NHRD Journal - National HRD Network

company for global competition. Over a
hundred teams were mobilised to bring about
improvements in different areas. Cumulatively,
over 5000 people were entrusted the challenge
of carrying out various initiatives for
modernising mindsets of the company's 40,000
employees, enhancing quality, bringing about
radical performance improvements through
'Total Operational Performance' (TOP), creating
a market-oriented organization, debottlenecking
facilities, phasing out
technologically obsolete plants, adding new
facilities for manufacturing value-added
products, capacity expansion and so on. The
entire workforce of 40,000 people was trained
in certain improvement techniques to change
patterns of thinking. A major change initiative
called ASPIRE (Aspirational Initiatives to
Retain Excellence) was launched to use teams
as an instrument and source of innovation in
the company. The idea was to get people to look
at existing operations with new eyes, be
innovative and translate the ideas into effective
ground-level implementation. Not
surprisingly, the company has been rated
among the top five steel producers in the world
for the last four years by the World Steel
Dynamics. The purchase of Corus has also
propelled the company to a high world ranking
in terms of size.
Though the company changed all the
components of capability - its skills, systems,
structure, strategy and culture, the heart of the
leadership lies in building self-efficacy. Selfefficacy
refers to the confidence an individual
has in his or her ability to achieve challenging
goals. A high level of self-efficacy makes it easy
for individuals to learn new things because
they experience less learning anxiety. As we
have noted, the subjective world and mindsets
of organizational members determine what
they see and how they would think and act.
This change leadership role of fostering a
positive belief in people that they can face the
challenges of change and overcome them has
been termed as 'efficacy builder'.
To build self-efficacy, leaders enhance the
aspirations of people to face challenging tasks.
They create positive role models for others to
emulate; design incentives that induce people
to set high goals for themselves; ensure that
there are support mechanisms to help people
achieve their stretch goals; and promote
learning as a desirable goal in the
organization. In short, they structure
opportunities for people to set challenging
goals and achieve them.
Finally, it is important to note that a single
leader need not necessarily address all the four
sets of challenges by himself/herself. An
effective change leader understands his or her
strengths and limitations and teams up with
other leaders having complementary strengths
so that the leadership team can perform all four
roles to be able to navigate through the complex
challenge of altering mindsets.
64
November 2007 NHRD Journal