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In 2008, the newly appointed chairman and managing director (CMD) of Bank of Baroda, one of India’s largest public-sector banks, was exploring ways to implement the vision of making the bank one of the most popular and customer-oriented public-sector banks in the country. Under the tenure of the previous CMD, a strong foundation for growth had been built, and subsequently, the bank had made tremendous progress and had been ranked third among its peers. However, the bank continued to suffer from the typical malaise of large public-sector organizations — although change was taking place, the firm was sluggish, inadequately responsive to customers, and using outdated processes and technology. Consequently, the new CMD was faced with the challenge of managing the legacy of his predecessor. To accomplish his goal, he took on the task of reinventing the bank by dispelling the culture of fear and caution that prevailed. Could he make the firm more agile and customer-savvy, while quadrupling revenue?

In early 2014, Ferio Pugliese looked back on his turbulent first year as president of WestJet Airlines Ltd.’s new regional air service Encore. Encore represented the company’s most significant organizational change in its 18 years of dramatic growth. Expanding the airline’s fleet to include smaller, short-haul aircraft that could service smaller destinations throughout Western Canada had not been without growing pains. For example, a number of employees reportedly felt they were losing their sense of belonging in the company that prided itself on employee satisfaction. Pugliese wondered how he should proceed in putting Encore on a successful path.

The chief executive officer of Kvantum Inc. received a distressing email from the human resources manager at Data Research Services. The two companies shared office space, and Data Research Services had invested seed capital in Kvantum. However, a Data Research Services employee was now accusing one of Kvantum’s most competent junior data scientists of harassment. The Kvantum employee had apparently approached the Data Research Services employee personally and then again through a popular social networking website. If the allegations were verified, Kvantum could lose a valuable employee. Moreover, a workplace scandal could adversely impact the start-up’s reputation. The issue required immediate action. Should it be considered misbehaviour? If so, what kind of misbehaviour? Most importantly, how should Kvantum resolve the problem?

Most leaders are so overworked that they have few resources left with which to energize their teams. And yet, as Peter Drucker noted, the foremost job of a leader is to “take charge of your own energy and then help orchestrate the energy of those around you.” This article uses science to explain why trust is an effective means to improve performance. It then shows how trust can be measured and provides an action plan to build and increase workplace trust. Dr. Zak’s lab discovered in 2004 that the brain chemical oxytocin allows us to determine who to trust. The mathematical models he has built to understand how trust affects economic behaviours reveal that trust accelerates transactions such as investments in factories and equipment. It does this by reducing transaction costs associated with distrust. When there is increased trust between trading partners, there are fewer delays and more deals occur. Conveniently, the eight factors that create a culture of organizational trust — Ovation, eXpectation, Yield, Transfer, Openness, Caring, Invest and Natural — have an easy-to-remember acronym: OXYTOCIN. <br><br> To increase trust in their organizations, leaders should: 1. View employees as volunteers, who continue to show up only if they are engaged by the organization’s purpose. 2. Use joy at work as a measure of an effective culture. 3. Experiment by changing OXYTOCIN factors one at a time and measuring the effect on joy and productivity. 4. Invite co-workers to tangibly recognize each other weekly (see Ovation). 5. Communicate your organization’s transcendent purpose internally and externally via an engaging human-scale story that goes beyond increasing shareholder value.

At dawn on May 29, 2015, Swiss authorities acting on behalf of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation entered a plush hotel in Zurich, Switzerland to arrest nine senior executives of FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), soccer’s global governing body, as delegates from across the world convened to elect a president to lead them for the next four years. The incumbent president, who had been in office since 1998, at first refused to step down, but pressure from the media, sponsors and fans as the investigation escalated forced him to resign a few days later. The organization’s signature event, the World Cup, had grown into a quadrennial cash cow through the shrewd sale of broadcast and marketing rights. Now, charges of corruption were forcing its governance and practices into the limelight. How could the executive forge a path ahead and what steps were needed to repair the organization’s reputation and survival?

Several experts had drawn attention to a peculiar problem existing in public-sector banks in India. There seemed to be two distinct generations: experienced employees who would be superannuated in the next four to five years; and newer employees who had come on board in the last four to five years. Though these young employees were academically sound, they lacked competence acquired through experience and thus were hesitant in taking on responsibilities. The older generation was slowly withdrawing. Management at Indian Overseas Bank (IOB) knew that in order to improve motivation and encourage higher productivity, the company had to trigger change and transform the mindsets of its employees.<br><br>Harnessing the energies of young members of the marketing team, IOB ran a unique campaign involving all employees called Rang De Basanti. Initial results were encouraging. However, two problems continued to arise: the underperformance of one particular region and the problem of keeping up the momentum and sustaining the change.

