More than twenty years ago when the washing machine market in India was brimming for the first time with a slew of brands and competition was really hot, one company stood out for its outstanding performance. In this company, the CEO was stupefied at the phenomenal performance of one of his zonal managers who went on to receive a massive hike in emoluments and a promotion to the very top of the marketing department.

It so happened that the CEO happened to read an article in a management journal to the effect that success ought to be analysed at least as seriously as failure and one should always be healthily skeptical–use the power of NO.

He appointed a creativity consultant to look into the reasons for the phenomenal performance of the ‘star’ zonal manger. Unknown to this manager the consultant travelled deep into the territory meeting dealers and end users and thereafter submitted what turned out to be a shocking verdict that lead to the resignation of the ‘star’ manager. It turned out that the end users were using the washing machine to churn lassi! The company quickly realised that this was a health hazard and that the manager was in fact aware of this perverted use of the product.

An oft repeated fault in many organisations, is to automatically attribute success to the brilliance of the manager concerned or the team. Failure conversely is attributed rather automatically to incompetence. This is a serious flaw. In the above instance the CEO could have requested the ‘star’ performer to make a presentation to all the sales staff and share his insights into the strategy and tactics that in fact led to his grand ‘success’. In all cases of good performance it is essential to analyse the success factors with a view not to investigate into a possible fraud as in the lassi case, but in fact to see if the strategy could be replicated across the organization and also to determine if it was sustainable. In the performance assessment systems of most organisations the focus tends to be on successful outcomes of an executive’s efforts. This emphasis is being carried too far in most companies. The result of this overemphasis on outcomes is that little if any attention is paid to the process by which success was achieved.

Consequently good performance based on fortuitous circumstances gets rewarded while a dynamic executive whose performance may not be up to the mark for reasons beyond his control may go unnoticed or even punished. The role of chance factors in successful decision making or business strategy cannot be overlooked.

The decision making process has not received the attention it deserves. In nationalized banks for example it is common for executives to be denied promotion or to be suspended for what the management considers lapses in decision making leading to bad loans. It may benefit these banks to make a study of the correlation between the quality of loans on one side and quality of the decision making process on the other.

Too often for want of adequate awareness of and stress on the process factor, organisations may end up rewarding luck and punishing competence.

In the early stages of the decision process we tend to make a fundamental error, that of not challenging the data available to us. We tend to look at the data and form a viewpoint and then not seek further data. Even in gathering data we tend to look for that which confirms our pre-existing views. We fall into the trap of assuming a certain stance and then seeking evidence that substantiates our stand. This ‘confirmation bias’ is possibly why some of the best thought out and researched decisions often go wrong.

People who say that ‘seeing is believing’ are usually better at believing rather than seeing, said George Santayana. What he referred to is the phenomenon whereby we actually and unconsciously seek evidence that strengthens our pre-existing beliefs. This bias is perhaps one of the most debilitating aspects of human thinking. Allied with this is the mental filtering that we all do whereby we let into our mind information in a selective fashion. This filtering usually lets in only confirmatory information into our thinking process while conveniently keeping out disconfirming evidence.

I had a personal experience recently when a young college student from a South Mumbai college asked my opinion on the quality of college education in Mumbai relative to the rest of the country. I told her that Chennai had some of the best colleges offering quality education, at which point she reacted almost violently. Obviously I had touched a raw nerve. She was not comfortable with evidence that challenged her pre-existing beliefs. She challenged the basis of my conclusion and when I told her that I relied on surveys done by two major national weeklies she retorted ‘Both these magazines have no credibility in Mumbai anyway.’ Of course I assuaged her feelings by honestly stating my reservations about the scientific validity if such surveys. I was aware of the power of NO, the power of healthy scepticism.

While this was a relatively harmless instance, the consequences could be disastrous in the corporate context when decisions are taken with the confirmation bias. It is therefore necessary to be conscious of the working of such a bias and deliberately seek out disconfirming evidence. Some very successful top executives make a fetish, and rightly so, of deliberately encouraging executives who ‘dare’ to differ from them. Thus Sam Goldwyn used to tell his colleagues ‘I do not want yes men in this organization. I want people to speak their minds even if it costs them their job’. What he meant was that he insisted on disconfirming evidence.

Another top executive used to say at the end of a meeting that since all participants were in full agreement with his views he considered the meeting a waste of time and would summon another one on the same subject when some of his colleagues would prove him wrong!

I once advised a top executive friend of mine to recruit those who aggressively differed from him in the interview and challenged his viewpoint. He tried this tactic with trepidation. He now tells me that these dissenting recruits proved to be the most innovative ones he had ever employed. They had helped him avoid falling into the trap of the confirmation bias. Indeed the power of NO is immense. Parallel thinking, pioneered by Dr.Edward de Bono, is one technique that can help keep out the confirmation bias, and summon the power of NO, more so in a group decision making context.

The up-close managers tend to see roadblocks like this as a major problem. They see a hitch in the smooth running of their department. They see things no longer running to time or cost or output. And they see the effect on today’s, tomorrow’s or this week’s bottom-line.

That’s why the knee-jerk reaction of the up-close manager is to step in as soon as a problem is detected and fix it quick.

The let-go managers see it quite differently. When they see their employees hitting a block, they don’t see a “problem”, they see an opportunity. They see the chance for people to learn and grow. And they see the effect of such an opportunity not on the short-term bottom-line but on the long-term development of the employee and the organisation.

That’s why the quiet approach of the let-go manager is to be supportive, to be there and to lead.

On our Leadership Skills courses at ManageTrainLearn, we like to relate the story of The Butterfly’s Wings that perfectly encapsulates this difference.

It goes like this.

A man found a butterfly cocoon. One day a small opening appeared. The man sat and watched the butterfly for hours as it struggled to force its body through the little hole.

Then it seemed to stop making progress. It appeared as if it had gotten so far and could go no further.

The man decided to help the butterfly. He took a pair of scissors and snipped the remaining bit of the cocoon. The butterfly then emerged easily.

But something wasn’t quite right. The butterfly had a swollen body and shrivelled wings. The man continued to watch the butterfly expecting that at any moment the wings would enlarge and expand to support the body.

Neither happened. In fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with its swollen body and deformed wings. It was never able to fly.

What the man in his kindness and haste had not understood was that the struggle for the butterfly to get through the small opening in the cocoon are Nature’s way of forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly into its wings so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved its freedom from the cocoon.

We’re all a bit like butterflies. We sometimes come to a stop in our development when the next stage is a major step in our growth. But we need to do it ourselves. Because when we do, we don’t just get to where we should be; we also learn how to cope with “problems”, how to face up to life’s difficulties, and how to learn about ourselves.

If you manage people like the man in this story, why not take a deep breath next time someone in your team has stopped and is struggling. Be there for them but learn to let go. And, you never know, they too might learn to fly.

Well Business Burps are a little like this. They have the following characteristics:
• Something unexpected happens following a period of high energy.
• There is excitement.
• There is resentment on the part of competition i.e. that’s not fair.
• There is some embarrassment on our part to exploit the situation.
• The event is likely to be totally ‘left field’.

A recent example of this is Sacha Baron Cohen’s character Borat, the sixth most famous man in Kazakhstan. This is viral marketing at its very best. It is embarrassing, offensive to the Kazakhstan government (at first), completely unexpected and well thought out (Borat has his own website, mySpace, etc) and many, if not most, people are talking about him.

So what has this got to do with business. First of all Borat is business for his creator. Secondly his appearance is at odds with what has gone before. So if, like many businesses, Sacha Baron Cohen had adopted ‘Best Practice’ we would have just got yet another mediocre comedy film. Instead we got the product of ‘Next Practice’. Like Borat, our new business ideas must be the product of ‘Next Practice’, a ‘Business Burp’. Not only should your idea be different, its method of delivery or production should be future looking too. So when you are next considering a strategy of innovation or business growth or ‘burping in the boardroom’ then consider
the following:
• Is your idea unexpected (for the marketplace)?
• Does the energy exist to see it through?
• Does it have the impact for competitors to scream ‘its not fair’?
• Can you avoid the fear and other barriers that could stop you exploiting the situation?
• Can this be delivered through new processes or working practices that make it even harder for competitors to copy?
• Are you forward and outward looking?

In his book, Getting Engaged: The New Workplace Loyalty, author Tim Rutledge explains that truly engaged employees are attracted to, and inspired by, their work (“I want to do this”), committed (“I am dedicated to the success of what I am doing”), and fascinated (“I love what I am doing”).

Employees who have these essential traits within themselves, become the brand ambassadors of the company and make it an Employer of choice.

Different studies have been made inside and outside companies to know about the attachment/engagement of employees with the company and the results are like high current waves in a sea, which can lead to disaster.
Results show that only 29% of employees are actively engaged in their jobs. These employees work with passion and feel a profound connection to their company. People that are actively engaged help move the organization forward. 84% of highly engaged employees believe they can positively impact quality of their organization’s products, compared with only 31% of the disengaged. 72% of highly engaged employees believe they can positively affect customer service, versus 27% of the disengaged. 68% of highly engaged employees believe they can positively impact costs in their job or unit, compared with just 19% of the disengaged. Engaged employees feel a strong emotional bond to the organization that employs them. This is associated with people demonstrating willingness to recommend the organization to others and commit time and effort to help the organization succeed. It suggests that people are motivated by intrinsic factors (e.g. personal growth, working to a common purpose, being part of a larger process) rather than simply focusing on extrinsic factors (e.g., pay/reward). [Ref: Blessing White (April 2008). 2008 Employee Engagement Report].

Advantages of engaged employees
•    Engaged employees are of mindset to stay with the company, and contribute to the bottom line of the business.
•    Usually they execute better and have smiles on their faces.
•    There is a significant link between employee engagement and fostering environment for creativity for sustained profitability.
•    It builds passion, commitment and alignment with the organization’s strategies and goals.
•    Increases employees’ trust in the organization and creates a sense of loyalty in a competitive environment.
•    Provides a high-energy working environment.
•    Makes the employees effective brand ambassadors for the company.
It shows how imperative is employee engagement for sustainable growth of the organization, especially in today’s aggressive scenario, where attrition rate is getting high.

Key drivers for engagement
Employees have different thought processes which drive them towards getting involved with the company. Here are some key drivers.
•    The importance they have in the company in terms of policy making, decision making etc
•    Their career matrix, along with the challenges of work
•    The monetary aspects/benefits
•    Other factors like health, safety, security
•    How open are they to put up their points in front of management
•    How happy they feel when they come to their respective offices
•    Reward and recognition program
•    Effective leadership; leadership by example
•    Motivation towards work, by means of mentors, coworkers
•    An assertive feedback of their work and clarity of responsibilities

Practices for engaging employees
1.    Meetings: Meetings are the best way to know about the gamut of the company we are working into. These days Intranet also helps a lot to break the ice. The more employees know their company, the more they feel involved. It has also been observed that sometimes, employees spend a good amount of time on the intranet and are taking things forward. Employers can set their default home page as their company’s portal, and see the difference it makes. In the same manner, in-house magazine also works. Inviting employees to write their own viewpoint make them feel involved with the company.
2.    Skill update: Technical trainings/soft skills trainings/certification programs/higher studies always make employees feel prouder of the company they are working with. In today’s competitive world, the skill enhancement is the only way to survive happily. That’s why when companies take care of their employees upgradation, employees also feel engaged.
3.    Reward and recognition: Another way for connecting employees and to bring a smile on their faces. On-the spot appreciation, which can be for anything advantageous for the work place or for the entire company, or the recognition award given at some very special day for the stupendous performance or contribution, are some of the ways which also add in to the value of employee-engagement.
4.    Developing organization culture: These days companies are doing a lot of brain storming for developing their culture. Celebrating events is one of the ways to do so.

“The ‘boss’ is an illusion and like all illusions its strength depends on the perceiver’s mind,” wisdom poured like a fountain. So, what was he suggesting, if the three of us practiced concentration hard enough our pot-bellied, tyrannical, gold-toothed corporate master could be…whooosh!!!?? “Of course, there are no magic wands,” (Oh my God, the guy was a mind reader!) “but if you try hard enough and long enough you can be free of the bossiness of others if not get rid of the boss figure.” I wonder if he noted the frowns and sighs that went round the room. “There is no great secret behind this Рonly the simple understanding of the web.”  The web? www…the answer to all ills? Don’t tell me this was going to be a combined form of advaita philosophy and matrix maya churned together by some glib talker who never worked under pressure or had to fend for a family? “What web?” someone burst forth. I wasn’t the only one listening!

“The web of life – the reality of our being connected. Life is not a vertical or linear arrangement, it’s more like a mass of wires connected. While it’s not possible to always reach each wire centre directly there is always a connection.” That was a good idea Рprovoke the boss’s wife-wire, or kidnap… after all, those connections would produce fairly direct results. “But remember, if you snap or cut a wire, the entire system is affected.” What a mind reader! Or may be it’s just obvious, that’s what most – all(?) bossed-upon employees want to do!

“You have to work towards finding the mass of wires that meet at an interval and try to produce an effect there.” So networking was the key, right? “Sometimes a good hard shake-up gets a dysfunctional interval to start again.” Ah revolution! So, that’s what he’s been talking about all along. I always knew revolution was the answer when came to some bosses at least.
“…Or an exchange of wires sometimes can work….”
What does it all mean? Not in woolly, abstract terms but for real-life people like us with deadlines and performance pay?

“…which just means that you’ve got to make the person see from your and other points of view, whether the person is your boss or your servant. Perception is all.” Easier said than done, my boss was severally myopic – literally and metaphorically. He hid and remedied one type of myopia by wearing contacts, but what is the answer to the myopia of the mind? How to make him see? “Begin by what the person does understand and is sensitive to and then take him to that he yet doesn’t fully comprehend.”

“Oh yeah! Like start from profit and take him to more profit! And if you really want him to see anything besides – forget beyond profit or his ego, it will take ages, I’d probably leave this job and move on by the time that happens, if it happens at all. Who cares about his transformation then?!”

“Transformation requires patience and knowledge or wisdom. First, the knowledge of the right ‘wires’ (read, string pulling!) and secondly, the knowledge to let go and wait patiently for the signal to reach the right point. But remember, sometimes, you just can’t pass electric current through a fused wire. It will take time and perhaps more than one stuck signal for the web to take out and make new the fused wire or even replace it.”

Fused wire? …Replace it?…I couldn‚Äôt quite make out whether he was talking about death and resurrection, or sending someone to a really transforming workshop, or simply saying that hang on there till more people push and he‚Äôs forced to quit, may be even fired. My devilish serpent tongue was licking my lips. Anyway, I still guess it would take some serious time for his bosses to realize that he‚Äôs fake‚Ķ. And what if it did happen? He may be replaced by yet another wired up character rather than a live wire one. That‚Äôs being back to square one ‚Äì with a different boss.

I wonder if he thought the same way about his bosses, and they about their respective bosses…where would this lead to? God?…or back to the web of which we are all an integral part? The notion of hierarchy leads to the ultimate boss РGod, and he’s NEVER directly accessible! You don’t even know whether his representatives are really his representatives, may be they are just pretending or worse, are self-deluded. If God isn’t the answer that leads us back to the web and the onus is on us, and a lot of wire work needs to be done. While you are at it, do the work as best as you can, make the right noise in right places, if possible in the right way and wait…and wait…and wait…and if nothing happens Рsip green tea – it’s good for the heart!

Harvinder Kaur is an educator and a writer, currently heading an international school in Mumbai.

Every human resources person worth his payroll has heard and used these clichés over and over again.

“People are our greatest assets” takes the cake. It is usually put on posters all over the organizations that least believe in that philosophy. Ask anyone why they wanted to choose HR as their major in business school or as a career and you get another cliché that makes me groan. The person will curl up their toes and say, “Because I really enjoy working with people.” or that “my friends told me that I am really good with people.” That basically means I am not sure what I am good at, but I think I can have coffee and make conversation.

So why do people choose HR as a profession? I chose it because
a) I knew enough about all other courses to dislike them.
b) This was the only one that I did not know enough about to dislike.
c) All of the above.

Of course, when I started working after B school, they used to call it personnel management. Today you would be really deemed to be uncool if you did not know that we no longer handle personnel. We are the new and improved human resource department. I guess those days we had to handle the animals in the zoo ourselves, unlike the new kids who get computers to do it all. No more human contact. We can now outsource the contact part of it. Someone told me that anything that can be templated can be outsourced. So I guess human contacts have just been so classified. Outsource that stuff so that we can get down to doing real work.

In one company where I worked, they were implementing a new fangled ERP system that was sucking up more resources than the Gulf war. I was told we had to implement that HR system so that it would leave the HR folks free to do real work. “If all the work was taken away, what would be left for the fellows to do anyway?” I had asked. My boss who was standing at the podium with the big cheese of the ERP company said that he would take my question offline. That basically means that he would either ignore the question or he would stab me when he met me in the hallway later that evening.

Please don't joke about your HR manager

Look at the seminar topics on HR. That will tell you what is the big question that the clods are grappling with. In those days seminars were around topics like “Human Resources РArt or Science?” Two days or five days of asking bad questions left neither the participant nor the trainers any wiser. In fact I have always had a queasy feeling when I was told that someone was a trainer. It always reminded me of the trainer who came to teach Rover how to shake his paw without wetting the carpet. It was after I joined HR that I discovered there were trainers for humans too. Their task was not different from what Rover’s trainer tried so hard to do.

I am just curious. Do all functions manufacture clichés like HR does or is it just us? Do all other blokes have self-doubt like we do? Well you know every now and then we will hear seminars where people ask “Is HR a business partner?” The answer is obviously expected to be yes if you are to be let in to join the party. But truthfully speaking the jury is still out on that one.

