Four CARDiac Arrests

I hate people who send in electronic greeting cards to everyone in their office address book. That is a cheap way of discharging social responsibility. It is a simple three step process. Select e-card, click the "Select All" option in the address book and press send. One greeting to all 14,479 employees across the planet. Imagine how painful it would have been to send a personalized greeting to all of them. Last year I received one such greeting from someone whose existence I did not know of. I wondered if I should just ignore it and press delete or should I reach out to this colleague. My debate was cut short. Before long the world was grappling with the flood of thank you messages. "Thank you for your wishes and wish you the same." Someone had done the unforgivable act of choosing the "Reply All" response to all 14,479 of us. The server got choked with this deluge of goodwill and had to be shut down. HR then put a ban on sending e greeting cards.

This year we are doing things the old fashioned way in our office. It is still a few paper cards being given out at year end. The HR Department just messes up my life. They sent me four New Year Greeting Cards. Cards that you can send to the most important people in your life. That sends me into a tizzy. All my life I have been operating with the belief that my boss is the ONLY important person in my life. After years of bad appraisal ratings and poor increments I now finally understand the root cause. It is not one but four I need to please. Why else would the company have assigned so many greeting cards to me? I draw out the company's organization chart. After drawing out a gazillion dotted lines and solid lines, functional reporting lines and project reporting, I give up. I report to at least 28 people one way or the other. Many of whom I have never met and probably never will. I am several greeting cards short. So I stick to safer bets.

Has everyone got the same number of cards or is there some hierarchy in that as well. I ask the mail room in-charge. He tells me he has been given one greeting card.

"Who are you giving it to?" I ask him.

"It is for my landlord. I owe him two months' rent. This is a cheap way to earn some goodwill."

"What would you do if you were given more of these?" I try asking for ideas.

"I would shred the others. Don't need them."

This is a serious interruption to a busy workday. I write out one and pass it to my colleague in the next cubicle. She looks at the card and at me in turn. I need to build bridges with co-workers. I smile at her hoping that she now considers me a cubicle pal. She shrugs and continues staring at her computer. "If you want to give me a card, at least buy one rather than passing off a freebie card to me. Have some more respect for your colleagues." That's one precious card and relationship down the tube.

I distribute the next one with greater care. I mail one to my wife just to be different. Two days later when I see the card unopened, I carefully drop hints within her earshot. It works. She half opens the envelope and without even opening the card to see the message she says, "Must be for you. Some moron from your office. The idiot has addressed the card to me. How careless." I do not have the heart to tell her the truth.

Now is the final moment. I decide that I will mail the last card to my boss. Where does he live? I have never been part of the charmed circle to have been invited to his home, so I do not know his address. I wondered if I should buy a regular greeting card from the neighborhood bookshop. I am unable to decide. Should I send him a funny card? Risky perhaps. One never knows whether he will laugh at the same joke. Better to send him one with flowers. Then I remember that he is allergic to flowers. I had greeted him with a bouquet on the day he had joined and then he sneezed for the next two days. Bad start to a relationship. I finally vote in favor of the office card. That is a safe bet. I make a mental note of finding out his home address.

A week into the new year I bump into boss in the cafeteria.

I ask him, "I hope you liked my New Year card."

"It was beautiful. I loved it. The lines were very meaningful. Thanks a lot. I hope you got the card I sent."

That was one from the left field. I did not know I was important enough for him to send me a card. There was no time for truth. This was a PR moment. OK... OK... I lied. I mumbled something about the lovely card he had sent and how thoughtful it was of him to have sent me one.

I came back to my desk all confused. My boss did care enough to send me a card. While trying to look for a ball-pen that actually works, I rummage through the papers and come across the greeting card I had written for my boss. The envelope was still intact. I had not found out his home address and had never mailed the card to him.

Work at Fun to Have Fun @ Work

Fresh out of Business School, MBA in hand, the taste of toast and mixed fruit jam still fresh in the mouth, when we joined the work place, life was very simple. You came in to work and bust your guts trying to work. We all hoped that the big boss would get impressed with our dedication. That had the potential of a generous appraisal rating for that year. Even when that did not happen, all of us gnashed our teeth, wrote his name on paper and shred that up to express our point of view (to ourselves). There was no such thing as fun at work.

Then the dot com boom happened. Young kids showed us that it was OK to be a dreamer. They quit jobs at blue chip companies and abandoned potentially hefty 12% pay hikes (that was the maximum you could get those days in my firm) in favor of an unknown world. A world where they would have the corner office by the time they were hitting twenty five. The "corner office" meant the CEO's Office and not the cubicle in the corner where the photocopier was kept. One of them had told me casually while quitting, "I want to have fun." That was blasphemy. I was no idea that we were supposed to have fun in the office. I asked the lad very apprehensively, "We are not supposed to do those fun things on the office desk? You could get sacked if you get caught." That reckless lad gave me a look that was hard to define. My logic was clear - work was meant to be making you miserable. To get away from the agony called work, we hung around with friends and had fun.

Six months down the line the young lad came back to visit us. He came in a car that I had only seen my CEO drive. Over dinner, he told us that they had a lot of fun in the office. The dress code was non existent. He could practically come to work in diapers if he chose to. Every Friday they drank beer and danced in the office which would be converted to a make shift dance floor. The Directors who were in their twenties, danced with other twenty somethings who were employees. This was truly democratisation of the workplace. Everyone traveled First Class if Business Class seats were not available. Everyone claimed they were having fun, until one day many of those places went belly up and closed shop.

