0:00:00.0 Wayne Brown: Hello, I’m Wayne Brown, and welcome to the ET Project. We’re delighted to be delivering this live broadcast for executive talent all over the world, whom we’re affectionately referring to as team ET. In our episode today, we traveled back to the island of Sri Lanka to once again connect with one of the country’s most famous sons, Mr. Vidusha Nathavitharana, or V as many of his friends like to call him. A true legend in the field of leadership, facilitation, and of course HR. He is truly a modern day thought leader. And this aspect of Vidusha has been recognized by organizations such as Thinkers360 and Global Gurus, just to name two. He’s authored an incredible 68 books, all of which are based on lessons that he has learned during his own career and that he offers to others for free. In fact, the reason for our discussion today is to examine his latest masterpiece called Growing Leaders.

0:01:00.4 WB: And as you’ll hear us discuss, Vidusha is passionate about many things, and supporting Sri Lankan companies to excel is one of those areas that excites him. Interestingly, his purpose behind writing this book is to support struggling families and their children by providing meals through schools where these children can not only receive nourishment for the body, but also education for the mind. A lifelong learner himself with multiple degrees attained overseas as well as at home, Vidusha has what appears to be a thirst for new challenges. If you follow him on social media on platforms like LinkedIn, you’ll get a flavor for the subjects he likes to discuss. They’re always wide ranging and thought provoking. He’s a true brains trust of knowledge and has the practical experience to back it up. His book Growing Leaders releases at the end of this month, 31st of July, and is sure to be a bestseller. It’s incredibly well written and crammed with wisdom and insights. Please sit back now and prepare to be enlightened around some of the reasons why organizations and leaders are struggling so much today.

0:02:10.2 Speaker 2: Welcome to the ET Project, a podcast for those executive talents determined to release their true potential and create an impact. Join our veteran coach and mentor Wayne Brown as we unpack an exciting future together.

0:02:24.2 WB: Welcome team ET. I’m excited today as I get to spend time speaking with one of my adopted mentors. He may not know that I see him as a mentor, but I find his wisdom, his insights, and his character traits to be things that I look to for guidance, as well as I see him as a role model in leadership. Before I introduce our guests however, I’d like to ask you all this question, what do farmers and their crop have in common with organizations and their leaders? I’ll let you mull that over for a while, but as it turns out, much more than we may realize. And today, as you tune into this conversation, you’ll find at least some of the answers to that question. We’re not gonna have time to go through everything, but we’ll give you a teasing of some of the answers. And here to help us with this as well as plenty more is the Destiny Architect himself, drum roll. Mr. Vidusha Nathavitharana, or as he is affectionately referred to V. Vidusha, welcome back to the ET Project, an absolute delight to have you here once again. And this time for a special reason, we’re gonna be speaking about your latest book, releases, I believe end of this month. 31st of July. It’s called Growing Leaders. So welcome, and how have you been?

0:03:46.4 Vidusha Nathavitharana: Thank you very, very much for having me again. It’s a great delight, and thank you for those kind words. Absolute pleasure to be here.

0:03:55.8 WB: My honor. We connected a couple of years back, and aside from you being heavily involved in your business, you are also deep in the middle of studying, and as it turned out, you’re something of a learnaholic, [laughter] I use that word very, very knowingly. I wasn’t surprised therefore this time round that not much has changed. You’re still studying, you’re working on your PhD how’s all that going?

0:04:27.6 VN: Not one of my proudest moments, I must admit. I took [chuckle] on the PhD for all the wrong reasons, but I think it has served me well. My dad is one of those people who spent 37 years inside the university service. He came from the village. He was the first of his family to go into tertiary education, and he was one of those people who swears by a PhD. And let me just give you a quick story on this. One of his vice chancellors at the time had a Mercedes Benz, and a Benz even at that time was a massive luxury. And so it was the pride and joy of the entire campus. And he would roll into the campus in his Mercedes. And one day, this Mercedes meets with an accident at Thummulla, one of our junctions, famous junctions with a bullock cart.

0:05:27.9 VN: And you have to put this in context, you’re talking 50 plus years back, 60 years back. And a bullock cart driver is someone from the poorest of the poor communities. And a person who drives the Mercedes is at the top end of the social spectrum. And the social strata were very keenly divided during that time. So it wasn’t common for social mobility to be as much as what we would enjoy today. So you can imagine this poor man’s plight because it was a wreck. And he was really, really struggling to come to grips with, how am I now supposed to pay for this? The driver of the Mercedes gets down and starts abusing this poor man, and the vice chancellor gets down, holds his hand, and turns around and says, can you please go and sit back in your car? I’ll sort this out. Goes to the man, picks him up, and says, let’s go first take a look at your cow, or your bull. It was always a bull that actually drove a bullock cart.

0:06:31.0 WB: Right.

0:06:36.7 VN: Made sure that the bull was okay. Then gave him some money to make sure that he repaired his cart and sought himself out because he would not have a day’s worth of wages to earn for the next couple of days. And then got back into the car and told his driver, understand where your priorities are. The only people here who are worth talking about are people and the bull because they’re living creatures. The car can be… And turned around and said, next time around, think before you act. And this was not even mentioned, and the only reason this came out, this entire story came out was, there was a journalist who was at the junction when the accident took place, and came and took a look and took a photograph, and then went and spoke to the poor man and asked what happened. And he related the story, and he wrote about this and ended by saying, this is the purpose of education. And my dad would recite this like a mantra on a regular basis. And he turns around and says, he changed a little bit. The article said, This is The Purpose of Education. He turned around and said, this is the reason why you should get a PhD [laughter]

0:07:57.6 VN: Because it always created someone with a certain level of wisdom and humanity with education. And he’s 83 this year. And a couple of years ago, when he turned 80, I realized that, maybe I’ve postponed this for too long and he’s not gonna be around for much longer. And then hastily applied and got into a PhD program hoping to finish it before his time with us is no more. And that’s because he always wanted me to have one. I could have easily passed the pain of going through this, but this is probably one of those last things I’ll be able to do for him. So thought I’ll do one.

