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.

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.  

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.