Tuesday, December 26, 2017

Where Lie the Obstacles, Often Within

One day a wise man from a distant land came to the Court of a Great Emperor of the East and proclaimed that he wanted to challenge the learned men of the kingdom by testing how intelligent they were. The emperor readily agreed and invited some of his courtiers and ministers to face the challenge. The wise man kept a pot covered by a cloth and asked the courtiers and ministers to tell him what it contained. Every one was dumb founded and kept starting silently at each other. There was complete silence. The emperor went blank with anxiety.
Then the kings clever minister came forward, he opened the cloth, looked inside the pot and then said there was nothing in the pot. It was empty indeed
"But you opened it." said the wise man. 

"You did not tell us that it can't be opened" shot back the clever minister.

The wise man was cornered. He quietly left.
Learning: There are many interesting take aways from this simple story.  You can form your own and relate.  
Often the limitations, boundaries, barriers are all in our minds. We as human beings set the limits and most often those that never existed in the first place.
Very often just because someone thought it so... it became the accepted norm. Common sense might suggest this is not so but we don't stop by to question. Is this familiar in our organizations?
In hind sight the message may seem simple but one needs to break out of the patterned thinking in order to have more creative solutions and approaches to the problems we face.
We also learn that there are others around us who can be more intelligent than we are. Those that outsmart you.... those you never expected to. So it does no harm to accept and acknowledge them for what they bring. When was the last time we acknowledge someone for how they think... of course without pretentions or without being hypocrite like.
I have covered just one dimension of how this story can be interpreted and the message about how the locus of how we respond to any situation is driven from within.
Will be interesting to see other interpretations and dimensions arising from this story.

Saturday, December 16, 2017

Seeking Lasting Change: The Trainers Quest

There is a saying that goes like this.... "Put a Changed Man Into an Unchanged Context and he eventually goes back to his old ways of doing things".  
 This is a paradox for trainers.  General quest for trainers is to see lasting change come about. This comes from their understanding of being change agents.  However the lasting change does not come by and the sentiment is what the quote above tries to address. This means....the trainers should understand the context from which the trainee (who you expected to change) came from and eventually went back to.  

Understanding the context and seeing that in light of the training is very important.  Therefore the role of the trainer is also to collaborate with the owner of the context (here it is the line manager)  to understand stumbling blocks as well as enablers for the desired change.  

For e.g. you wanted to make people more proactive through a training program.  However the situation on the ground once the trainee went back (here it is say one of the operations floor for customer X) was one where any hint at addressing something which was not raised as an issue by the client or any other stakeholder is not welcome and looked at with suspicion is a sure shot recipe for the trainee going back to old ways.   Why rake up issues, why search for embers to burn your feet... these are the kind of manifestations of feedback.

So what do you do?  Trainers can pass the baton to designers and say the context should be taken care of during design.  Yes but the product you create is what gets back to action in the context... (in example above it is the operations for Customer X) and it is in the trainers interest to work with the managers or leaders in the floor of operations for Customer X to see how people are encourage for being proactive.   The managers need to be sensitized that one has to encourage, reward, cajole people to be proactive just in case they have been so used to not being proactive and waiting for fires to be doused.

Operationally using Kurt Lewins - Force Field Analysis helps in identifying barriers to change and resisting forces and as a group the Trainers can work with leaders to eliminate the opposing forces.   Thereby it becomes a much easier task for trainers to achieve their goals of bringing about lasting change once the context issues have been addressed to facilitate changed behaviors. 