0:08:42.6 WB: Well, I wish you well with.

0:08:44.5 VN: Not exactly the reason why you should be doing a PhD.

0:08:50.7 WB: [laughter] but is there ever a right reason? I mean, everyone has their own reason.

0:08:55.4 VN: Personality is a good one. [laughter] rather than my dad told me so, or told me too, which is great when you’re doing your probably bachelor’s or something, why are you here? Well, my mom put me into this. I didn’t have much of a choice. [laughter] but at PhD at my age, that doesn’t quite work well. In fact, I was asked this question when I joined the PhD, why are you doing a PhD? And I said, do you really want to know the honest answer? Because then you would not give me admission if you know why I am doing it [chuckle] So they said, okay, fine, then tell me the rehearsed answer and then give the honest answer also. So that’s the.

0:09:35.5 WB: Very good. Well, before we dive in to too deeply at least between the covers of your 280 page manuscript, let’s paint a little bit of a scene here. You are based out of Kandy in the Islands of Sri Lanka, I believe. I’m gonna put my own self to the test here. I believe the city used to be known as Maha Nuwara?

0:10:00.8 VN: That’s right. So that’s right. So Maha means bigger, and Nuwara means town. So in simpler parlance, it means capital because it was the capital city at some point.

0:10:11.1 WB: Okay. So the city itself is steeped in history from what I can read. And it was even home at one stage to the Kings. It was called the Kingdom of Kandy, right?

0:10:22.4 VN: Yes.

0:10:23.9 WB: So quite an interesting location. I’ve been there, by the way, Vidusha. I’m not sure if you’re aware of probably a decade back, we went for a holiday and I spent some time there. We went through the botanical gardens and around the artificial lake, et cetera. Beautiful swat. So I can visualize where you are. Monsoon season at the moment, I guess, right?

0:10:41.8 VN: August.

0:10:44.1 WB: August?

0:10:45.8 VN: Yeah.

0:10:46.9 WB: Okay.

0:10:47.8 VN: In July, August, yes.

0:10:50.1 WB: Many of the listeners I’m guessing are not Sri Lankan. Many of our listener base, we have a number from India, so they may know Sri Lanka better than me, but I always associated Sri Lanka, at least the agricultural side of Sri Lanka with tea and rubber plantations. And I was surprised at one stage to learn that rice was or is a big part of the agriculture.

0:11:14.6 VN: Yes, it is. So we’ve always been a rice based agrarian society. Take, if you go back, we have a written history of probably about 3000 years or so throughout the written history period, at least we’ve grown paddy. Most of us believe that it went way beyond. So it is our staple food. And at many points in our history, we have exported rice as well. It’s difficult sometimes when people listening and knowing the financial wars our country’s going through right now, to think that we would’ve been a very, very prosperous nation at one point. But we were, and rice was very much the staple food. And also the reason why we were able to grow into greater heights as a civilization, because that stability of having enough food for everyday consumption gave you the ability to have leisure.

0:12:17.8 VN: And as you know, civilizations grow only when you go from a hand to mouth existence. So we had massive irrigation projects, of which I think even the world would not have seen. We have engineering that baffles engineers even now, because you would have people doing major surveys where to build a reservoir and find a spot where the kings have started building, but then abandoned. And they build the project, and to only realize that maybe the kings were right, that it wasn’t exactly the right place for it. So we are steeped in agriculture. We are steeped in technology around agriculture, and I think we still are, in fact tea and rubber came in as cash crops during the time the British ragged. Throughout colonization, we did have cash crops. First it was coffee, but coffee came down with a pestilence.

0:13:22.0 VN: And much of it was taken out, and tea came in as a replacement. And that took off much better than coffee. So we became a tea growing country. Rubber has been there, again for 300, 400 years, and again, has been a cash crop, but paddy has always been there. It isn’t a cash crop, but it is one of the reasons why we are able to feed ourselves so to say. It’s only very, very recently that we started importing rice. That’s a relatively new phenomena. We were by and large self-sufficient when it comes to our staple food.

0:14:00.7 WB: Interesting. With that backdrop, let’s inch our way towards the book. Anyone that follows you probably knows that you’re not a novice when it comes to writing books. By my count at least, you have something around 68 books that you’ve published. And for whatever reason, we’re gonna talk about that at the moment. They’re all available for free on your website.

0:14:28.9 VN: Yes. Yes. Right. So the reason for that first, my dad and I are both products of free education. Sri Lanka, pretty much throughout had free education, of course before the British and so on and so forth, we had a temple based education where you learn to read and write mostly, but you were taught a vocation. Our education came in with the British system. But later on, there were civil reformers that spoke about the importance of having access to education, even for the most rural of communities. And we had free education, at least for the time duration that I have been there, my dad has been there, we’ve always had free education and free health. And that’s probably one of the reasons why Sri Lanka has the highest literacy rate of most countries that you could find on the planet.