Then for the next few years, everyone went back to accepting the notion that work and fun were not designed to happen at the same time and at the same place. Can you really have fun with colleagues? After all the English language has two different words to describe a colleague and friend. To complicate matters people have different definitions of fun. Sticking a "kick me" behind your classmate in school may not be appreciated by a colleague at the receiving end.

Then Outsourcing happened and a different profile of employees barely out of school and college joined the BPOs and KPOs. The workplace had to change to reflect their presence. The older employees got replaced by The Millenials. The workplace again had to have prominent elements of fun because that became a retention tool. Elements of fun were designed around making the office culture as close to a college campus as possible. You don't need to leave college when you come to work became the format of fun at work.

The more homogeneous the employee profile is, the easier it is to have one activity that fits in to a common definition of fun at work. If the primary task is not enjoyable, the importance of providing fun as an additional component at the workplace becomes important. Can the task have an inherent piece of fun built in? The more mundane and repetitive the task is, the greater is the importance of having the fun element during the workday. It has to be an activity that rejuvenates and refreshes the employee.

Fun has a connotation of informality and playfulness. So any activity that lowers the hierarchy - especially in a society that is deeply hierarchical, provides an element of fun. Hence watching the senior manager's clumsiness at a sports event during the Annual Day celebration provides much mirth. The Annual Day is by definition annual. With shorter attention spans, having fun more frequently becomes a great driver of satisfaction. So wearing business casual clothes on Fridays cannot be defined as your original contribution to livening up the world of work. Think harder. I have always been amazed how big a deal wearing casual clothes to work is made out to be. It is supposed to enhance productivity I am told. Then hippies should have been the most productive generation, Rascal Rusty would say.

Recent research shows that the Millenials like activities that let them learn new skills. Pure buffoonery is not what they define as Fun at Work. So let them learn a new language, learn salsa dancing, learn magic tricks... just let your imagination flow. Ask them about hobbies that they wished they could pursue and skills they could and should learn but do not have the time to pursue. They might come back with weird suggestions - be prepared. Having fun at work is not easy after all.

Should We Make or Buy Leaders?

When are you hitting the office again? I have some work for you to do. Go to the corner office and without spilling coffee on the carpet out of sheer nervousness, ask the occupant what he or she does for a living. The trick is to tell them upfront that "playing golf" is not one of the options they can choose. That sobers them into really thinking hard. Chances are that most of them will tell you that they are trying to make more moolah for the shareholder. Now you should step up, look at the dude straight in the eye and ask, "What are you doing to ensure that happens continuously long after you are gone?" At which point, you will probably get thrown out by the office security anyway and will never know what the correct answer should be.

The CEO's job is to ensure that there is a steady stream of ready talent at all levels of the enterprise. It is especially important for the Chief Executive to ensure that someone is ready to take over the top job should a truck cut short his own trip across the road. Whenever someone asks me whether or not to join a particular organization, I ask that person to research and look for data on how many of that company's top ten executives have been grown from within. If more than half of the top directors or functional leaders are have been nurtured through the joint efforts of the company's CEO and HR then it is a good place to go to. That is a good measure of how the company has instituted processes to grow and nurture top talent. Having said that, it makes great sense to have a healthy mix of external hires at all levels since they may bring in skills that may be needed for the future. A sixty forty ratio of in favor of internal hires helps to reassure employees that the talent pipeline has a track record of producing leaders that pass the acid test.

Like all other decisions of a firm, there is a make versus buy decision to be made not just for products and services but also for leadership talent. Growing as opposed to buying your own leadership pipeline requires deep commitment of time on part of the organization to ensure talent is identified early and then nurtured through a combination of challenging assignments, executive coaching and learning from attending the odd training program. Research done by Center for Creative Leadership tells us that approximately 70% of leadership development occurs on the job and in the context of challenging tasks, while 20% occurs interpersonally, particularly with coaches and mentors and only a measly 10% occurs in formal training classes. I believe classroom training can supplement Make sure that a person attends the training program only after they have been doing a job, that you are training them for, with reasonable rates of success.

Developing the leadership pipeline is a vital ask from the existing leaders of the organizations. Leading edge organizations have been using the Leaders Nurture Leaders approach to have leaders handpick the top managerial talent and then design programs where they devote anything from five to fifteen days in a year nurturing talent not only by giving them exposure to latest research in management or strategy, but to help them understand what it will take to be leading the organization. I have known of organizations where the CEO spends five days at an off-site with the future leaders of an organization sharing concepts, case studies and even ethical dilemmas with them.

While the lateral hires into the leadership ranks of an organization bring in a view from the outside, which is just as necessary, it is the home grown talent who serve to inspire the existing employees because that action speaks louder than words. There is a certain reassurance that comes from seeing your own colleagues take their place at the head of the table. At each level of the organization, the chosen leaders need to demonstrate that they are successful because they truly live by the values that the organization claims to have. Growing your own leaders is the same as growing your own garden. It requires the right soil, weeding and nurturing before you get to see the flowers bloom. Creating a bouquet from such flowers makes it a rewarding task even though it is infinitely faster to buy them from the local florist.

A ship more seaworthy than leadership

I have made this simple test which we adminster to half the participants at the start of their learning journeys with us. You should try it too.

