Culture of Employee Engagement: Are You Ready?

 “In a world where most factors of production are increasingly standardized, where a production line or the goods on a supermarket shelf are much the same the world over, employee engagement is the difference that makes the difference” (Macleod & Clarke, 2008). 

Employee Engagement is defined as harnessing of one’s complete self (physically, cognitively and emotionally) to the work role. And has been very well document in both academic and practice writings, your ability to invest yourself completely in your work role results in higher productivity, customer engagement, profit, quality, retention, discretionary effort and safety. Additionally, research also highlights that a high quality work environment that furthers employee engagement has a better impact on employee wellbeing as compared to measures like hours worked or time off. Furthermore, Employee Engagement is viewed as forward facing indicator that has predictive linkages to the above mentioned critical business outcomes.

Considering the well documented benefits that an engaged workforce delivers, creating a work environment that allows employees to flourish and results in business success ranks high on agenda of business leaders. A work environment that furthers employee engagement is an outcome of a cultural change program that involves- establishing a tight link between organizational strategy and culture, deep research that draws on individual’s experience and expectations, strategic analysis that offers actionable insights, suggestions and support to change how leaders view their work, their employees, and their customers and encouraging individual’s to take accountability for their engagement and success at the workplace.

First step in this journey for most organizations starts with measuring the current level of employee engagement and then using the information to devise action plans for improvement. However, the decision to measure employee engagement should not be taken lightly and must be carefully evaluated. Measuring employee engagement without a clearly articulated agenda and plan for managing and enabling a cultural change has the potential to do more harm than good. This process of cultural change involves educating your workforce, reorienting your people manager’s, encouraging role modeling by your leaders and enriching organizational systems, processes and policies to further employee engagement at every touch point.

Even before we take this first step of asking employees for their views, there may be some introspection that we may need to do assess our readiness as an organization and as leaders. Some of these questions may revolve around:

•  Need: Why are we undertaking this employee engagement measurement exercise- what is it that we expect to accomplish?
• Commitment: Are we willing to allocate resources and nominate our best and the brightest to champion this process of cultural change? Are we as senior leaders willing to accept the employee feedback and take corrective actions/decisions which may or may not be comfortable for my division/function/business in the short term?
• Cascade: Are we willing to shoulder the responsibility of encouraging employee’s to participate, share their feedback candidly and then champion of the process of disseminating the findings and enabling actions across levels?
• Change: Are we willing to empower people across levels and enrich systems, processes and policies to further employee engagement?

If you are uncertain of your response on any of the above questions, perhaps, it may be useful to assess the organization’s commitment to this process of cultural change. A deep introspective discussion with senior organizational leaders and employees provides a starting point for assessing our readiness and commitment to this process of transformation. However, if you answered favorably to all these questions then you must congratulate yourself, for now you are on path of building a workplace where your employees will feel fulfilled, superior business outcomes will be well within reach with an enthused and excited workforce and your organizational culture will amplify your strategy and become your greatest competitive advantage.  

Management: Are we Free from it Ever?

Henri Fayol (1841-1925) is often one of the first few names we are exposed to as students and practitioners of management. He opined ‘To manage is to forecast, to organize, to command, and to control.’ 

What’s striking is that a closer scrutiny of our everyday lives reveals that this conception of management is not only limited to our working lives but actually extends to the fabric of our everyday life. The ‘hegemony of management’ overpowers almost everything that we do in our day to day lives.  Right from the time we wake up till the time we go to bed and for some of us even our sleep time and thoughts within are not our own but are governed by the ‘management speak’.   Following headings from some articles published in the Men’s Health magazine provide us some insight on what I am referring to here:

• How to have the Sexiest, Most Relaxing and Most Productive Hour of Your Life 
•  Trusted Advice On How to Secure Your Future and Avoid Costly Mistakes 
• How to Deliver in the bedroom 
• Life Management Principle: What Gets Measured gets Managed

The liberal splattering of management jargons signifies the widespread understanding of these ideas and the seepage of managerial discourse in our everyday life.

