Rishad Premji looks for 3 traits in an employee: Ability to unlearn, sense of empathy & vulnerability

Before the onset of Covid-19, Wipro’s Rishad Premji spoke about the changing workplace and impact of startup culture.
In what could have been a premonition of times to come, Rishad Premji, chairman of Wipro, recently spoke about the effect of startup culture on traditional business and the corporate world in general.

“If you are not thinking like a startup, you are staring at a shutdown. How do you continue to work in larger organisations with a startup culture? It is not easy,” Premji said at a panel discussion in Mumbai a few weeks ago, before the coronavirus pandemic sent corporates into work-from-home mode and the country under lockdown.

Wearing a grey suit and light blue shirt, he stressed on the need for older companies to adapt. “You have to have a mindset of learnability. And equally important, the ability to unlearn. Because often people who have been at [the same] jobs for many years, and been successful, [they] have a certain fixed way of doing things,” Premji said.

He gave an example from his own daily practice of putting learnability to use.


“When I interview people, I am looking for that skill. I am also looking for team work and the ability to work…The sense of empathy and vulnerability. Gone are the days of everybody having the right answers. The world is changing so quickly,” Premji said.

The ability to put people together to leverage what is outside of you and to bring it together are important for Premji and Wipro.

“We tried a certain planning approach [some time ago] where we wanted to have a base and an ambition target. It created a very different and distorted kind of behaviour than what we were anticipating. We said, ‘Hey, look, we made a mistake and we are going to change course’. We are not afraid to say, ‘We tried something. It didn’t work out’,” he said.

The way ahead is being able to overcome hurdles. “There is a mindset to try and then move ahead if it does not work. Not to get dog-headed about the fact that you tried something. You need to share failure as leadership — by talking about your own areas where things have not gone as planned. You can encourage your teams by sharing your own stories and having their back,” Premji added.