(This is not a test of your values. Please answer yes/no reflecting on how you think you would really behave not how you think you should.)
You are at home about to leave for work. Your bags are packed for an evening flight, which you will catch straight from work. You will be back in a couple of days.
What would you do if-
1) You find the flush is leaking, you know the problem but it will take some time to repair. Will you try to repair it? Y / N
2) You have dropped a full cup of tea on the bed. Will you change the bedclothes? Y / N
3) The blind/ curtain is stuck and you know the steaming sun will heat up the room. Would you take the time to rectify it? Y / N
4) You come to the lift in the lobby and realize you have forgotten to switch the TV off. Would you go back? Y / N
5) While getting into the car you realize you have left behind your toilet kit. You know you can buy the necessary items from the market. Will you go back for it? Y / N

I bet, like most of our participants, you too answered Yes to the first four questions and No for the fifth. Now remember i said at the beginning of this post that we give this test to half our participants. The other half are given the same five questions but the word home in the description at the top is changed to hotel. You try the test with this alteration.
Don't you want to flip the answers exactly opposite to what you'd replied earlier? For sure most of our participants do. We share this half's answers with the other lot (who we've given the test on a different colored paper). They can't believe that everybody on the yellow sheet (the one which has the word home in the stem) answer Y,Y,Y,Y,N while almost everyone with the blue sheet (the one which has the word hotel in the stem) reply N,N,N,N,Y to the same set of questions. Then we bring to their notice the one changed word which flipped totally different switches in the two sets of people.

After a pindrop silence of a few seconds, somebody who got the home paper invariably explains the behavior of the hotel group, "Ah! That explains it. If i had been in a hotel, i too wouldn't bother with all that stuff...except my toilet kit, of course."
To me that response sums up what distinguishes a high performing organization from an also ran. But i'll come back to that later. Let me first complete the story of the participants on our learning journey. Processing their responses further we arrive at the fact that they shouldn't cosider this journey as if they are in a luxury cruise. As if we, the facilitators, are the owners responsible for running/ repairing the ship while they as passengers would focus on bathing in the sun and the the new found sea of knowledge. We emphasize that it is their journey not ours, they are not participants but crew members and in fact they own not only the voyage but the ship itself. From this discussion emerges a common uderstanding of the magic word - 'ownership'.
Magic, because once you have it, a switch comes on inside you that changes your behaviors instantaneously. Behaviors that veteran trainers and wise coaches couldn't budge with a team of horses. But unfortunately ownership is also a grossly misunderstood word. For example, if you ask the employees of a public limited company, who owns their organization? Unhesitatingly, everybody would answer,"The shareholders of course."
"And you?"
"Why only me? The CEO downwards are mere employees! We all work for improving shareholder value because they are our key staklehoders."
So the owners of our organization are a amorphous bunch of shifting individuals who may never ever even set foot in the company! They are the absentee landlords whose lands we employees till to eke out a harvest for our masters.
Let's flip a switch. We are at home, say a home bought from a loan given by an obliging bank. Do we "own" this home? Or is the banker deemed to be the owner? Technically it may be the latter but the way we tend the space we don't seem to think so. Something leaks we repair it; something stinks we throw it out; something cries we soothe it. And we nurture the garden as if we'll be living here forever.
Switch back to the organization. Here too, couldn't we consider shareholders merely as "money bags"? People investing in our company's share for their own speculative gain and whose money helps us buy more machines/ infrastructure. As against the example of the home loan earlier, why do we, in this case, bestow ownership status to the 'banker'? How come the shareholder is the one stakeholder every CEO wants to please?
The ESOPs debacle is a case in point. People bought their company stocks not to gain a share in the owership of the company but for mere pecuniary (and thus short term speculative) gain. And when that did'nt fructify they bailed out real fast.
I believe the really high performing organizations are redefining ownership beyond mere shareholding (which is short term pecuniary speculation) as real investment - the investment of time, love, and effort. Much like the investment we make in our homes. No, i am not referrring to the "family" culture of the 80's, nor the participative decision making of the noughties. Real ownership can be bought with one currency alone. And that currency is the freedom to create and to learn from mistakes while doing it.

Let me explain. Last month i shouted at my seven year old daughter for dirtying the house. She cooly responded, "This is my home too." Her way of telling me to give her space to create a mess and to learn from it herself without me "training" her all the time. Maybe she gets her genes from my wife who the other day told me to move my stuff out of her cupboard because "you keep it too clean."
Anyway, my point was that, as leaders, we usually don't respond to this everyday plea for space from our employees forcing them to conform to the prevalant culture; every time we do that we lose a chance for investing real ownership into the person. And we lose a chance to achieve our common, shared goal.
Last month when i was out on a longish work trip, the mother-daughter duo got their chance to reclaim the house. When i got back on a late night flight, i groaned as i opened the door. A tornado had hit the living room. Shreds of paper were strewn like confetti, streams of glue had made a delta under the table, a mountain of socks was topped with a barbie pointing upwards at a stuffed monkey hanging on the ceiling fan.
After i'd cooled down (and got them to clean the place up) and was getting ready for bed, the duo produced an odd looking gizmo with two paper loops at either end of a stick. I laughed aloud at its strange looks but it was they who were to have the last laugh. My daughter held up the contraption in front of my face and lauched it into the air. It was an airplane; and it flew more gracefully (and far longer) than any convetional paper airplane i might have ever made (i forgot to add: i consider myself a paper plane expert). I had started my daughter off on making her first one. And here she was teaching me my latest. A weird but completely fascinating design that worked better than the original. She'd also taught me another important lesson: that everyone needs a space to mess around, a space they can call their own.
Since then i've vowed to cede the home space to my daughter (after all she spends more time in it than i do) and receed to the bathroom which i promise to keep clean as a whistle.

Do You Have a Lovemark?

I had the opportunity to talk to a student group on Employer Branding. When I asked them to name their number one choice of an employer, the overwhelming majority voted in favour of Google. Then I ask them for details that one would be expected to know about a potential employer eg the office location, the number of employees they have in India etc. All these queries draw blanks. I ask the group about what specific jobs at Google they wished to apply for. Except for three students, no one really cared and yet they wanted to be a part of an organization they had very limited information on. We proceeded to pick some more possible employers. The group had strong points of view about many organizations – most of which were not necessarily based on information or data. That is what Employer Brand does to your attractiveness as an employer.