Furthermore, books like ‘The Checklist Manifesto- How to Get Things Right’ or ‘Who Moved My Cheese’ have made it to the best sellers list and have sold millions of copies underlining the supposed superiority and  popular uptake of managerial recipes to achieve success in everyday life.

In fact for most of us even the early decisions on what hobbies to pursue or what sports clubs to participate in are governed by the future jobs we seek to chase. So, mere participation is not adequate but we have to demonstrate leadership skills and strategizing ability to have adequate talking points in place for the job interviews we will face 5-10 years down the line.

The managerial pursuit of ‘excellence’ extends to our personal life where we are expected to establish our personal goals, create strategies for achieving them, put in place plans that will get us there, set up rigorous execution schedules and adequate review mechanisms to keep the achievements on track. So, right from weight loss to getting married anything and everything must be subjected to this managerial approach to achieving success.

Now, if there is this widespread seepage of managerial discourse and excellence is seen as an outcome of following a managerial approach to planning and achievement, then why is it that we often see management and by extension our working lives as constraining our ‘true’ selves? We have images of suit wearing corporate honchos staring forlornly at the sea wanting to break free from the monotony of their working life and seize the waves as a surfer or the successful lawyer who actually wanted to be a musician and still has guitars stacked somewhere in the closet. This dichotomy of ‘management’ as a constraint and a hegemonic force and at the same time a tool to achieve excellence in everyday life makes me wonder if we are caught in this web of our making where we are constituted by and are constitutive of ‘management’ as a way of thinking and being. What are your views- are we ‘free’ from management ever?       

Monday Morning Blues to Monday Morning Sunshine: Is Changing Your Approach to Work an Answer?

‘You wake up in the morning and look out of the window, blurry eyed but hopeful, ready to welcome a new day, take on the challenges that it has to throw at you, wanting to stand up and be counted’.

This description would have probably resonated most with you when you were young and clueless. The ruthless world of working people had not depleted your enthusiasm and the cynical side of your brain had probably not developed. But as you grow up, things start changing, the pressure to pay the EMI’s, meet the sales targets and please your boss, takes away all the charm and promise that everyday used to hold. The pall of gloom of a Monday morning starts clouding your Sunday evening and eventually you go to bed cribbing and complaining about beginning of another week at the office.

I am sure not every one of us feels this way and there are many of us out there who simply love their jobs and cannot wait for the week to begin. But why is it that such lucky people are so far and between. Why is it that the hope and promise of youth is replaced by cynicism and distrust as we step in to our workplace? Where we spend close to 80% of awake hours every day.  Just imagine, you spend more than 40 hours each week, 160+ hours every month at your workplace and most of it is spent harboring negative emotions. Thinking and complaining about things that never go right, colleagues who are trying to pull you down and a boss who does not appreciate you.

What if there was a way to reverse this trend and start everything over? What is it that you would want to change? Think about the things that are in your control, don’t try and enlist stuff that you practically cannot do anything about, stuff like corporate policies or your ‘not so nice’ boss.  Things that were in your control, like changing the way you approach your work, prioritizing stuff in your personal life, treating everyone the way you would like to be treated etc. Basically simple things which all of us were taught when we were young but we somehow forgot all of those, the basic ingredients of a living a good life- simple values like- respect, integrity, and honesty.

While these are the basic ingredients that I think could help transform my work life, do share your thoughts on the basic ingredients that you think could help make your work life better.  Help you in changing the Monday morning blues to Monday morning sunshine…

Global Standards for HR: Are We Missing Something?

Standards may be defined as a set of rules. Rules that determine how certain people would behave in certain situations. Rules and predictability go hand in hand and predict the behavior of individuals in given situations. They also act as a means of classifying people into categories- as those who follow certain standards and those who don’t.  Recently I read this piece on tlnt.com on approval by ISO to create Global HR Standards. This acceptance got me thinking on how feasible it will be for ISO or any other such body to create universally applicable standards for a domain as socially constructed as Human Resources (HR) and what it would mean for organizations adopting these standards.