0:15:18.0 VN: And also a very, very good, healthcare system that enables us to live a little longer than the average person from our part of the world or with the kind of infrastructure we have financially. So those two things I think have been great going. So my dad used to always… My dad is a socialist in many ways. And when I started doing my work, he used to always find fault with me saying you know what? You’ve learned something and you are teaching it only to the rich, only to people who can afford you. And that’s wrong. And I’ve always told him that, Hey, you know what? That’s my vocation. I have a family to feed, and what can I do? Knowledge.

0:16:05.9 VN: And when I first wrote my first couple of books, this became almost my way of pacifying my dad [laughter] to make sure that he’s off my back, so to say. So most of what I know is put out in a book in some form. And whenever I learn something new, I do a new book. And that’s my way of saying, Hey what? If you want access to the insight, you wanna know something, here it is, it’s free of charge. I don’t even ask you to log in your email address or phone number or subscribe button, and you can download it. So that’s the reason why it’s free of charge. And the newest book, the reason why I’ve decided to sell it is because, as you know, Sri Lanka went through a massive financial crisis a couple of years ago.

0:16:56.5 VN: We are still not outta the woods, so to say. We are heavily in debt, and at some point as the citizenry of the country, we have to pay it back. And without our GDP going up by leaps and bounds that happening is slim. So, it is quite possible that we can go through several cycles of this before we are out of the woods. And one of the things that is happening now, which I haven’t ever come across in my years of existence. By the way, it’s mandatory that kids go to school until they’re 16 by law. And Sri Lankan parents are very invested in their kids’ education. It’s something that they take very seriously. So it’s very common. And I grew up in a village initially, and it’s very common for most people in the village to probably forego their meals and feed their children so that they go to school, because they see education as their way out of poverty.

0:17:56.8 VN: And we have a system where in the fifth grade, you pass a scholarship exam, and you can come into any of the best schools in Colombo. And that’s what most parents gun for if their kids show any inclination of excellence in academics, they would gun for that because they know their future is secure after that. What is happening now because of the deepening financial crisis, and it’s better now than what it was a couple of years ago where we had no fuel, no electricity and all of that. It’s a lot better now, but still, we don’t have enough jobs to go around. Inflation has more than tripled, quadrupled in certain aspects. So most people in many communities find it difficult to feed their children. And because of that, kids are dropping out of school quite often.

0:18:44.6 VN: There are days where they go without anything, and those days, they don’t go into school. A few of us, and this happens in pockets all throughout Sri Lanka. Lots of us are trying to find ways to feed wayward schools, because if there’s food in the school, they come just to have that meal. So it’s almost a way of guaranteeing that you continue to school because the school provides food. So we are trying to fund as many kids as we possibly can or many schools as we possibly can, where we have the lunch being provided free of charge in school, which ensures that kids actually attend class. Because you at least come for the food, and that’s good enough to get you to school. So that’s the reason we thought, let’s sell the book, raise as much funds as we possibly can towards the cause. And all of the revenue that comes out of the books, apart from obviously printing charges or something like that would go in directly to one of the organizations we are partnering with called Child Action Lanka. And the money just goes directly there. It doesn’t even touch our accounts.

0:19:55.2 WB: Well, it’s certainly a great cause and let’s hope that the listeners can support and purchase the book. You have a number of high profile local as well as international influencers that are giving support to the book. So I think you’re off to a great start. One of those influencers is, again, an adopted mentor on my part, Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, he is an interesting character, but the forward to your book was written by somebody many people have a love-hate relationship with, I know in HR, many him as the father of modern HR, Dave Ulrich, he wrote your forward. And he points out that we all know good leadership is vital, yet employee experience, and the evidence that’s being recorded around the world about leadership performance is kind of suggesting anything other than a positive situation. So clearly there’s something fundamentally wrong somewhere, whether it’s within the organization, whether it’s the individual, but what I loved about your book is that you very nicely address the issues, and not only address the issue, but you offer steps to correct the situation. And we’re gonna go into some detail into the book, but I’m curious before we do, do you have any overarching thoughts about why so many leaders are struggling today?

0:21:27.5 VN: So let’s step back for a moment and understand that we are all products of both aspects. I’m not gonna get into the debate of are we born or are we made? I think we are both. There are certain characteristics that we are born with for sure. Otherwise genetics play no part in you. But we are also made through the experiences that we have and the circumstances we are in and the people we meet, and we are shaped by it. I don’t think anyone can deny that. Now, which is more important is a relatively philosophical conversation and for the sciences to do. But I’m more interested in what do we do with that paradox, and that reality. So when an individual walks into the organization, there are a couple of assumptions that people make. The first assumption is that everyone should be a leader.

0:22:20.2 VN: I have always disagreed with this. And then therefore, there is a natural nudge for everyone to kind of climb higher in the corporate ladder assuming that you become a leader along the way. Bad assumption to have. Number one is that, we have to understand that when we grow in the corporate ladder, that becomes, you become more senior as a manager, not necessarily a leader, number one. And number two, most of us want to get to the higher levels of management because the pay is better, and we get other perks. And not necessarily because we want to take the responsibility. So there are many reasons why people wanna progress, especially now a part of the world that holds true. If you offered a junior level executive the salary of a CEO and turned around and asked the question, do you want to become CEO?

