Three lessons from Ganesh: purpose, focus and community

My friend and colleague, Balasubramanian Ganesh, retired from HSBC this month to pursue the next stage of his career: setting up and running an NGO in India. Anyone who knows Ganesh knows that he will make this endeavour successful, and that he will make a difference to many lives. I’ve had the privilege of working with and for Ganesh in three different companies over more than a dozen years, and would like to share three lessons I have learnt from him.

Focus Needs Persistence

It might seem obvious that you are more likely to be successful if you focus on a goal and are persistent in the achievement of that goal. However, by working with Ganesh, I learnt what it meant to truly focus on a goal and persist in its pursuit over an extended period of time. I saw this in two contrasting situations.

First, I worked with Ganesh when he led the technology integration of two large organisations. Many such programmes start well, but become bogged down in the realities of execution, and end up compromising their goals: they may conclude, but may not deliver what they intended. I learnt from Ganesh that it is possible to avoid this trap by clearly defining a goal, understanding the path to that goal, then focusing every single day on clearing obstacles to the goal - and persisting with this focus until the goal is achieved. That sounds easy when put like that, but it is incredibly hard to do over a programme of many years.

Second, in his time as leader of HSBC Technology India, Ganesh was a passionate advocate for increasing the number of people in senior leadership positions in India: to ensure that our leadership population reflected our team population. All of the technology leadership team believed in this goal - but it was Ganesh who kept us focused on it by drawing our attention to it whenever possible, refusing to let others forget it, and refusing to accept a lack of progress.

Purpose Should be Distinctive

I know many people who have received career advice from Ganesh, and they all repeat one lesson - that Ganesh advised them to find the answer to the question: what are you going to be famous for? By this Ganesh did not mean that we should selfishly seek personal glory, but that we should attempt to identify the distinctive value we could bring to our teams and organisations. This question can be difficult to answer, but answering it provides renewed purpose.

Ganesh found ways to apply this advice to teams as well as to individuals. Early in our time working together, I saw Ganesh take responsibility for a team with notoriously low morale, looking after a legacy system which was seen as unglamorous and unloved, and working in a physical environment which was similarly dilapidated. Ganesh offered the team a deal: he would personally spend time on improving their working environment and would give them the support they needed to do their job. In return, they needed to discover and demonstrate their distinctive purpose: the special value that they offered to the company. The team accepted - and the next year was at the top of team engagement scores.

Communities Grow Careers

The lesson that many people will remember for the longest time was also the one that I learnt most recently, when observing how Ganesh approached his role as leader of HSBC Technology India. In this role, Ganesh had very few people officially reporting to him. However, he established himself as the clear moral leader of a community of many thousands of people. He dedicated himself to giving this community an identity and purpose - and to incorporating development and learning into that identity and purpose. Many people now have many more chances to develop their career as a result of their time as members of the HTI community - and will have friendships and experiences which will last for life.

I learnt these and other lessons from Ganesh in our time working together - I look forward to learning even more from what he does next.