Much like the Fair Trade standards governing the procurement of coffee or the fair labor practices standards, most standards are created by voluntary bodies and are free for adoption or rejection by the larger audience for which it has been designed.  Also, standards can be created by anyone and it’s the adoption of it that determines its success. In effect there could be numerous available standards whose success would be determined by the willingness of organizations to adopt them.

Unlike the organizational rules which are backed by a hierarchical authority to ensure their adoption, standards have to rely on other means of adoption.  A standardizing authority may use scientific evidence as a means to highlight how the standard created by it is backed by science and hence warrants an adoption. ANSI (American National Standards Institute) will be developing standards for global HR and how effective they will be in convincing organizations on the scientific validity of their measures beyond statistical correlations would be interesting to see.

Additionally, a standardizing agent may try and create an elite identity around the followers of its standards and thus encourage active membership.  Most organizations are forever attempting to differentiate themselves from their competitors in the hope of attracting the brightest and the best talent. While following a global standard and benchmarking of performance may please the analytical side but I have my reservations on the kind of usefulness that such global standards could offer in terms of actual improvements on the ground. Unless this is actually backed by active nurturing by corporates which would mean active sharing of best practices and in turn a perceived threat to the pursuit of uniqueness that I earlier referred to.

Furthermore, standardizers may actually involve certain organizations in the design stage and the power equations at the design stage could determine the final shape of the standards as and when they emerge. This could in effect mean standards would mirror the practices of a few, with the expectation of making them applicable for a larger audience. This could actually undermine the creativity in practices and may actually encourage firms to look more like the powerful elite who created the standard in the first place.

I am not against a globally accepted measure on the cost of hiring or the heads to account for while calculating it, but my point here is to highlight how in our effort to standardize we may be turning a blind eye to certain realities which could have a bearing on how our organizations may look like in future.  My two cents on this would be for organizations to assess their existing systems, account for their own realities, outline their future outlook and then determine the relevance of these standards in their own context. Our organizations are loaded with numbers and standards to follow and it may be wise to take an informed call before deciding to add to this long list of numbers we track.    

Look Back & Move Forward

Source: www.scientificamerican.com

I know it’s a bit late in the year but it’s never too late to make a fresh start so a very Happy New Year to all of you! Hope this greeting helps you restart the year and shake off any negativity that a not so pleasant start (I hope not) would have brought with it.

Starting off is something that can be very exciting and scary at the same time. Exciting because you are embarking on something new, and, scary because you never know what this new challenge might throw at you or the lurking feeling ‘if I am good enough for this’. Well at least these were the two predominant emotions that were clouding my thoughts when I started this blog on 29^th November 2009. Over the past 14 months a lot has changed in terms of the layout, content and of course my philosophical and professional stand.

When I started this blog I was focused on using this as a platform to spew on the world the ‘wisdom’ I had gained while working as a consultant, advising some of the biggest and most reputed Indian business houses with a global footprint. Over the course of the past 3-4 months that I have been back in school (Warwick Business School, UK) for my second masters I have started questioning a lot of the things that I wrote and suggested to my clients. This is not to say that I was recommending actions that I did not believe in or I suggested action plans to my clients that were not right. Everything that I wrote or suggested my clients was a testimony of my understanding of the given context. All the advice that I gave or the programs that I designed were taking into account the ‘world view’ that I had at that time.  

Reflexivity is a great tool, it helps you take a look from the outside and critique your own work. That’s exactly how I feel at the moment, taking a step outside the boundary of my self-constructed world and looking inside to assess, evaluate and critique my own actions. In fact how interesting would it be if our hard working, extremely busy and under pressure executives could step outside their little constructions and peep in to see how it all adds up.  I understand that the pressures are relentless and expectations abound but is it too late to Assess, Recognize and Reflect!  Unlike my other posts where I try to outline a problem and attempt to underline certain prescriptive actions as a solution, in this post I would urge all my readers to adopt a reflexive view of any situation or action in their personal or professional life and unwrap the strands of  behaviours  which govern it. You are bound to unravel certain thoughts, ideas or actions which are embedded in your behavior and are playing a part under the surface to propel you to act in certain ways. And I am sure this renewed understanding of self would go a long way in helping you make more informed if not better decisions in future.

