Days of authoritarian leadership diminishing: Wipro chairman Rishad Premji

Aabha Bakaya, Senior Editor, Business Today TV moderating the session with Wipro Chairman Rishad Premji during the NASSCOM Technology Leadership Summit (NTLS) 2023.

The days of authoritarian leadership are diminishing, while the vulnerable leadership style is becoming pervasive, according to Wipro Chairman Rishad Premji.

“The days of the authoritarian leader are more and more diminishing. The space for authentic, empathetic, vulnerable leadership where I can say ‘I need help, I don't know,’ is very much becoming pervasive,” Premji said at the Nasscom Technology Leadership Summit (NTLS) 2023.

Premji believes that leaders who can empathise and connect with people are very powerful. The Wipro chairman also said that it is important to encourage an environment of risk-taking and celebrate failures.

“It is important to celebrate things that don't work. Because otherwise, you kill the spirit of trying new things continuously. Innovation by design doesn't mean everything will succeed,” he said.

This comes days after IT major Wipro wrote to candidates it previously made an offer of Rs 6.5 lakh per annum (LPA), asking if they would be willing to take up the offer at Rs 3.5 LPA.

Wipro has delayed onboarding the 2022 batch of graduates for several months due to an uncertain demand environment, margin pressures, and recessionary concerns.

Premji was speaking at a fireside chat with Amit Chandra, founder and chairperson of Bain Capital India Advisors, where the panel discussed the future of work, diversity, inclusion, and culture building within organisations.

The future of work is hybrid, according to Premji, at a time when the back-to-office debate is ongoing, particularly in the tech industry.

Premji, speaking at NTLS, added that a pure virtual model worked three years ago because employees knew each other in the world before the pandemic.

“I've seen high attrition over the last few years. 40, 50 to 60% of people in the organisation are new to the organization, they've never walked into an office. They haven’t built professional relationships before physically,” said Premji.

While talking about the effects remote work has on professional relationships, Premji quipped that there is a big difference between “a friend and a Facebook friend.”

Wipro chairman also said that while work needs to be hybrid, companies need to go to where talent is rather than getting them to bigger cities.

“We should be coming back in some shape or form and connecting because there’s an intimacy to it that is irreplaceable with technology. People should have the flexibility to work from home, but people should also be coming into organisations,” he said.

This also comes after the company laid off 452 freshers it had made offers to but hadn't yet onboarded because they "performed poorly in assessment repeatedly even after training."

The Nascent Information Technology Employees Senate had written to the labour department over these layoffs, terming them to be unethical.

Meanwhile, Wipro is rolling out 87 percent of the variable pay for the third quarter of FY23 for employees whose variable is linked to company performance.