India has experienced explosive growth over the last 25 years. Now there is an urgent need to find and develop the leaders who can manage growth into the future.
- By Dave Desouza

India has been experiencing robust business growth for over 25 years, overseen by a talented group of older executive leaders who are now much closer to retirement. At the same time, Indian companies are going global, culling business partnerships with multinationals while the government encourages foreign investments. The key challenge is developing leadership ready to assume the decision-making roles needed to keep business on a growth trajectory and to be truly competitive on a global basis.

This is a setting that applies to many expanding economies, so India serves as a good example for assessing how to best fill the talent pool and develop the next generation of leaders.

The immediate issue is closing the leadership gap by accelerating the process for finding and developing high potential talent because the business environment is changing rapidly. It will take a full menu of development strategies, including coaching, mentoring, rotational assignments, formal training, assessments, and experiences that involve the specific business environment.

Identifying the Challenges
Ernst & Young conducted a survey in summer 2014 that found 53 percent of more than 500 global business leaders planned to enter India or expand operations within the next year. The leadership gap is the top issue of concern, and this same concern is found in many other emerging and rapidly expanding economies.

One of the top reasons the gap exists is due to a lack of participative management. India's typical business structure remains siloed, and senior managers use top-down decision-making within the silo. This structure leads to managers with limited knowledge and experience, and who are ill-prepared to assume an executive-level position requiring broad, cross-functional knowledge.

Another problem is the lack of qualified candidates in the pipeline who can fill managerial positions created as businesses expand. A 2012 Manpower Talent Shortage Survey of global employers found that 48 percent of India's respondents had difficulty finding qualified candidates, and 17 percent could not find any candidates. As a result, senior leaders who have spent decades expanding businesses are not retiring when expected and that cannot continue.

In any country where there is a lack of business leadership development, multinationals going global must factor in programs that develop younger leaders in the foreign country while also developing leaders in the home country who can make up for the gap in the meantime. Putting people into management positions without training is risky because some will flounder.

Complicating the picture is that this set of conditions leads to a talent war for capable leaders, meaning a company may develop new talent in a robust internal development program, only to have the person hired away by the competition. This forces companies to recruit externally, a costly approach given the competition for talent.

A Foundation of Learning
A host of leadership development practices can close the gap, but the first step is developing a culture of learning. Current managers must understand the importance of training new and high potential employees. Otherwise, the company is at risk of putting trainees into departments for on-the-job development under the tutelage of managers who do not understand their roles in the process.

Current management development in preparation for filling the leadership pipeline includes activities like encouraging collective decision-making, workshops and discussions, executive coaching, and learning how to identify high potential employees.

As the Conference Board explains it, leaders must learn to be agile because different behaviors are required for different levels. Managers have to let go of entrenched behavior patterns and assess younger talent based on more than skills, abilities and past performance.

Potential leaders must be assessed based on their ability to learn new skills and behaviors in a rapidly changing business environment. Senior leaders cannot just pass on the old way of doing things. This presents real challenges for multinationals entering India or countries with similar business characteristics. Development must move people to self-empowered entrepreneurial thinking.

Company Specific and Broad Exposure
A varietyof development approaches can be used to develop more collaborative leaders with broader perspectives, cross-enterprise capabilities and interpersonal skills.

The Conference Board research found that leadership is contextual, so development strategies need to be company specific, "aligning leadership values, competences, and behaviors with long-term business goals" so that people are ready to manage in a changing business landscape. Development must be customized to the individual.

To fill the talent pipeline, organizations need to consider nontraditional talent pools for recruitment. They need to go to Tier 3 and 4 cities, look for people in a variety of places who have the right attitude now and can be skills trained later, and offer a variety of career paths.

The Conference Board research also found that development activities should vary based on individual needs. Young potential leaders can work on cross-functional projects and participate in a variety of business situations from start-up to shut down. They can also do international assignments to develop broad exposure to a variety of cultures.

Once it is certain an employee has leadership potential, development activities can expand to include participation on a management team, assignments as a leader's assistant, special project responsibility, participation in business school workshops and programs, and mentoring. Experiential learning is critical to developing talent in India, including business simulations, rotational programs, executive or senior management academic programs, and personalized skills development.

There is also a need to focus on developing cultural sensitivity. Countries like India and China have great internal cultural diversity, and talent must learn to work globally with different groups, some not recognized or accepted in their own countries (i.e. religious groups, LGBT).

These are exciting times as globalization matures and new entrants on the scene are bringing a rich new pool of talent. Finding and developing that talent will be challenging in many cases, requiring new approaches that are based on experience, education, collaborative learning, self-paced learning, building emotional intelligence, learning strategic thinking and other strategies.