Anger should be understood as a management tool. Humans are still in a state of insincerity. They are very happy with their cleverness. The only time they get shaken up is when they realize that their little world might come tumbling down around them. Fear is the key. A show of anger from a person who has the power to make or mar someone’s career is a potent motivator. So, one must learn to use it wisely. Use your intelligence to lose your temper under control. Note the time and need. Then alone let go and that too in short bursts so that the damage is minimal. Show of controlled and disciplined anger is a useful tool if you don’t get carried away by it yourself. This is where the risk is: one may be carried away into frenzy.

Life is designed to test you. See how children will test the waters around them and make their parents see red. They are growing and need to know how far they can go in life. This attitude is everywhere.
A driver trying to cut you off or an employee coming late are basically the children in us trying to gauge how far they can let their own selfishness carry on. It is another matter that eventually when the repercussions of their acts come back to haunt them, they may crib and moan. This is life.

A mature, intellectually aware person rarely shows anger. He sees through the machinations and he never jumps to premature conclusions which are normally triggers for unbridled anger build-ups. When the world has been understood and the elemental forces at work have been recognized, it is easy to distance oneself from the imbroglios created by vanity and stupidity. This is the real cure. If one wants to control anger, one simply needs to rise intellectually and emotionally above the mundane. Like a modern airliner that simply flies over the storm clouds to avoid a storm. We can’t avoid the mud but we can save our feet from it by wearing a shoe.

We certainly need to reduce the irritants around us. We first need to ignore them as tantrums of children when there is no harm done. But if it goes beyond that, a little show of anger will help and that is good.

Pradeep Maheshwari is an author, teacher of French, personal development trainer and marketing consultant.

You are a ladder for others when you ‘enable’, ‘let go’ and ‘give permission to fail’. Being a ladder is all about seeing people grow without any insecurity. It is the ability to see the inner potential of a person, trigger it, nurture it and facilitate enhancement.

In this fast moving world, we have no patience to experiment. When a person does not deliver, the easiest solution is to change him. True leaders have a different take on that.

Enablement

Look at the ancient gurus. All of them created discomfort zones for their disciples, frustrated them, chided them, but groomed them. That is what we call coaching or mentoring today. The gurus themselves were sometimes not as great as the disciples but that did not bother them at all. They were happy being ladders for the disciples to climb.

In the leadership lessons of today, the end justifies the means. No wonder more CEOs lost their jobs in the last one decade than the cumulative exit of non-performing CEOs in the last one century. The reason their salaries were pegged to the share market did not work always.

Since these CEOs had hefty severance pays and sign-off bonuses, it did not matter to them. Nor did it provide the right leadership to the organization they led.

As things are, leaders’ growth is always linked to top line and bottom line growth and hardly ever to their people’s growth. So whenever a so-called leader quits, there is an exodus of executives. The history repeats itself with the next leader’s exit.

It is important that the growth of every CEO and his direct reports must be made dependent to the extent of 40% for laddering their juniors with effective enablement.

JRD Tata once addressed a team of young professionals at Titan Watches in the late eighties. He did not talk to us about great fundamentals of managerial effectiveness but simple things like “How to use a stapler?” The message was clear and loud. It is all about perfectibility no matter what the task is!

Brand obsession

We have become victims of branding. No wonder people from the best branded institutes command the highest salaries. But the best brands have not yet produced any Bill Gates, a JRD or a Narayanmurthy.

The upbringing of these leaders, their family values and their discomforts made them what they became and not the branded educational institutions. They built successful empires that resulted in scaling by, large employability, economic growth, community wealth and societal prosperity. It is a different matter that they too push their own children to the assembly line of branded institutes.

Let us trigger our originality. Let us not be fooled by the crowd behavior and force our children to sit for entrance tests of these branded institutes. Who our children are is more important than the branding that these institutes will provide.

Laddering

I have had the pleasure to interview some unbelievable leaders who not only had laddered their employees but created wealth for their neighborhoods, for their country and for the society at large even though their beginnings were extremely humble.

The chairman of Suguna Poultry that runs a 500-million US dollar empire is a school dropout and once worked as a porter at Bangalore railway station. As early as the 1980′s he contemplated business process outsourcing and created 45000 women entrepreneurs ‚Äì which no global leader with the best of branded education has ever done.

It was a win-win. He laddered others and became a leader in the best sense of the world. Laddering others is what leadership is about.

We are always learning and will continue until dead. There is always something that could be improved and, to figure out, knowledge will facilitate the process.

I agree that many entrepreneurs develop their business skills with blood, sweat and tears, as I did. I co-founded two high tech start-ups and, after 25 years of “bloody times” and two companies, I decided to get my MBA.

In theory, having a couple decades of experience in running a business, I should already know almost everything about business management and development. But, actually, getting the MBA, I learned, rooted and improved a lot of processes and knowledge that I was already using, and also, I learned a lot of new things (state-of-the-art techniques, theories, new writers, new strategies, new “gurus”, and so on). I learned all that, even being a compulsive reader of everything about management, strategy, globalization and entrepreneurship, and had read hundreds of books about the matter, before deciding to return to school.

I think, that if small entrepreneurs want to go to the “next stage” a little more smoothly, they really need to have more base, more knowledge, more tools to define strategies, controls, costs, sales and marketing plans, know how to manage people and even to get better terms in a negotiation.

The MBA will not solve all the problems, inclusively maybe none, but it will give the path to go deeper in subjects that are relevant, in some moments, to the entrepreneurs.

Also, teachers’ profile and methodologies will be fundamental to the learning process of entrepreneurs. I believe (a little utopian) that it should be different the process of teaching entrepreneurs from the process to teach recent under-graduates (profiles are different, as well personal objectives and knowledge).

So, maybe the choice of the MBA, school and content, will be fundamental, but that it will add knowledge can not be questionable.

I would advise, if possible, to get an MBA.

Do you know anyone who fits this description? Their opinions are final even if their arguments are full of holes. No one can dare oppose them or even try to put in a word edgewise.

They feel justified that the control of every moment of our lives should not only be in their hands but that their say must prevail in every matter. The result is we have Control Freaks. Look at life from any angle; they are everywhere. Give them a position of authority and they immediately take on a monstrous image. As parents, superiors and drivers the worst in them appears easily.

The rage levels in our midst are rising every day. This mindset of being so obviously superior and better, stuffed with self-importance is behind this rising phenomenon. New words like flight rage and shopper’s rage are making their entry into our lexicon because these are newly emerging tendencies for which our language was not equipped earlier. This goes to prove that these tendencies are all around us now. The other day I went into a shop looking for a new mobile phone. The owner is known to me but that day his son happened to be at the counter. The moment he saw me coming in he became busy with a drawer of his. Nevertheless I did mange to get to him by asking if he had new phones. He never looked up and simply replied “No” and continued to rummage in his drawer. I left without seeing his face. I suppose I am too old, out of date, economy minded and not really his kind of client. A wave of anger did rise but I controlled it.

The unfortunate part of this is that it is becoming part of the personae of capable and well-meaning people too. They judge themselves on the basis of some activity in which they are really better than many but they start assuming they are the best on all counts. So their self assessment is terribly slanted; they see themselves as superiors standing out from the lesser beings around them. Unfortunately, these people become awfully arrogant and intolerant and fly into rages just about everything and anything. They demand respect as a right. I saw this advertisement for a car in which the catch phrase is “demand respect”. So I must be right; even the publicity managers have caught on to this weakness in us.

These grand guys see others as totally incapable nincompoops and in their anger there is an element of disgust at the incompetent lowly oafs they have to live with. They are as far as I can see always at boiling point and when they interact, this view that they have of others is fully evident in their responses and reactions. They never correct, explain, advise or ask questions but berate and criticize. Their comments are scathing and designed to hurt like they would crush an insect under their feet for defiling their space. Every expression of theirs indicates their frustrations and saintly forbearance for their loutish brethrens and their own strength in comparison in tolerating it all.

Well they are what they are and what we need to bother about is how to deal with them. Arguing with them or trying to make them see our point of view will only enrage them more and it is well nigh impossible, not unlike trying to pass through a stone wall. They would see this act as insubordination or at least a case of pure and simple arguing back for argument’s sake. But then we can’t keep totally silent either. So a little manipulation is called for and for this we need to learn a bit of applied psychology. The first thing is to stay calm and not react. This takes out the wind from their sails. The second thing of importance is to go along but with an aim to divert them. This is not so easy but it can be done; it is done by primarily avoiding frontal tactics. For instance a boss I know gives very difficult-to-put-into-action orders far removed from ground realities and he refuses to listen to the field staff. His employees say “Yes, Sir” and go out to do it. This is their break of sorts and when they come back they put alternative suggestions logically and well-meaningly and this works.

Control freaks are always in a hurry and in their hurry end up destroying quite a lot of things around them that they themselves have built up. The trick is to let them rant but keep the control of the final action and pacing in one’s own hands. As long as these freaks are not contradicted, all is fine. It might even be a good idea to let them apparently interfere. Ask them for something. This will keep their egos quiet. Don’t get intimidated – just go about as if nothing troublesome is happening.

We have to be kind to them. They need to be humoured but if abuse creeps in, the only solution is separation. Sometimes it is not worth wasting ourselves out on these freaks as they may drain us out. No relationship is worth that!

Pradeep is an author, personal growth trainer and marketing consultant.

Research indicates interesting facts about HR professional’s career span – less than 1.5 years at the junior level, less than three years at the middle level and up to 5 years at the senior level. Few organizations can boast of HR longevity. Is that a boon or a curse?

Someone might point out that when entire governments are run by short-term heads of states – clouds passing by – then why single our HR for short spans at a position?

A US president serves for 4 years. If lucky and elected again, it could be a maximum of 8 years. The story is the same in almost all parts of the world. Prime ministers hardly ever last for more than 5 years.

If such is the volatility in the larger space of governance, HR is a small player in a particular industry and should not be singled out for shorter life spans.

But there is an inherent paradox in case of HR people. On the one hand, they bat for the idea of retention, on the other hand they themselves have such short tenures.

It is therefore important that industries should reconcile to the rotating model and accept HR retention as a non-value add. They need to look at rotatable HR as a positive process for better value adds. Academic institutions training students for HR should focus on the art of making permanent impact in semi-permanent roles.

Another challenge for HR people is their ‘out’-standing contributions. Yes, their contribution is very high in the periphery Рin public presentations and forums.
But when it comes to internal customers – be it line managers or business managers – HR people are seen as just gate-keepers.

They are considered a nuisance and their inclusion in business process is more for being politically correct rather than for any business value add. The general perception is that if they are not in the limelight, they become dangerous distracters.

The reason is that HR DNA is linked to power and powerlessness is unthinkable for the HR fraternity. Unless all that changes, there is no hope.

It is about time HR became ‘in’-standing rather than outstanding. HR professionals need to learn the art of

1. Co-creating.
2. Co-ownership.
3. Magnanimity.

HR needs to imbibe servant leadership, not as a spiritual journey but as a success tool for the right journey. The key ingredients of servant leadership are

? Be behind.
? Have ability to enable and empower.
? Let go.

These are high-end competencies which need strong nurturing. But then this nurturing will eventually change the nature (the very DNA of HR).

HR manager’s KRA should include tangibles in terms of the number of managers with multi-tasking, grass-root teams with multi-skilling and driving lean processes. Uptime on employee engagement should be the critical indicator in the HR score card.

When it comes to equipment, we talk of OEE (overall equipment effectiveness). When it comes to people, do we track their OPE (overall people effectiveness)? Can we bring in measurability to OPE?

In their semi-permanent roles, HR people need to become the custodian of “share and care”. Will they rise to the occasion?

Looking around for something nice I found a pair of shoes that I wanted to buy. The price tag was Dhs 230. Off I went to the cash counter and was all ready to pay when I remembered that I could get that discount. So, I asked the cashier to give me the discount and let me pay Dhs 200 only.

Unfortunately, their policy clearly stated that to get the Dhs 100 discount, customers had to spend Dhs 300. The salesman at the cash counter told me that I was free to pick up something else for Dhs 70, to get the Dhs 100 discount. I tried to explain that it made no sense for them but a procedure is a procedure and had to be followed.

On his insistence I picked up five pairs of socks making the total bill Dhs 300. I paid Dhs 200 and walked out with 5 pairs of socks free plus a Dhs 30 discount on the shoes!

I wondered what business sense that made for Shoe Citi. It made terrific sense for me though. I wonder whether it is because I am a finance geek. The salesman followed the set procedure and caused an unnecessary loss to his company and I went away laughing at bureaucracy.

So, the question is, should we follow a set procedure or directive, irrespective of consequences or should we apply common sense?

In my opinion, the single reason to drive diversity is about providing a non discriminatory employment experience. Equal opportunity is the strongest reason. To be denied employment based on any criteria other than merit is discriminatory and illegal in many countries. How do we implement this in the workplace?

Most employers start with hiring targets that encourage diversity. The usual measure is to define the representation of the “diverse” group within the organization to mirror the percentages in which they are represented in the society in which the organization is operating. For example: If African Americans represent x% of the population, the diversity programs aim to eventually have the same percentage of African Americans among the employees. The issue is based on the assumption that education levels and skill sets are represented in equal proportion in the population.
To make diversity work, there are two conditions to be met. Let us take an example. If you are looking to hire surgeons or doctors for a hospital, the assumption is that

a) The diverse group is represented adequately in the population of qualified surgeons who are keen to work for the hiring organization.

b) The diverse group is represented in that population in the same percentage (here is the catch) – to allow for normal selection/ rejection rates.

If either of the two conditions is not represented in the population then it defeats the purpose and spirit of the diversity program. The first criterion is the necessary condition. The second is the sufficient condition. A good measure to look for is to see if the selection and rejection rates are the same as that of the other groups.

The other challenge is to define what element of diversity should the employer pursue? There are visible and identifiable elements of diversity eg Gender, Age, Disability etc. There are those which are not visible and more difficult to identify. For instance: Educational background, Sexual orientation, Economics Status, Political Orientation etc. Gender diversity in the employee population is usually the first of the diversity initiatives to be launched.
All too often I have seen organizations focus only on launching the diversity initiatives without focusing on how to build an inclusive environment that supports diversity. Having just one process – the staffing process focus on diversity will limit success of the initiative. How do we address needs of the diverse group as far as their on-boarding is concerned? What about their mentors? And yes, please do not have them be mentored only by “diverse” leaders. Women employees do not only need to be mentored by women managers. Making them successful is not just the other women’s obligation, it s also for male managers to partner in the success of the diversity initiative. Performance management, succession planning, etc are all processes that need to be examined to see if they are being inclusive.

Inclusive does not mean having varying standards for individuals. It means focusing on development to give everyone a fair shot at the opportunity. As soon as you consciously drive a diversity initiative in the workplace, the policies, infrastructure, opportunities etc will need to be amended to address the needs of the “minority”. Every HR process needs to be examined to see what measures would reflect progress and fairness in the diversity program. So while it may be good to check for percentages of diverse employees at all levels of the organization, it is just as important to see that the performance standards are not varied to “accommodate” an increase in diverse candidates. It may be better to examine what is missing in the talent nurturing and mentoring process that makes it difficult for enough diverse employees to progress at the same rate as the rest of the employees.

Read more articles on management, music, fiction and movie reviews by Abhijit Bhaduri at http://abhijitbhaduri.com

When I asked a class to talk about someone they considered a great leader, all of them identified leaders in history, or famous business personalities. Names like Gandhi, Trudeau, and Trump were mentioned. Then they asked me whom I considered a leader.

I said my grandfather was a great leader. In North America, hardly anyone knows my grandfather. But he was a visionary, and he didn’t brag about it. Decades after his passing, we’re discovering how much he’s contributed to the town he grew up in.

Actually, I told them, anyone could be a leader. The organizer of a non-profit organization, a school principal, a small business owner, and even your own mother, can be a leader. You see, it does not matter how famous a person gets, or how high up an organization a person climbs. It is about how the person influences the people around him/her in a positive and uplifting way to expand their awareness about themselves and life as a whole.

So-called leaders like Donald Trump and Lee Iaccoca are always talking about themselves. “See what I’ve done. I’m a great leader.” If they make mistakes, they blame someone else or the environment.

The real leaders don’t even identify themselves as such. They just do what they think makes a difference. They apologize for mistakes they make – they are accountable. They don’t take credit; they pass it on to the people who helped. They don’t call themselves great leaders. Someone else will along the way. Perhaps most importantly, they always choose service over self-interest; they always put others first. My wish is to find and recognize the leaders in our midst.

This article focuses on one important aspect of your business – who you serve.  Here’s an exercise I did when I first got started and if I find myself attracting people who are not ideal for me to serve. I revisit my vision  very often to keep my ideals clear.

I encourage you to do this process (or call it a game if you like!) in a chair where you would typically work.  If possible, have a second chair next to yours. Now think back to a client you’ve had in the past who was ideal for you or at least as close to ideal as possible.  Consider all the interactions you had with this person.  What was it you enjoyed about serving this person?  What are the positive qualities, attributes, and characteristics of this person?

Take out a piece of paper or computer document and write a list of all these qualities, attributes and characteristics of your ideal client.

For example, my ideal client: has a sense of humor; is interested in his/her spiritual development; takes action; values my time as well as their time; possesses and demonstrates mental well being; is intelligent and has common sense; understand and demonstrate that he/she deserves to be successful; has a financial cushion allowing them to buy my products and services; wants me to be successful and make a profit; subscribes to my weekly ezine; enjoys referring my services to others; has realistic expectations about what can be achieved and when; has clarity and focus; are open-minded; is heart-centered; is a learner; is true to himself/herself.

Now, if you can, switch chairs – put yourself in your client’s chair.  Ask your ideal client these questions: What are they struggling with that brought them to you? What is the biggest change they experienced as a result of the wonderful work they did with you?  What are the results they have now as a result of their work with you?

Next, make a list of at least 10 problems your ideal clients/customers want to solve.  What change/breakthrough do they want to experience and are they willing to pay you to help them get there?  List 10 results they could get from working with you.