Inspiration, not Control: Key to Realizing Ones Potential

"Align with the Leader for guaranteed success"
"Do What He Wants, Listen to What she Says and it's a pathway to sure success"
These are some of the cliched beliefs you may find in organizations or some parts within organizations. If these are fueled by actions on the ground the culture of that organization will be at risk. Short term success might come by but overall there is bound to be poor sustenance of performance in teams where such beliefs abound.Reality is that "Performance Delivered for Success" is what every organization wants and pursue and often you find themes that the organizations drive would probably include campaigns around "Give Wings to Your Dreams", "Realize Your Potential" , "You Can If You Wish" , "Discover the Diamond in You" etc.
The common belief among line managers and HR fraternity is that achieving this objective is a self driven phenomenon. All one needs to do is to reflect, understand what he or she can do / cannot do and work deliberately towards that and he / she can achieve much much more than what was possibly thought he / she could achieve.  Also, maybe put them in front of some achievers who have "been there, done that" types and there will be some kind of osmosis of inspiration from the speakers to the listeners. 
Fact of the matter is that in order to enable employees achieve beyond what they think they can.... or for them to realize their potential we need a whole lot of inspiration coming from the managers and leaders in organizations. Control freaks who are there to stifle creativity and show their teams how to align with them (the manager) are doing very little to create that environment.  
What may be good is to work towards showing the team how to align with the mission of the company and drive excellence in the delivery of the services or product offered, helping overcome obstacles that impede the successful execution of organizations goals, working along side with the employees to solve problems, enabling a coaching culture where focus is on helping the employee realize a pathway to a different performance plane, mentoring them in areas of expertise of work being pursued.....only these deliberate actions by leaders and managers can lead to a enriching and motivating environment that can truly free the mind towards achieving beyond what was thought "possible".
So the need for managers is to inspire the teams to align with the organization, to inspire them to see how their job is contributing to success, to inspire them to understand how their job / work is relevant to customers needs, to inspire them to go beyond and connect the dots and to enable them to work without fear.....only then we can really set an environment where everyone can realize his or her potential.  

Friday, December 1, 2017

Job Shifts: The Road Ahead What one can expect

In my earlier blogs (Links below) I had spoken about job losses being real but the consequences of it being a hype unless we just ignore what the response should be.   It is like saying I will go out on a rainy day without my umbrella and not get wet.  So someone has to do something about it only one can get out unscathed or untouched by the drops of water.

Automation Tiger: Hyped Or Real

Decluttering the Hype Around Job Losses

Recently the McKinsey Global Institute did a survey on this subject and came up with a paper in December 2017 titled "JOBS LOST, JOBS GAINED: WORKFORCE TRANSITIONS IN A TIME OF AUTOMATION"


I would emphasize the usage of  Workforce Transitions in the title that reflects the nature of what is to come and has already arrived.

The fact is echoed here too that shifts are happening and one should be ready.  While I won't go much into the paper as you can read it on the McKinsey site I want to emphasize some points from the article and then discuss who should try and address this shifting jobs and ensure that societal impact is reduced. 

To Quote from the article

"Automation will bring big shifts to the world of work, as AI and robotics change or replace some jobs, while others are created. Millions of people world wide may need to switch occupations and upgrade skills."

Another interesting fact therein is about 30% of  jobs within 60% of occupations leading to many job shifts needed.   The question is who will manage these and what kind of leadership will organizations and individuals need to show

a) To avoid a disruption to the economy in a rapidly changing world of shifts in skills a balanced growth should be planned (in skills,roles and competencies).  

b) Industry along with the Government and Industry Bodies have to play a key role 

c) Educational institutes,  training agencies should be roped in to take up this massive effort

d) If we don't take this up on rapid scale within the country external universities will come in and take a big pie of the opportunity

e) Large corporate houses in every industry will have to play a "Responsible Leadership" kind of  role to nurture new talent by providing a view of what they need and a slice of what should be done.  

So the coming decade will see the role of Industry Academia alliances shooting up and UGC and NAAC (Indan Context) have already seen this coming and place a heavy weight on this collaboration in their ratings of colleges and universities.