Although the Toronto Blue Jays didn’t make it to the 2015 World Series, they clearly didn’t lack character — and this wasn’t a fluke. As departing General Manager Alex Anthopoulos explained, team management had made a concerted effort during the off-season to focus less on “talent and tools and production” and put more emphasis on player “character, make-up, quality of the human being, what kind of teammate they are.” This article uses research on 11 character dimensions that drive performance to examine how the team members came together to contribute to one of the team’s best performances in decades. The focus on character that Anthopoulos put in place did much more than make the Blue Jays popular with fans — it was what turned the team into an outstanding baseball club. And that’s something that the next GM should take note of, along with managers and directors responsible for hiring and promoting individuals in the public, private and not-for-profit sectors. After all, as Ivey research shows, giving character the attention it deserves leads to “home runs” in performance outside the baseball stadium as well.

The Bob Franklin case series portrays four critical incidents in the life of Bob Franklin, allowing students to explore both the role and development of the lead character throughout his career. Although there are choice points, attention is directed at who you are and why you are and who you are becoming as revealed in the choices made.

A recent law-school graduate is delighted to land a job as a junior associate at an up-and-coming legal firm in New Delhi, India. In spite of his initial enthusiasm for the job, after just three months, the young man is on the brink of quitting. The firm has failed to meet its promises with respect to compensation and the nature of the work assigned. After many fruitless attempts to rectify the situation, the young associate is left feeling powerless, cheated and angry. A series of futile arguments with his immediate superior have left him all the more bitter, as he believes that his boss holds some sort of personal grudge against him. He now wonders whether he should quit this job he so desperately wanted, or tough it out and wait for things to get better.

Only about one-third of unethical corporate behaviour is driven by a desire for personal gain — greed isn’t the key issue. This article debunks myths of unethical corporate behaviour and argues that such behaviour is most often a result of situational and contextual factors, job dependence and cognitive factors. No evidence suggests that the average businessperson has a Machiavellian personality. Although some unethical workplace behaviour is self-serving, most unethical acts are the result of managers encountering moral dilemmas. They can act unethically out of desperation, especially when their job security and financial livelihood are challenged. If they behave unethically, they often rationalize their unethical behaviour by believing that what they did was morally acceptable, and emotionally “consume” to address the negative feelings associated with this behaviour. Their organizational dependence causes them to experience added pressure to perform, thus perpetuating unethical behaviour. <br><br> In order to avoid the cycle of unethical behaviour, managers should a) have human resource managers focus on providing employees with career counselling and development opportunities so as to avoid becoming too dependent on their employers; b) try to live within their means; c) keep an independent ombudsperson in the firm that can assist when they encounter moral dilemmas; d) implement ethical training programs; and e) practice ethical leadership. The outcomes associated with workers behaving badly are often relatively benign, ranging from lost office supplies and inflated expense reports to minor customer deceptions and white-lie tax filing. Collectively, however, the cost of these acts is enormous, and the business world needs a better understanding of what makes managers misbehave.

When Volkswagen’s emissions-hiding scandal surfaced, then-CEO Martin Winterkorn initially tried to ride out his leadership crisis, claiming he had been unaware of the company’s use of pollution-hiding software. Authorities are investigating, but currently no public evidence directly links senior management to the rigging of diesel engines marketed as green technology. Winterkorn eventually agreed to resign to give the company a chance to recover, which might have been worthy of some praise, but then Winterkorn insisted he was “not aware of any wrongdoing on my part.” This article examines why he bears responsibility for the crisis as a leader and examines the related lessons that should be learned. The auto sector is under huge pressure to cut both costs and emissions while also improving vehicle quality and safety. As a result, and as every CEO knows, the temptation to cheat is enormous. But as a leader, it never pays to focus on rewarding results while ignoring how they are achieved, especially when conducting business in environments that are highly competitive. In other words, trust is only a good thing when you have a culture that supports the right behaviour. The essence of good risk management is asking appropriate questions and getting truthful answers. Leaders need to listen to the “whispers” in the organization. The Volkswagen saga is yet another example that all three Cs of leadership — competencies, character and commitment — are essential for good leadership.

Apple, the tech firm founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976, could soon be a trillion-dollar enterprise. Its power to invoke fear in competitors is directly related to Jobs’s success as a market disruptor. But while Jobs’s passion for the design and quality of products created under his leadership is worth trying to emulate, the leader character of the man is not. Besides significant shortcomings in his personal life, Jobs had no problem taking credit for work done by others and declined to join The Giving Pledge. His burning passion for design caused him to fail as a businessperson more than once, and much of Apple’s success can actually be attributed to happenstance and good fortune. While the business world can learn a lot from Steve Jobs, the leader character of Apple’s legendary co-founder is not pedestal-worthy.