Once you are clear on their challenges and results you deliver, you will not only be setting into motion the attraction factor – you now also have plenty of authentic words to use in your marketing materials!

Here are a few pointers that can help get the most out of the STAs for the organization and the employee:

1. Agree on the duration of the assignment: Many assignments tend to keep stretching beyond the initial term agreed upon. It is just as difficult for single employees as it is for those who are married or have children. (read some of the comments on the article posted here) The problems are different. Agree on the motivation of each player – the employer and the employee. What do they both expect to get out of the assignment – the outcomes, learnings and possible challenges.

2. Agree on the what if scenarios as best as you can: Knowing what role or assignment one could come back to is comforting and reduces anxiety of the assignee. If the business scenario demands a shoter term or extension of the time of the STA, agree on the what-if scenario upfront.

3. Agree on allowances, benefits upfront: The number of home visits, emergency trips back, allowances etc all need to thought through and agreed upon before proceeding on the assignment. It is important to stress how this may change if the duration of the assignment changes. It is also important to think of providing emotional support and anchors during the assignment to the employee and the significant other – especially if they are staying back.

4. Encourage the assignee to talk to others: Especially who have been on STAs – especially if they have worked in a similar or neighboring geography. Assigning a buddy or an employee who they reach out to can help quell some anxiety. Some organizations assign a coach even for the spouse or partner or significant other.

5. Insist on cross cultural training and preferably language training: This helps the assignee understand the sensitivities of working in a different environment and makes them aware of what might potentially be a deal breaker in the new land.

6. Design a re-entry plan: It is hard to hit the pause button in your life and go away on an assignment only to return after the assignment and resume seamlessly. Even if the person comes back to the old assignment and role, the equations would have changed. The colleagues would have changed and certainly the world view of the assignee would have changed. It is a time for adjustment for all – colleagues, employer, employee as well as the family. STAs when handled skillfully can offer a win-win for the employer and the employee. Yet there are plenty of examples of the best employees failing at these. There could be broken homes, messy relationships, disappointments if there is no partnership between the organization and the assignee. So build in the support anchors before you need them. If nothing else, before you go say yes to the assignment, read this research report and then decide.

Download a copy of the cartoon from here

Read more articles by Abhijit on Management by clicking here

The report, in its introduction, sets itself out to report on the potential benefits of engagement for companies, organisations and individual employees, and as it states later, it is not meant to be a “How to Become Engaged” guide, which is a pity because one of the themes that runs through the report is the confusion over what engagement is and the effect that it has on performance.

The report has been created with reference to surveys of many individuals and organisations and the compilation of statistical evidence is awesome, but most of it appears to have been gathered from the same people who are suffering confusion about what engagement is.

There is no feel in this report about what a phenomenal difference an engaged workforce  makes, no understanding of the market dominance that comes with engagement or the flexibility, imagination and pride that an engaged workforce generates.

The engaged workforce is the result of an extremely simple change in the way that managers manage and the result of this change is an earth shattering performance that cannot be competed with by any organisation running a conventional “Command and Control” management strategy.

We had in this report an opportunity to get rid of the confusion that surrounds the concept of engagement. What could have been an extraordinarily insightful initiative got bogged down with phrases of faint praise like this quote from the report: “Work is good for physical and mental wellbeing.”

This sounds like a line written by Harry Enfield for Mr Cholmondly-Warner, instead of the most exciting thing that has happened to our understanding of how to manage our workforce since the brilliant work of Douglas McGregor in his 1960 book, “The Human Side of Enterprise.”  To still be confused about what we should be doing fifty years later is not encouraging.

An employee at the phone company O2 is quoted as saying: “One thing that really stands out at the moment is the help and support we get from the management team. They’re really listening to their people.”  But in the feedback from their Head of  “Employee Involvement and Experience” there does not seem to be any acknowledgement of just how key this simple statement is.  It is as if what management are doing happened by accident, instead of being the cornerstone of a deliberate policy to change the way the workforce feel about what they do, to engage them.

Later in the report we are told that barriers to engagement are “confusion and misunderstanding,” but at the same time the report quotes Professor John Oliver of the Northern Leadership Alliance as saying: “Ninety Nine percent of failure to engage staff is due to management behaviour.”  There does not seem to be any confusion about that statement. The barriers to engagement are created by the behaviour of the managers!

On the first day at work every employee is engaged. They are happy to be there, they know the skills that they have to bring to work and they are looking forward to being able to use them to make a difference. The workforce’s natural engagement and desire to be effective is killed off by the things that management subsequently do to them.

The authors of the report tell us that there is no Silver Bullet that will cause people to engage. Perhaps that is because they are looking at the wrong end of the gun. Instead of looking for the bullet that will make people engage they should have been looking for the bullet that would stop people from disengaging, because that one is blindingly obvious. Find out what managers are doing that causes the workforce to disengage. Then stop them from doing it!

Vic Bayliss, the Director of Customer services at Westminster City Council got it in a nutshell. He said: “Staff have seen this as a programme that is being done with them, not to them.”  In this report Vic shows a rare perception that is unfortunately not shared by the bulk of the contributors.

I sincerely hope that this report does not have the effect of turning the concept of Engagement into the level of another “Management Good Idea” that will be used, as has been stated on several different occasions in the report, as a way to get the workforce to accept what management want them to do. When used in this way it becomes a cheap trick alongside many other “Management Good Ideas” that failed as soon as the workforce realised that management were just trying out another way to manipulate them.

Real engagement is the result of an ongoing collaboration between management and the workforce that produces the sorts of comments that were quoted by the O2 employee, not the result of a single initiative, survey or desire to manipulate.

Download the complete report from: http://www.davidzinger.com/employee-engagement-macleod-review-this-is-required-reading-3523/

There were the usual nods of recognition around the table then our friend indicated the woman sitting on her own at the head of the table. It was obvious that this was an office party and the woman sitting on her own was the manager, even before our friend introduced her. Our friend said that she was the office manager, and the rest of the girls were the team who worked with her. The way they had arranged themselves around the table spoke volumes for their work relationships.

The manager sat at the head of the table, obviously because she was under the impression that she was the most important person there and therefore should have the most important seat, even at a social gathering. Our friend was the supervisor, second in command in the office, and therefore had to sit near her boss to show support, but even then she placed her husband between her and the boss so that she was not sitting too close but, as the supervisor, she was still the closest. All the rest of the girls were huddled together at the other end of the table, not a great distance away but far enough to make an obvious gap between them and us.

The manager, appraised of the content of the book turned her hubris up to maximum, demanding to know what right did I have to write books about management when clearly, as a practising manager, she was the expert. The easy answer would have been to explain how dysfunctional her social gathering really was, how that dysfunction was probably a direct result of the way that she managed her team and the relationships that she created at work. Fortunately before that thought had even begun to speculate about the possibility of crossing my mind she gathered her self up and delivered her management philosophy: They think I am a bitch, but that is my job!

I was absolutely gobsmacked.

Here was a manager who, I think not unusually, believed that the job of a manager was to be a bitch to the workforce. It was clear that there was going to be no conversation about how well she thought she was doing as a manager or any expression of desire to become more effective. She was proud to be acknowledged as a bitch and clearly thought that she was doing pretty well at it.

Looking at the cowed fearful expressions of the people she managed I could only agree that she probably was. This was a completely prehistoric management monster who was fully aware of what she was but had built her defences so high that there was no possibility that what she was doing as a manager, or why she was doing it, could be questioned.
She had set herself up as the bitch in the office and saw that as a valid management strategy, to behave like a bitch to frighten her staff into working.

She had not the faintest desire or curiosity to try to figure out if there was a way that she could allow her team to be more effective and therefore impress her own boss with how effective she was as a manager. Worst of all it was probably not even her fault. The ordinary person who spends a large part of their working life on the end of oppressive management practice, when eventually elevated to the position of manager, has no other model of management to copy other than the one that she experienced as a member of the workforce.

Her behaviour as a manager mimics that of the managers that she hated while she was being “Managed” and it is this same behaviour that she will then pass on to the people who will replace her, because they too will have no other behavioural model to work from when they become managers. We seem to be doomed, by our own example, to show each new generation of the workforce the same model of how not to manage people.

To break this destructive cycle of learned oppressive management behaviour we have to find another model. A good place to start might be to Google “Theory Y”.

This other model does exist and has been around for an awfully long time.

Beyond the trillion dollar bail outs and band aids that have gone to contain  the fallout and reboot the economy, some questions keep popping up again and again:
- Are we all too short term in our focus?
- Did we forget that we must  endure short term pain for a long term gain?
- Do we adopt difference yard sticks in our personal and professional lives?

In life, we postpone many immediate enjoyments for a bigger goal– like putting aside money for our retirement, education of child, etc. However in our professional lives we tend to look at a majority of things from a short-term perspective.  Is this because, we live in an age where companies go belly up on one quarter’s bad performance?

It is a classic “catch-22” situation.

While I believe that is preferable to replace short term with long term thinking, in today’s situation this appears utopian. Today, short term thinking is a prerequisite of survival –  not necessarily a sign of greed or impatience!

At times I wonder if this economic tide will turn but it is worth waiting to see the consequences in the months and years ahead. Or, perhaps we need to look at a new way where both these perspectives are simultaneously taken care of without a long span of uncertainty and anxiety.  It is probably time that we adopt a “right term” focus of long term sustainability, while still achieving short term results we need to survive.

1. Strategy and Planning: Strategy is derived from the objectives of a company. Planning is required to implement the strategy. All three of these need to be done effectively. A gap in any of the three will be problematic. A study of the external environment is required and this must include political, social, economical, technological and legal frameworks and institutions. Know yourself, know your competitor and know your customer, and you have won the battle of the market.

2. Surprise: This is the most important element of the attack. Blitzkrieg (German) meaning ‘attack with lightening speed.’ Catch the competitor napping. This will result in them taking knee-jerk reactions. It will compound their problems which are to your advantage. For example, sudden price changes (could be increase or decrease in price), a technological breakthrough or radical cost cutting through a BPR effort.

3. Innovation: The best form of surprise is innovation. Product innovation doesn’t give the competition time to react. It also gives you a first-mover advantage too.

4. Sustainability: Attack prepared for a sustained assault. The competitor is expected to fight back. Thus be prepared for a long drawn battle. Test the patience of the competition. Eventually they will give up protecting their other strong areas or even stop the fight to save money for R&D.

5. Flexibility: Keep a tab on your sales numbers, competitors’ sales numbers, and consumer behaviour. Accordingly change your tactics.

6. Confusion: Keep the competitor guessing on the parameter you are competing. Is it the product, or price or the distribution channel?

7. Competitor behaviour: Predicting the type of reactions the competitor will have to your moves, as it happens in chess. This will keep you one step ahead of competition.

8. Retreat: When you go for an all-out assault, make sure that you back is safe. The enemy should not have a chance to encircle you from behind. This is also necessary in the eventuality that the competitor has gauged you properly and your assault is going to be thwarted. So rather than continuing, it’s better to back-off and live to fight another day. Take the product back from the market or reverse the decision with regards to price.

This incident brought home to me another lesson on the differences between the East and the West in the way people think; in fact this is the subject of my next book titled, Can Indians Think?

Let me cite some other instances. A Japanese company entered into a contract with an Australian company to buy millions of tonnes of a commodity, let’s say sugar. Within days of the contract the international market and price for sugar fell precipitously. The Japanese called for a re–negotiation of the contract. The Australians refused saying in effect ‘a deal is a deal.’ The Japanese felt this was unfair. The Australians felt it was business after all. What are the chances that the Japanese will do business thereafter with that Australian company?

At a discussion on the violent incidents in connection with the Nano car project at Singur, some people argued that the farmers were being unreasonable – they had been offered financial compensation, their sons were promised a job in the factory but was it logical that the farmers should let their land be acquired? Is logic all there is to life?

I have often written articles and books on thinking skills and have emphasized the importance of logic. Some readers have protested that I seem to be laying too much stress on logic and ignoring emotions. If I have given this impression then I need to improve my communication skills. I believe not only in logic but also in intuition, emotions and more importantly in non-logical creative thinking that I teach to corporate executives. My website tells you more about this. It has been conclusively proven that a person whose emotional centres are damaged due to trauma and only his logic centres are functional, CANNOT TAKE DECISIONS!

Eastern thinking tells us that it is more important to be reasonable than to use logic and reason. In the Singur case my stand is as follows: Try suggesting to a Mumbai-based executive to shift to — say Chennai, in his own company on a promotion with better salary and perks. The executive will leave the company rather than shift to Chennai (until recently at least). When asked for the reason he will shower a torrent of criticisms at Chennai without the benefit of having ever visited the city! I agree this is not universally true but you would be surprised at the response. My point is that even people in cities have their attachments to their city, locality, friends, way of life and will resist if they are asked to move to another location .

In Mumbai people are even attached to the specific train they travel in everyday. My friend Ashok will commit suicide rather than NOT travel by the 8,37 Andheri fast to Churchgate. Why blame the farmer whose family has been attached to the piece of land for thousands of generations. To say that money and a job in the factory ought to be sufficient may sound logical to the urban planner but is not reasonable to the farmer.

There is a story about a school boy who used to walk from home to school every day. One day some illiterate ruffians decide to check if education makes a boy smart. They offered the boy a choice of coins: a fifty paise coin or one rupee coin. The boy selected the fifty paise coin, bought a chocolate and enjoyed himself. This exercise continued for several days to the continuing amusement of the ruffians who firmly concluded that education did not make one smart.

An elderly observer decided to question the boy,”I think you are a smart boy,” he remarked.
“I think so too,” said the boy.
“Then are you not a fool for choosing the coin of lesser value?”
“Not at all. Those guys are fools.”
“How so?”
“The day I chose the one rupee coin the game will stop.”
Western logic would tell the kid to take the one rupee coin. Eastern wisdom tells him otherwise.

A spokesman for BA, Mr Willie Walsh, said last month: “The combination of unprecedented oil prices, economic slowdown and weaker consumer confidence has led to substantially lower first quarter profits…But British Airways is well prepared and has adapted its plans in the event of further economic uncertainty.”

These reported performance figures for BA and their smooth denial of concern reminded me of the last time BA management hit the news. It was several years ago and Rod Eddington, the then chairman of British Airways, was responding on TV to concerns about the profitability of British Airways. He was having a moan about how the budget airlines were cutting into his market share, but he was still being quite bullish about the situation. He told the interviewer how, in the last three years, he had cut the operating costs of British Airways by 5% and that although the competition was tough they fully expected to maintain their market share.

What he did not say was that in the previous three years, to make that 5% saving, he had made redundant 16,000 members of his workforce. He must have had some idea of the consequences of those redundancies for the remaining workforce. How did he think they felt about it? Did he think they still felt good about working for British Airways? Did he think they still felt their jobs were secure? Did he think they felt proud of what had happened?

At the time Rod Eddington seemed supremely unconcerned by any of the consequence of his actions other than the ability to boast about the financial savings he thought he had made. The men and women who worked for BA had, in the main, been in their dream jobs. Pilots, who as schoolboys had dreamed of wearing Raybans while they lounged around in the cockpits of big jets. Cabin crew who used to dream of all the exotic destinations they would go to. Baggage handlers and support staff who at the time could use BA to nip over to Paris for the weekend for the price of a cup of strong coffee.

And then, by making 16,000 redundancies, Rod Eddington had at a stroke, completely changed the way that the remaining BA employees felt about what they did. He had changed their attitudes and behaviours from those of a proud group of motivated people, dedicated to the service of their customers, to a bunch of disillusioned job hunters. By making these redundancies, British Airways changed the behaviour of their whole workforce from a powerful group of people who were proud of what they did, to an apathetic, untrusting workforce who were only interested in where they could send their next CV.

In the latest twist of the BA failure saga, we read of the appeal from the current management for the workforce of BA to give the company one month’s work without pay to try to save the company. Since the days of Rod Eddington, management at BA have completely lost the loyalty of their staff by the way that they have behaved towards them, creating a morally bankrupt organisation. Make no mistake, this moral bankruptcy was caused by BA management. Now we see the current management attempting to cash a cheque against the BA account that they themselves have already emptied.

Is this BA management completely misreading the way that the workforce feels about the company they work for? Or is this a cynical manoeuvre by management to deflect the blame for the failure of the company onto the workforce? It is possible that the company will fail without these individual contributions from the workforce? The workforce must be aware that it is just as likely that the company will fail even after they have put themselves into personal debt to try to keep it afloat; the only difference being that when the company fails, even after the workforce have given their time for free, the workforce will be in an even worse position to support their families when the company goes under.

Either way, management have already broken the trust of the workforce and since no one in the management team appears to have offered to work for nothing, it seems even less likely that any of the workforce will be persuaded to stick their necks out. Do BA management truly believe that the workforce, working for nothing will save them or are they working a spin, which when the company goes to the wall, will enable them to say, “It was not our fault. We were let down by the workforce who would not support us.”

In this ongoing crisis we have to be very careful about what we do to survive and how that changes the way that our remaining workforce feel about they are asked to do. Ride roughshod over the workforce during the recession, because you can, and like BA, you will have a very hard time continuing to trade even when the rest of the world has resumed doing business. Or, take care of your people when they need it most and they will take care of you when you need it most. We can’t have it both ways. What goes around comes around.

What is it about speaking that makes it such a powerful marketing tool? Listed below are 3 benefits of public speaking.

Benefit #1: You build your Leads’ List quickly. People get an experience of YOU. They get to feel your essence – who you really are as an individual. That is how you earn their trust. When building your list of prospects (the MOST important part of creating your business!) people typically move through four stages:

1) From Suspect – they don’t know you and think you just want to take advantage of them.
2) To Prospect – they say “yes” to a free offer you’ve made and are interested in learning more about you.
3) To Client – they’ve spent money with you, even one dollar is a good beginning.
4) To Raving Fan - they buy just about everything you offer AND tell others that they must get to know you too.