The Employer Brand is what people believe is the promise of an organization as an employer. In a competitive talent market, that is the reason why someone chooses to put your organization's name as an employer on their resume - at least for a while. The existing employees' perception of the employment proposition has an equally strong impact on what the employer brand would be seen as. That is the reason why the existing employee decides to hang up when the headhunter calls. It is the reason why a newbie feels good or regrets the decision to join the organization, especially if they had a choice. It is what the employee says about the organization to friends and family when HR people are not listening.

Kevin Roberts (author of Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands) talks about some brands that go beyond and become what he calls "Lovemarks". When you plot brands on a 2x2 matrix of Love and Respect, there are some brands that inspire love AND build respect for themselves. Those in that hallowed zone are called Lovemarks. When a brand achieves Lovemark status, the consumers becomes evangelists for a brand. The relationship between the brand and the individual is beyond the realm of logic. Being a Lovemark does not automatically make it a top choice as an employer but it probably helps. That is because our needs as employees are different from those that we may have as consumers. The sobering thought is that, the No 1 Lovemark in the list of top 200 Lovemarks is not a corporation but Shah Rukh Khan. Apple at number 4 trails Kajol and Google is at number 9 followed by Rani Mukherjee.

Employer Branding is the sweet spot where Human Resources meets Marketing (and feels inferior). Marketing people spend money, time and resources building consumer insights so that they know who buys their brand, when do they buy it, why do they buy it or why not, where do they buy it and how do they consume it. Based on this research they can decide how to communicate with their Target Audience. These are the same questions the HR person needs to answer about existing and potential employees.

The number of vacancies that the organization fills through employee referrals is rough measure of the strength of the Employer Brand - at least as far as the existing employees is concerned. Finding out what potential employees are saying about you as an employer is equally important. Sometimes that information floats in the most unlikely places. The social networking sites such as Orkut, Facebook, MySpace etc have communities that feature organizations. Chances are that your organization has a presence there and you don't know it yet. Doing a search on blogs will sometimes reveal what the buzz is about your employer brand. The quiet little kid in that corner might the most widely read blogger on the internet who is writing stuff about what it feels like to be working in this organization. I hope you read his blogs. Unfortunately in many cases, perceptions about the organization as an employer are being built and most top executives don't even have a web presence.

At a recent gathering, a hundred top HR professionals from around the world were asked if they were members of sites like Orkut or Facebook. Only three embarrassed hands went up. That was stuff for teeny boppers most of them said. Yet if you are fishing in a shrinking talent pool would you rather know what the buzz was about you or would you turn a blind eye (or ear) to it? If you did not know what people were saying about you wouldn't be in a position to impact that opinion. Banning blogging and social networking sites is not a solution. I hope the HR people embrace this change and actually begin to leverage the opportunity to turn their Employer Brand into a Lovemark.

Coach Coach Hota Hai

I am currently reading Sun After Dark by Pico Iyer. He writes about the Dalai Lama who is considered to be the spiritual Coach to a nation and to many world leaders. He says though the Dalai Lama is "increasingly famous as a speaker, his real gift, you see as soon as you begin talking to him, is for listening." That ability to listen makes him a true Coach. The world leaders listen to him because he in turn is a world leader who listens.

Organizations want to see their managers become one, each employee wants to become one and the parents want to be one to their kids. While one half of the world is looking for an effective Coach, the other half is trying to reach that sweet spot and proclaim themselves as experts while the fog is still thick. Every HR professional is not the de-facto Coach of the organization. They ought to be - but in all likelihood they are not equipped to be. One test is to ask the person to differentiate between the role of a Mentor and that of a Coach. Some organizations use the term Mentor and Coach interchangeably. No wonder they say if you don’t know where you are going, you can’t get lost.

So all those who believed that you were the first Mentors to walk the earth, sorry, the prize goes to Odyssesus. According to Greek mythology Odysseus entrusted his son Telemachus to guide the young man into adulthood in the absence of his father. A Coach is different from a Mentor. While Coaching is task related, Mentoring is about life itself. The role of a Mentor is to link up all the roles of the mentee - as an employee, as a parent, as a spouse, a sibling etc and then identify the patterns of dysfunctional behavior that the individual displays. A Mentor guides you through the journey of life. The reward is learning and insights for both. The Mentor is best selected by the individual himself or herself rather than assigned by the organization. So when organizations launch a "Be Mentor to a Young Mind" campaign, they need to leave the choice of the Mentor to the "Young Mind".

The Coach needs to be able to diagnose various group processes that are happening in the organization and craft their interventions accordingly. The measure of success of a Coach is to finally make a difference to the functioning of the individual and the organization. The executive Coach when successful will impact the performance of the executive. While the Human Resources folks will hand over the 360 degree reports and other state secrets to the Coach to get a headstart in identifying areas of development, the main deliverable for the Coach should be to help the individual learn new processes. There is always the danger that the Coach becomes yet another manager in the organization because of the power this relationship has. So periodically remind them that the football Coach teaches new techniques, based on the insights they have about the psychological makeup of the players they coach. Their job is not to take the ball during a tough moment and score the goal themselves, no matter how tempting that is.

Bunty Aur Babli in the Corporation

The workplace has always been a safe haven. This had always been a place where the regular folks came to work. They all spoke English with the same fake accents and chewed gum while moving their jaws sideways and wore their underwear like a fashion statement. They all used "kewl" and not just a simple "Yass" like the wannabes. The regular folks all had been to similar schools and had seen similar films and read the same set of books while growing up. It was not surprising that their world view was also the same. They all had similar nicknames too. So Harmeet or Harpreet were all called Harry or something that sounded Western. Then when they came into the workplace, they all hung around with the regular people in the office cafeteria and on weekends socialized with each other over imported wine and cheese. Their progeny played "Scrabble" in the next room.

