving beyond greatness ?

Accenture and Infosys have various similarities. Both offer a wide range of services in technology and consulting domains. Both have an extensive world-wide presence; Infosys is present in 46 countries, whereas Accenture is present in 49 countries. Both have clients in a broad-range of industries including banking, capital markets, automotive, chemicals and communications. Both are listed on Nasdaq, in fact, Infosys was the first Indian company to be listed on the Nasdaq. While these similarities are known to all, there is another similarity not so known, and that is the way both these firms create, develop and nurture leadership within themselves. I intend to highlight the frameworks used by both of them in building leadership across levels.

Accenture:

Accenture went public in 2001 when it listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the leadership of Joe Forehand. Of the Fortune Global 100 companies, Accenture services 92 of them. Consulting, technology and outsourcing are its key areas of business, and its business is structured around five Global Operating Groups- Financial Services, Products, Resources, High Tech and public services. The entire workforce is primarily divided into four quadrants- Consulting, Solutions, Services and Enterprise.

Leadership at Accenture is led by the Accenture Leadership Development Program (ALDP), which is focused at the development and improvement of leadership capabilities supporting strategic business objectives. This program has been created by the Human Resource (HR) team at the global level and streamlined and tailored at national levels by the regional HR teams.

The ALDP is guided, at each step, by the Accenture Leadership Statement, the uniqueness of which lies in the fact that it encourages leaders at Accenture to develop their own leadership beliefs and styles, but those beliefs should be articulated and passed on to their teams in a consistent and coherent manner.

The Leadership statement has been broken down into leadership competence matrix that delineates required skills and behaviours per level and leadership role. These skills and behaviours are then embedded into development tools, and these tools are further integrated into HR practices and processes.

The Leadership Statement guides Accenture to strive to imbibe certain set of behaviours as an organization.?The statement also elaborates on the three most significant contributions expected from an existing leader or a potential leader at Accenture- Value Creator, People Developer and Business Operator. It then goes further to establish the six core values of Accenture-

·??????Value creation for client

·??????Excellence in people

·??????Respect for an individual

·??????Integrity

·??????One global network

·??????Stewardship.

The leadership traits are the same across the Accenture universe. Any leader, at any level, has to necessarily demonstrate results in all the three areas of contribution- Value Creator, People Developer and Business Operator. He/she has to live the core values of Accenture, and has to uphold the Accenture code of business ethics while doing business with /serving any stakeholder/customer. A [potential] leader has to strive genuinely to make others successful; he/she has to remove barriers to working with others. The individual has to drive change, first, at an individual level and then at a team’s level with an authentic his/her unique leadership style.

The ALDP is very systematic, well-structured, comprehensive and a holistic program that is the sum total of seven discreet elements. These seven elements are seamlessly integrated into the HR framework.

????????I.???????????Identifying leaders- In this first stage the competency matrix is used for recruitment and career and succession planning.

??????II.???????????Management of Leadership Program- In this stage planning, budgeting and monitoring of development programs take place. The programs are synchronised to offset impacts of variations in geographies.

????III.???????????Measure success- 360-degree feedback and satisfactions surveys are the key features in this stage, which corelates directly with employee engagement and employee experience.

????IV.???????????Compliance Monitoring- This is the second most critical stage after Leadership strategy. Here there are two imperatives, which Accenture strives to achieve- an ongoing integration of leadership dimensions in internal processes and a strategic performance management process.

?????V.???????????Story-telling- The culture comes into picture in this stage when leadership examples and internal and external success stories are communicated in the organization.

????VI.???????????Leadership Training- The training curriculum goes through iterations/evolutions/ refinements at a pace that enables quality of delivery of Accenture in sync with the changes in external business environment and probably that’s the reason its L&D team is one of the most strategic resources for Accenture.

??VII.???????????Leadership Strategy- This is the heart of the ALDP. From here emanates the core values, global leadership statement and the uniformity in implementation at a global level.