Industry bodies like NASSCOM and PHARMACEUTICAL ASSOCIATION are already doing significant work on this and every sector should have some responsible leaders within their space coming out and looking at the future and assessing the skills demands and shifts that will happen

As we all know from economics Wages and Salaries are sticky and so any decline in demand or supply reduction due to talent availability will drive down the jobs and this will have a spiral effect if the road ahead is not redone.  Its only with the help of this careful planning and management  that the road ahead on job street can be smoother in the years to come. 


Sunday, November 12, 2017

Knowing-Doing Gap and the Conflicts: What can organizations Do

Bridging the Knowing-Doing Gap. This is omnipresent. In our personal lives....in our professional lives- when we work with friends, colleagues and 

Most often the stresses within is what causes most damage.  What is seen on the outside and experienced without is of far lesser consequence that what is experienced within.  And one of the classic causes is the Knowing-Doing Gap.  

Although we may know what, how and why to do something, this does not translate into action.   The conflict within arises when we are not able to translate the intent into action and therefore build up stress due to the guilt, due to the dilemmas of thought and the constant ringing that occurs within the mind.

Knowing-Doing Gap is also commonly found in competency proficiency levels.  At the simplest 


Tuesday, August 8, 2017

De-cluttering the Hype Around Job Losses

In my blog post earlier I had written about how the automation tiger is not really as "terrifying" as it seems.   Read it here. Let me continue the argument around this

In recent 30 to 40  years computer controlled equipment has substituted wide range of routine work including jobs of book keeping, booking clerks, telephone operators, librarians and at the same time created jobs needing cognitive skills such as computer programming, software engineering.

Generally technology alters the tasks that people do and as a result there is a shift in demand for skills performed.   When washing machines became popular in India since 1980's the jobs of washer-men was at stake.  But today the difficult job has been sculpted out and numerous laundromats and premium service home delivery laundry services abound.  The washer man's job in the earlier form still exists but the "hardship" factor goes on increasing and the "returns" one can get keep decreasing year on year. So it makes practical and economic sense to shift to something different learn a new skill and expand. 

I met some of the washer folks at DhobiGhat (Near Mahalakshmi Railway Station at Mumbai) and found that they have expanded into dyeing of textiles, subcontracting several hundreds of dyeing jobs every day to make their livelihood easier.  The art of dyeing cloth needed them to re skill themselves and take up the new work.

Thus we see that as technology can shift work from hard work (hand washing by washer-men) to something done much easier through laundromats and large scale automated washers.   This happens due to more and more people willing to pay for more expensive services as society progresses. In short it can happen as the economy grows and people become well off and improved standards of living are evident.




Take another example from IT sector.   
COBOL as a programming language has been around since the time computers evolved (1960's) and the focus was to automate business.  Over the 80's and 90's the shift was towards desktop power and Database (SQL) and Visual Basic became popular,  in the 1990's and 2000's internet became popular and shift was on internet / browser related  technologies and so languages like Java,  ASP.net became more popular... Similarly the years after 2000 saw a thrust on business agility and Service Oriented Architecture started becoming key technologies....Now since last decade we are in the world of mobility and now programming languages like Python, Ruby, Java Scripts are the in thing.  

During each shift that the IT industry experienced new technologies replaced part of the demand for older skills. As the shift occurred people had to re-skill themselves, reorient their thinking.  (E.g. Shift from procedural programming languages like C or FORTRAN to an Object Oriented Programming Language like Java needed not just a new skill to be learnt but rather a completely new way of thinking about programming) to survive in the long run. 

While a new technology continues to expand it does not mean the old simply vanishes overnight.   For e.g. COBOL which is no longer taught in colleges today still dominates the world of business computing as there are many systems which still run on COBOL.  But the growth of demand for such skills is almost down to a trickle and hence only the best will survive in this technical expertise.  This is another reason for those who wish to survive to either be the "Super Guys" or "Super Gals" in their field or shift to something different.