When you go out and speak to a group, you will want to collect their email addresses and postal addresses. Offer to give them your free ezine or a special tip sheet or a CD of an interview that you’ve done, in exchange for their email address. My experience is that 95% -100% of folks will do this – after hearing you speak, they will want to get more from you. You’ve created a relationship and these folks aren’t Suspects, they are already Prospects! If they have purchased one of your information products, they are Clients and many will already be Raving Fans!

Benefit #2: Sales in the “back of the room.” I don’t know about you, but I always love browsing the information products (books, workbooks, CDs, home study courses) that are provided at seminars. I always buy at least one thing (usually more) because I am interested in the topic the speaker is talking about and hungry for more information.

A speaker is truly performing a disservice to her audience if she doesn’t give them more of what they want. AND, you can make a boatload of money selling these information products! You spend time to create them once, and then continue to make money with them for years to come.

Benefit #3: You are Living Your Life Purpose and Serving Others. You have good information to share (yes you really do!) and it would be a shame not to share that information with others. When you speak on a topic you are passionate about, you can literally change lives. One piece of information can encourage someone to take a baby step that leads to another and another – resulting in a positive life change.

Tom Antion is the man I go to for public speaking advice and tips. Check out his resource center, click here: http://tinyurl.com/lhusza

About the Author: Ann Ronan, Ph.D. is an author, speaker, certified career coach and self employment expert, and vision generator.

Ann delivers smart, simple ways for people to acknowledge what they love to do and do more of it. Her articles, products, and books have motivated and inspired readers in numerous print and online publications. She regularly leads coaching programs, tele-seminars and live retreats, bringing the message to audiences internationally that living a passion-based life will bring prosperity and success.

She was recently selected from a nationwide search to be featured in Discover Your Inner Strength. The book features best-selling authors Stephen R. Covey (Seven Habits of Highly Effective People), Brian Tracy (Million Dollar Habits), and Ken Blanchard (One Minute Manager).

What about the fallout from this downturn and how will it affect employers, employees and the overall economy in the coming years?

This recession has been a huge shock; emotionally, financially, in fact in every sense of the word. Painful enough for the young and old alike to resort to suicide as an extreme step.

From an individual’s perspective, this has been the time to accept uncertainty as a fact of life. But, this has been particularly difficult for those who have long-term goals and prefer the stability of lifetime commitments to one employer or institution. Within such a context, having to accept uncertainty and potential threats to their economic and social well-being is making them uncomfortable and anxious, particularly when the risks are not understood or are imposed by others. When faced with these variables, the ability to carefully analyse risks or develop creative coping strategies in a formal way can be undermined.

Taken positively, this downturn is an excellent life lesson which again reinforces that human relationships and spirituality are far stronger foundations on which to build our lives than materialism and money. However, how many practice positive thinking is a matter of conjecture.

My concern is that the main casualties of this downturn would be the loyalty and trust that people have traditionally placed in organizations where they are employed. Casual job changing or hopping is a fairly recent phenomenon, at least in India and that too is limited to a few industries. Even today there are many people who have spent their entire lives in an organization. How would this affect employee loyalty in organizations that have restructured with right sizing exercises?

This makes me wonder, who is priority in a downturn? The loyal, long serving employees or the stock market players who buy the share when it goes up and sells the same when the company faces any issue? In many cases the frantic cost cutting exercises within organizations is not an act of survival but a strategy to protect the financial forecasts made, with an eye on the price of the shares. In that context, is it prudent to please the stock market or ensure that employee loyalty and trust are rewarded?

Are we creating more stock market players instead of loyal, productive employees in the society?

Being productive is about achieving our goals while making optimal use of the resources at our disposal. However, being productive may not be enough in today’s world! In fact, it is not good enough! Instead, we have to be creatively productive to succeed now! In the corporate world the term, ‘innovation’ is preferred to ‘creativity’ but in practical terms, the end result is the same. Innovation implies action and plans that work. Creativity implies lateral thinking and new ideas but those striving for success will concur that without ideas there is nothing to innovate so let us interlock both terms for our discussion. This will help us to be ahead of the game!

Let us consider the basics of my simple success equation.

Being Creatively Productive = Thinking out of the box + Working smart

Here are four tips on how we can be creatively productive at work:

Remember Change Is Always Happening.

Be aware and constantly watch out for changes in our environment. We must keep focused what our competitors, suppliers and customers are doing and be psychologically ready to embrace innovation by adopting and adapting new technologies to work smarter. The only constant in today’s world is change so mental flexibility in mandatory. Innovations might be resisted for several reasons including cost and a fear of big changes so be ready to consider several options when drawing up your proposal.

Resist The Urge To Be Complacent.

Be resilient and go the extra mile in what ever we do. We must be committed to making the extra effort to satisfy our clients and close the deal. We must resist the urge to expect one successful paradigm to be applicable to all situations. Research and document everything you can find that pertains to your client’s business which may not be included in your brief. Be ready to create uniquely customized solutions that will serve them in the short and medium term. Take time to consider a few unconventional solutions and keep them on file for future reference.

Be Ready To Play Different Roles.

Having a keen eye for continuous improvement by focusing on how we can incrementally enhance our processes and systems. One method is to listen closely to complaints and observations being made by colleagues in the workplace. While some feedback may just be useless whining, some may contain valuable insights about general perceptions and performance shortcomings that you may be overlooking.

A good source of inspiration and information is the blogosphere where many great minds and professionals go to vent and share ideas.

The hallmark of creative/innovative people is their mental flexibility. Sometimes they are open and receptive, at other times they’re playful and on occasion they can be critical. But one constant is that they’re all determined and persistent in striving to reach their goals. From this we may conclude that the creative process will demand that we play different roles within the workplace which are not described in any manual on business management.

Keep Looking In The Mirror.

Keep track of your failures and successes by using an effective performance management system to give focus and feedback. Be certain to set out clear objectives, ideally with quantifiable performance targets. Without continuous and honest evaluation, we will not be able to recognize our strengths and weaknesses and won’t be inspired to realize our enormous reserves of untapped creative potential.

I believe that these tips can lead to extraordinary achievements when coupled with the right mindset. And what is the right mindset? A willingness to express your creativity, a passionate determination to succeed and a positive outlook for now and the future.

The effects of the failure can be observed, for example, on organization, processes, product or service, finances, marketing and sales.

The causes can be related to strategic planning, implementation, management, control, human resources, absence of competitive intelligence and external factors like market dynamics or government regulations.

If we are talking about new ventures or small enterprises with less than two years, the most common reason for failure is related with financial problems. The most common cause of the financial problems is related with managerial faults and a weak strategic planning.

Managerial faults can be rooted in poor organizational control, follow-up, course corrections, the wrong people in the wrong place, underestimation of the target market, unrealistic cost estimation and so on.

A weak strategic planning, or inside the drawer, is one of the key factors contributing to business failure. A strategic plan is a dynamic document. As the enterprise evolves, so does the market. The defined strategy must be updated and in the course of time, corrections must be made to keep the boat on the right course with the right velocity.

Talking in a global context, each cause has its origins in the business environment, the global region and the profile of the entrepreneur.

But all problems usually start with managerial faults and bad planning.

Also, small entrepreneurs usually have a small cash flow, which makes o a “second chance” almost impossible. If a large enterprise makes a wrong investment and fails, it is only a bad investment and shareholders (or the government) will pay the bill. Small entrepreneurs do not have that chance.

Now, if we are talking about well established enterprises and large companies, usually the problem starts with managerial incompetence and expands to financial problems.

Well established enterprises need to have a continuous process of reinventing themselves. They should follow the procedures of learning organizations – always learning and upgrading. They must be in line with market trends, new products, new demands and they must control costs, prices and margins. They must also have an effective process called competitive intelligence.

We are in the ‘Knowledge Era’ and in a globalized world, so the horizon of business changed radically in the last two decades. Companies that do not follow this trend, complacent in the old market share already achieved, will be vanquished by new entrants, new products and new ways of doing business.

Similar thought should be used by new entrepreneurs. They should explore the new technologies, the internet, social networks, blogs, chats, and so on. New entrepreneurs need to create competitive advantages with these new technologies to enter and enlarge their market and exposition. There are plenty of tools at a low cost or even free of charge, already available on the web.

In summing up, be sure to develop a consistent strategic plan, take care of day-to-day operations with continuous follow-up and control. Take time to carefully chose the right people for the right positions. Work closely with your collaborators; hear and understand their feelings, needs and aims. Watch the competitors. Keep close to your clients and be sensitive to their feedbacks and needs. Remember – fortune favours the bold.

Most of us inherit most employees at the workplace. We do not raise them in the strict sense that parents raise children. Parents lovingly will potty train their progeny, teach them language skills, pass on core values and give them unconditional love despite the pranks and bad report cards. They will willingly cart them around for soccer matches after school, suffer them through teenage tantrums and beyond. Is it even fair to expect managers to do somewhat similar stuff for their team members? Unlike parents who choose to have kids most managers do not necessarily choose every one they need to manage. They hire some of them, some are inherited and some join teams as a result of the shifting sands of time. So is it fair to expect a similar kind of almost evangelical commitment towards their team members. If they did all that for their team members, would it really matter? Do we all need to live with the natural level of intelligence that we are born with or can this level be influenced by the environment we grow up in. Is it Nature or Nurture? A psychologist had answered a journalist by asking her to choose what impacts the area of a rectangle, the length or the breadth

If you planted corn in two different fields, one with rich soil and the other which is less fertile, the differences in the height of the plants in the same field would be what people call Nature and the differences in the height of the plants which were planted in the field with rich soil would explain Nurture. Over the years the debate on intelligence has primarily been divided into these two schools. So when parents tell their child that our family always excelled at/ struggled with Science, they are voting for Nature. This view tells you that any number of after school tuitions or coaching classes will do little to improve Science grades. Those psychologists who vote in favor of Nurture will tell you that given the right environment, it is possible for an individual to go beyond the limits that Nature built in.

Intelligence is the ability to “figure out” and make sense of the world around us as we go. So why should one aim to be intelligent? There is research that shows good schooling correlates particularly closely to higher I.Q.’s. Be warned the kids who abandon reading books and intellectual activities during the summer vacation will come back with a few IQ Points dropped – honest ! So keep them busy is the advice to parents and teachers.

The author of the book INTELLIGENCE AND HOW TO GET IT – Why Schools and Culture Count, Richard Nisbett’s research interest has for long been in understanding how laypeople make sense of the world around them. That kind of explains that he would eventually start examining the whole concept of intelligence ie how to make sense and figure out the world as we go along. His book is based on three premises:

1. The right interventions especially in school can make people smarter

2. The changing culture and educational environment is making the population smarter. Around the world IQ points have been rising by three points every decade.

3. It is possible to reduce the gaps in IQ that economic inequality creates.

What the whole audience knows, but the young man does not, is that the Elixir of Love is just cheap red wine with no magical properties at all.

The real story is that the whole equation was changed by the young man’s belief – changed by the change in his behaviour that was the result of his changed belief in himself, not by any alleged magical properties.

This idea that we can change lives by the way we feel about ourselves or about others is as old as the hills but what we see these days is that this almost magical ability to change the way that we feel seems to be invested exclusively in the high priced motivational speaker.

What Donizetti realized is that this ability lies within all of us and that with the smallest of effort we can change the way that we or other people feel about what we do.

A colleague in North America told me a modern version of this same story. His story was about how we can change the way that people behave by the way that our beliefs make us behave towards them.

The story I was told concerns a local motor vehicle workshop whose principal business was the servicing and repair of cars. The mechanics were a happy bunch who enjoyed what they did and took pride in the service they were able to deliver to their customers.

Then one day the manager of the business decided that the mechanics could no longer be trusted to correctly torque the nuts on the wheels of the cars that they prepared. The mechanics were informed that in future all vehicles leaving the shop would have the wheel nuts checked by the shop manager.

Whatever.

The manager started checking the wheel nuts and it wasn’t long before he started to find wheel nuts that had not been properly tightened. The manager congratulated himself for initiating the effort to double check the wheel nuts. He believed that if he hadn’t done this then his customers would surely be driving off in unsafe vehicles.

What the manager did not understand was that before he had decided to check the nuts, no wheel nuts had ever come off a vehicle that his shop had delivered. The mechanics knew the consequences, should they fail to make sure that the nuts were tight, and as competent professionals they took pride in making sure all the vehicles they delivered were safe.

Then the manager, by his actions, announced that he no longer trusted the mechanics. By checking the nuts himself, the manager was sending a clear message to the workforce that he no longer trusted them.

His behaviour robbed them of any feeling of pride they had in their delivery so they stopped checking the wheel nuts, why should they? The manager had made it perfectly clear that he did not trust them and was checking the nuts himself. The result, some wheel nuts were now leaving the shop loose.

The manager by believing that the mechanics could not be trusted to tighten the wheel nuts had changed the way that the mechanics felt about what they did and thus the way that they did their work. He had changed his workforce from proud motivated professionals into people who no longer gave a damn.

What is so awful about this story is that the manager, by finding loose nuts, was convinced that his input was essential to ensure the safety of his customers. What he did not understand was that was his behaviour that caused the problem.

The poet and philosopher Goethe said in 1746 “If we treat people the way we think that they ought to be, then that is what they will become.”

Two hundred and fifty years later this manager had, by treating his mechanics as if they were untrustworthy, made sure that they did in fact become untrustworthy.

What a pity that this manager did not understand that the opposite lesson was just as pertinent. By treating your workforce as if they are valuable, that is what they will become. Trust them and they will become trustworthy.

The coming months can be decision making times for senior leadership of Indian organisations. Decisions that are vital to the health of their organisations and employees. These decisions then need to be communicated and the entire organisation needs to be aligned with the new decisions. When it comes to taking tough decisions, asking important and difficult questions and taking a stand, most leaders still follow a traditional command and control path, which creates tremendous resistance, tension and uncertainty across the whole organisation in times of change.

Most of the decision making happens at the executive level. Command and control system assumes that the leader has all answers and all he needs is a bunch of people who could execute what he knows. At times like this when the problems are chaotic and complex, depending on the wisdom of the leader or the top team alone is foolish. How could then leaders involve the entire organisations in times of complexities and navigate through ambiguities? The answer is to effectively use the whole system intelligence. This way the leadership team can involve and engage the whole system in the process so that they do not have to later communicate and align everyone to a change agenda.

So the leadership team’s challenge now is in engaging the whole system and tapping into the whole system intelligence for actions that would help the organisation cope with the present crisis. One way of doing this is to use whole system approaches to planning and implementing change and what have come to be known as large group methods.

All organisations and communities are strongly influenced by factors and events that lie outside their boundaries. A shared understanding of these environmental influences – in the past and the present – has been an important aspect of popular large group interventions.

Large group intervention designs that allow people up to thousands to come together to co-create the destiny is what organisations would be using instead of boardroom decision making that then needs to percolate down. Command and control based management practices feel insecure to use the whole system and leaders feel others will not agree to the idea. But the fact is if leaders can involve all stakeholders, tap into the whole system intelligence, the system would be able to see the problem in a holistic way and take decisions that would have an agreement from all.

So, the need of hour for leaders is to create large group intervention platforms where a significant number of people in the organisation can come together to take effective decisions that affect their lives and organisations’ future. Tapping into the whole system intelligence, gives voice to greater numbers of stakeholders, promotes whole system organisational learning, produces faster and more sustainable change, generates higher levels of commitment from organisation members, and achieves business results.

I have today picked up some gems from a journal where the writer is trying to help his readers to enhance their potential. Every word he says is right but useless too.

See what a brainy young man, who has just joined the workforce, has to say in response to the advice/suggestion/feedback/exhortaion:

Suggestion: COMMUNICATE WELL.

Response: Well what makes you say I do not communicate well to begin with? In school and college I used to even be appreciated for my language and clarity of communication. I was winning debates. I am very confident that my language is good and my grammar correct. Everyone I know in my family and friends said so. What more is needed?  Then you say “Be persuasive”. What do you mean? Am I not good at getting things done? Very few people refuse me what I want. I have a string of happy clients to prove it. You say; try and adopt effective communication skills. Whatever are they and have I not explained my point already?

Suggestion: THINK THREE STEPS AHEAD.

Response: Do you think I am a seer? How do I see ahead? Everything in life is a team effort and most people just don’t put in their 100%. If things are not turning out well, am I solely to blame? OK I know that I must take this into calculations but that I already do. That is as much as I know about the game. Then, where is the problem? And if you feel I do not calculate the exigencies well then let me ask you, have you taught us what is what in this game?

Suggestion: KEEP IT SIMPLE AND SHORT.

Response: Have you tried the technique yourself? What interest do I have in talking on and on to explain my point? We are all at work, doing our jobs. The others are supposed to know what they are doing and they are equally responsible. The problem is that they never do. They know that after all it is my baby and the axe will not fall on their heads. Tell me of one person who would know how to get an ounce of seriousness into these guys. Even after crossing the Ts for them, they go and do the very thing they were told to guard against. I assume you have never tried to sell anything with a sales target quota dangling on your head?

Suggestion: STAY IN HIGH SPIRITS

Response: Frankly I miss the point entirely. With all these untrained lumber loaders around my neck putting spoke in my wheels at every stage of life it is easy to say. There is a saying: The advisors don’t have to pay for it. First I am needed to delegate, then supervise and finally end up redoing it all by myself again. At work it is a madhouse and home is no place to relax and you ask me to stay in high spirits. Have you ever worked in a team which was not of your choosing; where you have all the responsibility but no authority?

Suggestion: ADOPT A FRESH APPROACH.

Response: Shall I fire the team and get a new one? Change my job? Or do you mean I am incompetent? If I were not certain of my methods would I be following them? Why would anyone think this is purposeful advice? Where were these teachers when we were at school and they were appointed for shaping us for life? These people who now want us to change are the ones who taught us earlier or of the same ilk. Then they would not hear a word we had to say. Discussions were discouraged and insistence was taken as argument and opposition. Now when we have been certified as ready for managing our lives and the affairs of men, we are told to forget our old self and recreate into another image. For them it is mere words but have they tried to improve themselves?

