Narrow the Intent-Content Gap !!!

When Content does not Match up to Intent,  you are likely to  lose credibility.  The writing on the wall is loud and clear.  If we fail to live up to the talk as HR professionals then we are seen as folks "throwing the cannon balls" at the party.

Have you experienced that people speak about some new concept they heard of,  bring in a whole lot of jargon and then quickly adapt and adopt what was working somewhere and which they claimed could be a cure all, a solution for tomorrow and then .... Bingo !!! it all fizzles out as quickly as it got created.

If this rings a bell then it is probably a case of intent-content gap at work.  What you wanted did not happen and what you expected did not turn out to be.  Here are four reasons why this happens.

a) The concept did not fit into your context:  Understanding the context is key to successful implementation.  What works for A situation does not apply to Situation B.   Try remembering the last time you tried a least common denominator approach to employee engagement.   Wont' work -  it has to be segmented if it has to work,  Not everything that motivates an employee in second year of his job career can motivate the one with a decade or more.

b) Concept not thought through:  If you tried an approach that resembles tunneling your way through the mountain then at best you can see the other side.  If you want to see the top you need to climb the mountain.  Ask few of your HR teams what a normalization process intends to achieve and see how much they can explain.... or even simpler ask what the philosophy for performance management is and if you have a common response you are doing well otherwise the concept is not clearly understood.

c) Rome was not built in a day:  Big Bang roll out without a prototype or a working model is a sure way to rework, or in all likelihood failed implementation.  Ever remember a day when your folks at work decided that you need a new process or system from the scratch, from the ground up to replace the current one.

d) You put the squirrel to do what the turtle was supposed to be doing.  Climbing trees is best done by the squirrel and swimming across the current in the river by the turtle. If you ever tried switching roles in the name of meeting goals of  job rotation then you will be in for a surprise.

Good One !! On Big Data

A nice interesting perspective on Big Data from HBR Blogs in the link below

Read here (External Site)

Thanks

http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/10/does-bigger-data-lead-to-better-decisions/#!

Is Promotion a Reward for Performance - Part II

In an earlier post (Is Promotion A Reward for Performance) I had spoken about how organizations can stall the outcomes of an important process by positioning it inappropriately as something which is attributed as a reward for performance.  However performance is a necessary but no sufficient condition for a promotion.

Take the simple case of A being the best territory sales representative for Pharma Co.   As a Territory sales person he is responsible for ensuring good services to clients within a geographical boundary, increasing sales all at optimal travel and overhead costs. He is the star performer among sales folks.  A is a a go-getter, loves traveling, loves meeting people and extremely achievement oriented.  He always prefers to be in the limelight,  gets excited and highly motivated when receives a praise and recognition from the Regional Sales Head or the Territory Sales Manager.   The Regional Sales Head had just received a resignation letter from the Territory Sales Manager and was contemplating making A the new Territory Sales Manager in next 3 months.

When he discussed the proposal with the HR Manager he got the following feedback. A loves to follow schedules,  meet Doctors as per assigned protocols and engage with them in a very pleasing and detailed oriented manner. However he really hates managing outcome of others.  He just can't lead a team, motivate performance,  coach or mentor others.  He prefers being a star and can't stand losing out on sales targets.  He gets completely dejected and takes the failures to meet targets as his own doing. 

The regional sales head knows this very well and is not sure how to retain A if he is not able to promote him in at least next 2 years.  But the question is will he be setting up for failure.

It is in the interest of the organization to do something else to retain him.  So promoting your best sales guy might end up in your having a bad fit for a Territory Manager role because he has to fix targets for others,  drive up motivation,  arrange team meetings,  take stock of weekly performance all of which is not something that A is very keen on.   He needs a fair bit of coaching before he can take up the role of Territory Manager and the HR team feels that this can happen only after 2 years of inputs

So what options does a manager have to retain A.    Here are three ways it can be done.  While the first is essential you have a choice among the other two.