0:23:08.2 VN: Vast majority of people will turn around and say, I don’t want the hassle. But you become that because that’s the only way for you to have a better quality of life. That’s one. The second is that we assume that leadership always is around a title or a job or a position, which is also not true. However, the paradox is also not true, which is to say you can be an effective leader without some form of authority. Inside an organizational setting, that’s almost impossible, especially for hierarchical cultures like ours. If you don’t have the title, you can have the best leadership qualities that you can find in a person, but you can get easily overruled. And it’s only a matter of time until you get so frustrated that you leave. So that’s the second aspect of it.

0:23:52.1 VN: The third aspect of it is, we assume that we naturally display certain characteristics if we are given the freedom and the space. Partly true, once again, partly false, because there are a lot of conditions that goes in. And just because you get a position and get the authority doesn’t necessarily mean that I will act in a way that befits it that particular role or title or position. If that were true, the world will be a beautiful place. Presidents will be presidents, CEOs will be CEOs, fathers will be fathers, mothers will be mothers. It is not that simple. So what I’ve always felt that there are three things that you need to kind of make sure happens simultaneously inside organizations. The first is, I’m a firm believer that structure begets behavior. And I often say that you need to have certain level of structure for a person to behave in a certain way.

0:24:47.7 VN: Without those structures, it’s a hit or miss. And I often give the example of people driving on our Sri Lankan roads. Sri Lankan roads are quite chaotic. You have cows, you have dogs, you have cats, you have people crossing the road. And the road isn’t big enough. And it’s chaos sometimes. But we also have highways. And in the highways, if you actually set up a drone and watch our behavior, we drive as well as if not better than most European countries or the US or Australia. We signal when we are overtaking, we are very polite. We are very structured and so on and so forth, but it’s the same person driving on both roads. How do we switch that behavior? It’s the structure. So from an organizational perspective, I think you need to have structures around who is identified for leadership potential and who’s moved up, number one. And number two, on how they are groomed.

0:25:52.1 VN: You have these two things in place. It’s very difficult at the entry level to find out whether you have leadership potential or not. At an interview, it’s near impossible to demonstrate this. But six months to a year to two years inside an organization, there’s plenty of time to observe you, identify where you need to improve and help you along the way. But you need to have very strict criteria on who goes up. Performance is always the reason why you should be identified as potential, you need to perform, for sure. But performance alone without that particular type of behavior that the organization is looking for, and the values that you have to live by, if those are not present, promoting that individual into a leadership position is a grave mistake. So that’s the structure part of it. The second aspect of it is obviously, I need to bring myself into the party too.

0:26:47.7 VN: I need to be willing to learn. I must be willing to take on more responsibility. I must be willing to make a few sacrifices along the way, and I must be big enough to understand that is this job for me or not? Can I really do it or not? That’s the second part of this where I need to bring myself into that equation. And the third, of course, is the role that the organization and you do in tandem, which is about offering leadership opportunities, taking on the leadership opportunities. Offering opportunities with mentors and coaches and making the most out of it and embracing that. Making sure that I test you and me learning from that set of tests that I undergo, and introspect on it. So those two meeting and working together is what grows leaders. And I think the reason why organizations don’t have the type of leaders they need to have is exactly that reason.

0:27:45.9 VN: Those three things are not there. We do not have the right practices to vet out people and distill people and take them to the top only if they’re suitable for leadership positions, vis-a-vis only because they perform really well. And the second is, when I am given that opportunity, I don’t necessarily make use of it, it’s a combination of these two. So nine times out of 10, what we have is either someone who performs brilliantly well, who’s completely ill suited for leadership positions. I feel completely as if though, I have a big ego. I’m threatened by other people. And therefore I now make sure that nobody else who’s remotely as smart as me has any hope of actually climbing the corporate ladder, because I felt threatened. That’s where it all stems from.

0:28:37.1 WB: It’s a great segue into your book. I know you’re very vocal on LinkedIn about leadership training and organizations and the way they offer leadership training and their expectation being extremely unrealistic in many cases. We won’t go into that in a lot of depth, but I think that also ties nicely to what you’re talking about there. So we really need this holistic approach perhaps when we talk about developing leaders. So with that nice foray into the book, Growing Leaders, if the listeners recall, I asked the question about similarities between farming and Growing Leaders. This is essentially the metaphor that you use as the books framework. So I wonder if you’d mind introducing that background and why the farmer concept, how that comes about?

0:29:29.5 VN: Well, when we talk about agriculture, I do need to slightly set context, because the kind agriculture you are used to in Australia is very different to the agriculture we do. We do have obviously a certain level of mechanization. We do have tractors, we do have equipment. And now more than ever. But the agriculture I was talking about was mostly organic, mostly used with bulls and a plow, manual labor. And it was a way of life more than something that you do for profit. It was how you fed your family, it was how you made sure that there was enough crop to last the rainy seasons, and that you didn’t go hungry. So there was a lot more riding on it than rupees and cents that you make as an organization or a profit. So.

0:30:19.7 VN: And we still have this type of agriculture in Sri Lanka. It still exists. It’s not as common as it used to be, but it’s still prevalent, and it still exists. So if you just take a look at how we do agriculture and what we do, for starters, there’s a certain reverence around it. It’s not just a job. It’s not just a vocation. It’s a livelihood, and it’s a way of life. So there’s a certain reverence to it. Secondly, you have to understand that you can’t control the weather, and the weather plays a big role in the kind of agriculture we do. If you don’t have the rains in time, all of the effort that you do is for nought. And you can’t help that. We can’t predict the weather. Even back then when global warming wasn’t a phenomena, we still couldn’t predict the weather, and now it’s a lot worse.