Then the talent crunch happened and all this changed. The regular folks had to come to the workplace and rub shoulders with a diverse employee population. The talent crunch forced organizations to look beyond those who spoke the Queens English. The social change in the office has been palpable. Slowly but surely, the workplace has been adapting to the new inhabitants of cubicles. Over the last few years, there has been a steady dilution of the number of "regular" folks in the offices. The "Buntys and Bablis" - the people from small towns and rural areas have ecome a growing minority that we have to learn to include. The movie Bunty Aur Babli was about the dreams of young men and women from the small towns of India. In the workplace Bunty and Babli represent the archetype of the talent pool corporate India has to integrate into the somewhat homogeneous and insular workplace that we had got used to. I don't know when this insignificant minority began to forge ahead and move into corporate offices, but today you cannot ignore them any more. The people from small villages, the second tier towns, from the not so prosperous end of the great Indian middle class have started becoming noticeable. Maybe it was triggered by the BPOs and now Retail who were desperately looking for more and more employees just to make their business model work.

Many Human Resources people still believe that Diversity and Inclusion programs is just a passing fad. Wrong. Diversity is the answer to the talent crunch in any organization. The BPOs have been doing this for a while. So while they started off with their offices in the Metros, they have quickly discovered that to attract and retain talent they need to take the opportunity closer to those for whom that job is an aspirational job. Frustrated at their failure to attract fresh graduates of the top few Engineering colleges or Business Schools, many top Employers are opting for the next layer of institutes. The time is running out there too as the demand supply imbalance is offering options to the Bunty Aur Babli institutes. Having acquired diverse talent, the bigger challenge is to build an inclusive environment that enables the people who are “different”, to feel engaged enough to give their best. Therein lies the business case for making Diversity and Inclusion a part of the HR professionals’ list of challenges.

The inhabitants of Bharat have stepped forward and are now ready to lead India on their own terms. The Bharat-ization of corporate India is inevitable.

Where Have All the Employees Gone?

I keep bumping into people who are completely uncool. I swear there are some who have not realized that our function is not called Human Resources anymore. We are about Talent Management. You do not hire fellows anymore. And you get a minus 5 if you think that it is the folks in Staffing or Recruitment that give you jobs. That department is now called Talent Acquisition.

My friend Prof Madhukar Shukla says that the term "Human Resources" tends to dehumanize people and views the employees as one of the factors of production at par with land, capital or enterprise. I explained to him that for a while the trendy things was to refer to good ol' employees as Human Capital or Intellectual Capital. That must have made communication difficult. Imagine someone saying, "I will join you for lunch at the Human Capital's Cafeteria". Just now as we speak the new term of endearment at the workplace is "Talent". Even those employees who can best be described as possessing only enthusiasm unfettered by talent are also now walking in the workplace with a swagger. Everyone is behaving like the little monarch who needs constant attention and fussing only so that they stay on your payroll and do not walk away for a 40% pay hike. Now that there are no more employees left in the workplace, just raw "talent", the rules of the game are changing.

Talent is defined as an "endowment or ability of a superior quality". It is an innate ability to accomplish stuff that is beyond the ken of an average person. The person in charge of Talent Acquisition is impacting your business way beyond what you realize. Hire the wrong people and that not only impacts morale, but also impacts your firm's competitive edge. Hence the task of the interviewer is to spot such talent and lasso them in to the organization. This is not a job for the faint hearted. When a sports coach goes from village to village to spot children play street football, they see a large range of players and then spot that exceptional person who goes on to become the next God of Soccer. You need to have that soccer coach in your organization who can sift through a million resumes and sit through numerous interview meetings until they find the person who has that ability of a superior quality.

This is a vital job. So do not leave it to an ape who hires your next CFO by asking deep probing and dumb questions like, "If you were an animal which one would you be?" These questions may be cute conversation starters if you are trying to make a quick impression at the office party, but do not use it for choosing talent. Make sure that the person entrusted to spot talent is trained to look for gems amidst millions of badly written resumes. Talent Spotter has to be able to look for the right fit without getting distracted by glib talk. So before you look for more employees ... er... talent to hire, make sure you have the right person in charge of Talent Acquisition.

See you for coffee at the Talents' Cafeteria of our office.

If the World were my Classroom

We have this hugely successful open program called the Big Ticket to High Performing Teams. Trainers from all sectors use the instructional design (ID) techniques imparted to construct interventions in technical, process, sales and behavioural training.
We encourage our participants not to take themselves too seriously despite the pompous sounding title of the program. The very first session asks folks to reflect on their most significant learning event ever and share it with the class. As they talk we write it down on a flip chart. Then we ask them to see any common threads. "Look deep because in the flipchart/ mirror is framed a painful truth." Slowly everyone gets it but no one says anything; they look around sheepishly waiting for somebody else to utter the uncomfortable reality.
It never fails. We've done 125 plus Big Ticket programs with an average 15 participants (you do the math) and only once have i had a trainer participant cite their most significant learning being derived from a classroom event. It's a painful but unarguable truth. All of the rest learn best from real life.
"That means our classroom based training programs are a waste of time?" Someone will finally ask the question uppermost in every mind. Few of them who've just moved from an opertional or sales role into the function begin rueing their luck at having agreed to the HR guy's spiel citing a great career in training. A discussion will start.