Suggestion: BUILD A TEAM.

Response: I knew you would be coming to this eventually. How much choice do I have in life? Did I choose my parents, family, friends, schools, teachers then what makes you think I have any choice about the boss or the team I have? It is so easy to string a few words that mean nothing. It only shows that you have read a few books and become a trainer but with little experience of life. Get your nose to the grinding wheel and let’s meet again in a few years.

And so on and so forth.

I have yet to meet a person who would listen and admit that he has room for improvement. Just to impress the boss and the entourage they may often make a show of humility by saying yes they have faults with a lot of room for improvement. But it is all a sham. They know what they are. They are quite impressed by their selves. The world likes to find fault and criticize. That is the way of the world and best forgotten or ignored for the good of their mental health.

What sounds good and virtuous is left best alone as wonderful words on paper that will go nowhere and take nobody anywhere.

 ”The heart of motivation is to give people what they really want most from work. The more you are able to provide what they want, the more you should expect what you really want, namely: productivity, quality, and service.”

The topic motivation is extremely important for employers. Motivated employees can create a climate that is conductive to performance, do their best and help the organization to achieve the targets. While a stressed out and grumpy person with a frown on his face cannot perform well on work and so cannot help the organization to achieve their goals. I can share the example of one of my managers who enters the office with energy, enthusiasms and a big smile on his face. With same positive motivation he spends some moments with all of his team members, shares happiness, discusses new tasks, and new expectations. This is an extremely simple activity but it is the key of high motivation and morale of his team members.

Each employee gets motivated by different things. As the heart of motivation is to give people what they really want most from their work, it is very important to find out the “heart”. If some of them are interested in sports, provide them facility for it. If some want to go a hill station then arrange hill station trips on weekends twice a year. These all are very small things but vital for employees’ motivation.

Here are some steps and suggestions to find your employees’ heart of motivation.

1. Define your organizational hierarchy.

2. Measure your team members’ performance systematically without favouritism. Individual goals and targets must be realistically defined and discussed with team at the start of the year. Performance factors e.g. quality of work, target achievement, productivity, dedication, innovation, discipline, dependence of members etc. must be considered. At the end of performance evaluation all successes and failures of team member must be discussed with him/her to make a clear picture of his performance in his/her mind.

3. Also consider previous years’ performances while evaluating current year’s performance.

4. Allocate a certain amount of money to use for compensating the teams on good performance. For example, team members’ dinner on good work or target achievement.

5. Provide them proper feedback of their work.

6. Provide employees with ample opportunities to learn new and advanced skills. They should be supported by the company for higher/further education as well.

7. Get to know your employees, families, children, their birthdays, wedding anniversaries, hobbies, favourite restaurants and food. Do change the nature of relationship with your employees. Care for them, thank them and appreciate them.

8. Celebrate their birthdays.

9. Informal gatherings like trips, dinners, visits must be arranged by the company to improve communication between teams. Organize quarterly, two to three days’ trips.

10. Listen to and act upon employees’ ideas and suggestions. In the words of Roy E. Moody, a motivational speaker, “The greatest motivational act one person can do for another is to listen.”

11. Provide employees with appropriate authority to make decisions about how they do their jobs.

12. Policy for annual vacation with family supported by the company on draw basis must be introduced.

13. Introduce employee of the month, employee of the quarter and employee of the year awards to keep employees motivated.

14. Announce bonuses in team meetings so that all of the other members know who got some extra reward and why.

15. Start some in-house recreational activities like table tennis, badminton and volley ball.

16. Company policies must be defined, well communicated and user friendly.

17. Try to eliminate extra working by managing tasks, estimations, executions and trends. Late sitting due to work burden must be compensated with leave as well as monetary reward (bonuses based on productivity) and facilities (refreshment, dinner).

18. Organize monthly employee meetings for better coordination.

19. Sponsor your employees’ certifications/short courses. 

There are so many other small activities that can keep your team motivated. Sustainability of the motivation is very important and to sustain its high level you are required to establish reliable and comprehensive systems, policies and process in the workplace. It will ensure long-term motivation of your people to contribute to a desired development of organization.

I have come across two kinds of people. First kind are the ones who want to get something done and they get it done no matter what (read as beg, borrow or steal). The second kind are those who eventually get things done by playing the game of “war of attrition”!

Then I came across the third kind. Smart, energetic, enthusiastic, brimming with ideas but who do not have either the ability to get it done or play the attrition game. In their lifetime, they come up with some brilliant idea, suggestion, or cause but never succeed in getting them off the ground. They get themselves entangled in a mesh of political quagmire and run out of steam before they can see their idea see the light of the day.

I think many of us fall in this category. I am sure many of you will be able to re-collect instances from your days at school, college, work place, home and social life. If you had a chance to trace back, you will find that someone else picked up the baton from where you dropped and achieved glory. You tend to say to yourself that “If only, I had not dropped the ball…I would have been” or even worse reminisce, “You know what, it was my idea!”

This recent photograph which I took, of kids near my house celebrating the festival of colour “Holi” has an interesting story behind it and got me thinking on the concept of political will. They were the only group celebrating Holi! Un-fazed by the lack of interest amongst the elders around, they went about having fun which they wanted to. When I approached them for a photograph they were more than willing to pose for me. I interviewed a few of them and heard their story of enduring spirit and uncovered the following story…

It seems that when the kids approached their parents for resources needed to celebrate Holi, the response was lukewarm. They were challenged with hurdle after hurdle like, home work, health issues, society/apartment association regulations on using colours within the premises, practical difficulties of cleaning up, special project (being a long holiday most of them had special projects which they needed to complete and bring back after their small vacation), impending examinations which are just round the corner, they were even told the lame stories on how their favourite film stars did not celebrate Holi as a mark of paying homage to the Mumbai 26/11 incident and so on. The parents piled up hurdles as if it their life depended on it.

However, the children had made up their mind! All they wanted was to have a blast and celebrate Holi and that they would do it.

They got together, planned out their study schedule and homework for the coming week. For the special projects, the kids had an idea! They volunteered for the topic “Holi Celebrations” for the special project in their respective classes. This way they could use special projects as an excuse when they lobbied with their parents. Confused? So was I…

Well, they offered their parents that If they celebrated Holi, they could click pictures and write about the event at their society and would get the project completed by themselves instead of passing it on to them (which is usually the case). This way the parents would be glad to know that they got all the 4 days for themselves. Otherwise they would have to do a lot of research for the projects.

Once they were done with their internal housekeeping, they identified the area where they would play Holi, and what kind of ammunition they would use like water guns, powder sprays, foams. It was during this conversation that they decided that they would not use eggs, tomatoes or any such item which was costly and also compromised on some of the colours which were known to be made of harmful chemical dyes. They came up with some regulations like wearing a slipper, not so costly T-shirts or trousers, and also committed to use swimming glasses to protect their eyes. Thus they made their list of resources that looked pretty good, and approvable.

I also understand from some of the seniors in the group that they made a cute little speech at the monthly society/apartment owners’ association meeting on how they intended to go about their preparation. So, the proposal was completed and presented to individual parents and then the association as a whole!

Do you think these kids were making up this story? I don’t think so! The coherence in narration of incidents and the enthusiasm with which each kid pitched in to explain their hard earned fun moved me.

Is this an isolated incident where kids have shown an astounding example of political will? Here are a few more examples of kids having their way:

• A wailing kid in the wide aisle of a grocery store.
• A kid completing his homework early and doing some helping around at home only to ask for time out to play.
• Kids complaining to a visiting relative about how their parents would not buy them a toy which they very badly want and eventually making the relative feel that he/she should buy it for the kid!
• Kids telling a story of how beautiful their friend’s wrist watch is and why they too need one. They don’t stop there usually. They ask their parents the way to get it. I mean they try to understand from the “giver”, what it would take to get one for themselves.
• Kids seeking and getting the permission of their parents to attend a school picnic.

In the cases discussed above, one thing stands out. In the psychology of children it is ingrained that they have to pursue their ideas or wants to achieve the desired result. They know they have to lobby hard; they tend to understand what tactic works well and when to use what tactic without hurting their future chances. This uncanny ability to persuade without hampering your future chances is called political will! We too have been there, done it or at least have seen it!

Why is it that we lose this political will as we grow up?

At work place, I have seen some brilliant programmers come up with some intelligent tool that automates a very tedious process. They wish that it be used enterprise wide. However, when they encounter the very first challenge or a set of challenges they give up. The tool never sees the light of the day.

Do you know the story of now famous Arvind Adiga, the author of “White Tiger”? Before his work was published and won the Man Booker Prize, he was rejected by every major publishing house in India. That did not deter him. But unfortunately, for every Arvind Adiga there are many others who have put their work in their attics and have given up!

Many innovations, books, arts, ideas have died a silent death because of the lack of political will on the part of the innovator to push it into the system.

When I set out to understand the reason behind giving up instead of having the political will to push the ideas forward, I chanced upon an article by Diane Kennedy Pike. She theorizes a reason why we lose the political will as we grow up. According to her, people develop a sense of distaste for arguments and conflicts as they grow up. They perceive that it is important for them to be “liked by others” than to hold on to their principles and convictions.

This obsessive compulsive disorder for being “liked by other” is what strips you of one of the most important character, namely, the political will, which as a child you carried in abundance and were getting things done the way you thought was right!

During conflicts whilst you are pursuing an idea, you might be faced with hurtful comments. There could be people lobbying against you and your principles. But if it is correct and if you believe it could change people’s lives, stay put! The key is to stay the course on your principles, ideas and convictions, not to take criticisms personally, be passionate about the cause and at the same time be dispassionate in engagement.

Further Diane Kennedy Pike notes,  “I recognize now that to bring about any change at the group level takes tremendous commitment. First, there must be a vision of what is possible. Then, there must be a willingness to sustain that vision through all the stages: presentation of it, support for it, organizing practical programs to implement it, recruiting others to participate in the programs, spending hours talking with people, carrying on when you feel you are the only one who cares, not allowing criticism, rumours, and name-calling to discourage you, allowing others to get the credit when what you envisioned finally begins to manifest, and supporting those who are willing to carry on the vision now that it has become a reality. This is how I would define political will.”

I would like to end with a personal story which made me learn the importance of political will and hence re-build it as a part of my character and also helped develop my tolerance towards “dirty politics”.

I started the student placement office at my college in 2001. It was tough time for technology companies in India. People started remarking about the lack of traction in placements and also were speculating about mismanagement of funds. They demanded a disclosure of accounts. I quit at that very instant. I could not take the fact that people did not trust me. There was no problem with the accounts, and I would have been cleared of all the charges. But I was afraid that such conflicts were going to make me only more unpopular and also that it was a thankless job. Later, I learnt that someone else picked up from where I had left, disclosed the accounts, was cleared of all charges and as luck would have it, a few weeks into his leadership, the placements started happening at my college. The homework which I had done was paying off. He took all the credit for turning around a system that I had abandoned!

I learnt my lesson on political will and vowed to myself that I will never reminisce “You know what, I was the one who started all this placements…”

I refuse to be a loser, just because I do not have political will!

One of the greatest assumptions that we make in almost every walk of life is that we can make others work harder by offering them rewards.

There is a whole industry dedicated to the provision of rewards programmes for performance and almost every organisation on this planet in one way or another runs their business on the basis of providing rewards for performance.
 
Let’s be clear right here that the reward is something extra, something other than the wage that has been agreed as the going rate for the job.
 
Alfie Kohn in his book, “Punished By Rewards”, exposes the assumption that providing these rewards improves performance.

He shows us in detail in any number of different cases how wrong we are to believe this and shows just how destructive the practice of rewarding performance really is.
 
Without reading “Punished by Rewards” it may be difficult to appreciate Alfie’s point but let me give an example from the book.

Alfie tells us one story about a scheme sponsored by Pizza Hut in North America to encourage children to read.

He tells us that in order to encourage literacy, children were promised a pizza for every book that they read.

On the surface it sounds perfectly laudable until you examine the detail of what actually happened.
These children instead of being encouraged to read, now saw books as obstacles between themselves and a pizza, and that the obstacle had to be surmounted as quickly and with as little effort as possible.

Thus instead of finding joy in the act of reading, the books these children read were selected by them on the basis of how thin they were and the size of the typeface so that they could qualify for their free pizzas as quickly as possible.
 
As Alfie notes, instead of encouraging children to develop an interest in books, this programme produced “fat kids who couldn’t read.”
 
In the first five chapters of this book Alfie Kohn turns our understanding of what is accepted as a basic tenet of our management practice, on its head.

He does it with such startling logic that it is impossible not to get it, and although his history is principally in education his experience as a behaviourist means that the lessons he learned in the field of education are as surgically relevant wherever we find one set of people trying to make another set of people work harder.
 
He goes on to show us in a hundred different ways, through stories and example, how what we assumed was a way to get people to perform, actually has the completely opposite effect.
 
Alfie tells a brilliant story to illustrate the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and the effect one has on the other, in the case of an old gentleman who lived on the route home outside a local school in America. The children had taken it upon themselves to stop outside his house to fire abuse at him, safe in the knowledge that he could not chase them.
 
But the old man had a plan.
 
One day he called to the children and asked them if they would come back the following day to abuse him again, if he paid them a dollar each.

The children were delighted and duly turned up the following day to earn their dollar, and spent the afternoon hurtling more abuse at the man.

The man waited until they had finished then apologised because he would only be able to pay them 50 cents for the same thing on the following day.

The children agreed that fifty cents would be OK so they returned the following day.

Again the old man waited until they had finished then apologised again, tomorrow he would only be able to give them 10 cents each.

At this the children turned up their noses and refused to abuse him any more.
 
The old man had taken something that these children were clearly enjoying and by rewarding them for doing it, he completely changed the way that they felt about what they were doing until they would not consider doing it unless they were paid.

By rewarding them with an extrinsic motivator, he had robbed them of their joy, their intrinsic motivator.
 
Alfie shows us how managers do this exact same thing to their workforces every time they attempt to influence performance by giving rewards.

But still they do it because they know of no other way to influence the performance of their workforces.

This is while the world is reeling under the current crisis caused by bankers who were blinded to the long term effects of their financial strategies by their short term pursuit of individual rewards.
 
If you don’t read this book you will be able to continue giving rewards for performance in the knowledge that what you are doing is improving the performance of your workforce.
 
If you consider reading this book, be prepared to discover that almost all of the things that you ever considered to be good management practice, are not.

1. See the glass as already broken.

Change is a natural and inevitable part of life. Just as change is essential for the formation of a business in the first place, so it is essential for the continuation of the business in its later stages. The Buddhists teach that, to understand and accept the inevitability of change, we need to see “the glass as already broken”. In other words, we need to accept that, in time, everything that is made will be unmade and everything that works now will stop working. In time, a simple product like a glass will disintegrate and fall to dust. Nothing stays the same and we must accept it.

2. Open up your thinking.

Being able to see the way ahead is one of the hardest things to detect and get right. Napoleon Bonaparte was reputed to have dismissed the invention of steam ships with the words, “What, sir! Would you make a ship sail against the wind and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? I pray you excuse me. I have no time to listen to such nonsense.” Gary Hamel says that those who run enterprises must guard against such closed thinking by listening to three types of employee: newcomers because they’re not yet into the corporate way of thinking; young people because they have more creativity; and those on the periphery because they’re closer to change.

3. Ride the horse in the direction it’s going.

Even though seeing the way of the future can be tricky, it’s not difficult…if you look closely and without attachment to the way you want it to be. Charles Handy tells the story of how former American President Dwight D.Eisenhower, when President of Columbia University, received a deputation of students asking for a pathway across the grass.

“Why do they walk there?” he asked.
“It’s the easiest way to the hall,” came the reply.
“Well, if that’s the way they’re going to go, then cut a pathway there,” he said.

4. Let go of your attachments.

Seeing change and the need for change is sometimes much easier than we make it. It’s the blocks that get in the way. The main blocks to change are the attachments we hold on to from the past. The three main ones are:

• attachments which make us feel secure, such as status, possessions, routine, old skills and old know-how
• attachments which give us power, such as titles, connections with important others, and a position that is able to reward and punish
• attachments which make us feel good, such as having others need us, look up to us, and be dependent on us.

Hanging on to these attachments when the signs say “Let go” is like the mountaineer who falls down a cliff in the dark and holds on when the ground is just a few inches below his feet.

5. Share your bread. One of the solutions to managing successful change lies in learning new ways. It also means learning together. Peter Senge reminds us that the word “company” came from the word “companion” whose original meaning was “com” meaning “with” and “panis” meaning “bread”. In other words a companion was someone you shared bread with. Senge says that one of the best ways of managing change is to share ideas with others in the organization. This is what car makers Ford did when faced with massive change. Instead of hiring outside consultants to tell them what to do, Ford undertook a one-year teaching programme that involved every one of their salaried employees. And they taught and listened to one another. 200 Ford leaders taught and listened to 1200 section leaders who taught and listened to 50,000 others. As Ford CEO, Jacques Nasser, said, “There is simply no better, faster way to distribute knowledge around a company than through teaching. And the company has to do this teaching with their own people.”

The general consensus is that change is hard. The management gurus tell us so. But there is nothing inherently difficult about change. It’s part of life and at the heart of what happens throughout our lives. Follow the simple steps above and you can put it at the heart of your enterprise.

Handling a staff role is like skating on thin ice. Though the top management will give you full authority and support to do your staff role, you will face a lot of hurdles, sometimes from the same management and your colleagues.

I remember a couple of times when I functioned in the role of a training manager though my designation was otherwise. I had to constantly struggle and fight for resources and time.

I once asked a senior colleague Palani  with a lot of hands-on field experience, to help me in the training lab. He was too busy as, at the same time, he was also called to help a field engineer, a software engineer, or even the marketing team. But I put my foot down and said that I need his help till the lab session was over.

