In the 16 years that Gordon Coburn has worked at Cognizant Technology Solutions, the firm has ballooned from about 1,000 employees to more than 145,000. To manage such explosive growth, Coburn and his team seek to preserve organizational culture.
For Coburn, president of Teaneck, N.J.-based Cognizant (CTSH), the key to protecting the information technology consulting firm’s culture is creating an environment where employees can apply themselves fully and succeed. That means articulating a vision and then getting out of their way.
“We empower people to run their piece of the business and make sure they have the tools they need,” said Coburn, 48. “Otherwise, you become a bottleneck. To get and keep good people, you can’t micromanage them.”
He adds that a culture of empowerment depends on the quality of the staff. Hiring self-starters with technical prowess and people skills paves the way for better results. Coburn says the best people “have judgment, intellect and fire in the belly.”
Tapping Internal Know-How
Coburn’s appreciation of the value of empowerment set in early in his Cognizant career. As head count grew, he realized he no longer knew everyone’s name within the firm — and that he had to step back so they could step up.
Giving employees the space to succeed is especially important today. In 2011, Cognizant hired an average of 20 people every business hour during the year, Coburn says. Establishing what he calls the “tone from the top,” characterized by transparency and clear communication, has enabled the company to grow so fast without losing its identity.
To harness its expanding brain trust, the company launched “Cognizant 2.0” around five years ago — a global collaborative platform for employees to share knowledge. Through this online tool, staffers can connect with internal experts and discuss learning experiences with customers.
Thanks to this repository of internal knowledge, employees preserve institutional memory and best practices. They can answer each other’s questions and read case studies and white papers.
“We want it to be process-dependent, not people-dependent,” Coburn explained. “We want the process to be replicated so that it’s not dependent on a particular individual. So we document with care what’s done and why it’s done.”
If a customer faces a recurring problem with an application, for example, the Cognizant employee who fixes it the first time will describe the steps he or she took — entering the solution into Cognizant 2.0 — so that other workers can follow the same process in the future.
Because a majority of Cognizant’s workforce is under age 30, they are adept users of social media. Cognizant 2.0 appeals to younger employees in part because it involves crowdsourcing and other online social networking activities.
“Many of our employees are on Facebook Sunday night,” Coburn said. “We want to make their Monday morning experience like their Sunday night experience.”
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