Let's leave the Big Ticket participants to get on with their class while we of the real world ponder the same question. Is training really a waste of time? To answer that let me invoke the expansion of the acronym ID. It Depends. And it depends on one thing alone - how close to reality your sessions get; the methodologies have nothing to do with it. Suffice it to say that the most successful trainers are able to get a slice of life into the cake they bake in their classroom ovens. With that slice of life in it the cake looks good, certainly worth having. But can you eat it too?
Not yet. Knowledge seeps from your head into your heart, then flows into your feet and only when you walk the knowledge does it become learning. Even the best of trainers can only help you get real world insight but to internalize it you have to practice it back in the real world. The limits of classroom training are revealed starkly when we try to evaluate its impact (an act that is surprisingly a rarity in itself). A handfull of participants actually change behaviours as a result of training, fewer still impact the organization. Interventions that include projects and coaching apart from classrrom sessions have shown better results but here too actual life and its competing priorities wreak havoc with the structure of the intervention. In the flux of the scorching growth in Eastern economies, no one has time for learning.
Isn't that a great paradox? For it is the very same eastern philosophies which condemn us to being born again and again till we obtain enlightenment. Their contention is that the real and only purpose of life is to learn!
The only way to resolve this paradox, I believe, is to have all of life declared a learning process. Officially. The game changes. No nitpicking on what's more important - learning becomes the paradigm in which you choose between priorities. As critical as the declaration is the need to create technologies to learn better from life experiences. We discovered a while earlier that our most significant learning events are based in life experiences. But is there a method to that learning or is it just serendipity? All the research in instructional technology today is skewed towards making the classroom a better learning space. I haven't heard of too much work in the area of helping people to learn from real life. I've yet to come across processes that transform your entire world into a learning space and every experience into a potential development tool.

Meanwhile the situation back at the Big Ticket program is potentially developing into a riot. Remember we warned them not to take themselves too seriously. Well it seems they decided not to heed our warning! A heated debate has been raging sparked by the incendiary question "Is classroom training a waste of time?" Ambitions are burnt, dreams go up in smoke and reputations are being razed to the ground ( mainly ours). The new converts from operations and sales are the ones making the most telling points aginst the profession they've just entered.
"Hey, break it up", I intervene before any blood is let. "When I said don't take yourselves too seriously I didn't mean that we make laughing stocks of each other. This debate between the world and the classroom is a waste of time. Isn't the classroom a part of the world? Is it the walls that hassle us? Your office, your home, the factory shopfloor, they have four walls too. But we don't think of them as apart from the real world? So what's it about a classroom that sets it apart?"
Complete silence!
"It's because we've positioned training to the participants as time away from real life. What if we were to declare all of life as a training program? Call everybody Learners for Life and the whole world a classroom. Won't it change the way participants percieve clasroom training?"
Silence. And then a voice pipes up from the back, "It depends."

Work Life Balance - Walking the Tight Rope

I know the young kids will never believe me when I tell them that I never had an X-Box or an iPod when I was growing up in various towns across India. Somewhere along the 90's, globalization happened. Salaries started to rise. Productivity and Quality became important criteria for survival. As companies started to face competition not just from Indian companies but also global behemoths, the treadmill started. That was the beginning of corporate India's "Get In Shape" campaign. We got on to the treadmill and felt good as we saw our fat melt away. Corporate India stepped up the speed of the machine and we started to actually get in shape. These were exciting times. If you felt giddy with the speed, you were not good enough. The layoffs started to happen but the treadmill started to go faster and faster until every ounce of fat had been shed. Every extra headcount had been trimmed and outsourced. Every little piece of change that had rolled off under the bed was reached out to and put back into the balance sheet. Meanwhile we had forgotten about Corporate India that was still running on the machine.

There is no time to waste. So we have added one more TLA (Three Letter Acronym) to our vocabulary. We are finding ways of achieving WLB (Work Life Balance). So what does getting that WLB mean? Is it driven by the individual or the organization?

We all play multiple roles in our lives – that of an employee, a parent, a spouse, a friend, a sibling, a son/daughter, a neighbour etc. When any one role takes precedence and prevents tasks related to the other roles being done effectively, there is need to fine tune that balance between various roles.

As employees we all want faster promotions, more money and live the lifestyle that Bollywoood stars do. Organizations need to be more competitive and deliver more with less resources. In a growing economy like India’s salaries are going through the roof. To be ahead of the competition, we are all putting in longer hours at the workplace. How many of you still pursue the hobbies and sports that gave us so much joy and meaning when we were growing up. If we revived them today, those would rejuvenate us and prevent burnout in the workplace. WLB means being able to find the time for the roles that rejuvenate. That could mean being with family for some or listening to music or going for a trek to discover Nature.

Sometimes the problem is different. I was talking to my friend who is the head honcho of a big corporation which has put managing WLB as a key priority for every people manager. He was talking to me of his team member Soumya, who comes in late everyday because he drops his kid to day care which doesn't open until 9:15am. Then he has to go home for lunch and inevitably gets late because of traffic snarls. In the evening Soumya leaves at 5pm sharp everyday because he has to go for his evening MBA four days a week and on Fridays he takes language classes. Soumya refuses to work weekends since the "organization is telling the employees to push for Work Life Balance." His boss asks me, "Isn't Work the first part of the WLB equation?" Yet this employee will compare increments and career opportunities with all others who are busting their gut trying to meet office deadlines. Isn't that unfair, my friend asks.

When I look at my neighbour's daughter who is all of twelve and has to come back from school and immediately rush off to take Tennis/ French/ Ballet on weekdays and has to go for Karate and Theatre classes on weekends, that makes my workday seem light in comparison. Her mother told me that during summer she will take classes on creative writing as well, since she will have more time. All this is needed to make your child an all rounder I am told. Last Sunday I saw her punching her day's schedule into her cell phone as she walked in to the elevator. I am getting a PDA for my birthday, she told me.