• Assign a performance coach and work through action and improvement areas. Needs to be a two way process starting with establishing objectives,  working through with understanding barriers to improvement and then action planning followed by action to change 

•  Have an alternative engagement model for motivating and incentivizing the Sales Person (A in this case). This is very important and should be done in parallel to the coaching assignment.  That way A is focused on the achievement and it is important this laddering (showing few more steps on the path towards something different or a new role is to be done)is important.  Most organizations fail on this count and thus are unable to retain your good performer and lose them for lack of action taken.

• Look for a rotation to a new location or new product line in same role and change the context for the individual. It is more likely he / she will be engaged for the period since the change and parallely you need to work on the coaching bit

At times you may be promoting someone into his or her area of expertise or capability then in such case it may be a good thing but if not then it is a sure shot for failure.

Look forward to some ideas and comments and if you liked it feel free to share.

You may also want to read

Is Promotion A Reward for Performance - Part I

The Normal Curve in PMS

BPS Industry in India: Some Sectoral Challenges

Earlier I had written about the BPS industry being at a sweet spot.  However the bitter truth is that we are staring at big numbers when it comes to employability too.  A survey by Aspiring Minds (www.aspiringminds.in) in 2013 reports that about 47% of graduates are not employable in any area primarily due to poor cognitive as well as English language skills. Computer knowledge and application is another weakness.  Only about 21.37% of the graduates are employable in the ITeS sector and mostly for non functional roles.  

If India has to maintain its competitive advantage in the ITeS sector (today it is talent availability more in terms of numbers) then quality and consistency are key in the future.  With forecast 2020 revenues in the region of 50 Billion USD my estimate works to about 1.9 million direct employment in this sector by 2020.  Around that time we can compute that the ITeS industry alone would need about 100,000 to 150,000 graduates per year.    This is based on the trend where we grew from < 1 Billion USD in 2001 to about 16.8 Billion USD over next ten years.   

Each year Indian universities and colleges graduate about 5 Million every year from over  30,000 colleges and of this over 85% are non-engineering graduates.   If you look at the demographics as per the Aspiringminds report female to male ratio is about 100 to 109 for general degree programs versus 100 to 196 for engineering degree programs. 

Reasons for lower employability is that today's curriculum is not job oriented and from our experience in working with colleges and universities the curriculum lags by anything between 1 to 10 years from what industry demands across various skill areas in ITeS. 

While the ITeS sector caters to several global clients the challenge is that today organizations don't have the luxury of training (unlike previous decades of 60's to 80's) hires for extended periods of time.  Today's customers need a quick turn around in taking over their business processes and running them real time.   So it is not about one organization in India losing business to another rather it is about other countries vying for the same business.  We have a threat from Latin America,  Eastern Europe as well as Asian Countries like Philippines.

Unless something drastic is done on the employability front it would be futile for India's competitive edge in the coming decade.   Solution required cannot be only in hands of the education sector.  Lot of investment has happened in education but it is only a collaborative effort with industry working closely with academia that can bring about this change in focus.

More on how and what can be done in a later post

You may also like to browse

BPS Industry in India: In a Sweet Spot

Responsible Leadership : Abstract of Case Study

Responsible Leadership: The Case of Tata Consultancy Services

Rajiv Noronha, AVP & Head Organizational Effectiveness (BPO Services)
Ranjan Bandyopadhyay, VP & Global HR Head (BPO Services)
Venkatnarayanan N K, AVP & Head- HR, Banking Services (BPO Services)

All Authors from Tata Consultancy Services

Paper was presented by Rajiv Noronha at the Symposium on Responsible Leadership at XLRI Jamshedpur and won the Outstanding Paper Award