0:31:12.6 VN: And then of course, you have to understand that the entire family and the entire community is involved in it. It’s not just one family doing it. So there’s an interconnected aspect to this. So when I looked at agricultural ways, and I come from a agricultural background, and my father’s family were farmers and still are, some of them are still farming in the old ways, I honestly think it’s exactly the same kind of thing, or the same processes that happens in leadership. And that’s why I called it growing leaders versus developing leaders, because growth is a more organic thing, development is much more mechanical thing. So if you just take a look at the process, firstly, you obviously prepare the soil. You’re not gonna plant anything without preparing the soil. Now, when I say it like that, it sounds so obvious, but we take it for granted.

0:32:10.7 VN: We assume that you can just throw a seed and then it’ll blossom, which is the assumption we have when it comes to people. We think that you can put people in a position and they blossom, and it doesn’t, because the soil isn’t fertile for the person to grow. The general joke I always make is that if you take a coconut to Siberia and plant it, it’s not gonna grow [laughter] And there’s nothing wrong with the coconut, and there’s nothing wrong with Siberia either. It’s just the wrong place for the coconut to grow. At the same time, you ain’t gonna put a coconut in and expect mangoes to come out of it [chuckle] So you have to really be sensible about these things, which we are when it comes to agriculture. I don’t think anyone’s gonna plant paddy and expect anything else apart from paddy to come out.

0:33:02.4 WB: So you can’t really do planting without preparing the soil and preparing the soil is a big part of paddy cultivation. There’s a severity to it. There’s a focus to it, and there’s a seriousness by which you do it. And I think the same thing is true for organizations. Before you do any form of leadership intervention or training or coaching or mentoring or anything of that sort, you need to make sure that the organizational architecture is right to build leaders with. And if that is not right, you need to put that right first. And if it is not done, you can throw the best of people through a training program, nothing much is gonna come out of it. Coconut in Siberia. Then of course you have the planting side of things. Notice the fact that when we do traditional farming, the best seeds are generally kept for replanting.

0:33:54.1 VN: It’s the rest that is consumed. Because understand that if you don’t take the best of the best and replant it, the crop is not gonna be good next time around. So the same is true when it comes to choosing leaders. If you don’t take the right group of people to the next level, there’s a mismatch. You’re expecting them to be leaders, but you haven’t taken the best of your people to those positions for them to demonstrate those. Then you have to look after the plant. And once again, it’s manual work. There is also something called weeding that we do, which you have to do if you want to make sure the crop survives, otherwise the weeds take over. The same is true for organizations. Sometimes no matter what you do, you have people who don’t fit the organization.

0:34:45.4 VN: I have always maintained that there’s nothing called a bad person, but there is such a thing called a bad fit. So if the person doesn’t fit right, you do have to remove them from the organization, because otherwise it becomes dysfunctional. And then of course, there’s a lot of care, a lot of love, and a lot of protection that happens to the young plants. The same is true for young leaders. You need to give them coaching. You need to give them mentoring. You need to give them training. You need to give them opportunities to shine, and opportunities to grow. And when they do make mistakes, you do have to support them through that and make that a learning experience rather than a horrendously difficult experience for them to live through. And then they start to bear fruit. And then comes the harvesting time.

0:35:30.2 VN: Now harvesting is also a ritualistic activity. And the first harvest is always made into being a celebration. We have have our new year to celebrate the new harvest. And when leaders come of age, the same is true. You need to give them that pride of place. You need to celebrate the fact that they’ve made it. You need to give them that opportunity to bask in that glory knowing that, I’ve arrived and also still that I have a long way to go still, but nonetheless, I’m here now. And then of course comes the practice of passing this down to the next generation. Notice the fact that we don’t have agriculture textbooks written by our forefathers that tells you how you should be doing this like we do. It was done by taking you by the hand at a very young age and putting you through the motions.

0:36:19.1 VN: I think the same is true for organizations. There is great wisdom in someone who’s lived through a certain experience, and we don’t make enough of it in modern organizations. We discard the old as if though they don’t belong, or they have no part to play. And I think that’s a huge mistake. And there is a huge role that seasoned veterans inside the organization who took the organization to a certain level that can impart on the youngsters. And there’s a lot that the youngsters can impart on the seniors too. Learning is not something that is hierarchical or tenure based. Learning is something that both parties can do from each other. And this happens in our societies where you would find that the youngsters come in a pair of jeans, and our forefathers would wear a loin cloth still. But there is no problem with the learning experience just because you are in a loin cloth, or because I was in a pair of jeans.

0:37:17.7 VN: We just accept. It’s just the way it is. So sometimes we get so bogged down with the semantics of these things, and we draw divides between the generations and so on and so forth and label them without saying, Hey you know what? Forget the labels. Let’s just figure out how we can learn from each other. And if you flip it that way, there’s a lot that we had. And then of course comes you eventually retiring and you only coming to take a look at the field, and you might give a few bits and bobs of wisdom. But you are not gonna poke into the affairs of the youngster who’s plowing the field at that moment in time. Once again, the same is true for organizations. I think there is something really nice when seniors who build the organizations comes once in a way, even if though they’re retired and says hi to the young generation, gives a couple of inputs, shares a few war stories, that helps propagate a certain culture and ethos and deep bond with the organization. So to me, the process by which we do agriculture by and large, it’s beautifully with how I think we should grow leaders within an organization.