So what this means for those in the corporate world is to understand the evolution of skills in your domain. Look for what is changing, learn and update yourself and continue to stay relevant

I always advise business leaders to ensure that everyone in their teams stays relevant. One of the ways they can do it is to ensure that everyone on their teams has either upgraded at least one level of proficiency on their current skills every 18 to 24 months or added a new skill to their repertoire. Of course 18 to 24 months is more from the tech industry perspective and this time frame varies across industries.

If they haven't either upgraded or moved to a new skill they are likely to face a redundancy sooner or later.   So the bottom line is that "Be Relevant to Just Stay Afloat, After that invest in self progress"


Technology changes should not ruffle us but should propel us to newer pathways.

Monday, July 24, 2017

Why Change Attempts Fail

They say that "deciding to change is more difficult that the actual process of changing.  But does it mean that once you decide the change happens easily.   

Deciding to change is rather the first step to change and most potential change imperatives get thrown out of the window since they don't even cross this first barrier.   Many times action on the need to change or the "change imperative" is not even attempted leaving it as a "missed opportunity".   How may of us can forget the time when we "swore" in our minds as students saying that from next exam onward I would prepare well in time for this subject and not go thru this nocturnal grind a day before the exams.  What happened next time was anyone's guess probably.

There are two abstractions of change  one is personal change and other is change for a entity, a team, a work group. Lets focus on individual level barriers and what can be done to overcome them.

New Idea, New Approach No No:  I stick to my past...can't come away, can't think of leaving the established ways behind.  Every time you thought of making a personal change 




"Deciding to Change is more difficult that actually process of changing".  Once you decided does it happen by default.  Not really, If you go by data on change efforts.  There are many reasons why attempts to change fail.   Key among them are

a) Laissezfaire attitude


  Most of the time change attempt recede because the decision was fluid.  

Saturday, May 27, 2017

Automation Tiger : Overhyped Or Real

People are said to  fear and shiver when they hear about the roaring "automation tiger".  Every journal, newspaper, television channel or blog of these times speaks about how jobs will be non existent or how people will be victims of progress and so on and so forth

Let me give you a reality check.  I will take a few examples in the next few blogs to counter that view.  Let me take you to mid 1980s.  Anyone who was familiar with the banking sector know that computerization was spreading it's wings in the banking industry



There was great resistance from the bank unions and they were raising issues about job losses, the bane on humanity due to computerization spreading its tentacles and how it was not right for machines to take over jobs of people.

Looking back and now looking at where we are in 2017 gives us the right picture.  Lets take the employment data of banks which are published on the RBI website

1995 -  Employment 9.9 Lakh
1999 -  Employment 10.17 Lakh
2005 -  Employment 8.58 Lakh
2016 -  Employment 12.6 Lakh

Now let me give a overall picture.  What is show is direct employment by banks.  In 2004-05 the banking sector saw a impact of sudden appearance of online banking and resultant drop in direct employment.   Add up the indirect employment due to spiralling number of ATM's  and the outsourced jobs due to automation and servers and systems being developed by third party vendors and the cash management juggernaut that manages ATM's and so on the employment opportunities only have increased.


Has the banking sector vanished today?  Absolutely not.  Today we have more banks, more branches and even more ATM’s than we ever thought.  Digital Banking, Net Banking and Phone Banking are prevalent like never before.   Unlike earlier days when banks hardly had products beyond savings accounts, current accounts, recurring deposits, fixed deposits and a few others… today banks are overflowing with hundreds of financial services and offerings.  

So jobs are not disappearing but shifting.As society becomes more progressive economically disposable income rises,  spending on leisure goods goes up,  alternative services come up and more jobs are created.  


So the example of banking industry shows us the fact that automation is here to stay and not here to kill jobs alone. Automation and technology shifts help progress and the progress creates alternative job opportunities than what existed.  There are few more examples that we will consider in coming posts.  We can decide for ourselves if the automation tiger is hype or reality.


Friday, February 3, 2017

Some learning from Last Week's Australian Open Finals!

