The author of this article, Professor S
Ramnarayan, teaches at the ISB’s Post
Graduate Programme, and at the Centre
for Executive Education. He is Director
- Change Management at the Centre for
Good Governance, Hyderabad.

Peter Drucker, considered the father of modern management, once wrote that all the effective leaders he had encountered did not start out with the question, “What do I want?” They started out asking, “What needs to be done?” They then asked, “What can I do, and should I do to make a difference?” Drucker argued that leadership does not refer to rank, privileges, titles or money; it is responsibility. Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky, authors of “Leadership on the Line”, express a similar viewpoint. They note that leadership involves getting people to own and engage with difficult problems facing the organisation. Tackling major challenges requires bringing about changes in people’s values, beliefs, habits, ways of working, and ways of life. In short, leadership is fundamentally about changing the way in which people think and act.

I have been discussing, over a number of years, with a colleague at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, about the crucial leadership task of altering mindsets. We have studied how managers and organisations confront the complexity and uncertainty posed by this in the global context, and found that changing mindsets is indeed a challenging task. Our inquiry has shown that there are four main challenges that are crucial to the leader’s success as a navigator through the rocky process of altering mindsets. We identified four roles that leaders need to play in today’s

organisations. Leadership failures occur when one or more of the above roles are not performed effectively. Let us examine each of these roles in detail.

Leader as Cognitive Tuner
A traditional organisation had sought to make certain important structural interventions to be able to face greater competition. Accordingly, teams were constituted, and resources allocated. The objective was to strengthen interface management among the key functions for developing new products. For the success of the change effort, employees were required to behave in ways that would be qualitatively different from the manner in which they had been used to operating.

For example, the organisational members were required to move away from a hierarchical culture in a number of ways. Juniors were expected to talk openly about difficulties and voice opinions freely at meetings. They had to assume responsibility, work across functional boundaries and operate with minimal guidance and specific role prescriptions. If required, they had to communicate requirements and demands to individuals, groups and functions even if they were powerful. The seniors, on the other hand, were expected to actively seek opinions, encourage dissent and support efforts to modify dysfunctional procedures.