Leadership Style Leading to Astonishing Group SuccessA Case Presentation from the pages of successful product launch of Daily News & Analysis (D.N.A) newspaper in the Mumbai market during 2005-2006Daily News & Analysis or D.N.A was launched in the Mumbai market amidst much fanfare and media scrutiny on 31st July 2005. Promoted by Diligent Media Corporation, a 50:50 JV between vernacular media powerhouse Dainik Bhaskar Group & the electronic media giant Zee Television Ltd, D.N.A was launched with the objective of challenging the hegemony of the Times of India in its own turf and providing a viable English daily alternative in one of the biggest advertising market in the country while riding the economic boom that the period stretching between 2004-2005 was witnessing in general. A differentiated all color English language daily targeted mainly at the urban educated young demography was the target population behind that bold decision. The editorial theme was to provide contemporary news in a format that questions the prevalent status quo and channelizes the pent up feelings among the educated, discerning and opinionated mass through insightful and investigative journalism.

The advertising revenue strategy of the newspaper was justifiably focused towards establishing category leadership in segments that were reach-critical from the point of view of young readers who were expected to constitute the most profitable readership base to be sampling the new product as early innovators in the initial phase of the product diffusion process. One such important advertising segment was the education vertical a segment that was generating robust business volumes in the Mumbai market those days. The phenomenon was aided by the prevalent high economic growth which led to significant corporate investments and employment generation and there was heavy demand for professionally qualified manpower. That in turn was creating significant market demand for various professional and vocational courses resulting in heavy advertising investments by such service providers in communicating their offers to the target group/s. The case presenter had incidentally joined D.N.A at that point in time in the advertising sales wing of the company and was inducted into the education category sales team during early July 2005.

It was a brand new and very young sales team with members joining with diverse experience including the case presenter and many of the team members were not even from media advertising or from print dailies background. The team was headed by a senior manager who had earlier worked with the Times of India Group but catered to a different market and therefore carried no prior experience in dealing with either Mumbai market or more specifically with education sector. The need of the hour was to get the disparate group members settled into a highly cohesive and interdependent team whose group task could have been achieved optimally only through collaborative participation and goal sharing. All of these had to be achieved within a very short time span as the revenue stakes involved in the audacious launch were indeed high, while defending against a ferocious competitor and a very agile market leader the incumbent Times of India Group.

The backdrop was an ideal platform for a business leader to demonstrate assertiveness, tact, maturity and vision qualities that were not only required to face the challenge head-on but which could also help building a resilient, fast learning and highly empowered team who could quickly develop into a high performing unit. The incumbent Senior Manager in charge of D.N.As education vertical seized the initiative as a deft task master and cracked the whip early on in demanding complete commitment from individual team members at the very outset. An elaborate process quality and control mechanism aimed at augmented client relationship management was initiated at the behest of the manager and every team members were made to go through the drill with daily feedback sessions stretching well beyond late evening. The sessions were free-wheeling filled with sharp innuendos with the sole objective of testing individual team members depth of involvement with the tasks allocated and their delivery accountability in terms of potential realization of the associated revenue targets. The tone of the sessions was modulated to test the true mettle of the team members with an eye to evaluate their mental and physical fitment in meeting the arduous challenge day in and day out.

This task-oriented approach of the Manager quickly helped in institutionalizing certain best client servicing practices for the division which started to translate into precise business forecasting with high level of client engagements and robust business pipelines. Individual team members achieved their role clarity and developed an instinctive eye for details while canvassing for their respective business domains.

Interesting fallout of those testing times was the emergence of a high degree of team cohesiveness and team identity where the individual team members started to complement each other in achieving the collective goal. Coming from diverse backgrounds meant that each member brought in some unique strengths and skill sets which the members started cross leveraging while foregoing their individual vested goals. These practices ranged from servicing clients based on interchangeable role plays to satisfy unique buying motivations, rotating and distributing operational routine tasks among members and bestowing specific resources with the task of addressing specific developmental needs in catering to key account management practices. The impact soon started translating into robust increase in market shares for D.N.As education vertical and pegged the competition with a credible challenge to run for their money.

As things started to unfold, the Manager gradually changed gear and over time his involvement metamorphosed into active mentoring with the aim to push the team members into a group of high energy creative solution seekers. The evening feedback sessions started to culminate into fortnightly team dinners, sometimes along with the Divisional General Manager and the occasions were to celebrate each of the new milestones achieved. Cash rewards, spot incentives which the individual team members started to achieve were decided to be spilt equally and such decisions were always unanimous in contravention to the general practice across the organization otherwise. Monthly target forecasting interestingly transformed from being top driven exercise to bottoms up projections where individual members used to take the lead in generating more than were expected in terms of organic growth possibilities. The ritual became more aspirational rather than conservative projection estimates and more often than not, those stretch projections started to materialize. Emboldened, the group dared to push the frontiers of competitive selling and started to think of innovative ways to break into anti-competitive practices erected by the competition as revenue roadblocks to bleed D.N.A.

Here again the Group Manager took the initiative in pushing the team members to start interacting with various departmental colleagues across editorial, production, distribution to help broadening the team members holistic business understanding from an organizational context. Free exchange of ideas, thoughts emerged from such interactions and the education team suddenly started viewing opportunities beyond the realm of advertising engagement with important clients in their attempt to create strong service differentiators.

One such idea caught the fancy of the team when they realized that the newly installed press is yet to run full capacity owing to limited circulation of the newspaper. As the education business those days involved printing of reading materials, there was a captive demand for such job works across the education sector a business necessity that such clients mostly outsourced wherein they had little competitive advantage. Soon bundled package offers were introduced by the team in accounts who had exclusive advertising contracts with the competition and in one innovative move; the exclusive advertising contracts of the competition surmounted the legal implications and the roadblock disappeared for D.N.A. The move resulted in account win of a large education service provider of national importance whose volume contribution to the education advertising business was close to 8% annually.

While the team members achieved the seemingly impossible task of breaking into the bastion of the competition, the Group Manager played the role of a perfect facilitator of relationship harvesting, mostly staying at the background while occasionally stepping in to add the missing piece in fixing the puzzle. As the team gained in self-confidence, the Manager started delegating more decision tasks to the team members, making them to face senior company functionaries in fielding revenue critical questions while he himself would be clarifying specific doubts with regards to the more loaded queries on strategic directions. Within no time, the journey distilled out a robust second line of team leaders from a seemingly inexperienced batch of disparate young sales executives who made a significant contribution towards establishing D.N.As education advertising vertical on a strong footing in the Mumbai market.

The entire episode saw the Manager donning the initial hat of a hard task-master and then gradually switching to a more relationship-oriented facilitator. Starting with extreme level of control, the leadership style changed into active mentoring mode to pave way for the development of a group of high willed and independent high performers. The Manager willy-nilly made himself redundant over time for the specific role for which he was roped in and while the second line of sales executives developed into mature team leaders, the Manager was promoted to Divisional DGM rank.