“Leadership with EQ is my mantra,” Kabir Ahmed Shakir, CFO of Tata Communications, wrote on his LinkedIn page. It may seem like an unusual sentiment for someone who heads up finance for one of India’s largest telecoms, but a conversation with Shakir reveals that people skills have been a constant throughout his career. His EQ has been instrumental in growing Tata Communications from a company satisfied with average performance to a global giant. Here are some of the leadership lessons he shared with CFO Brew.
EQ trumps IQ: Before joining Tata, Shakir was CFO of Microsoft in India after spending 23 years with Unilever. When he was a VP at the CPG company, he asked his mentor, an SVP, what he could do to make it to the next level. His mentor told him that technical skills would only take him so far. “‘Those are table stakes,’ he said,” Shakir remembered. “‘If there is something that’s going to really take you further from here, it’s going to be people management skills.’”
Shakir took the advice to heart. He defines leadership as being so inspiring to staff that they’re looking forward to work even during their off hours. “That’s true leadership. It’s not Monday through Friday when I pay your salary,” he said.
“You hear people join organizations but quit bosses,” Shakir said, but he’s observed that the corollary of that is also true: “They deliver their exceptional performance only for bosses.”
Know thy customer: Leaders need to thoroughly understand their businesses, Shakir said. “Management commentary needs to come from the part of the story behind the numbers, and that will come only from understanding the business,” he said. “And the way to understand the business is grassroots: Go meet the consumers who make that purchase decision.”
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While working with Unilever’s sales team in India, Shakir did just that. “I’ve gone to villages,” he said. “I’ve gone to huts where there’s not a chair to sit in, sat on the floor, and spoken to consumers.” He observed small business owners as well: “I literally went and measured the number of cups of tea my tea powder would produce in a hot tea shop in Chennai, in the south of India,” he recalled.
Brand equity is everything: This experience taught Shakir an invaluable lesson. Once, he spoke with the 16-year-old daughter of a landless laborer, who told him she used a particular brand of skin cream called Lakmé. Shakir asked the girl why she didn’t shift to a cheaper brand. The girl agreed that Lakmé was expensive, and noted that the price had recently risen from 58 to 60 rupees. She then said, Shakir recalled, “‘Low price means low quality.’”
That statement stuck with Shakir and influenced his decision-making whenever others suggested “salami-slicing” product quality to improve margins. If they argued that consumers would never notice a 1% reduction in quality, he would reply, “She will know. And when she punishes you and walks away from the product, she’s not coming back.”
“The biggest thing was, for me, never play with customers’ trust,” Shakir said. “You earn it over the years, you lose it in a second.” The same holds true for B2B, he said. If customers know you as a “secure, reliable network,” he said, “then no excuses—do whatever it takes internally to live up to the promise to my customer, because that’s why they came to Tata Communications.”
“As a CFO,” he concluded, always be mindful that “the source of sustained revenue comes from your brand equity.”