I hope you found this rant useful in some way and I look forward to hearing your views as always.

Stay blessed! 

Harmless Lies & Unsaid Truths- Do They Matter?



Source: www.thisislondon.co.uk


Every time we are faced with an unpleasant situation our immediate reaction is to either find a way to avoid it, or, if we have some thinking time, craft a logical explanation to rationalize our actions.

At work, missed a deadline- point out how the person in the other team never came back with the background data that you had requested him for and hence you could not meet the deadline. Business review with the boss- simple, get your creative juices flowing and fill the damn client sheet with meetings that never happened and the phone calls that never got through. Meeting with the HR on recent spurt in attrition in your team- tell them how you made every possible effort to bring them up to speed but there is only so much you could do and how attractive compensation from others is luring them away. 

Every one of us has been in such situations where we resort to a course of action which though not in line with our personal values is still the favored option. No one ever joins an organization thinking that, I will be a lousy employee or a lousy manager and I will lie my way through tough situations. Each one of us wants to do a good job, work hard and be appreciated for his/her contributions. But why is it so that we are forced to depart from our favored value driven actions to seemingly harmless lies which appear to be highly logical responses and do save us the headache and heart burn till the next encounter??

My view here is that the ephemeral nature of employer-employee relationship is at the heart of this deteriorating situation. ‘Job for life’- the motto is dead and gone, no longer people join companies with this view and even the employers while expecting loyalty from you, don’t expect you to be under any impression that your job is for life. Your job is yours till the time you are performing and you are fitting with the organizations chosen course of action for future. The employer-employee relationship needs a constant feed of performance and rewards respectively, from both the parties involved to keep it going. Thus, in this pressure to keep this relationship going, we end up acting in ways which while being against our personal values, help us keep this equation balanced.

While I will not suggest that organizations need to change their policies and start mirroring state bureaucracies where you may hold jobs for life, but is it possible for organizations to transform the nature of this relationship from transactional one to a relationship based on love, trust and respect. A relationship which while valuing results does not forget the person bringing those results and appreciates him/her for their contribution. I understand that bringing this kind of a change warrants a change in the DNA of the organization and is indeed a daunting endeavor but one step at a time will be a good start.

As a suggested first step, is it possible for us to broaden our relationship with our employees? An employee who comes to work for us is a person first and we could start by connecting with him/her on that level. Our managers while pushing for outcomes, can they spend some time knowing the people in their team? Simple things like a kind understanding word, an appreciative pat on the back and a congratulatory note on welcoming a new dog to the household may seem like very trivial gestures but if done with the right intent, they can have a very lasting impacting in cementing that employer-employee bond.

Your employees do have a life when they step out of the office and they have family, friends, fiancée’s and girlfriends who have an equal part to play in enabling your employees to contribute to building your company. So why don't we start by thanking them for their contribution and telling them how much we appreciate their role in enabling these people to give their best at the workplace. Indra Nooyi (CEO, Pepsico) in a recent interview to NDTV’s Barkha Dutt mentioned how she personally wrote to parents of all her direct reports, thanking them and telling them the great contribution their children were making in building Pepsico. 

Harmless lies and unsaid truths, may appear  inconsequential but they are like little termites eroding the strength of an already weak and strained relationship. Every little lie dents the relationship further and even if we choose not to admit it, it eventually does accumulate into an insurmountable mountain of lies thereby leading to severing of the relationship. The idea of this post was not to give you an exhaustive list of suggestions to improve but to draw your attention to something which appears insignificant but can have serious implications on our working and personal life. I hope it does get you thinking and encourages you to do what is "right".

Is it time we changed the view- Different perspective for a different solution?



Source: http://cabaretstills.deviantart.com

Corporates have traditionally been seen as being in the business of maximizing output while minimizing input. This precise mathematical equation like definition of business, however shallow it may be, is still seen as the reason for businesses existence and any deviation from this definition is seen as an aberration.