Even a layman can guess that a field request is high priority and is a line function. But sill a trade-off has to be reached as smooth functioning of a training session without interruption is also important. One of the marketing heads used to joke, “Have you released Palani? Can we take his help?” But you have to be firm, otherwise, next time you organize a training, people will think twice before they can attend one!

At times, when a department head is in a training session, he/she will be called by the director for a critical business meeting. Sometimes, I have got phone calls from department heads when their staff are held up in a training session that lasts for more than an hour. At times you will get a mild heartache when a training session is cancelled at the last minute due to project deadlines.

Thus a staff role is very delicate, as you cannot antagonize people who are at the front-end of the company’s business. At the same time you cannot act like a wimp.

Popularity across departments and company branches is something an employee in a staff role will get by virtue of his/her role. Sometimes his or her popularity may surpass and overshadow the popularity of line managers. This fame is again a sensitive issue, and has to be handled without hurting the sentiments and ego of senior colleagues. Acknowledging and involving senior colleagues in your decision making and communication will help in easing ego problems.

So a person handling a staff role has to have a firm will, determination, and also good people skills. Then your staff role is a boon and not a bane!!!

What are the odds that you and me, as hiring managers, will find our Captain ‘Sully’ Sullenberger?  .

For most of us in the corporate/human resources space, the formidable challenge is to get the star hired out of the lot of candidates out there, be it a CXO or a frontline sales foot soldier. This singular ability to identify and hire individuals, who can excel at work, and beat the market – the raison d’etre of any winning organization!

The trick is probably looking at the candidate’s core competence and also what he is passionate about, at work or otherwise. Picture this: If you were the guy in charge of hiring pilots for US Airlines, how would you have identified Capt Chesley Sullenberger from the whole lot of aspiring and young pilots? Or rather how would you not at any cost miss out on hiring the handful of Capt Sullenbergers from a thousand aspirants.

While there are surely many proven models on ‘how to hire the right person for the right job’, the most simple and cost effective way is to factor a few simple questions as a part of the hiring discussions.

In today’s rapid fire hiring processes, it is competency assessment on the basis of standard question templates that dominate rather than a few rudimentary but revealing questions.

One such rudimentary question is: What do you do in your spare time?

When Michael Balboni, New York State’s deputy secretary for public safety, thanked Capt Sullenberger for a job done brilliantly, he responded “That’s what we’re trained to do.” But that was humility at its best, another hallmark of passionate leaders.

Only a probing question on the Captain’s hobbies, life likes and passion would have revealed this:

When most friends were getting their driver’s licenses, he got his pilot’s license. For fun, he flew glider planes, which is what he did when he landed in the Hudson River with no engines. Extracurricular activity? An accident investigator for the Air Line Pilots Association and work with federal aviation officials to improve training and methods for evacuating aircraft in emergencies. This explains why he walked through the cabin twice, making sure no one was left behind before he escaped the sinking plane himself on that day over the Hudson river!

This might seem eccentric and obsessive to quote from what I read somewhere: “Obsessions are one of the greatest telltale signs of success. Understand a person’s obsessions and you will understand her natural motivation. That one thing for which she would walk to the end of the earth.”

Well, we are not hiring for those who would be willing to do that long walk, but only those whose probability of success on the job is above average, at least and excellent, at best.

So, look for that little obsession for job-related skills – a receptionist excels in greeting people with a smile, and has to like doing that and being hospitable, a sales guy needs to be passionate about people and how the product and services benefit the customer, a recruiter is passionate about helping people shape their careers, a doctor is passionate about saving lives.

To re-iterate, only the right and simple questions throw up our ‘Captain Sullenberger’!! Let’s ask those few questions now on.

–

Muralidharan is an HR practitioner and a recruitment professional. A strong believer in spreading cheer and positivity, Murali currently works out of Chennai and is a voracious reader and a prolific writer.

If you have had a dog in the house, and here let me qualify that I mean a live-in pet that is allowed to enter all areas of the residence, you would know that caring for it is serious work. We have had two by the way and one is still alive and with us. Nonetheless, the fact is that many people have a dog to show off their wealth, or to tie at the entrance of their house or as a guard dog, that cannot enter the front door. So we have people who buy a ‘pedigreed’ dog, authenticated by a proper certificate by a kennel club.

There are only two areas that this piece will focus upon, one the way the dog owner treats the dog and the second, the way he or she deals with the ‘doggy do’ or poop. Believe me, I have seen plenty of owners, and the way they treat this rather sticky aspect of dog care is a revelation.  So to get to the point, we have the following:

Democratic owner

Their dogs are allowed the run of the house. They can climb on to sofas or share the master bedroom with the owners. They are not tied up at any time and, in the rare event that dog haters come to the residence and they have to be isolated, the dogs are simply kept in one of the bedrooms, behind a closed door.

Here’s what is probably the owner’s management style. He will allow his employees or subordinates the freedom to express themselves through work. He will probably give them a long rope and will spare them the hanging if they commit mistakes. This makes for a friendly and responsible employee who learns on the job and from each task he or she is required to do. Rather like the CEO of IBM who did not fire a VP who committed a blunder that cost the company a cool $7 million. When asked why he did not he said, “Hell, I just paid for his tuition!”

Dogs and children and employees need to be corrected and this also happens with such a manager. However, the annoyance lasts for only a short while. Normally, employees respond to the needs of the organisation best, with such a manager and he or she dotes as much on the employees as they on him or her.

Dictatorial owner
 
This person treats his canine like a military commander treats his troops. He expects complete obedience and punishes any infraction or signs of rebellion with a reprimand or a beating. What this does to the dog is to make it a canine existing without any enthusiasm. This man’s employees are also likewise, an unenthusiastic bunch of people who work because they have to and, their life or death depends on this person who happens to be their boss. I have worked with three such caustic bosses and any attempt to do my best always met with a reprimand for some unexpressed requirement that remained unfulfilled!

The organisation suffers such bosses more due to political reasons than anything else. In the long run they cause more harm than good and the employees flee faster than people leaving the Gulf, as of now.

Careless owner

This person cannot be bothered to take care of his or her dog. The poor dear is left to fend for itself. Food is not given on time, the pooch is not properly toilet trained and the neighbours keep complaining. Not the fault of the dog. However, you can bet the owner blames the dog and says that all this happens despite the care he takes!

You know this kind of manager, the one who delegates work and responsibility and blames the employee for any mistakes. What happens is that the employees start shirking work and woe betide the poor sod who volunteers, with sucker written all over his or her visage. Of course everyone learns fast and no one steps up on the plate after sometime. At which point, the boss berates everyone for lack of initiative, for laziness and what have you.

The sticky part

What about the doggy poop, the sticky part. In India where every person is a law unto himself, there are a few owners who take the trouble of cleaning up after their dogs. In Singapore, the fear of fines and lashes of the Rotang ensures discipline of cleaning up after the canines.

In places where discipline is not enforced or, if at all, very loosely, the true character of the owner manifests. Here let me get to the types, without this description claiming to be complete by any means.

One owner takes his or her canine on to the public road and is busy using the mobile while the dog sniffs around looking for an appropriate toilet space. Sometimes, the dog is not on leash and the owner is looking elsewhere. The dog will choose, as dogs are inclined to do, the entrance of someone’s house, or the middle of the road. Passersby avoid the mess and walk around it. Meanwhile big daddy is still busy on the mobile and starts walking homeward. The canine follows although in an inquisitive way as it sniffs its way around its neighbourhood including the hindquarters of other canines. If the canine gets into a fight with another not so kindly inclined one, the owner promptly puts it on leash and drags it away from the scene despite the stiff resistance it offers to the curtailment of its freedom. This owner believes in the public being spared the menial task of clearing public spaces of doggy poop by the citizen. The dog’s duty is to dirty and the municipality’s duty is to clean up. Of course, if this worthy steps on the mess made by a canine, even if it is his own, he will lament loudly about how public servants are lax in the performance of their duty.

The abovementioned person would be the one who will fudge accounts and do all sorts of slimy things and expect that others will clean up the mess made by him. Sorry, but this trait is more masculine than feminine. Only don’t tell my wife I said so!

The next type of owner keeps his dog on leash but will stop short of cleaning up. He or she ensures that the dog does its stuff away from the public gaze and in a corner somewhere. This person may be careful not to make a mess but will still walk away from it and allow others to clean up.

So who is the ideal dog owner?  He or she carries a scooper or at least newspapers and plastic bags, when taking the pet for a walk. These owners clean up after their dogs and take care to use the trash can thereafter. This is regardless whether anyone is looking. These owners take good care of their dogs and keep them from straying and dirtying the neighbours’ spaces. They take responsibility to clean up any public space that has been dirtied by their dogs and bristle when their pets are accused of messing up the neighbourhood. They pass on these rules to their children who grow up to be caring and careful citizens. At work such people are likely to be responsible employees who take ownership of the business and do their best, own up their mistakes and do not leave the rectification to others.

So that’s my piece. By no means does it purport to be an all encompassing treatise. Am sure that lots of people will tell me what I have omitted, an error to which I freely admit. Let’s all strive to be like the last named dog owner. And here are my two precious canine sons, one of whom, the brown one Dennis, shrugged off his mortal coils last year. Rex is with us and he has sufficient toilet etiquette to use the toilet. He does not flush. But then he is a dog and not a man!

(Disclaimer: This does not purport to be anything but pop psychology and the author claims no responsibility for anyone taking this too seriously!)

–

R.A. Krishna, 56, is a former banker and a financial and banking consultant. He has two sons Arun, 29, and Adethya, 20. He also has a dog named Rex, whom he calls his canine son!

Another common sentence is that you are born a leader, that it is a natural gift.

In some aspects it is. But, there are some attitudes that can be acquired to change that perception.

A born leader – or so called – is an individual with charisma. He has a natural empathy with people and can convince them to do what he wants. He has a global vision of situations and quick answers to the problems. He keeps himself cool when the world is exploding around him. He remembers names and profiles of anyone around him. He is a multi-task professional. He can control different areas of business and even different businesses. He is a natural negotiator, internally and externally, on business environment. He manages people naturally. He evaluates, knows how to choose and attracts the best professionals to work with him. He is a visionary. He is a reference to the novice and also to the professional savvy, and so on.

Wow! Seems an endless list to accomplish!

Actually, those skills can and should be achieved by anyone that aims to have a senior position, to manage any organization, team or group.

First of all, you should make a self-evaluation to know if you want or not to be a leader and have more responsibilities and to dedicate energy to achieve that goal. It is not an easy path, often shifting from success to failure and from failure to success very quickly, and many times it is a lonely path.

Be careful with promises like “10 step to become a leader”. There is no magic, or recipe or formula to transform you into a leader. To be recognized as one it takes a long path and a natural evolution.

But you can prepare your self to, when comes the opportunity, be ready to assume the responsibility.

Below you can find some suggestions to prepare your journey:

To lead you need to have followers, though first thing is to know how to deal with people. Improve your people management skills, have at least three different references or methodologies and techniques to achieve it. Read some books and take some courses, short-time courses with highly recommended or recognized professionals, not the first one that you discover on the web. People management is easy to teach, difficult to practice. You will be dealing with feelings, empathy, motivation, egos, power disputes, accommodations, fears of changes, and so on. Nowadays, also, cultural aspects are fundamental, we live in a globalized economy and connected world, and awareness of different cultures is essential.

You need to know how to make presentations and to speak in public. Related to speech and presentation is also the ability to conduct, control and start and finish productive meetings.

Negotiation is another basic skill. You negotiate internally in your organisation and also with business partners. You negotiate almost every day in many situations and in many places.

Be a strategist. Scenarios development, evaluation of situations and figures, and decisions based on truly reliable information will be a daily activity. Improve your strategy skills. Read Sun Tzu, Mintzberg, Prahalad, Porter, and so on.

Prioritize your activities, organise your agenda and have always a daily moment to new insights and to assess trends. It is important to stop and self-evaluate what you are doing and results achieved, and always to search for innovation and to think out-of-the-box.

Benchmarking is another important activity; learn with other leaders, where they had success and where they failed.

Keep up to date about news, political, economical, and cultural, and business related.

Nurture your networking, professionally and personally. Join the winners, your reputation will be, many times, measured by your links. There is a quote that says: tell me who you know and I will tell you who you are.

Balance your life and work. There is a tripod between work, money and family pay attention to all three. If you have one unbalanced area, it will cause stress in all others. Professional success is not every thing in life.

Nowadays, the time of the “smart guy” is surpassed with all the issues that we are seeing globally with this international crisis – social and environmental responsibility and governance.

To finish, don’t rush. Hurry is an enemy of perfection. Again, as already said, leadership is given not taken. You will need to be prepared and with a broad spectrum of skills and experiences. Anything that comes very quickly also goes. So to have a strong and rooted ascent it needs time, perseverance and self-confidence which only well prepared people will be able to achieve.

–

Mario Luis Tavares Ferreira is a seasoned manager and entrepreneur, with a broad technical background, multi-lingual and multi-cultural experienced, co-founded two high tech start-ups, developed business in half dozen countries and is developing a non-profit project to leverage small businesses and start-up development.

Peter created the “Breaking the Mould” process to make his astonishing results available to clients in all industries, public and private, large and small. Once you have understood the simplicity of ‘Breaking the Mould’ – it will transform your life forever! Visit www.breakingthemould.co.uk.

Now the things have changed. The HR professional is required to play a significant role of a strategic collaborator, of a mentor and a counselor, of an employee advocate and most importantly of a change agent. He contributes to the organizational goals, business plans and objectives. He plays an integral role through his knowledge in coaching, counseling and mentoring of employees and executives. 

In my point of view, FOUR Cs are required to be a “lovable or a competent HR professional”.

1. Communication
2. Care for employees
3. Coaching
4. Counseling

Communication
 
Communication is one of the major competencies for an individual to be a lovable HR professional, either from an employee or from a management’s point of view.

The HR professional is required to organize and express the ideas clearly to the right person in an appropriate manner; and using the best and efficient methods to convey the relevant information to the employees or to the management.

The information is at its most useful when it is “accurate, timely, complete and relevant”.  (Rouse and Rouse 2002)

Nowadays expectations of the employees are diverse and sophisticated. They want to understand organization’s goals, business objectives and missions. They want to be fully aware of the company rules and regulations. They want to be a part of the business decisions, policy making and to be involved in moving the business forward and getting ahead of the competitors. Communication is a powerful tool through which an HR person can fulfill their expectations. Poor communication of an HR person can cause a business to fail.

Care for employees

Employees’ positive attitude is critical for the success of the business. Taking care of employees’ personal issues, grievances and problems makes an HR person a lovable HR professional. He must be ready to support his employees, to resolve their workplace conflicts, to foster their motivation level, to provide them with healthy work environment, to evaluate their performances and to endow them with benefit protection.

“When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creature of logic but the creature of emotions.” (Dale Carnegie)

Coaching

Coaching is a job focused and performance oriented process. It helps the employees to establish their personal short term goals and objectives that are congruent with the goals and objectives of the organization.

In this process HR professional plays the role of a catalyst and a facilitator. He educates, guides, trains and supports the employees to connect them with their passions, principles, plans and values to hook them up to their work commitments and to long term organizational goals.

“Coaching is about making everyone feel part of the team, encourage players to cooperate, keeping them informed and taking an interest in their individual performances.” (Birkinshaw and Crainer 2002)
 
Counseling

Counseling is known by many names like “therapy” or “psychoanalysis”. It is a process to help and to counsel the employees to learn how to solve their emotional, interpersonal and behavioral issues.

Every individual cannot be capable enough to manage the stress of his/her life, at home or at the office. Whether he/she is married or unmarried, he/she cannot escape from his/her responsibilities. This situation causes the stress and then the need of HR counseling arises to cope with this stress and to manage other additional issues of his/her life. The HR professional can be helpful for the management and the employees. He can manage the change easily if he counsels his employees effectively. He does it in a friendly manner to help them take charge of their lives. He helps them to overcome their problems at work, to manage the workload and to resolve the workplace issues.

We may conclude that HR professionals who are good communicators, caring about employees, having the ability to coach and counsel their employees are the most lovable HR professionals and are seen as an asset for the companies. A lovable HR professional adds the value to his/her organization being proactive and persuasive.

–

Result-oriented human resource professional with four years of generalist experience in strategic recruitment, employee relations and employee development, Ghazala is a Human Resource Manager. She is a hobbyist writer and poetess since her college days and her work has been published in magazines.

Friendship groups amongst colleagues are very much in vogue today. And these friendship groups are very prevalent in industries such as IT, ITES, and media. Every month, these friendship groups across different companies and their competitors, meet to discuss the latest happenings in their respective work lives. High profile projects, star performers, opportunities to travel abroad, and other juicy events are discussed during such meetings at restaurants or in a cozy home. 

Though these meetings are seen as healthy amongst employees, managers view it from a very different angle. Managers’ fear that sensitive information about clients, flaws in their systems, loopholes, and best practices of their company get leaked outside their companies during such heart-to-heart sessions. This fear prevents a small business owner or manager to openly discuss the strategies of their enterprise with all their associates.

I have seen a few entrepreneurs openly lament that a few employees of their companies started their own business after learning the tricks of the trade in a few months. Such fears of losing an employee to competition or to another industry prevent employee engagement.

So, enterprising employees are never included in important discussions such as tender quoting or pricing, project evaluation and design, training programs, and promotions. Thus the company loses out on the experience and engagement of a senior associate.

How do we avoid this dilemma or locked horn situation? One factor that has to be taken into account is that a lot of employees are ignorant of the ill effects of the information sharing they innocently engage in. Non-disclosure agreements that employees sign is a good first step. But many employees forget the agreement the moment they finish putting the sign.

So, a more humane method can be followed. A human resource person or a trusted senior can conduct mini meetings to discuss criticality of non-disclosure with practical examples. And tell the employees they value them as much as they value the company’s confidentiality.