0:38:28.4 WB: Yeah, there’s a great correlation there. And you weave it so beautifully through the book. So you’ve just introduced the four parts of the book, by the way. So the book is broken into four parts, preparing the soil is part one, planting, part two, nurturing and watching over part three, and then harvesting part four. What I thought we would do today, if it’s okay with you, is we’ll focus mainly on part one. We don’t wanna give everything away about the book. We want people to go out and buy the book. [laughter]

0:38:56.5 VN: Absolutely, absolutely.

0:39:00.3 WB: So [0:39:00.4] ____ have the whole story. You make some great statements throughout the book. One of them you mentioned has stuck with you from your ancestors, from your grandparents in particular. A saying that says, if I get it right, you can’t demand plants to grow faster. And I really enjoyed that association when I think about some of the leaders, and some of my leaders, and their expectations were somewhat different to that.

0:39:29.5 VN: Well, for sure. So here’s the thing. I think there’s a… See, nine times out of 10, we take a one-sided view of things. And this is the beautiful part about agriculture. No one planting seeds takes credit if the crops do well. Of course, I’m not talking of greenhouses and such, okay? I’m talking of my type of agriculture that comes down from generations. We always give credit to the weather, to gods, to whatever you wanna call it. We always externalize it simply because we understand that whatever effort we put in is only one part of the equation, not the total equation. Now, is this not true for agriculture that is done in a greenhouse, which has definitive technology behind it? Of course it isn’t true. So the analogy only holds if you are coming from this kind of context.

0:40:26.6 VN: But I find it so important that you understand that context, because that is so for people also. When people do well, we generally have a big thing about finding one reason why they were successful. I worked hard therefore I was successful. I had great parents because of that, I became successful, or I had a vision and therefore I was successful. None of this is true by itself. No matter how much of a vision you have, if you didn’t get the support you need, chances are you will not be successful. Similarly, no matter how much of support you got, if you didn’t have a vision for yourself, you are not gonna be successful either. So nine times out of 10, we fixate on just one thing and say, this is why it happened. The reason why I put that in at the very beginning of the book is to say, you really can’t tell people this is how you need to grow in leadership.

0:41:20.7 VN: It’s very difficult to do that. You can’t just give a set of statements and aspects, I’ll talk about competencies. Right now, we have a competency metrics generally that you are supposed to be trained on, which is great, but none of us are good in every single competency. It’s just not possible. It’s a bit like asking a batsman to bowl and a bowler to be a batsman. There are all rounders, of course, but they’re the minority, the vast minority, most of us who generally specialize on one thing. So what you need to careful about doing with people is to find that which you are really good at, which you are passionate about, and that you have a inkling of success towards. If you don’t pick that as a senior leader, you’re gonna actually get this person to suffer through their leadership journey because you’re doing something that is alien to you.

0:42:11.9 VN: But we all grow. With the right conditions we all grow at some point. How fast we grow, it’s a very personal thing. Even in families, you imagine being told, look at your brother or look at your sister. They got straight A’s, why can’t you is a no brainer. That’s because they are them. And I am me. I am not good at mathematics. My uncle was brilliant at mathematics, and my mother couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t particularly good at it. And I told her, it’s your fault. You didn’t pass on the gene to me. What can I do [laughter] but I was good in other things. So we each have a very personal journey to undertake in leadership. And I think that’s the starting point of growing any leader. For you to have that conversation with an individual, you must be open to the suggestion to say that individual needs to have a very personal growth plan. And if you have a cookie cutter model on this and turn around and say you know what? We are gonna put all 35 of you into a program, and we are expecting you to come out on the other side exactly the same. That’s a non-starter to begin with.

0:43:20.7 WB: Well, let’s look at the first part. And it’s preparing the soil. When we talk about farming in your context, you just talk about the need to put in the right effort and the right focus to ensure the soil preparation is done properly before you plant. And then when you relate that back to the organization, you say there’s a need to make sure that the organization’s ready to grow their leaders, and that the soil is ready for the leaders to be grown in. And you talk about three elements. You talk about the mindset of the organization, you talk about having the right frameworks in place, and then ensuring that the resources are available, that creates three chapters and makes up part one. So there’s an insight for the listeners. That’s what the first part’s about. I won’t go too deep into all of these, but maybe we can just talk briefly to each chapter starting with mindsets.

0:44:19.6 WB: You introduce under this mindset or norms as you also refer to them that there’s some prerequisites, if you wanna grow leaders, that we need to have four key mindsets or norms in place for leaders to be able to grow. I don’t even know if you remember them, but I’ll introduce them and you can speak to them if that’s okay. So the first one is, everyone has a potential to lead. You already mentioned that. The second is, not everyone will become a leader, and that’s okay. You’ve mentioned that. The third is that each individual is a person, and they had their own unique leadership journey to undertake. And you’ve touched on that as well. And then development of people is an investment into the future. And we have to make that investment irrespective of the circumstance.

0:45:09.6 VN: And I go back to agriculture. I really do go back to agriculture. We plant thousands of seeds. Not all of them sprout. And there’s no way of knowing which one will sprout until you plant them. You really don’t know. Now, you can have a success rate of 90%, 95%, 99%. You never have a success of a 100%, ever. That’s what you… Now imagine a farmer thinking, damn it, 10% of this is not gonna grow. So I’m not gonna plant 10% [laughter] that’s a no brainer. If you want to say that to a farmer, he’ll look at you sideways to say, you probably need to go to the asylum mate, not come and do farming. [laughter] Because your logic is completely bombing. So it doesn’t make any sense. But we take this call with people, we try and assume or try and almost take a bet on who will work and who will not work.

