The WorldBlu Blog

USA Today has a fantastic article in today’s paper entitled, “CEO’s bold experiment: Management by democracy” by Del Jones. The article features a Q & A with the New Delhi-based information technology services company HCL Technologies which is headed by Vineet Nayar.

What I like about the article is that is shows that organizational democracy is not about transplanting political democracy into the business world, nor is it just about voting. Organizational democracy is a way of organizing people to, “enable [them] to find their own destiny,” as Vineet Nayar puts it.

It’s one of the best short pieces on the topic that I’ve read. Here’s how it begins:

India is the world’s largest democracy, so it seems fitting that the New Delhi-based information technology services giant HCL Technologies is attempting what may be the most ambitious effort yet at installing a workplace democracy.

That may sound impossible, but so did running nations as democracies in past centuries. CEO Vineet Nayar, 45, has written a case study about HCL’s experiment for the Harvard Business School. He spoke to USA TODAY corporate management reporter Del Jones about his bold experiment and why he believes that in the future, democratic companies will outperform the command-and-control dictatorships that have persisted since the industrial revolution. [Read more. . . ]

There is another piece about HCL which appeared in BusinessWeek recently entitled, “The Employee is Always Right,” written by Jena McGregor. It begins:

Vineet Nayar, CEO of Indian outsourcer HCL Technologies, needs to work on his time-management skills. Last year, his team rated him 3.6 out of 5 for how well he keeps projects running on schedule. That was among Nayar’s lowest scores from the 81 managers who rated him, and everybody at HCL knows it.

Nayar’s grades, along with ratings for the top 20 managers at HCL, are published on the company’s intranet for anyone who wants to see them. Employees also have the capability to see their own supervisors’ scores. While many companies have “360-degree reviews”—which compile feedback from peers, managers, and underlings—HCL may be the only one in the world that broadcasts the results throughout the organization. That has created no shortage of workplace angst. “There was this whole picture of me that [emerged] as a heavy taskmaster,” says R. Srikrishna, who runs HCL’s U.S. infrastructure services division, of his early results. “It was very unsettling the first time.”

The public grading of managers is just one of several unconventional steps HCL has taken over the past two years to build a more democratic workplace. While plenty of CEOs utter bromides about “servant leadership” and say their most important job is supporting employees, Nayar is more willing than most to back up his words with actions. “In our day and age, it’s the employee who sucks up to the boss,” says Nayar. “We are trying, as much as possible, to get the manager to suck up to the employee.” [Read more. . . ]