There are a lot of fun activities that can be conducted without the company investing money. In one of my workplaces, all the associates had to dress in shades of orange for “Orange Day.” And the best dressed male and female were selected by a simple survey and announced via e-mail. Or all employees can be asked to dress up in attire akin to different Indian traditions or states. Such simple, colorful, participative, jubilant, and zero investment activities can engage employees to a very large extent. Just a bit of commonsense has to come into play.

Entrepreneurs have to be broad-minded and understand that they play a larger role in the industry and society. And hence look beyond their own vested interests.

Three cheers to confidential and penny-wise employee engagement activities!!!

–

Anitha is an engineer with a masters in human resource management. She has conducted and been a part of syncronous and asynchronous training in technical and soft skills subjects. Her interests include reading, cooking, singing, and listening to music.

So, how does the management deal with a lateral hire? Can he or she be given the same treatment that is given to their colleagues? How do the team members respond to a lateral hire? What type of assignments and responsibilities can a lateral hire handle? These are a few questions that will invariably pop up when an experienced fresher enters an organization.

Subroto Bagchi, co-founder of Mindtree, in his book “High Performance Entrepreneur” suggests that lateral hires (LH) be handled by an experienced mentor in the organization. The mentor need not be the immediate supervisor of the LH. However, the mentor needs to have the experience, maturity, sense of humor, and compassion to make the LH feel at home.

The sensitivity factor here is the other team members should not start feeling that the LH is given preferential treatment or importance. So, a fine balance needs to be maintained.

In one of the companies I worked, a new employee has to send an e-mail to all employees of the company (including the CEO) describing his or her education, areas of expertise, strengths, weaknesses, and a bit about their personal interests and lifestyle. This introductory mail helps everyone to understand the newbie. And also evaluate themselves as compared to a new or LH.

I feel this type of an introduction is important because most of the time your own colleagues, whom you have lunch with, have no clue of your areas of expertise. A healthy induction and introduction will help the other team members understand why critical assignments and new business initiatives are being directed to the LH.

Job markets these days are very fluid. Stereotypes have been diluted and hence we have an influx of housewives, rural wannabes, freelancers, and crossover specialists entering the corporate arena.

So it is a challenge for the human resource executive and/or the management to acknowledge the diverse workgroup and devise appropriate strategies to make everyone feel at ease and work together in peace.

–

Anitha is an engineer with a masters in human resource management. She has conducted and been a part of syncronous and asynchronous training in technical and soft skills subjects. Her interests include reading, cooking, singing, and listening to music. You can reach her at anithajebaraj@gmail.com. Visit her blog at www.anithawrites.blogspot.com.

Our story was something along these lines, and to clarify Mark (my husband) and I have a strong personal relationship, but it is not perfect and so there is some ‘stuff.’ What we failed to appreciate was just how much of our personal lives we were injecting into our business and how this was eating into our productivity, profits and potential.

A list of the tasks and management principles used by a large company, and there are a few below, should be similar for a smaller outfit, although the order of magnitude may differ.

•    The most qualified person to do a particular job, should be doing it: The poor salesman needs to get trained and good, or move over and let someone else do it.
•    What are the aims and objectives of the company?: If you want to make a million pounds while your partner wants to save the world, then factor this into your objectives and direction.

•    Short, medium and long term goals: You must understand each other’s goals and motivations so that you act synergistically.

•    Company values: If one partner is operating the business outside of the values of the other, then the business risks failure. For example, if your top company value is helping people, whilst your partner seeks financial wealth, someone’s values are at risk of serious compromise. This one is a deal breaker.

•    Individual strengths, weaknesses and development needs: In the big corporate world your performance would be appraised to identify weaknesses, training needs, set targets and ensure you work to your strengths. When was the last time you had an appraisal?

•    Individual job titles, job descriptions and responsibilities: If no-one has a job description, how do you ensure the dull and difficult stuff gets done, or eliminate overlaps, i.e. two people doing the same job

•    Have you assigned yourself an hourly rate?: By this I mean, what would you pay yourself per hour, for what you produce. If you don’t know what your time is worth, how can you decide if you should do a job yourself or pay someone else?

What will you change when you know the precise cash value of your wasted hours?

Perhaps you are like a lot of couples who decide to go into business? At first you’re so busy in the trenches that forward planning is the last thing on your mind. If you take a step back now, do you and your partner do any of these?

•     Accept substandard work rather than risk hurting your partner’s feelings.

•    Bringing last night’s argument into the office.

•    Redoing your partner’s work because it is not up to your standard.

•    Discussing at length how, why and by whom a job should be done.

•    Rehashing and re-organising systems.

•     Agreeing with a proposal you think is flawed, just to keep the peace.

•    Both of you doing the same job, which only needed doing once.

•    Rushing a job which has now become urgent because no-one was responsible for completing it on time.

If you do any of the above, do you know what it costs you?

The quantifiable resources such as wasted time spent squabbling or by inefficiencies; unnecessary travelling time and costs; additional printing or postage, phone bills, extra taxes, unused products…

And what of the even scarier unquantifiables such as lost sales; lack of momentum, unused or wasted resources, lost energy, lost the will to live.

If you could spend just one day to identify with certainty your individual strengths; align your personal and company values; set exciting and empowering business and personal goals; develop a congruent business plan AND take away with you all the skills and tools you both need to repeat the process and realign your values whenever you wanted, and as your company evolves – how much would that be worth to you? Later on I’ll tell you about the really tiny thing which Mark and I discovered but which turned not only our business, but our personal lives around. But first, a little background information about how we happened at that point. When we started our company Stormchasers Ltd we just divvied up the jobs so that all the important tasks would get done. This is what happened:

•    Instead of doing my boring jobs, I would poke my nose in to find Mark a more efficient way of doing his.

•     I might decide not to tell Mark there was a better way to do his job, for fear of undermining him.

•    Frustrated, eventually I would tell him there was a better way of doing his job, but in a way that did undermine him.

•    Mark would give in to my suggestions for ‘improvement’ just to keep the peace; but I hadn’t really thought things through properly so the job would get done my way, but now ineffectively.

•    I would come up with loads of business ideas which I would partly implement.

•    We discussed everything at length for fear of excluding each other from decisions.

•    We spent ages fussing and arguing over trifling issues and left the really important matters alone for fear of causing a serious rift in our personal relationship.

If these seem inconsistent and contradictory, that’s because they are, and that happened because each one of us was lurching between deciding to accept poor workmanship, or a bad decision by the other, to reaching the point of no compromise where something had to change.

I’m a certified Master NLP Practioner and came across Value Systems as part of my ongoing studies and decided to try it out on us. This is what we found.

Mark is operating at values level 4 where hierarchy, duty and having the correct system to follow are extremely important. Interestingly, he spent sixteen happy and productive years in the army. Values level 4 people often don’t feel their personal reward is of upmost importance; they crave purpose, order, stability and someone in charge to provide direction. Their management system is hierarchical with order maintained and a defined decision making process. They have a sense of duty and believe in doing what’s right.

I on the other hand am largely a values level 5 where individual goals and seeking out the best way are important. Values level 5 will compete to succeed, sense possibilities for change and find an individual opportunity to do better. These are the innovators and idea generators. The entrepreneurs. Goal setters and seekers. They have no sense of duty and believe in doing what’s right for them.

This was an amazing revelation for us. Before, we had a task based organization.

Mark – retail, accounts

Sian – paying bills, getting customers

However, there are some fundamental elements missing from the above structure, which prevented us from moving forward. After our values revelation, we restructured to this.

Sian – Strategic big picture, product development, testing, focus and system development.

Mark – Detailed processes, retail, accounts, bills.

Both of us – goals, vision, job descriptions, aims and corporate values

Today I contribute the ideas to move us forward – the strategic direction, whilst Mark provides the stability and delivers the systems and day-to-day jobs, which now get done on time. He says, “It’s Sian’s role to come up with the ideas, and my job to organise the chaos she creates into real productivity.”

We learned that instead of him dreading me taking over, Mark was desperately wondering where the structure and rules were. I on the other hand, was so wary of being seen as a domineering tyrant who wanted to be in charge of everything, that I did nothing and was largely unproductive.

An NLP Practitioner will structure a bespoke programme for you, but you can start right now by applying these ideas for change.

1. Create a positive environment for change and development by agreeing to be honest, trusting and accepting of a performance less than perfect. Don’t point score.

2. Each work out your life and business values and describe what they mean for you.

3. Agree common values for your business.  Examples could be integrity, customer satisfaction, delivering value, making money and helping others.

4.  Brainstorm all the jobs that must be done for your business to run smoothly.   Beside each, write the name of the person who will deliver. Agree empowerment.  No poking noses in.

5.  Establish areas where either or both of you lacks confidence such as cold calling or dealing with customer complaints.

6.  Use the information in items 4 and 5 to establish a training, development and appraisal programme.

7. Each write a job description and decide job titles.

8. Set business and personal goals.

Do it all again 6 months later.

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Sian Murphy is a direct response copywriter who works with Alan Forrest Smith as part of the Orange Beetle Team. In addition to writing for sianmurphycopywriter.com and the non-conformist Orangebeetle.com/blog she also writes and publishes articles on business and personal development.

But actually planning is a natural and embedded activity that we practice everyday. We plan the best route to go to the office.  We plan when we go shopping. We plan our vacations. And so we do with other diverse actions of our daily activities (professional and personal).

With strategic planning we have a scope enlarged, a little more of variables, an expanded timeline, defined methodologies (tools) and usually we need to write it. But it continues to be an extension, or an improvement, of what we are accustomed to do.

Talking with focus on Start-ups and SMBs (small and medium businesses), the strategic planning is a fundamental tool to avoid “lose the path in the middle of the running”.

It is like a “compass” and a “user manual”, to help entrepreneurs to surpass initial stages of start-ups and to help SMB to go to the second level and increase business and results.

As a strategic plan is not a static document, it should be revised periodically and updated. We are in an extremely fast and mutable business environment; it would be a utopia if we want to define a business scenario for the next five years (or even three) and expect to be 100% correct.

When you define (write) a strategic plan, you are organizing your ideas, defining the business scope, vision, mission, values, targets, products, analysis of the competitors, marketing and sales strategy, key figures, resources, points of control, feasibility,  costs, cash flow, financial needs, break-even point of the business, and so on.

Finishing the plan, you will be in control of the situation; it will have a pleasant feeling.

You will have a reference and a document to share with your partners and collaborators to develop synergy, motivation and synchronicity.

You will have a document, if needed, to present to your bank account manager, in the “bad times”.

You will have a set of “tools” already developed, to correct quickly any deviation of your original thoughts and plans.

You will sleep better with everything planned, organized and controlled!

Given below is a simple structure to write a basic business plan or strategic plan.

Executive summary

Depending on the objective of the plan and its audience, the executive summary can have different approaches and content. If it is to sell the company, get venture capital, implement an internal expansion, enter in new markets or make a turnaround.

The business

Description of the business, products/services, strategy, the mission, vision, values.

Market analysis

Here we discuss about the target market, competitors, and SWOT analysis – analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. We also analyse macro-environment factors which are the political, economical, social and technological factors, and this analysis is called the PEST analysis. We can also analyse the marketing mix (the four Ps: product, price, place, promotion), key success factors, and so on. The detail will depend on how deep we want to go with the analysis.

The strategy

Now we clearly define the objectives, the strategy and the operational plan involving administration, human resources, production, marketing and sales and financial analysis. An important point is to define timings and key performance indicators, which we will use to control the plan implementation.

Conclusion

Here we present the final thoughts and reinforce key points that we identify as unique or differential aspects that make the plan attractive.

About the document

Usually the overall document should have around 20 pages. Its content and number of pages will depend on your target readers and application, and obviously on what kind of business we are talking about. Our focus, here, is on SMBs (Small and Medium Businesses) and Start-ups.

Final Thought:

So, organise your work, have more productivity, control it better and have more time to be tickled by life.

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Mario is a seasoned manager and entrepreneur with a broad technical background, coupled with multi-cultural experience and multi-lingual skills, co-founded two high tech start-ups, and now is developing a non-profit project to leverage globally the business development of small entrepreneurs.

When we get out of people’s way, they have the space to grow. When we stop thinking for them, they start to think for themselves. And when we stop telling them what our solutions are, they come up with the best solutions of all.

1. Gentle Leadership. Like it or not, the group will turn to the group leader at critical moments in the life of a group…
• to exert authority (especially if someone challenges the agreed rules)
• to be a model of legitimate and compassionate authority
• to be the expert
• to inform
• to adjudicate
• to empower
• to reward
• to provide feedback.

The group leader does not respond to the need for leadership by wresting control back from the group, but rather uses the skills of gentle leadership to help them lead themselves.

“The true leader is always led.” (Carl Jung)

2. Gentle Interventions. Gentle leadership comes from gentle interventions: a gentle frown; a gentle look; a gentle smile; a gentle touch; a gentle nudge; a gentle few words; gentle persuasion.

Other techniques of gentle persuasion are:

• suggesting options but without forcing the group to choose
• posing questions to make people think
• pointing out possible consequences
• making a point indirectly through stories, anecdotes, myth and legends, the way gentle leaders throughout history have always conveyed their message.

“Gentle interventions, if they are clear, overcome rigid resistance. If gentleness fails, try yielding or stepping back altogether. When the leader yields, resistance fails.” (John Heider)

3. 3D Leaders. The 3-D leader is the leader who can lead a group from any of the following three positions:
• out in front of the group
• in amongst the group
• at the back of the group.

The 3-D leader is like the mountain guide who knows when to tell the group to “Follow me!”, when to mix in amongst them to gain their confidence; and when to let everyone climb a cliff first so that he can check their progress and safety from below.

The distinctive mark of the 3-D leader is care; and from caring comes the courage to try bold things.

4. Charisma. Charisma is a quality that belongs to the art of gentle leadership. It enables you to influence others simply by your presence and attentiveness.

One of the most charismatic people ever to have lived was President John F. Kennedy. It was said that when you spoke to Kennedy, you were made to feel that nothing else in the world mattered to him at that moment than you, your thoughts and feelings. That’s the effect of charisma.

The word “charisma” comes from the “Charities” or Graces of Greek mythology. These were three goddesses, Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia, who were reputed to have given humour, graciousness and good manners to mankind.

5. Class. The gentle leader has no need to prove himself or herself to the group. When interventions are made, they are as a last resort; when skills are used, they are always understated.

“One thing that all of us must understand, whether it is in selling, business or in our relationships with others, is not to come on too strong. Many of us tend to do this. We get so excited that our enthusiasm outruns the content of our message. That is, the harder you try, the more doubt you imply to the listener.

There is a phrase that covers this. The object is to be so strong, so powerful, that you can afford to be gentle. As change occurs, as your growth happens from inside, you will become more powerful, more confident. So you can become gentle, at ease and real. Which is another way of saying you will have class.” (Louis Tice)

6. The Leader as Catalyst. A catalyst is a substance that merely by its presence, causes change in other substances.

The group facilitator acts as catalyst when he or she shows the group genuine understanding, offers them recognition, helps them to make sense of their problems and encourages them to be all they can be.

• at the feeling level, she is wooer, charmer, and empathizer
• at the thinking level, he is interpreter, questioner and stimulator
• at the valuing level, she is champion, enabler and nurturer.

None of these roles are played up front as if to say: “Look at me”. They are always applied with a light and gentle touch.

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Eric Garner is Managing Director of ManageTrainLearn, the site that will change the way you learn forever. Download free samples of the biggest range of management and personal development materials anywhere and experience learning like you always dreamed it could be. Just click on <a href=”http://www.managetrainlearn.com”>ManageTrainLearn</a> and explore.

Ashok, a young management graduate from a prestigious school, settles down in his new assignment full of confidence in his ability to make a difference in his new job. He initiates what he thinks are much needed changes, sure to propel the organization to stratospheric levels. Soon he meets with what he thinks is irrational resistance. Pulled up by top management, he resigns.

Most young managers and often even experienced ones find it difficult to understand why people are not able to accept the simplest of changes which are in fact ‘in their interest’. They conclude that they are surrounded by bad colleagues, by incompetent executives. This diagnosis is not always correct. The fact is that many of us do not have an understanding of the concept of systems.

Almost anything we can think of is a system or part of a system. Our body is a system that we can understand. Each person is part of a system—the family, community, organization, etc. Simply speaking a system is a number of parts acting as a single entity. Technically a system is an entity that maintains its existence and functions as a whole through the interactions of its parts. These parts are interconnected and work together and the behaviour of the system depends on the total structure. Change the system structure and you change the behaviour.

There are two issues of significance here. Firstly, systems function as a whole so they have properties above and beyond the properties of the parts that comprise them. These are known as ‘emergent properties’. These properties cannot be predicted by analyzing the parts in isolation. Thus the expected performance of a team is not just the sum of the individual capabilities of the members of the team. Secondly and conversely if you take the system apart these properties are lost. Analytical thinking sometimes does not work because of this second feature of systems. Thus analyzing the individual performance of the executives in a failed department may not reveal the correct reasons for non-performance—the problem may be of the lack of teamwork and coordination.

Dynamic complexity is a concept young managers may not be familiar with. Consider a business team. Each member of the team has his or her moods and these can vary moment to moment. There are many ways in which these members can relate with each other. So even if the team is small in size it may have a great deal of dynamic complexity. Problems that seem to be simple on the surface may be having a great deal of complexity when probed further. Every new connection to the system—the addition of one more person for example—increases complexity, not by one, but exponentially.

To understand the ‘exponential’ bit you have only to realize that managing two people is more than twice as hard as managing one person! In a complex system like a company or even a department in an organization it is useful to remember the following.

The relationship between the different parts of the system determines how it works, so each part, however small, can affect the behaviour of the whole. The humble peon for example can have a big effect on the working of a department as some of us may have experienced.

All parts of a system are interdependent, they all interact. How they relate to each other gives them the power to influence systems.