0:46:10.7 VN: Our job is to offer equal opportunity to everybody to come and shine. Whether you do or not is up to you. And lots of circumstances. Maybe I have different circumstances to you, and therefore my leadership journey might be slowed down or what, or maybe I don’t wanna become a leader in the first place, whatever. But that doesn’t mean that the organization doesn’t give me the opportunity. The opportunity is given to me. Whether I take it or not is a different equation, which is why I in the next chapter talk about self volunteering for leadership programs, rather than being nominated for them. Or having a system of ensuring here is a set of self-learning material, come and take a look at it, study for yourself, sit for a small exam and see whether you can get enough marks. And if you showed enough interest, you will get enough marks, that’s my litmus test to find out whether you want to progress any further or not. Show that interest before I invest.

0:47:07.6 VN: That is fine, but the opportunity must be given to everybody. So the issue is that we are not willing to make that investment on people assuming this would not benefit. And the answer is genuinely right throughout my career, lots of people have surprised me in how they’ve grown in their positions, including people I work with. I’ll give you one example. I have a young colleague of mine who joined us to train, and her first training programs were horrendously bad. She got really bad ratings, she got really bad reviews. Some people even turned around and said, don’t send her again and the whole nine yards. But we somehow knew at the back of our heads, she was a subject matter expert. She works really hard. She does superlative work in her workplace. There’s no reason why she can’t be a good learning facilitator.

0:48:09.9 VN: So we sat down, we did some work. To her credit, she took all of that feedback beautifully well. Was she upset? Of course she was. But she took it beautifully well. She made notes. She worked even harder. And today, she’s probably one of the most asked for trainers that you can find. So you don’t know who will surprise you, and you must be open to that suggestion. If by one event or a couple of events you discard people and say, that guy has no potential. I think that’s a big mistake. Now contextually, they might not have a place in your organization in that particular context, for sure, maybe, but they can find other slots to shine. And that’s our job. Once again, you’re not gonna plant something like, I don’t know, mango trees or coconut trees or vegetables or something like that in a paddy field, you only plant paddy in a paddy field. The soil is prepared for that. So organizations are also like that sometimes. We have a particular type of person we need at this moment in time for our positions. That doesn’t mean the others are bad. They might be a wrong fit. And it’s part of our job to find them places where they can shine.

0:49:34.4 WB: One of the things I like throughout the book is you give real case studies, and you talk a lot about Sri Lankan businesses. You showcase a lot of Sri Lankan business, MAS holdings, I think is is one of the ones you showcase in the beginning. They’re a textile or an apparels organization. It seems based on our conversation earlier and what I see in the book, there are a lot of companies in Sri Lanka that are doing extremely good things.

0:50:02.3 VN: Yeah. Well, I’m very biased on this because I’m Sri Lankan obviously, but I’ve genuinely felt whenever I step out of Sri Lanka and do work outside of Sri Lanka, that we don’t make enough of the strides we’ve made in the HR vocation. I really do think that Sri Lanka has some brilliant best practices. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, we don’t necessarily make case studies out of it as you would do through a Harvard Business Review case study or in academia, in other countries where the academia comes into industry, analyzes case studies and presents it back as learning material. We don’t have as much in the management sciences and leadership, elements in Sri Lanka. So we borrow a lot from the west. And in a very selfish way, I wanted this book to also kind of portray to the rest of the world that we might have been a bankrupt nation, but we are not bankrupt when it comes to our HR practices.

0:51:09.4 VN: We really have a lot of good that I think the rest of the world can learn from. Let me just give you one small example. You mentioned MAS, MAS has pioneered some of the best practices in the apparel trade. Brandix is another organization that is big in the apparel trade. They’ve pioneered some of the industry best practices that you can find. Hirdaramani is another major player in the garmenting industry. They have pioneered certain best practices in the world. So set it into context. Before MAS most garment factories anywhere in the world was more or less a sweatshop. MAS was one of the first, if not the first organization in the world to actually have fully air conditioned facilities for sewing. And that was a radical move. And if that doesn’t speak to the love and care we have for people, I don’t know what will. Where those days it was only the management that was actually sitting in an AC office, the factory would just have fans or just normal ventilation and it was considered okay.

0:52:17.2 VN: That’s right. And with MAS, they actually AC the entire facility and said, everyone will work in AC comfort. That that was unheard of. And this is 30 years ago, well before any form of compliance standards were there. In fact, when compliance standards first got introduced, Sri Lanka had some of the first pilot studies of things like the wrap apparel code or the ETI code and things like that. They pioneered this. So whether it is MAS or Brandix or Hirdaramanis from the apparel trade, whether it is Duncan Duo Porcelain from having completely different ways of managing themselves to even smaller organizations. We have a little eatery, which I have visited and patronized from the time I was 12 or 13 years old, I still go to it called Raheemas. Raheemas have a way of making sure that their cooks stick to the recipe, which is unwritten.

0:53:16.3 VN: And they have the biriani and fried beef, which tastes exactly the same. They have the same level of consistency that you would find in a McDonald’s burger without a single written process involved or a recipe involved. How do they do it? And we don’t make enough of these because there is a method and a process around that too. It doesn’t have to be written down. And if those little organizations are anything to go by, we have a lot to learn from the little people as much as we do from the larger organization. So the book was an effort to showcase some of these, which I think should be spoken about, and hopefully it’ll peak enough interest for some of the better, bigger universities to come down and take a look at Sri Lanka in earnest and do a few case studies. I think that will be grand.

