SBI Cell for Public Sector Leadership                                                     

Although leadership as a subject has been widely studied, the understanding of public leadership and its practice is very contextual with a strong relationship to the culture, principles and mindset of the people being led. The Government and the Society have very different expectations from the leadership of the public institutions. There is a clear need to study such leadership in the Indian context, in the context of privatisation movement, and in light of the heated competition with private organisations from around the world. By studying leadership in public institutions and identifying strengths and weaknesses of our systems, processes and development approaches, we could enhance the quality of leaders in public sector and help our public organisations to become globally competitive.

The SBI Cell  will study innovation, change management, organisational transformation, leadership comparisons between public and private enterprises, managerial mindsets and risk taking in middle management resulting in publications, cases, and books meeting global standards in collaboration with global publishers and schools. It will also focus on enhancing the understanding of change management among organisational leaders and their teams, influence management thinking to create the environment/culture within their organisation that fosters risk taking as well as conduct workshops and sessions that will help take this knowledge to action. It will challenge the leadership of organisations to think about more than the single bottom line of making profits.

The SBI Cell for Public Sector Leadership will help understand how leaders in public sector organisations succeed, fail, change, innovate and groom future leaders. Some of the questions the cell will explore through research are:

• How does Indian style of Public Leadership differ from that of the west?
• How is change management unique or different in different Indian organisations—both public and private?
• What is an innovative mindset?
• How do we assist middle managers and senior managers to take risks, support innovation, and demonstrate leadership at all levels of the organisation to meet the multiple goals typical of a public institution?
• How to work with limited resources, dependencies, regulations in public institutions and come up with resourcefulness to challenge and succeed in competition with global companies?
• What is the value of instincts, insights and intuition in dealing with complex and novel global customers and scenarios?       
• What role does EQ and perhaps SQ play in developing resilient, results-oriented, accountable, yet caring global leaders? 
• How does leadership differ in emerging economies compared to developed countries?

These are some of the questions which CLIC seeks to address through its research work. Broadly our work will fall into three categories: Knowledge creation, knowledge at work or knowledge in action projects and knowledge dissemination.

CLIC will ensure that the following activities will be undertaken by the proposed Research Cell:

• Case studies focussed on Public Sector Leadership in India — both text and video-based and thereby help develop world class case writing capability in India in the areas of Public Sector Leadership and Change Management etc.
• Specific leadership focussed studies on Public Sector companies, developed in India and for India but that has the potential of global impact.
• Research and knowledge creation on change mindset, models, frameworks on managerial  leadership
• Exploration of innovative approaches such as Public Sector CEOs Roundtable Discussion series.
• As part of the above research programme, ISB would study SBI’s Parivarthan Programme as a case study to carry out more research in order to understand, substantiate, and identify gaps if any in current strategy and approach and point out further directions that SBI could take in the area of leadership, change management and innovation. ISB will share with SBI the outcome of the above study free of cost.
• Executive education in various topics under Public Sector Leadership and any other activities which are relevant and deemed suitable by the ISB for the proposed research work.

Knowledge Creation Projects
The first project will be about applied research and addressing some important questions about industries, organisations and requires some research to see patterns across companies, industries or organisations. CLIC will engage in joint projects with clients and some independent funded research projects and publish them as reports, papers, videos and podcasts. The Asian Women’s Leadership Project is an area where we will research how we can help working women in India and the rest of Asia to become global leaders. What is the current reality, how do we identify support structures, processes that help them to become senior leaders and what hinders their growth.

The Centre will also conduct research on lessons from Wisdom traditions and how they shape our mindsets, mythologies and behaviour. How does an Indian mindset differ from that of a Chinese mindset or an American mindset? How does this difference play out in how we lead, change and innovate ourselves and others around us? These are the kind of questions that will drive the process of knowledge creation.

Institution Building and Turnaround of Indian Railways
How did a public sector organisation turn around from inefficient, loss making and inherently corrupt perception to modern, efficient, technology driven, highly profitable organisation in a short span of 3-5 years? Where did the mindset change come about and how did the organisation transform itself? What roles did various constituents play in bringing about this turnaround? This is a project where leadership, innovation and change management all play a role.

Lessons from Wisdom Traditions
Can we identify models, principles, values, myths, stories, proverbs that shaped our lives? What percentage of those originated in wisdom traditions that surround us? How do we become conscious of the cultural, spiritual and social conditioning and their role in shaping our mindset and behavior as a leader, as a change agent and as an innovator? We are looking at identifying some of those key principles, values, myths, stories, models and proverbs and document them methodically and see how they can be turned into processes, methodologies that can help others to become conscious and choose when to stay with them and when to pick different set of principles in becoming global leaders. First we need to identify them, categorise them, document them in a way that is accessible and then validate their influence on people and develop methods for helping people to learn or unlearn some of them. This is multi-year, multi-phase project that will help us to understand what makes us Indian, makes somebody else Chinese and how we can value diversity and become global leaders, besides being Indian leaders.

Women’s Leadership
What makes Indian women leaders successful? How do we ignite the leadership potential of Indian and Asian women? We have invited a group of women leadership researchers from around the world , women executives and academic scholars to spend time in exploring what it takes to unleash Asian Women Leadership power. In the initial phase there will be a forum, then a leadership circle, followed by a potential conference in 2009, before we launch a series of programmes  in this area.

Spiritual Audit of Corporation India
Professor Ian Mitroff from the University of Southern California and Elisabeth Denton did the “first-ever survey of spiritual beliefs and practices among managers and executives and found that while most people have strong spiritual beliefs, few feel that they can act on those beliefs at work. And yet, overall company performance is actually higher in companies where company values and spiritual values coalesce.” Would such a study reveal something different in Corporate India than what it did for Corporate America?

Knowledge At Work Projects
These are essentially joint projects or action learning projects in partnership with our clients. Sometimes, companies and organisations would like us to develop new kinds of models and frameworks based on what is going on in their corporation. For example, Young Global Leaders of World Economic Forum is partnering with us to explore leadership styles of Asian leaders vs. western leaders.