Wise Leaders Are Driven to Serve Others
While smart leaders can be self-centered—driven by either the basic need for safety and security (blue zone) or the desire for fame and money (red zone), wise leaders are other-centered: they are purposefully driven to mainly serve others.
Wise leaders are not motivated by personal wealth, recognition, and success, though they are comfortable with them. So what really motivates them? They derive a great deal of satisfaction from serving their noble purpose, which often has a strong ethical basis. Intrinsically motivated, they can exercise great self-discipline in staying with an issue and resolving it without seeking any external reward or recognition. Even when asked to lead a routine project, they can look at it from a systemic or holistic perspective and find ways to make the project more engaging and effective—for both themselves and others on their teams—and try to learn the most from that experience. Wise leaders thrive on happiness and effectiveness around them and find joy in bringing the best out of others. They are driven by high aspirations, such as peace and well-being for all; translate those noble aspirations into actionable steps; and work on them for the rest of their lives, as we saw in the case of Dr. V, founder of Aravind Eye Hospital (profiled in chapter 2), which has delivered affordable eye care to millions of people. Highly self-disciplined, wise leaders keep their body, mind, and spirit fit by engaging in activities like exercise, yoga, meditation, or gardening.
Most important, rather than competing with others in an organization, wise leaders engage everyone inside and outside their organization in win-win scenarios in an attempt to cocreate sustainable value for all stakeholders. They motivate others in their organization or ecosystem to follow them in serving a higher purpose. Whereas smart leaders use financial incentives like bonuses to motivate their employees and partners, wise leaders leverage their personal authenticity and deep commitment to the larger purpose to set an example. Consider Om Prakash Bhatt, who, as chairman of the State Bank of India (SBI), transformed the bank’s culture by instilling a sense of pride in all its employees.
In 2006, Bhatt became the chairman of SBI, the country’s largest bank in terms of assets, branches, and customers, with about 200,000 employees and a storied history dating back more than two hundred years. At the time, though, the bank had been steadily losing market share for two decades. Customers were unhappy, and staff were demoralized and lacked a common set of objectives, goals, and vision.18
In September 2006, Bhatt convened the first strategy meeting with his senior management team as the chairman. He kicked it off with segments of The Legend of Bagger Vance, a movie about a great golfer who fell on hard times after World War I and eventually rediscovered his swing as well as his pride. Bhatt then told his senior managers: “India is on a growth burst. The banking sector is on a roll. But, sadly this growth is largely bypassing us. What has gone wrong? Have we hit a midlife crisis? We have become like Bagger Vance: we have lost our ‘swing’. How do we regain it?” Bhatt hoped to rekindle SBI’s swabhiman (Sanskrit for self-respect) and encourage his senior managers to find ways restore SBI to its prior glory.19
We know of many organizations that bring in a turnaround expert as CEO to revive their sagging fortunes. They link the CEO’s compensation (with big bonuses) to improvements in the organization’s bottom line. In this case, the CEO’s motivation to drive major transformation in the organization is primarily self-interest: the hope of getting a fat bonus check at the end. But at SBI, Bhatt’s salary was less than one thousand dollars a month. His motivation to transform SBI wasn’t about financial reward but enlightened self-interest to put the bank on a sustainable growth path—something he could derive satisfaction from even after retiring.
In a similar way, recognizing that he couldn’t motivate SBI employees through financial rewards, Bhatt leveraged his core asset, authentic communication, to rally his demoralized troops, starting at the senior management meeting in September 2006. The effect was immediate: most of the senior leaders in that meeting who were initially skeptical were energized by Bhatt’s wakeup call and, with Bhatt, devised an action plan for reinvigorating SBI’s performance. This plan of action included transformational initiatives in various critical areas such as customer service, employee engagement, and technology infrastructure.
Having enlisted senior management support for transforming SBI and having cocreated with them a plan for that transformation, Bhatt set out to secure the buy-in for that plan from middle management. Over three months, he personally met with two thousand middle managers and shared with them his inspirational vision for the future of SBI: an agile and customer-centric organization run by a highly motivated and innovative workforce. With both passion and humility, he requested these managers to join him in realizing that vision. Bhatt’s gift for authentic communication stoked the passion in his unmotivated middle managers: no senior leaders had engaged them in this genuine fashion before. As one middle manager who interacted with Bhatt explained, “We were almost resigned to the inevitable demise of a bank we had grown up with and the only option for us to grow seemed to be to leave the bank and join our competition to contribute anything significantly. [Bhatt’s message was like] music to our ears.”20
As staff enthusiasm grew for the transformation agenda, two powerful unions of bank employees came to believe that such a process could boost low employee morale. And so they added their voices and contributed to the transformation process too.
In mid-2007 SBI rolled out Parivartan (Sanskrit for transformation), a change management program, across all fourteen regions in the country simultaneously. Parivartan was a massive communication and training program that was executed in thirty-eight hundred (two-day) workshops held in over one hundred venues across India over one hundred days. Over 130,000 employees attended these workshops.
In the wake of this program, employees at different levels began demonstrating more creative leadership and cultivating closer bonds with customers. For example, Shiva Kumar, at the time the chief general manager of SBI’s operations in Hyderabad (currently he is the managing director of State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur), set up a mobile text-messaging service for customer complaints, which addressed seven thousand complaints within five months.
By unleashing and harnessing the ingenuity within all employees, Bhatt was able to expand SBI’s market share to 19 percent from 16.5 percent in a highly competitive industry during his tenure. At the same time, SBI’s stock value doubled, and customer satisfaction climbed.21
Bhatt retired in 2011 after thirty-nine years of service to SBI. Looking back, he told us that the transformation agenda evolved through conversations as he engaged leaders from all levels in his ecosystem, including all employee unions and customers, in addition to regulators. “It was like building a bridge while walking on it,” he said.22
How did Bhatt lead SBI wisely? First, he was guided by a noble purpose—to restore the past glory of an illustrious establishment—and aligned his decisions and actions with that purpose. Furthermore, he acted as a servant leader by allowing his employees to lead the bottom-up transformation of SBI. In addition, he demonstrated fortitude by seeing through his decision to make SBI more innovative and customer-centric. Ultimately, however, it was his wise motivation—his enlightened self-interest to restore the sense of pride within SBI’s workforce—that gave him credibility and inspired the 200,000 SBI employees to support and help implement this transformational change.