Being a business executive is about leading, competing and winning — which is why sports stories can be valuable reference points for decision making and motivating. Take, for example, the National Football League’s Super Bowl XLIX, which was lost due to a terrible judgement call by the Seattle Seahawks coaches that provides a vivid illustration of something that is critical to business success — the willingness of leaders to listen, and the willingness of staff to speak up when they disagree with the boss. History is full of mistakes caused by leaders who set courses of action that went unchallenged even when everyone else saw them as folly. Leaders should ask for feedback before taking courses of action, because it is easier for staff to be critical of a position the leader has not yet taken. The viewpoints of staff should be carefully listened to, and private conversations should be initiated with those staff members who do not speak up. Staff can be heard more effectively if they are prepared and well-informed, because nothing makes a leader stop listening faster than half-baked criticism.

ABB India, the Indian subsidiary of ABB Global, has been lagging behind the parent company’s other subsidiaries in terms of its percentage of female employees. To rectify the gender imbalance, the parent company has assigned the head of Diversity and Inclusion for India, the Middle East and Africa with the task of introducing and rolling out diversity and inclusion initiatives at ABB India. In June 2014, the chairperson of ABB has scheduled a visit to India and is looking forward to reviewing the status and progress of the diversity and inclusion program.

In identifying high-potential employees and leaders, the HR world tends to prefer “all-rounders,” meaning individuals who score well across a range of competencies deemed necessary to lead and grow businesses. As a result, many HR departments focus executive development plans on individuals with limited weaknesses — weaknesses that can be fairly easily “rounded off” or trained away. The logic behind this appears sound. But this reasoning can eliminate leadership candidates with one or two significant soft spots even when they are outsized talents in other areas. And that’s not something that everyone on the executive floor accepts. Indeed, to many members of the C-suite, clear gaps in competencies are seen as the price that must be paid for an individual’s clear strengths — especially when those strengths are in areas that drive business performance. <br><br> An emerging body of evidence suggests that managers who are exceptional in key areas and weak in others have a much greater impact on corporate performance than individuals who are exceptionally well rounded. While more work needs to be done in this area, the existing work indicates that having an executive team with some distinct capability “spikes” rather than smooth across-the-board capabilities can make a significant difference to business performance. Thus, when selecting leaders, the HR world should not discount individuals with a distinctly uneven capability profile, especially when those distinctive capabilities are likely to be key performance drivers. In other words, mind the spikes, don’t mind the gaps.

The hacker attack on Toronto's Avid Life Media — in which confidential information on 32 million Ashley Madison users was released — offers lessons for all companies, not just controversial ones. After all, the hackers in question did not act simply because the company runs the infamous Ashley Madison infidelity service. They were also moved to act by its aggressive marketing and customer service claims, not to mention its short-term thinking when developing tactics to make the firm more attractive as an investment. In this article, Ivey Business Journal Editor Tom Watson takes readers back to his 2010 investigative journalism on Ashley Madison during the time of its attempted initial public offering, when one of his questions to a boardroom of potential Avid Life backers was enough to make the bankers second-guess their decision. In addition to examining the stakeholder versus shareholder perspectives, he explores the threat that hackers and hacktivists pose to firms and cautions that leaders, such as the former CEO of Avid Life, can in fact have too much bravery.

The co-founders/consultants at Maynard Leigh Associates (MLA), an HR consulting firm based in the United Kingdom and India, are in a quandary about how to respond to a couple of ethical dilemmas. In the first case, a client has hired MLA to deliver a series of workshops to a group of employees who clearly do not need any help of this kind, and the workshop facilitator feels the client is wasting its money. In the second case, the CEO of a local IT giant has hired MLA to host a workshop that would brainstorm ways to eradicate all roadblocks to his organization’s success, but during the delivery of this workshop, the consultants realized that the biggest roadblock to the organization’s success was the CEO himself. Should the partners be open with the client about their findings and risk damaging a lucrative business relationship, or should they simply remain silent on the subject and pocket their fee. What would be the impact of their decision on the future of their company? Importantly, they need to make a decision that upholds MLA’s corporate values.

A merchant fraud scandal threatened Chinese e-commerce group, Alibaba Group, endangering its positioning, corporate values, reputation, brand strength, share price value and performance. It compromised Alibaba’s leaders’ credibility and the public’s perception of the trustworthiness of Internet-based trading. In the fallout of the scandal, two talented executives were accused of negligence. The board of directors had to decide how to respond to this crisis and to prevent future fraud on Alibaba’s diversified web-based trading platform. Was dismissing the executives the most effective way to achieve these goals?

The three cases in this series focus on two Chinese families’ experiences with entrepreneurship and succession. Because most family businesses in China are relatively young, these first-generation entrepreneurs use their own approach to identify and develop their successors, and to pass their “wealth” to their offspring in a context shaped by unique Chinese cultural elements. The role-play exercise that relates to the (C) case illustrates the current Chinese cultural characteristics that influence leadership succession and highlights the case issues to be explored in the case discussion. See also 9B15C021 and 9B15C022.

This is the second case in a three-case series. See also 9B15C020 and 9B15C022.