Arising from the above we have a useful tip on how Ashok our young management graduate, referred to in the start of this article, could have handled his situation better. The more connections he would have made the more possible influence he could have exercised. Networking, for this is what this rule amounts to, brings influence. Research suggests that successful managers spend four times as much time networking as their less successful colleagues. {Paul Luthans in ‘Real manager’ 1988]

Different parts can combine to affect the whole—a phenomenon we often dismiss as ‘cliques’. Any system is a web. The many links in a system make it stable. Any change in one part will, by the very nature of the interconnectedness of its parts, affect changes in the rest of the system. The other parts will also resist change because it means they will have to change too. Complex systems like organizations resist change. The vast bureaucracy in an organization is notoriously change resistant.

New business practices are resisted as people feel comfortable with the old ways of doing things—something that Ashok discovered to his cost. Systems do however change and sometimes very fast in some circumstances. Ashok could have succeeded if he knew another aspect of systems—the principle of leverage.

Imagine a system as a web with many parts connected. Suppose you want to change the position of one part. When you pull on it directly, it seems to resist. Really it is the whole system that resists. However cutting a small link in another place may free this piece. Like undoing a crucial knot in a tangle of string. You have to know how the system is made up to know which knot to undo. Once this is understood even major changes can be achieved with little effort.

In Ashok’s case he was not aware, that he had only to win the confidence of the PA to the CEO and he would have had no problem in initiating change!! Change can happen if you identify the right connections. This phenomenon, whereby a small effort can get a huge result, is the principle of leverage, a feature of systems. Charlie Chaplin had quite by accident pressed the right ‘lever’.

How does one apply this principle? Ask the key question ‘What stops the change?’ Look at the connections that are holding the part you want to change, in place. Cut or weaken these and the change may be easy.

As for Ashok, did his business school education prove inadequate? Maybe yes, maybe no. You gain knowledge through analytical thinking. You gain understanding through systems thinking.

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K.R. Ravi is South Asia’s first Dr.Edward De Bono certified public trainer in lateral thinking, and a pioneer in spreading lateral thinking in the Indian corporate sector. For more details, visit http://www.krravi.com or contact him at createravi@hotmail.com.

The challenges thrown at the entrepreneur are merely tests to ascertain the level to which s/he is capable of understanding his/her business: “Do your homework.”
If it’s a partnership you’re involved in, the VC needs to know if you can gel. The VC needs two areas covered in such a situation – “someone who can build and someone who can sell.”
On the flipside, the entrepreneur needs a number of things of his/her VC. Number one on an entrepreneur’s list of priorities is chemistry. The question must be asked: “Is this someone you can disagree with.” The VC must be the first person you are willing and able to call when you are struggling with a problem. You must be able to ask of the VC if future rounds of financing are safe. Are your operating values soon going to be seen by the VC as operating problems?  These and many other questions relating to compatibility or chemistry must first be answered before jumping to conclusions about how the relationship is going to work.
Secondly, what do you need? The stage in which your enterprise is in and the ability of the VC to understand future variations in revenues depending on the timeline of the business are vital.
There was plenty of debate regarding valuation and liquidation references, but the simple core of their advice was this:  create demand for the product, get people excited in it and you are in the driver’s seat, with the VC riding shotgun.
Of course businesses have different gestation periods depending on the models they use, but as long as you have found a VC who understands the machinations of the industry, there shouldn’t be a problem.
Questions were soon raised about the general fear of ideas being stolen. The panel was quick to retort that the only way to protect an idea is to run with it. Ideas are meaningless without execution. The cost of making and executing the idea must be less than what the customer is willing to pay. And naturally the scalability of the idea depends on the market for it.

Some VCs saw the coming year in an optimistic light drawing attention to the fact that this downturn will result in a lot of experimentation with new business models and constant innovation.
Essentially however the tone was Darwinian at best. “The bar is being raised”, “Survival of the fittest” and other such phrases were designed to assure entrepreneurs that funding would be available to those who adapted to changing situations.

Chairing the special panel discussion titled ‘From Adversity to Advantage: Opportunities for Growth & Investment’, Sonjoy Chatterjee, Executive Director, ICICI Bank suggested that the entrepreneurial ecosystem in India was finding sustenance despite the economic downturns. Atul Punj mentioned that this could also be opportunities for companies to make good acquisitions/investments as the price point of some of the companies would provide attractive upsides in the times to come. Hari Bhartia on the contrary mentioned that cash is king and companies must be conservative in spending cash and use Lean and Six Sigma techniques for process improvements.

In a session titled, “Are you ready for venture capital”, a star panel with varying expertise addressed issues relating both to the availability of capital and whether or not acquisition of that capital is a good idea.
Sudhir Sethi of IMD-IDG ventures that deals primarily with early stage enterprises, spoke about the question being how to expect the funding market to change. Sudhir Sethi is Founder, Chairman and Managing Director of IDG Ventures India, a US$150 million early-stage technology venture capital fund backed by IDG, the world’s largest IT-focused media company. He founded IDG Ventures in 2006 after 26 years in the technology and venture industry.

He classified this impact of uncertain capital markets under the following:

Fund-raising and general partner/team quality

Limited partners, he said, would become very selective as regards the quality of teams they bet on. Few general partners in India, he believes, possess a “full cycle GP experience of deal flow generation, investment, monitoring, exits, and fund raising”. In effect, first-time funds with teams that do not have much chemistry will hit road blocks raising capital. On the other hand, second time funds with a well-planned investment strategy and a “full cycle venture experience”, will find it easier (in terms of adaptability to the market) to gain funds.

Deal flow

Panellists expected a slowdown in deal flow. Start-up venture funding saw a decline, as the number of newer start-ups fell. There appears to be a slowdown in entrepreneurial movement from corporate to start-ups. Expectations abound, in an optimistic VC atmosphere, for the quality of deals to grow.
Tier-two cities such as Pune, Coimbatore & Mysore may also see a piece of  the action in terms of deal flow.

Valuations

Sethi also mentioned having seen falling valuations in deals with early stage ventures. This trend will probably continue.

Exits

Dependence on IPOs will continue to fall as companies are being constructed increasingly to exit by acquisition. Founding teams may be pushed to build significantly tech differentiated models so as to harness greater valuations at exit.

Co-investments

Yet another impact of unstable capital markets discussed at the summit was the increase in co-investments. Sethi quoted the example of his own IMD-IDG ventures where out of 7 investments, 4 are together with co-investors.

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Some challenges that the industry may face in the near future were addressed. The Venture industry will be seen in the next 4 years to be one where opportunity management is vital.

The industry is however currently strong and flexible enough to support more funds. This was evidenced by fact that IMD-IDG met numerous limited partners who communicated the intention for IMD to continue to focus on venture investments. The difference between first time and second time funds in the near future would be the latter’s ability to raise funds easier and faster.
There appears also to be a healthy trend in terms of greater numbers of disruptive product ventures.
Another big challenge however is that of maintaining the teams they have gathered while private equity firms are cropping up.

Venture funds will face a challenge of retaining their teams with more private
equity funds being formed.

Clearly, there is much to be considered in the coming year. Funding will be scarcer than ever and survival of the fittest will function in its bluntest form.
That is not to say that VCs are now a completely excluding mechanism. If you’ve got the idea, the passion and the vision, coupled with effective execution, funding should not be a problem.

What he meant was that in our obsession about fine details we miss the larger picture. Some of the related characteristics are the tyranny of the rule, quoting ‘audit objection’ to stymie the most enlightened of suggestions, a refusal to have a re-look at timeworn practices and indeed a refusal to rethink on extant ways of thinking.

At a dinner meeting at a five star hotel in New Delhi I asked the manager why he had provided forks and knives but no spoons at the buffet table. “It is not the practice in hotels abroad to place spoons,” was the reply. I requested him to demonstrate to me how I could consume sambhar with either of the accessories. He looked sheepish but did not remedy the situation.

Emerging from a mall in Mumbai my carry bag neatly sealed, I was stopped by a guard outside the exit door, who asked me to show the paid bill which I did, though I was earlier tempted to throw it into the dustbin. He fumbled in his trouser pockets, fished out a rubber stamp and proceeded to stamp my bill with an illegible legend. The stamp did not work. He was about to head for his boss’s room for a substitute stamp when I asked him what purpose the stamp served. “I do not know but rules are rules,” he said peremptorily. The boss emerged ten minutes later only to inform us that the substitute stamp did not work either and would we please wait till he received suitable instructions from Head Office? By then at least 50 shoppers had collected and our temper was made worse by the scorching sun. Our entreaties to spare us this agony fell on deaf bureaucratic ears. Finally a serious and stern looking man calling himself the administration manager appeared and proceeded to sign the bills – a formality that delayed us by a further fifteen minutes. Incidentally I passed on my bus ticket which also he quickly signed! I asked him the rationale for this ridiculous procedure. He mumbled something under his breath, which I am sure even he did not understand.

If this is the state of private sector organizations we can shudder at the state of affairs in government undertakings. Here is an unbelievable but tragically true story narrated by a well-known Indian economist writing in a leading business magazine. Apparently there is a clerk in an obscure state government office in the southern city of Tiruchirapally who sends a one-line statement to his superior who in turn sends to his boss and so on till it reaches the District Collector and thence to the State Secretariat. At the end of this tortuous exercise the paper finds itself on the august desk of an External Affairs Ministry worthy who promptly files it.

The contents of this letter that was being sent till a recent date: ‘Sir, during this month we have not sent any cigars to Sir Winston Churchill’. Talk of famous one-liners. I rest my case here.

It appears that our excessive zeal to be correct in procedure and our expertise in handling small details and in processing paper, has its advantages. Dr. De Bono, for example, attributes our success in software programming to this unique ability of ours. We may add that the jobs currently being outsourced by developed countries to India are precisely those where little thinking and much detailing are required – call centre operations, accounting, medical transcription, tax returns filling and processing etc. It is here that farsighted and creative HR managers have a role to play. I call it the PPSSST approach that HR managers could adopt.

This acronym stands for POLICIES, PROCEDURES, SYSTEMS, STRUCTURES, STRATEGY, TACTICS. These are broadly areas where the creative HR manager could initiate a lateral thinking drive to re-look and rethink. The lateral thinking tool of ‘Challenge’ is just what he and his company need to creatively challenge procedures and practices and come up with alternatives that will achieve the accepted objectives with least number of speed-breakers along the way.

The Challenge technique requires us to examine the Dominating ideas, Boundaries, Essential factors, Assumptions, and Avoidance factors behind each aspect of a company’s working. These can be challenged creatively and unobtrusively without upsetting egos. The result could be one of the following three – a decision to eliminate the rule for example, or re-assess the reasons for continuing it or finally to come up with an alternative for it that will be user friendly, less cumbersome, less detailed, or more time and cost efficient .

My experience has been that this Challenge technique produces the best results with the least disruption to egos when applied to the rules, procedures and even form filling activities in an organization. In this context the ETDBW [Easy To Do Business With] approach when viewed at from the perspective of the many people and institutions that interact with the company when combined with the Challenge technique generate the best ideas that go to make it a pleasure for others to interact with us.

In the five star hotel example ,the manager was blindly following what may be the practice in the west where food habits are different from ours. In the cigar case the practice was hopelessly outdated by over 50 years at least. In the mall case the rule made no sense except to keep the security guards busy.

This technique of Challenge, which is but only one aspect of the exciting and extraordinarily useful bouquet of lateral thinking techniques holds the key to de-stifle organisations of rule-boundedness and clinging on to outdated modes of thinking and doing.

At a seminar on ‘Liberalisation’ I asked a top industrialist how many clearances he now needed to set up a medium-sized manufacturing venture. ‘33000 signatures’ was his reply. Clearly our Government is not yet ‘Easy To Do Business With’.

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K.R. Ravi is South Asia’s first Dr.Edward De Bono certified public trainer in lateral thinking, and a pioneer in spreading lateral thinking in the Indian corporate sector. For more details, visit http://www.krravi.com or contact him at createravi@hotmail.com.

While enough has been said and written on how it is important and crucial to manage performance in an organization, not much emphasis has been laid on the importance of communicating it to the members of the organization at all levels.

This leads to a lot of confusion, uncertainty, and most of all, shock and surprise when in the middle of the year/end of the year, the employees are measured, reviewed, and  evaluated by a process which they are not even prima facie aware of.

Many a times, such a performance management exercise, which is truly objective and equal to all gets perceived to be biased, and partial; the only culprit in this whole event is the absence of a well laid down communication strategy – within the organization to all internal stakeholders.

That strategy which will, well in time, at the beginning of the period or year under review, state in writing to each and every employee the measures and attributes by which his/her contribution will be done.

Lack of such communication will also have an adverse impact of the performing members of the team. Whilst they give in their best, which would have exceeded their division and business objectives, they would see that their not so performing peers also seem to hold the same stature and growth in a patriarchal management. This can be highly dangerous to the overall health and long term growth of the company. Unless people see a visible difference between where performers will stand – higher – and where non performers will stand – lower or out of the organization – the very performers will desert the organization.

Communication, in the right time and in a very transparent manner (with all the measures quantified, sans any scope for bias), will be a decisive differentiator that would enable all concerned to view the process as legitimate and objective. And once this happens, tremendous amount of discipline comes by in the way everyone views the short term and long term goals. And they also know how and where they will grow within, with the kind of work they do in the period under review.

This highlights the critical nature of the performance communication process, and the time and energy the HR team, the SBU heads, and the CEO ought to spend in making this exercise possibly the best communication amongst the employees. If there is one single exercise that would contribute directly to the top line and the bottom line of the organization, it is PERFORMANCE COMMUNICATION.

The best way to do this will be to create a sort of ‘war room’ that takes care of the whole communication process – planning, vetting, implementing at all levels top down, ascertaining feedback on whether everyone had understood their goals right through. And post the actual performance process, a check on whether what happened is as per the communiqué to each of the employee.

So let all of us, in our organizations do our bit for PERFORMANCE COMMUNICATION.

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Muralidharan is an HR practitioner and a recruitment professional. A strong believer in spreading cheer and positivity, Murali currently works out of Chennai and is a voracious reader and a prolific writer.

Leading such teams is indeed very challenging, even stressful. The project leader has to create convergence towards a common goal  when everything seems to encourage divergence: different geographies means little direct contact between team members, different time zones reduce windows of availability for team discussions, different languages increases communication problems and different mindsets mean potential disagreements in terms of what, who, how, when and why.

In my opinion, 3 key challenges must be met by the global manager:

•    Trust: the key ingredient in team success is mutual trust which comes from knowing one another.  Local teams build this trust through day-to-day contact, a luxury often denied global teams. Global team leaders have to be even more attentive to building trust in the team.
•    Cohesion and clarity of purpose: team members dispersed geographically are more vulnerable to fragmentation because they are often caught between the hammer of global objectives and the anvil of local objectives.  The global leader must therefore make special efforts to bond the team to the common goal.
•   Communication: distance and dispersion creates a communication gap which makes global teams more vulnerable to confusion and misunderstanding. Global leaders must therefore constantly make special efforts to maintain clarity of purpose.

Trust, cohesion/clarity of purpose and communication are the key ingredients in making the “glue” which the global leader needs to lead his/her global team. So what pragmatic, concrete steps can a global leader take to build trust, cohesion and clarity of purpose? Here are some suggestions:

Trust

•    Celebrate diversity: diversity is positive so always be open and listen before you speak. Team members will feel more confident and willing to contribute when they feel they are listened to and all are included and can contribute.
•    Trust but verify: Give your trust first but reserve the right to check. People respond to trust positively but organizations sometimes get in the way of individuals meeting commitments.
•    Lead by example: say what you do and do what you say. Team members will recognize that you deliver on commitments and respond positively.
•    Be honest: don’t have any hidden agendas and be up front. Team members will accept mistakes, not being misled or tricked. Always be open and clear.
•    Think win-win: team members will be more willing to contribute when they feel there is a win-win spirit and it’s not all one way traffic. This means understanding that team members have also other commitments which require attention.
•    Demonstrate respect: demonstrate respect at all times. Anger, frustration, behaving emotively contribute little and alienate team members.

Cohesion and clarity of purpose

•    Plan: setting overall objectives with clear individual and shared goals and deadlines for all team members is critical in managing global teams. If you don’t know where you’re going, you won’t get there!
•    Prioritize: global leaders need to work with team members to manage the balance between global and local objectives and be flexible when local needs to take precedence over global ones.
•    Monitor performance regularly in a constructive way: a project dashboard capturing collective and individual objectives is even more necessary for global teams so that all can constantly monitor team progress and all can provide mutual support.

Communication

•    Build a communication plan with your team: decide together on how you will communicate as a team within the team and to the organization.
•    Use Technology wisely: the global project leader needs to lever all the different technologies at his disposal to communicate with team members: email, webex, visio, internet, blogs, etc. At the same time, technology is only a support. The global leader must always be available and not rely only on collective meetings via webex. One-on-one discussions are also important.
•    Keep it simple: whatever the communication format, never use slang, never presume others understand, communicate clearly in simple unambiguous words, always reformulate to check understanding and always add personality, enthusiasm and warmth. Remember that spoken words are forgotten, written words remain!
•    Recognize cultural diversity: different cultures have different but complementary ways of getting things done. Be alert to cultural diversity and adapt your communication style accordingly. Some cultures are more task-oriented than others. Some are more relationship oriented. Work with your team to understand the cultural profiles within the team so that all can interact more effectively.

These are only some tips for leaders working globally. However, once the global leader focuses on the 3 key ingredients in bonding his/her team together: trust, cohesion & clarity of purpose, communication, he/she will be well on the way to building an inclusive team culture and the convergence vital to obtaining global success.

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Based in Paris, Josph Noone works in Human Resources, specializing in Organisation and People Development in the aeronautical industry. He is Irish and he has been living in France for more than 20 years. Contact him at Josephnoone@aol.com.