It is because of this mathematical nature of business that we always rely on a particular lens of numbers to visualize any organizational challenge and then use the vision obtained through this lens, to chart out a solution to address that challenge. While letting go of this lens of numbers may seem too inappropriate because we all have been made to believe for far too long that “whatever gets measured, gets done”. But I just think that for once if we decided to look at challenges through a different lens, then we may still be able to get things done while not getting bogged down by what and how of measurement. I am totally in favor of assessing outcomes and tracking progress, but don’t you think there are far too many uncountable’s out there which impact our everyday working. Hence if we looked at organizational challenges differently, then maybe we will be tackling these same challenges very differently and probably covering a lot more ground then if we were to look at these challenges solely through the traditional lens of numbers.

Job motivation has for long been a topic of great debate and discussion and our managers have always been brought to book for not being able to impact it positively. There has been a lot of research on what factors impede or promote job motivation and how these factors should be assessed and accounted for. But if we were to just forget all of this mathematical assessment exercise for once and just look at job motivation as a state of being and a way of doing business, don’t you think we will be able to achieve a lot more whilst not limiting ourselves with a fixed set of numbers and parameters. What that means is, if we looked at job motivation as a cultural imperative of the organization and how it is important for the organization to have a motivated workforce, we may be able to achieve a lot more by way of positively impacting our people, than being constrained by a set of pre-defined conditions and parameters. As a manager if you realized how critical it is for your people to be appreciated for their work and how each member of your team likes being recognized, wouldn’t you be more successful in positively impacting their motivation levels at the workplace than if you were working with a pre-defined set of conditions which highlighted what all is wrong with your team and how “that” score on “this” parameter had to go up for you to get your year-end bonus. Bringing that cultural change and sensitizing people to each other’s needs and aspirations, while being a long drawn process, could actually be a more rewarding and long term solution to this challenge of improving job motivation.

While numbers may be critical to assess achievements and reward performance, I personally do think that creating relationships that last, be it with your employees or customers, requires a lot “more” and that “more” goes beyond numbers. The ability to appreciate others point of view, visualize the challenges that your team members will face when chasing that target and how hard it can be to be away from one’s family during festive season, may just sound too fluffy and soft to have a place in hardcore numbers driven business world of today, but it may still be more important to your team members than having that team meeting to discuss how you can improve “that” score on “this” parameter.

You may have strong opinions on how critical it is to measure to achieve results, but I personally do think that it may be helpful to change the lens to take that next leap of improvement.

Look forward to hearing your views…

Learning from organizational failure

If you are interested in business history, you may be able to come up with many different examples of organizations which were once very successful and were in fact market leaders in the space in which they were operating but who eventually just vanished from the scene. They were no longer present in the market and there was no trace of them anywhere as if they never existed in the first place.

There have been numerous examples where organizations fail to identify an impeding slowdown in the economy and keep on manufacturing their products at full steam without taking into account how the product is selling in the marketplace and eventually are forced to extend credit lines to the dealers and are squeezed by their suppliers leading to a severe strain on cash flows and eventual crumbling of the organization. This situation is just one example of how an organization can lose touch with what is happening on the ground and end up creating a financial hole which has the potential to take down the whole organization.

The reason why I am talking about such a depressing scenario is because I think , while it is important to understand what makes an organizational successful, it is also crucial to understand what causes organizations to fail-to understand what NOT to do when you are walking into a period of growth.

Once an organization becomes successful, there is always a tendency to replicate the formula for success by continuously repeating what made it successful in the first place. For instance, imagine the future of Apple, if after creating the iPod, Steve Jobs and gang just decide to start making more of iPods and try to sell them in the market without realizing that the competition is busy creating products which are better, cheaper and more universally compatible than the iPod. The future would be very bleak for Apple without an ability to innovate and manufacture products which help it capitalize on its success. So, it is important for a successful organization to realize that- what made it successful will not always keep it there and hence it is important for it to keep looking to innovate and better itself every day in an effort to keep the organization relevant and maintain its success.