0:54:09.5 WB: Yeah, it’s extremely interesting that that’s why I enjoyed it so much, because the stories really resonate, and they’re not things that you typically hear about, and you bring them to life. In the second chapter, you talk about two essential frameworks that really need to exist for uniformity as well as structure, the values framework and the leadership competency framework. I’m conscious of the time, so we won’t go into too much detail on those other than just to mention them. And then in the third chapter, you start talking about role models, and this is closer to home. So I thought we’d sort of spend a moment on the role models. You talk about three key areas of resource, in fact, not just role models, but you talk about, there needs to be sufficient time, there need to be the right financials, as well as having the role models. So I wonder if you you’d introduce that a little bit, please.

0:55:09.2 VN: Sure. Again, one of the problems I’ve often faced is that we assume that money is the only resource you need to have. And lots of people have training budgets, which is great, don’t get me wrong. But I also know of organizations that has run, one example by site is Pelemix, which has no training budget, or well, didn’t have one for the longest time. They did all of their basics internally, but they had fantastic role models, and they took the time to teach people. Now we have a fascination with outsourcing everything. It’s good to outsource, but you can’t outsource responsibility of grooming someone to someone else. It doesn’t work that way. It’s a bit like parenting. You can’t outsource growing your… Parenting children to somebody else. You can of course send them to school to be taught certain subjects that I understand completely, but you can’t really outsource the responsibility of growing them to somebody else.

0:56:10.3 VN: The same is true for developing leaders or growing leaders. You can’t outsource this. So the budget everyone talks about, so most organizations get that piece right. You have a decent budget for training and development. But what about the time? Lots of people don’t necessarily have the time to devote to that, and that’s an organizational fundamental belief issue as well. Releasing these people for training is a waste of time, or we shouldn’t release them because we have more important things to do. Now, of course, there are extreme circumstances, but by and large, you need to make sure that you make enough time for it. So if you’re putting the money, you better make sure that you have the time as well. And role models come into play, both these parts. You have to be a role model to be able to say you know what?

0:56:57.3 VN: And sometimes if you have role models, you don’t need the budget nor the time, honestly. Because we mimic behavior. When we are small, we mimic behavior. I often joke about the fact that if you tell me who your three bosses were, and Sri Lanka is a relatively small place, so chances are we know most people, if you tell me who your first three bosses were, I will tell you exactly how you behave. Because we mimic behavior when we are young, when we first join work, the type of boss we meet, we absorb that person. Similarly, when we are children, we absorb most of our parents little nuances, little habits, little norms, little beliefs, all of that. We are responding to that. So it is, inside organizations, if you have the right role models, we watch them.

0:57:45.2 S5: And you don’t necessarily need to give instructions. Just being there in their company and being able to do what they do and be part of that informs you. And when you take up leadership positions one day, that kicks in automatically, near automatically. If you had a boss that would take you out ever so often and sit down and have some lunch and crack a few jokes, you innately start mimicking that behavior with your juniors. So I think all three are important. Now, there are limitations to all three, which is why I brought up all three. If you have only role models, you don’t know any better. Your job is to be better than your role models, not to be limited by your role models. And that’s the biggest compliment any son could pay the father is to be able to say, I’m better than you.

0:58:35.5 VN: That’s about the best compliment you can pay. The same is true for leaders. If you are a great leader, chances are your team should be better than you. And the moment that happens, you’ve done your job right. And towards that, a certain amount of resources to listen to people who are completely from a different perspective, go and experience training programs that your mentors would never have been able to experience, have exposure in places that they couldn’t have had access to, and so on and so forth is important. And towards that, budgets and time matter. So having role models, I think is the anchor. The augmentation of it comes through time and money.

0:59:15.1 WB: Any last teaser to our listeners around the book overall that’s likely to draw them in even more?

0:59:20.2 VN: Right. So, I would leave you with this. I think it’s important that if you take on the approach to take growing leaders inside an organization, I think one of the things we struggle with, or at least certainly I have struggled with, is to see where do I start and how should I go about it? It’s not to say I should be limited by a framework. But to start with, I need to have something holistic that I can sink my teeth into so that I know where the moving parts are. So what the book hopes to do is not just to give you bits and bobs of things, or to mull over, but to give you a starting point to say, if you do 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, that is your starting point. And making sure that you have taken this holistically rather than only focusing on let’s do a training program on leadership, or let’s start a coaching, or let’s do this or that or this intervention. Rather than doing that, take a look at it holistically, understand where the moving parts are, and you will know exactly how to go about ensuring that you have a leadership pipeline that spans across the organization, not only at the top. It is important to make sure that you grow leaders from the bottom onwards. And that is what the book will give you.

1:00:37.5 WB: So the book’s called Growing Leaders goes on sale 31st of this month, July, all money goes to charity. I believe you can pre-order already, Vidusha.

1:00:49.2 VN: Yes, you can.

1:00:53.9 WB: Where are you going to be releasing the book? Amazon or where?

1:00:56.3 VN: Yes. So we are planning on releasing it on Amazon as well as other platforms where eBooks are available. And for pre-ordering, we’ll probably give you the link so that, and if anyone wants to pre-order it, they can also as well.

1:01:11.8 WB: Absolutely. Fantastic. I’ve had the pleasure of reading the books and I’m confidence it’s gonna be a bestseller, and all the best.

1:01:15.7 VN: Thank you very much.

1:01:22.1 WB: Thank you for joining us on the ET project, a show for executive talent development. Until next time, check out our site for free videos, eBooks, webinars and blogs @coaching4companies.com.