Though public sector bank leaders demonstrate certain levels of competencies, they fall short in customer responsiveness, planning, decision-making, risk taking, openness to change, creativity and innovation. This has been surmised by a FICCI-KPMG report titled ‘Public Sector Banks — Profiling the Leadership Landscape’.
The report, which was officially released at the Banking Conclave 2013 here on Wednesday, said banks would have to transform from a “transactional intelligence demand and supply of economics to emotional intelligence of building, nurturing and caring”.
KPMG said banking structures and portfolios would get re-crafted over the next decade and this would require effective leadership. “Leaders would need to display significantly higher levels of proficiency across a spectrum of key leadership competencies”, it said.
The HR issue
The report has been prepared in view of the human resource problem that the banking system is likely to face after a decade, as the existing pool of “leaders” shrinks with retirements.
“With an inadequate number of employees at the middle management level (majorly due to hiring freeze in the public sector organisations between 1990-2000), succession planning is likely to emerge as the key area of concern,” the report said. The consulting firm, while assessing more than 1,375 leaders (top three levels of management), also developed a ‘Leadership Competency Model’ for public sector banks. The model identifies key requirements for leaders to be successful.
“These competencies are strategic leadership, change leadership, operational leadership, stakeholder leadership, talent leadership and customer leadership,” the report elaborated.
The average age of senior management employees in the public sector is around 50 years. More than one-third of these employees are likely to retire within a decade.
The Khandelwal committee has observed that over the next few years 80 per cent of general managers, 65 per cent of deputy general managers, 58 per cent of assistant general managers and 44 per cent of chief managers in public sector banks will be retiring. The Reserve Bank of India has termed 2010-20 as the ‘decade of retirement’.
jayanta.mallick@thehindu.co.in