The Art of the Possible

Some do it every day, some do it weekly, some do it weakly, yet others weakly try to do it. Some do a lousy job of it and there are those who use it to leave their colleagues breathless but satiated. You guessed right. The skill in question is about giving your colleague feedback about areas of improvement. Most managers try to avoid giving feedback unless thrown with their back to the wall or while reviewing performance.

Chances are that if you told a colleague that needed to give them feedback, they would walk into your office with a feeling of dread. Expecting you to lambast them about stuff they had not done. About deadlines they have missed or about colleagues who they have miffed in the course of their existence. When you hear someone say, "Can you come to my office for five minutes? I need to give you some feedback..." the greater probability is that your first reaction is not to expect anything positive being told to you. Leaders and visionaries often set themselves apart by getting their teams used to the idea that feedback is also about telling someone that they just did a good job.

Giving someone feedback to drive improvement in performance is a tougher act. Most people dread it. Performance improvement is driven when people understand exactly how their actions, behaviors or choices had led to an undesireable result. So the more accurately the link between action and results is established, the clearer it is to an individual on how to improve. Some managers go a step further and suggest what alternative action would have led to success. People learn if the person giving the feedback also shares the manner in which he or she evaluated the alternative choices that led to the final outcome.

I have often heard people say, "I don't like to sugar coat my feedback. I like to tell it like it is." One must be truthful and accurate, but without being hurtful or abrasive. Feedback that hurts the self esteem of the receiver will never produce behavior change. So before you sandpaper your colleague's self-esteem with your version of the truth missile, just ask yourself if the intent behind the feedback, is to help the person improve or lie their bruised and bleeding. Most people are sharp enough to figure out if the intent was to hurt or was it to help the person do better. You can identify it so clearly when someone is not being truthful or biased or is merely saying stuff to hurt. Right? So can the rest of the world. If your feedback is just making the recipient defensive, chances are that your feedback is coming across as an attack. No matter how valuable your suggestion is, no change will happen.

The term feedback is neutral. There is no such thing as giving someone "positive feedback" or "negative feedback". The recipient classifies it as helpful or unhelpful. Hence this can be a very strong tool to drive change in behavior. Feedback provides guardrails that can nudge a person's behavior in a desired direction if handles patiently. Every manager owes it to his or her team member to invest time to coach and give feedback that reinforces good behavior and builds awareness of "derailers". David Dotlich and Peter Cairo identify eleven such derailers in their must read book called "Why CEO's Fail: The 11 Behaviors That Can Derail Your Climb to the Top and How to Manage Them." This book is based on the Hogan Personality Assessment.

One last piece of learning I wish to share. Formalize the meeting where feedback will be shared. I have often seen colleagues get taken aback when their team members state that they were not given regular feedback on their performance throughout the year. "That's not true. I have been giving feedback on an ongoing basis.", the manager moans. The manager should set up a formal "Performance Feedback Session" with his or her team member and ensure that the person receiving feedback also marks it as a structured feedback session. That prevents disappointments at a later point of time because it sets expectations of the role. Informal feedback sessions do not count. This is an important opportunity to shape behavior and the manager would do well to invest the time perfecting the art.

Are You A Global Manager?

You have attended global conferences. That basically means that you have snored through Executive Development Programs in every country. You have seen the Seven Wonders and notched up more frequent flyer miles than your nearest rival down the hallway. You have developed a taste for exotic spirits and by that I do not mean people who pursue Extreme Sports. But are you a global manager?

In 1992, Christopher Bartlett and Sumantra Ghoshal had stated in this HBR Classic that was called "What is a Global Manager?" I once had a boss who used to ask each of his subordinates to summarize such articles and books in no more than a sentence. He was a big one for precision. In case you had not read that article, let me tell you that their conclusion was that there is no such thing as a "universal global manager".

Being a global manager means being able to manage and bring about change in settings that challenge your own world view. When you next ask someone about their experience in "change management", ask them what significant behavior, skills and attitude of themselves have they changed and in what time frame. How did they identify what needed to be changed and then how did they go about doing it. That will often give you a better insight about change management skills and approach of this person than probing for leading widespread change in others. If you have not been able to change yourself, then you will never know what it takes to change others.

Part of the requirement of being a global manager is to be able to expand your worldview or Weltanschauung. Welt is the German word for "world", and Anschauung is the German word for "view" or "outlook". It refers to the framework of ideas and beliefs through which an individual interprets the world and interacts in it. A global manager is one who is equally comfortable in a world that he or she is not familiar with. That comfort arises from the ability to interpret the world whose cues are unfamiliar. So learning to make sense of data in unfamiliar settings is the key. If you are a global manager then you ought to be pretty skilled at making sense of unfamiliar settings and cultures. The ability to discover trends in a world of chaos helps when you are operating in a new business environment where all the old rules have been rewritten.

In a world where "talent is the new oil and like oil demand far exceeds supply" navigating the talent landscape helps the global manager to be competitive. We are all used to learning to read cues that will help us choose great talent. Being truly global means leveraging diversity to go beyond the familiar. Global managers learn to look beyond nationality, race, ethnic, function, education, working style and gender when they build their talent pool. The manager who wants to operate on a global canvas will need to build teams often with diverse people who all need different ways and approaches to be managed, coached and coached. To be able to run businesses in diverse business environments and succeed is never easy.

Being a global manager means being comfortable holding almost two opposing thoughts and not allowing either one to overwhelm. Being able to flex one's style to address different business and people needs means that such individuals are a rare breed. They learn to manage change. Not in others or in other corporations but starting first of all within themselves.

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.

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.