Abstract

Responsible Leadership is about making business decisions that, next to the interest of the shareholders, also takes into account all the other stakeholders such as workers, clients, suppliers, the environment, the community and future generations[1]. Since 1991 Indian economy has made significant progress and opened up new opportunities for the youth. Yet two areas we have not addressed seriously as a nation, in order to keep up with the pace of changes that happen around us, are employability and education. On employability - today job opportunities are much more abundantly available for graduates and those with advanced degrees in their field of study. Talent supply from colleges has also increased several fold since 1991 but the paradox is that there is a shortage in the midst of abundance. This is primarily an outcome of the lower levels of employability. Several studies and surveys have indicated employability levels of between 20 to 30% among all graduates. In many cases the graduates are employed in jobs that are far below their real potential leading to disguised unemployment. On education – the issue that one needs to worry is the extent of contextual relevance of the curriculum being imparted. Industry captains have been talking about the time lag to update the curriculum to make it relevant to current industry practice. In the learning imparted at colleges we are few years behind in terms of what the industry does and what students learn thereby making it a problem both for the students as well as for the industry. Significant time and effort in training the fresh graduates to make them up to date before they can be gainfully productive can be avoided if this gap is minimized. This case study highlights how Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has been able to display the well intentioned facets of responsible leadership to address these two critical challenges that we face as it is directly relevant to the business we are in. A significant point of departure of this case study is that we look at defocusing “Leader” in the sense of a person and focus more on “Leadership” and how the organization can create significant capability in terms of making the difference, enabling a culture that facilitates the needful display of leadership that builds on synchronous and pressing needs for organizations, individuals as well as the nation. We call this a win-win-win and try to understand facets of Responsible Leadership at TCS through this case study. While there are numerous examples that one has seen at TCS we try to bring out how Responsible Leadership is fostered by using two examples from recent years.

[1] Financial Times: Internet reference http://lexicon.ft.com/Term?term=responsible-leadership (Acc: 10 Sept 2012)

BPS Industry In India....In A Sweet Spot

Why a blog post on the BPS industry (business process services for the uninitiated).   Well actually it is not  just this one but several forthcoming one's including this one.  And the key reason if I may say so is that I currently work for this industry.  I take care of the Organizational Effectiveness Function for the BPS Line of Business of Tata Consultancy Services  (popularly known as TCS).  

Truly a people intensive and fast growing industry and very relevant for discussing people related matters.

The BPS line of business accounts for about 12% of the overall revenues of TCS.   (closed FY13 with  overall revenue of INR 62,989 Crores or 11.57 Billion USD) 

Well BPS industry in a sense changed the fortunes of many many people in India.  Job opportunities shot up and the industry has contributed significantly to direct employment which grew from about 70,000 in 2001 to over 0.85 Million in 2011.

Also from revenues of < 1 Billion USD in 2001 the industry crossed about 16 Billion USD in 2011 and today its revenues are in the range of 20 Billion USD which represents about 20% of the IT/ITeS industry.    

Slated to grow at a rapid pace even in the coming few years NASSCOM has projected a revenue of 50 Billion USD for this industry in 2020.  This surely implies that we are in a sweet spot today as far as potential and growth are concerned.

The industry hires employees with graduate, post graduate and higher advanced level degrees across a range of degree streams (Commerce, Finance,  Mathematics, Statistics, Biotech,  Pharma and Life Sciences,  Management,  etc... to name a few) and hence truly a big contributor to the diversity focus also.  In fact most companies in this sector have in upwards of 25% female composition in their workforce when some even have as high as 40 to 45% women in the workforce.

In my next post  I shall discuss some challenges on the people front for this industry and what can be done to overcome these.

The Good The Bad & The Ugly: Role of HR in Enabling Knowledge Management

Ever wondered why knowledge management initiatives also fail many a times.   Why would anyone want to avoid pursuit of knowledge. It is all about cause and effect.  What does that knowledge being captured yield at the end of the day.  Are we enabling some capability that we use?  Are we ensuring people overcome fears,  develop a strong perspective how the KM pursuit fits the larger picture about where the organization is headed.

HR plays a vital role in enabling knowledge management.  Read about it below.

XLRI Synapse 2012 Article on Pages 13-15

More Here