Dr. Reddy's Foundation

Dr. Reddy's Foundation works to support India's most underprivileged youth in attaining sustainable livelihoods. Its flagship social responsibility program LABS—Livelihood Advancement Business School—has trained over 290,000 youth. "This is a CSR arm of Dr. Reddy's laboratories. Our objective is to reach out to poor families both in the space of livelihoods as well as education," then-CEO Jitendra Kalra explained about their mission.​

Broken Culture Paralyzing Leadership

Until very recently, the LABS program was free of cost for participants and supported by grants received from a sponsoring company. Due to financial constraints, the program was limited to 75 centers and 25,000 youth a year. To overcome this challenge, the foundation adopted a more sustainable social business model in which aspirants contribute a nominal fee to offset program costs. While this change would enable the foundation to serve significantly more youth in more locations throughout the country, it also required the foundation to become more lean and efficient in its operations.​

Reaching the necessary levels of efficiency seemed impossible at the time of the change. The organizational culture was broken. "One of the key challenges I was facing was collaboration between the heads of the departments. The blame game would go on. We weren't gelling very well within our team," Jitendra described the dysfunction.​

CEO Arbitrating Everything, Losing Sleep

Friction between internal departments resulted in interdepartmental issues being delivered to the CEO who was expected to arbitrate and provide solutions. When asked to account for lagging results, each department would blame the other departments for their failure to improve team performance. "But when it came to interacting with the other departments then there was more of a blame game than any collaboration," he explained.​

"It was like you had to push things. You had to lose temper at times. You had to shout at people and you had to really push people around to get things done. Now all this was huge stress for me," Jitendra admitted about the toll. "As head of the family I was concerned about the loss of productivity. I wouldn't have sleep on certain nights. I was worried on certain fronts."​

Raghvendra echoed the breakdown: "Well, we should mutually, you know talk together and resolve that issue. You know, that was missing." Bhaska described the mutual blame: "I blame them for their not supporting me in certain areas. And they'd continue to blame me, me not supporting them in certain areas." Soujanya admitted her own role: "I was always complaining to my boss saying, Ari what's happening? What is going on here? Why isn't things moving ahead? I was only focusing from my side."​

Enrollment Decline and Quality Collapse

The quality of the training program delivered to the youth suffered, and enrollments steadily declined. To combat lower enrollment levels, the foundation began exerting more energy to recruit new students, reallocating resources that previously ensured program quality. Program instructors felt significant pressure from administrators, and without adequate support, their morale and motivation plummeted.​

It became a common practice for the instructors to register youth who didn't meet program need requirements in order to reach enrollment quotas. These core issues were exacerbated by an internal stream of formal complaints, poor response to internal emails, and irritation at the demands of the students. "They never used to understand us. We never used to understand their requirement. So there used to be a lots of struggle during the meetings," Bhaska recalled.​

CEO Commitment as Foundation for Change

Many interventions fail when leaders delegate ultimate responsibility for change to someone else. Because the Arbinger consultant who arrived to assess the foundation's problems knew the critical importance of leader buy-in to improve team performance, he invited the CEO to expressly state what his role as the organization's leader would be in the transformation effort.​

"There was some very exciting experiences I started relating to that were talked of in the book," Jitendra recalled about discovering Arbinger through Leadership and Self-Deception. Raghvendra had found the book first: "There is a book called Leadership and Self-Deception. And I found the book, whatever the concepts given in that book is powerful. So immediately I shared with few of our colleagues in the organization." He continued: "We could do a two-day workshop in the organization, with the help of Arbinger."​

"The trainer asked me to get a sense of how much committed I was as head of the organization to the whole process," Jitendra explained about the accountability moment. Once the CEO had expressed this commitment to his key leaders, the CEO and leadership team began an initial facilitated work session.​

Workshop Creating Common Language

The workshop provided a common language for the top 30 leaders that first, helped the leaders heighten their self-awareness. Second, provided a framework and tools for self-management, and third, provided opportunities to apply the framework and tools in their work with each other.​

"This was a complete transformational experience for all of us. The impact of the workshop, the journey thereafter, has been immense. We achieve far more now than what we were achieving earlier," Jitendra described the breakthrough.​

Three-Month Intensive Transformation Process

After experiencing a new and better way of working together, and equipped with Arbinger's tools, the foundation's leadership embarked on an intense three-month process to transform three key aspects of their organization. They focused on: (1) redefining organizational and individual objectives; (2) shifting from holding people accountable to helping people hold themselves accountable; and (3) refining policies and processes to ensure they were inviting an outward mindset.​

Department leaders worked alongside individual team members to revise department and individual objectives. They focused on doing work in a way that enabled the foundation's stakeholders—especially the students—to accomplish their goals and objectives. The foundation also instituted monthly meetings between the students and department leaders as well as between leaders and their direct reports. Feedback from the students was now shared in real time with the instructors and their managers, helping them make rapid course corrections and adjustments to improve team performance.​