PG Diploma in Common Sense

Everybody has an opinion on HR.
After trying to convince a client of my subjective views on yet another fuzzy HR topic (it was career pathing i think), i said exasperatedly to him, "I thought you called me in because i am the expert in HR."
He said, "Expert? C'mon, HR is just common sense. And by definition everybody has it. It's common after all. So how can you claim to be at the top of a common sense hierarchy? There is no such pyramid."
He was right but all the same i came crashing down from somewhere pretty high up. And it hurt. Fool on a hill? Maybe. Since then i started searching in earnest for the HR holy grail. Something that raises us above the status of 'commoners' into the esoteric world of 'experts'. Like those Six Sigma black belts. Soft leather and shiny buckles have always fascinated me. Maybe my pop being a cop has something to do with it.
But this is not about me. It's about us. And about HR's need for a Six Sigma like top notch holy grail. And come to think of it the quality function was once pretty much like us, wandering around lost, searching for an identity in the business. For eons, they'd been sandwiched by production on one side and sales on the other. Lip service would regularly be paid about quality being the most meaty part of the sandwich but in reality the business invested just enough to spread the function thin like butter. Essential to the sandwich but not really adding any taste/ value to it. In the nineties TQM gave the quality folks some respectability but the hard core production and sales guys weren't really convinced by its mere 'feel good' intangible tools. Then in the naughties somebody cooked up Six Sigma, catapulting the quality folks into the board room and overnight they became business stars.
Meanwhile HR was already there in the board room (mostly taking minutes) struggling gamely to reach the status of "business partners". The closest to Six Sigma we had was the 360 degree appraisal. But pitting 360 against Six Sigma was like pitching a carousal against the Taj Mahal in a poll for becoming one of the great wonders of the world.
So what's my point? That's another slur we've always had to deal with: "You HR guys are forever beating around the bush." And my reply to that everytime somebody says it is: "We are looking for that second bird, the one that flew out of your hand, Mister." It stops the other guy in his tracks. "Profound!" is normally the reply. Do drop me a mail if you understand the depth in my remark because i have no clue.
Now to get back to the point - the bird in hand - We need to architect an exclusively HR Taj Mahal. That mecca of concepts to which a business leader will approach, stare in wonder and then get down on her knees and pray. Come, see and concur. No gyan. No opinions. Just agree to the Taj Mahal of HR. End of common sense.
As i said earlier, i have been doing some study on the topic and its not going to be easy. This business of building Taj Mahals. The problem is really acute because we don't have a solid foundation. Let me explain. Six Sigma is based on statistical tools and sciences. Rigour and precision is the basic building material. But all we have is shifting sands and non methods. Take Individual Behavior theory for instance. Do we really know what motivates somebody? Yes, we have a menu of guesses and 9 million by the no.of items on the menu times the combinations in which the variables could play out. And then there are the thousands of individuals inside an organization whose behaviors combined in another million ways produce the organization's vyaktitva, character or culture. Phew! Take that for beating around the bush. It could take years to just determine the "real" culture of a place let alone drive it. And as i argue in another piece, three months is all we have to "build" a new culture because in a blistering economy HR has to build @ speed of light.
Woudn't it have been super to have a tool which could tell you the culture of your organization? Just wheel it into a series of group meetings and other conversations. Let it film, tape, absorb the dialogs and process it internally and spew out the cultural differentiator's of your organization. A 'Culture Analyzer' if you please (remember you heard it here first, i'll call upon you to assist me in any copyright disputes). Not such a fantasy - you have machines that do it for a powder for example - precisely detecting the elements that compose it.
So once you know the old culture accurately, and you envision the new behaviors you require, you only have to make the necessary changes in the individual's mindset. And you still have 60 days or thereabouts left to complete your intervention.
What do you do? Simple. Just whip out your array of "Tuning Folks" (ditto advisory on copyright). Now go forth into the kingdom and resonate. Oh and don't forget to calibrate using the "Culture Analyzer" once you've finished.
Fantasies apart, moral of the story is that until we have some robust theoretical foundations our Taj Mahal will never be built. Its time the HR academics took over and gave some solid material for us practitioners to build the Taj Mahal with. Professors are you listening? You sent us forth into the world with good intentions...and nothing else. PG Diploma in Common Sense? What good is that in a world full of PHD.s in the same subject? Sorry don't mind the ranting, we all know it's not your fault either. It goes much deeper. Into that elusive, impossible to hold entity called the human psyche. They say that once you can measure it you can manage it. We humans know how to make everything else measurable and scientific but our emotions and thoughts. Those we can't control.
The very last point of this piece and i think i could have done away with all the other points if i had announced this one right at the top: basically you're all invited to a party on my hill. If you are foolish enough, you could even find a place to live up there. There's ample space for everybody. And we'll be able to see the Taj Mahal from the top once it comes up.
So after you guys are done taking minutes in the boardroom, do come up for a drink.
All are welcome. Dress code - no belts please! Nonsense is highly appreciated, but common sense you shall use only at your own peril.