A very striking and appreciable rather inspiring feature of the ALDP is the finesse with which it integrates leadership guidelines and principles firmly in the HR framework. An example, which can be helpful to academicians as wells as practitioners both is that of performance management in Accenture.?Mid-year review, ongoing project feedback and project feedback follow up are the differentiators that create a world-class talent pool, which elicits encomiums from a diverse set of customers spread across the globe. Performance (including appraisal factors) are strictly based on the competency matrix and the guidelines of the ALDP are incorporated into each step of the performance management. Needless to say, but leadership dimensions are taken into consideration for rating of performance and feedback and in discussions on promotions.

I applaud the flexibility and professionalism of the Accenture HR Organization in the creation, execution and roll-out of the ALDP a decade ago. Even though at Accenture each employee is responsible for his/her growth and development of leadership capabilities, the climate, infrastructure and the systemic commitment are very much required for building up and nurturing Leadership across levels in a not so benign environment of today.

Infosys:

Like that of Accenture, the values and contributions expected from existing and potential leaders at Infosys are codified into a mnemonic -C-LIFE, which stands for customer delight (C), leadership by example (L), integrity & transparency (I), fairness (F) and pursuit of excellence (E). Also, like ALDP, Infosys has the accelerated leadership development program that focuses on high potentials called 'Tiers' in the Infosys parlance. The objective of this program is to keep on growing a cadre of leaders who can, at any point of time, succeed the senior most leaders in the organization. A key feature of the program is the role of ‘counsellors’ who help leaders in evaluating strengths/opportunities and reassess every year in a renewed context. ?The program is integrated holistically into the Organizational Development initiatives across the organization and its subsidiaries across geographies.

Infosys has created seven dimensions of leadership-

????????I.???????????Strategic Leadership- unique positioning, differentiation

??????II.???????????Change, adversity and transition leadership- anticipating and leading through resistance, managing crisis and integrating new lines of business.

????III.???????????Operational Leadership- Flawless execution

????IV.???????????Talent Leadership- Individual and team performance

?????V.???????????Relationship and Networking leadership- Social capital asset management

????VI.???????????Content Leadership- Thought-leadership

??VII.???????????Entrepreneurial Leadership= Launching new businesses and innovative offerings.

At Infosys, developing oneself is an individual’s responsibility through ‘Road Maps’ that guide specific investments a potential leader can make in himself/herself. Each roadmap is a portfolio of possible investments one can make for himself/herself provided these investments are in line with the competency assessment through the competency-matrix.

The Infosys Leadership Institute (ILI) is the body that guides the process of building leadership across the Infosys universe. It espouses two prominent methods for self-development- experiential learning and simulation. Infosys is one of the few companies that has developed a virtual reality environment for various leadership skills. The ILI uses the Rasch family of psychometric methods to evaluate the potential of future leaders.

The seven leadership dimensions are broken down into granular level, and competencies including business knowledge, technical and leadership skills and developmental orientation are integrated in the HR framework. A new series of assessments called the ‘Leadership Journey’ series was incorporated into the ILI framework to assess potential leaders and existing leaders with a focus on lateral movements and new recruits.

Similarities:

The discussion on similarities is critical to understand that at a broader level what great companies do to develop talent and leadership. It is evident from the preceding paragraphs that leadership is not just a practice for Accenture and Infosys, rather it is an ethos for both. Guiding principles of leadership, in both cases, emanate from their values/credo and they use structured, planned and measured mechanisms to drive leadership across their respective organizations.

The process of building leadership, in both, is built into and integrated with the day-today affairs of the company. E.g feedback on ongoing project or mid-project review is a mundane affair in technology or consulting firms, but the way these feedbacks are aligned with leadership dimensions is exemplary, and one of the points of differentiation of the duo from their other competitors.

At both the firms, the ALDP and the ILI are strategic capabilities, HR function in both the firms are agile enough to incorporate and integrate principles into practise and above all both the companies treat Leadership as religiously as they treat their P&L and their Balance Sheets.

It is no coincidence that both these companies have evolved from good to great, and now moving towards beyond great, it seems, and they have been built, over the years, to last probably till eternity, though that may reflect my reckless optimism given the fact that there are very few companies in the world who have been able to celebrate their centenary.