Before every meeting, employees determined together whether they were approaching the meeting from an inward or an outward mindset. This has enabled the foundation to focus on results instead of allowing their personal biases or emotions to impact key decisions and influence the strategic agenda.​

Weekly Coaching and Policy Overhaul

The final piece of the puzzle was to review key processes and structures within the organization. Unhealthy attrition rates signaled the need to closely assess program quality and recruitment policies. After identifying a significant disparity in instructor quality, managers worked one-on-one with lower performers to help them assimilate student feedback and create their own improvement plans. Guided by Arbinger's tools for self-correction, instructors and their managers were able to clearly define and rigorously track improvement.​

In order to maintain momentum and continue applying an outward mindset to the practical and ever-changing needs of the organization, the CEO and department leaders met with an Arbinger consultant weekly. Through these regular sessions, the team ensured an outward mindset by measuring their impact on other departments and working in a disciplined way to assimilate feedback. These sessions were marked by straightforward and honest interchanges and spontaneous efforts to help each other succeed.​

As a result of working with Arbinger to improve team performance, complaints have all but disappeared, student enrollment and retention has dramatically improved, and the interdepartmental blaming and resulting silos are relics of the past.​

Collaboration Replacing Conflict

"Well, we have seen a lot of value. It has been one year now. So in this one year, if you see in the organization there is a tremendous improvement in terms of collaboration," Raghvendra summarized the first-year impact. Raghu Gudipati, a senior department head, described the change this way: "There has been a significant improvement in collaboration, teamwork, and support between departments. People are now treating people as people. I can surely say that this has brought considerable change in our way of working and has dramatically impacted our results."​

Soujanya described her personal transformation: "Then I actually started interacting with people and started to see what they are trying to achieve in the department or what they're trying to reach. So from then I started like changing my style of working and going to the level of what they are expecting."​

The shift was visible in daily operations. "90% of my time used to go into writing emails. Today I rarely write email. That's how today the collaboration goes to the next level," Bhaska noted about the efficiency gains. The culture change reached all levels: "Now that kind of a culture is visible at all levels in the organization," Jitendra emphasized.​

CEO Time Freed for Strategy

The transformation freed leadership from constant firefighting. "Earlier, my whole day was spent in addressing issues, largely of conflict, of two departments not agreeing to something. Now, I hardly ever see emails like that. Number of emails itself has gone down to me," Jitendra explained. He continued: "After this journey, they stand taking responsibility for it. They resolve it and maybe they come back and report to me what the dispute was and how they resolved it. And there's no intervention required from my side."​

Major Strategic Decisions Now Possible

Because of their new way of working, the leadership team was able to generate the consensus needed to take major, unprecedented steps to remove roadblocks to success. One example is the reduction of the enrollment fee cost per participant, a substantial shift only made possible by newfound operational and cost efficiencies. "Arbinger provided the courage to make key decisions which have resulted in improving course registrations," Jitendra remarked.​

Remarkable Output and Quality Gains

"The output now is four times. We train approximately 2000 youth every month and get them with the jobs," Jitendra described the productivity breakthrough. The quality transformation was evident in employer feedback: "And in fact, the employers are starting to come back to us saying, 'Your youth are different. They talk a different language.' And some of the even grown up employees in our organizations don't talk that language. And I think that's making us believe that the process has begun."​

With this new way of working and a sustainable model, Dr. Reddy's Foundation is poised to continue its aggressive growth strategy and better enable economic empowerment for the rising generation in India.​ 

Dr. Reddy's Foundation proved that you can't scale social impact when departments spend their energy blaming each other instead of serving beneficiaries. When India's largest youth livelihood program needed to transition from grant-funded to sustainable fee-based model requiring operational efficiency, broken culture made scaling impossible. Department heads blamed each other for declining enrollment while the CEO lost sleep arbitrating conflicts, instructors registered unqualified students to hit quotas, and program quality collapsed. Traditional interventions would have failed—the breakthrough came when the Arbinger consultant required the CEO to commit to his role in transformation before beginning. Through two-day workshop with top 30 leaders, three-month intensive process redefining objectives and accountability systems, and weekly coaching sessions, the foundation shifted from CEO-arbitrated conflict resolution to teams resolving issues themselves. The result: 4x productivity increase, training 2,000 youth monthly, complaints eliminated, and enrollment dramatically improved after operational efficiencies enabled fee reduction. Employers now report that Dr. Reddy's graduates "talk a different language" than even experienced employees. The lesson: you can't improve team performance by making the CEO a permanent referee. Transform how departments see each other's objectives—from obstacles to support—and collaboration, efficiency, and mission impact follow.