HR @ the speed of light –
Building to last or ...to finish last

I know of an organization that has been doing Institution Building for the last 10 years. Everything (and almost every body except the top layer) has moved on. Their cash cow is on the verge of being milked dry, phased out due to new technologies; and their flagship business hasn’t yet quite sunk but is under severe margin pressures. The management response: they’ve just announced yet another round of institution building workshops – “These processes take time. We are ‘building to last’”, says the HR Director.
Or does he mean “… to finish last?” Agreed it takes time. Unfortunately the business has run out of it.
I myself have been guilty of recommending long drawn out HR interventions with foggy outcomes and ‘feel good’ intentions that meander like an Atal Bihari Vajapayee speech in his later years as PM. In fact, I’d like to argue, that in general the HR fraternity, as a whole, strongly believes in the adage that human processes take time to flower. They have to be planted deep. Nurtured carefully. Protected from the chaos and politics.
Maybe for a stable economy there might be a kernel of truth in that viewpoint. But in one that’s blazing along like India’s unfortunately the gardener doesn’t have that kind of time – dallying around trying to build to last is a surefire way of turning the garden into your businesses’ graveyard. And yours. Sure HR talent is in great demand. But unfortunately the market is looking for gardeners not undertakers. We can keep lamenting that we tried to partner with the business, that we wanted to hold their hands but they just kept running right on ahead.
I believe it’s time we stopped trying to hold the business back and ran, rather flew, along with it instead. We’re hopelessly out of rhythm with the business. If you think of an arrow formation of jets (the different functions) we should probably be at the nose leading the show. Right now, to be honest, we are watching the flypast from the ground and trying to control its turns and twists with a remote that broke down long back.

And I believe its beyond repair. Tinker with it as much as you will, it won’t get us to fly. We HR folks need to invent a brand new machine! A vehicle that delivers HR processes at the speed of light. As a benchmark I throw down this gauntlet - from concept to implementation to evaluation of the most complex HR intervention shouldn’t take more than three months. Most should aim at being completed in one.
An inventor of such a vehicle will first need to jettison sacrosanct mindsets embodied in pet HR keywords like, ‘accountability’, ‘retention’, ‘career planning’, ‘work-life balance’ and shift instead to new ways of thinking that might propel us on.
I propose ‘ownership’ in place of ‘accountability’, ‘contracting’ and ‘freedom’ instead of ‘retention’, ‘aspiration management’ for ‘career planning’ and ‘joyful work’ as against ‘work-life balance’.
My counsel to the ‘institution builders’ is to stop being so self-indulgent. Take a lesson from kings of yesteryears, illustrious rulers of our past, who built ornate palaces for themselves that became merely pretty curiosities, years down the line. A hard look in the mirror will convince you of the reality – that ninety percent of the people in a vibrant business are going to be moving on within a couple of years. We live in a world of instant utopias. Maggie noodles, instant coffee, two minute videos on Utube – pitch your institution building against that and figure out for yourself who’s going to live in those institutions?
Get real folks! More than just our survival depends on it!

misFortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid

Prof CK Prahalad wrote a book called Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid about the 4 billion people who live on less than $2 a day. He says that if only we could start looking at this group as a group of discerning consumers with specific needs, the corporations could tap into the immense opportunities that lie there.

How about having the HR folks taking a look at those in the corporation who make up the bottom of the pyramid? Anything that involves dealing with the blue collar employees does not seem to feature in most HR people's careers - and if it does, it is only expected to be a "short stint". In the past some organizations did insist on making a year or so at the factory mandatory, until they realized that the HR talent was wriggling out of those places faster than people do from a crowded Mumbai local train.

If you offer a career start in the factory to a fresh MBA in HR, they will look at you as if you stepped out of the dark ages. "How long do I have to be there?" Can I do this for six months and then come back to Corporate Office?" Or worse still as some would have us believe, "I am a quick learner. I will learn in six months what others may take three four years to learn."

Every HR person wants to begin and end their career in the corporate office. That's where the action is. Wrong. The action is really at the bottom of the pyramid. With the blue collar employees. There is new and path breaking work waiting to be done for workmen/ operators or whoever makes up the bottom of the pyramid for your employees. Even research done in this area is inadequate compared to the attention middle and senior level employees get. If the people who are fresh out of colleges and MBA programs do not actively try to put into practice what they have learnt, how will anything change?

Take for instance training. Even today, the training done for junior or middle level employees gets diluted and passes off as training for the blue collar employees. We have not done enough work to identify what competencies we need to build for them to manage their careers. And why haven't we done that? Because we have never done career planning for the bottom of the pyramid. We haven't even started to understand what makes for career for an a skilled or semi skilled employee. Creating skill grades is just a starting point but that is not where it ends.

How many organizations spend the same amount of time and rigour to do succession planning for BOTP population? Yeah yeah, you will tell me there is that one organization that you work for or know of that has done great stuff. My question is why is that not mainstream? Compensation and Benefits, Talent Acquisition, Capability Building... you name it, there is new and different stuff that can be done. So why isn't everyone grabbing the opportunity?

Someone was telling me that in the Greek Civilization, the philosophers were the highest paid. So that started to attract the best and the brightest to those jobs. If the factory jobs or jobs that addressed HR issues of the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOTP) employee population, went almost as high in the org chart as the HR jobs in the Corporate Office, we would be able to attract the freshly minted HR folks to build a career that focused on the largest chunks of the organization. While I know that this argument pans out differently in different sectors and in different organizations, yet I cannot help saying that the principles seem to be universally applicable.

Pareto's 80:20 rule will tell you that 80% employees get 20% of the attention of the HR folks. If only we used the same logic to understand that 80% of the opportunity to do new and different stuff is for the BOTP population, then maybe one day we will all be able to point to them and call them Fortunate at the Bottom of the Pyramid.

People Are Our Greatest Asses (oops ...Assets)

Every Human Resources person worth his payroll, has heard these cliches over and over again. "People are our greatest assets" - 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 cliche 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 Resources 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 that fellow 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 would that he would be allowed to stab me when he met me in the hallway later that evening.

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 - Art 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 cliches 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.