Infosys's vaunted leadership programme disappoints

BANGALORE: The joke doing the social media rounds is: who is having a bigger leadership crisis — Congress or Infosys?

For the Congress, the crisis is kind of understandable, dependent as it is on a single family. For Infosys, it's really surprising because it has had a much vaunted leadership development programme. And at a time when it was most needed, the programme has been found to be desperately wanting.

The first signs of that emerged last year when co-founder N R Narayana Murthy was made to return from his retirement to lead the company. And now, as it looks for a successor to CEO S D Shibulal, who retires by January next year, every internal candidate has seemingly been given a go by. Many other senior level executives have resigned over the past year, indicating Murthy's dissatisfaction with their performance.

Infosys established a major leadership development institute in Mysore in 2001 which was to help produce a steady stream of leaders for the company.

The Infosys Leadership Institute (ILI) was Murthy's vision to offer individual and organizational interventions, right from assessments to organizational development initiatives to ensure that the company has a ready pool of leaders all the time. The leadership institute offers roadmaps for leaders to achieve excellence in their scope of work.

In 2012, ILI experts were certified by Prof John Antonakis of the department of organizational behaviour, University of Lausanne, to teach charismatic leadership.