Some learning's from today's Australian Open Match Roger Federer Versus Rafael Nadal (29 Jan 2017)
1. You don't have to be top seed to deliver top performance. You just have to give your best shot
2. Whatever be the position always remember the opponent has some new trick coming up. Keep your eye on the target (ball) always. The shot in the unexpected direction is when you lose the point.
3. Whatever the rivalry and intense competition a fair game with full involvement is loved by all.
4. Respect your opponent. At time of shaking hands on winning the tournament the two players displayed lots of professionalism in the manner which they shook hands and rubbed shoulders.
5. Age is no bar for performance. Even in a competitive sport like Tennis we are inclined to believe that you have to push the envelope after 28 or 29 but today the champion beat the opponent at the age of 35 to bridge this record after over 40 years.
6. Being humble makes others respect your leadership. Federer referred to the concept of draw and said that if such a thing existed in tennis he would love to share the same with Nadal. So much respect for the opponent.
And of course...as one of the anchors put it
No better Reality TV than Sports
For more blog posts and views

Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Performance Management: Misconceptions and Realities



 
Wishing you a very happy year 2017.  This is going to be a milestone year for HR and Performance Management in particular.

Performance management is at a stress point.  Fissures have been visible over the past 2 to 3 years and the cracks are now being acknowledged by company after company that gave up their existing ways of doing things when it comes to managing performance


The popular press (sic !! Experts on social media) and also the fourth estate makes it look like companies are abandoning the appraisal process.  Look at below four examples among hundreds of misleading titles and excerpts


"Microsoft and Dell are ditching employee performance reviews" (Source)

. "Similar to the visionary Adobe and Accenture are dumping and redesigning annual performance reviews, Deloitte long knew that their old performance management approach neither boosted employee engagement nor high performance."  (Source)

Reinventing the Wheel: How companies like GE, Adobe, and Deloitte get rid of the performance review with one on ones   (Source)

Starting September, multinational management consulting firm Accenture will officially get rid of its performance reviews as part of a “massive revolution” in internal operations. (Source)


One would get an impression that companies are giving up the performance review process. Managers and employees are saying "Ahaa.. finally we don't have to go through the boring motions of appraisals"

In fact the opposite is true. Companies are not giving up rather they are making it more focused, more relevant and more aligned to the business.  This will actually mean managers, employees and leadership will have to spend more time, undivided attention and bring in more rigor into the process

The systems will have to be more agile,  fact based,  evidence driven and outcome focused.  All this will mean more work.   Remember what gets focus gets attention and what gets attention gets done.

That's exactly what's happening. Lets look at what will change.

1. Goal setting and reviews will be more frequent.  Biannual,  Half yearly etc will now become monthly, quarterly and feedback will kick in more often than ever experienced except at some very agile (few that may be countable on your fingers) organizations

2. Discussions will be more focused on all round focus of development,  performance. More evidence based data driven scenarios have to come into the picture.  Focus will not only have to be on what was achieved but also why and how.  (means to the end more relevant in a performance driven organization)

3. More stakeholders will need to validate the performance outcomes and specially the focus on process (why and how) .   Peer reviews, customer feedback (internal), stakeholder surveys etc will be more commonly used in organizations.

4. With the five digital forces staring at us from all sides, a data driven analytics based approach to data will be the key way in the future.  This is so true as my favorite quote I use in my PM sessions.  "In general we can argue but with data we can dialogue".  When we have a data driven approach dissonance will be low and both outcome like engagement and productivity will see a positive shift.

5. One on one's will be key: in the days to come.  The one on one's will focus on key issues relevant to the day to day job and core need of the individual employees when it comes to his or her work. This would mean that work gets discussed in context of how it gets executed removing the uncertainties, addressing the stumbling blocks and getting things to move forward for the organization

Thus we can say that performance reviews are only going to transform and not vanish.  Time will show who stands out. Organizations that understand it and take it seriously will surely stand strong vis a vis the also rans who try quick fix and patchy solutions to the key DNA of the organization (Managing Performance)


Blog Archive