Building people excellence in Bangladesh

Simon O'Grady is the Founding Headmaster of Haileybury Bhaluka. To accompany his keynote address to business leaders of Valors of Bangladesh, he outlines how to build a sustainable competitive advantage through people excellence. An alumnus of the LSE, he writes extensively on business themes and is an exclusive guest on Channel 24's Haileybury One talk show. His thought leadership in Bangladesh has brought him into discussions with some of the country's leading entrepreneurs and business leaders.

Purpose, people, performance

Starting with a clear sense of purpose is disarmingly simple and yet amazingly complex. Simon Sinek told us that successful leaders start with why. They understand and convey purpose and start with an end in mind (sic Covey). In starting with why, business leaders inspire their people to action.

Easier said than done, however. Purpose is often confused with making money, sometimes dressed up as value creation. Clarity on purpose is key. For example, at Haileybury Bhaluka, our purpose is to give our students a world class education. Any surplus on school fees is reinvested so that we can improve in delivering our purpose, year on year. 

Great leaders work within a golden circle, with why at the core, and then moving out to the how and then to the what. Haileybury Bhaluka seeks to achieve its purpose by getting and keeping the best teachers in the world. Part of the keeping has involved a unique partnership with Harvard University to ensure that all our teachers are certified by the Graduate School of Education.

Great leaders always bang the drum about purpose and their leadership is driven by doing so. Mission driven, they articulate clearly and inclusively. In Bangladesh, it's the means of getting great people; keeping them loyal and building commitment and coaching for achievement; avoiding the revolving door that high staff turnover brings. Looking beyond business, we see how sporting excellence has been achieved by smaller nations. Purpose-driven leadership, strategic planning and funding, and nurturing talent have led to Olympic success on a sustained basis. Thus, keeping people is a success metric and a means of growing a purpose driven culture. 

Defining business excellence

Business excellence has a great inheritance within its literature and each decade brings a new model or favoured paradigm. Over the last half century, competitive strategy, human motivation, change management, quality focus and leadership traits have all competed for business leaders' thoughts and actions. 

Business excellence is dominated by the pillars of leadership, process and performance. Leaders strategize, manage change, improve performance, and forge sustainability. Process focus enables strategic integration of people, partnerships, policy and resources. Performance helps secure those key results that enables us to improve on purpose. Towering above models of excellence is the European Foundation for Quality Management which presents an adaptable framework for leadership, process and performance. For companies in transitional economies or developing countries, recent work by the Institute of Management (Cambridge University) links measures culture, values and communication to assessments of business performance (as shown below):

Asking which three writers and leaders you would host for dinner is not a bad place to start. Peters and Waterman might be at the party. They gave us a picture of what business excellence looks like. Ignoring issues of methodology and matters of history, they identified the common attributes of business success, profoundly influencing leadership approaches, strategy and organizational design long term. Whilst phrasing such as loose-tight properties and stick to the knitting are products of their age, productivity through people, close to the customer and a bias for action resonate as loudly as ever.

Building People Advantage

Models of business excellence are inevitably about people. Like other economies, we are faced with people challenges to competitive advantage. It is useful to identify them, evaluate their importance and understand how to mitigate them. Talent shortage, changing skill demand and high labour turnover: these are supply-side themes for the country as well as specific market matters. In the context of creating a Smart Nation we need smart people, and future work models need to be addressed alongside leadership gaps. The following scorecard might be useful in evaluating your own people challenges.

Forging future success

In shaping business thinking about the future, the Boston Consultancy Group's Build for the Future, gives us a great frame forward (source BCG 2022). In an unwitting reference to Peters and Waterman, we are now in the realm of cross-functional attributes, with pre-eminence given to leadership and purpose and people advantage.

Leadership and purpose

We are seeing four emergent trends in leading organizations across the world. We are moving from an age of individual leadership to an era of networked leadership teams. We are seeing that high performing teams will always outperform high performing individuals. We are seeing that old style hierarchies cannot cope with new complexities. We are retaining traditional leader accountabilities and seeing that leadership now sits in teams serving the business or the school. The challenge for today's leaders is that they need to be able to lead themselves, lead peer groups, and coordinate networked teams at scale. To do this, leaders need self-awareness and awareness of the operating environments around them. (Source: New Leadership for a new era of thriving organisations, McKinsey & Co, 2023).

Creating people advantage

Leaders who build their teams innovatively do so with purpose and intent. It is not an accidental act or a fad of fashion. Start with culture, by creating contexts for people to thrive. Systemise culture by putting HR at the centre of team builds. Be mission drive in recruitment: hire people who can think, people who care and people who persist. Reward solution finders. Problems good: solutions better. Build diverse teams. Avoid analysis paralysis by having different mindsets around the table. Value teams by building teams based leadership. 

Strategy, system and structure for skills and shared values for sustainability in people performance.