Organizations put together elaborate research, social media, communications and information gathering cells in an effort to create a formal structure in the organization which will help it sense the changes in the environment and hence respond to it in an appropriate manner. While it is important to establish formal systems of intelligence gathering and information sharing within the organization, it is also critical for an organization to be cognizant of the fact that there will be subtle changes in the environment which may be missed by such formal structures but may prove to be significant game changers at a later date.

As observed by Starbuck, Greve and Hedberg (1978):

Many unanticipated events are never perceived at all; others are only perceived after they have been developing for some time…organizations overlook the earliest signs that crisis are developing, because the earliest signals are poorly observed variables and they are communicated orally in informal reports.

Thus, it is critical for an organization to be aware of the early signs of impeding trouble which may or may not be observed by the formal structures or mirrored by the metrics being tracked.

Organizational success while dependent on strategy, execution, environment and several other factors, cannot be achieved if we do not have the right set of people at every level in the organization. The focus here is on having the right people in the right roles. It is the people who make decisions and execute organizational strategies and no individual has the capability to make decisions which are based on 100% of the available information and hence it is imperative that we have people who have the ability to process the available information for a certain role in the best possible way and then make the most optimum decision given the constraints under which any human being would operate. Thus, while an organization may be successful today, what would keep it successful is its ability to hire and engage the right people in the right roles.

As is popularly attributed to Jack Welch (CEO, General Electric), maximizing shareholder value is often used by organizations as the ultimate measure of a company’s success. However, in March 2009, Jack Welch himself called maximizing shareholder value as the "the dumbest idea in the world". While it is important for organizations to consider the interest of its shareholders, it is critical for organizations to understand that their long term success cannot be achieved without taking into account the societal impact of their actions. A lot has been written about corporate social responsibility (CSR) but it is now time to move beyond the talk and token acts of CSR to restore the faith of the people in the businesses ability to contribute and make a difference. Successful organizations measure the worth of their business not only in financial terms but also in their ability to positively impact the lives of the people and the community in which they operate.

While I may not completely subscribe to this school of thought of looking at failure to identify lessons for success- it’s like asking a divorce lawyer for marriage advice, but I still do think that organizations have limitations which may stem from cultural, environmental and human factors and hence it may be helpful to look at failures in our effort to create a formula which guarantees organizational success…if such a formula for organizational success does in fact exist??

Dilbert on Employee Engagement

Via: Mumblr (Abhishek Mittal) on Twitter

Prevention is better than cure- do we care!

Every time you came running into the house and looked to grab that icy cold bottle of water from the refrigerator, your mom would yell at you, trying to save you from falling sick with a sore throat and fever...

Your mom telling you not to eat that roadside treat or you may end up with an upset stomach...

Your dad telling you to drive carefully on your return from that late night get together with friends...

        ...these are just some manifestations of the age old adage- “Prevention is better than cure”.

Like all the parental wisdom, you actually realize the truth behind those words only when you have gone through most of your life or when you end up with a not so pleasant experience in life.

Now if we were take this thought- “ Prevention is better than cure” a little further and extend it to an organizational context, I think we would be hitting a sweet spot of “SIMPLE TO UNDERSTAND AND EASY TO IMPLEMENT” advice. Most organizational initiatives or strategies (for lack of a simpler word) fail or do not achieve the desired success because of one simple reason and that is – that they are just too complicated to understand and warrant a whole lot of effort in implementation. Imagine sitting through classes on competency definition and identification for three days and then being faced with a super complicated performance appraisal system which utilizes complicated behavioural algorithms to map individuals competency scores to the skills required. Sure does sound very scary!!

So, the point is, that if you want something to be done make sure you keep it “SIMPLE TO UNDERSTAND AND EASY TO IMPLEMENT”.

 I digress, now coming back to topic at hand...

This simple piece of advice – Prevention is better than cure, if followed by our managers, would go a long way in helping them overcome most of the challenges that they may face in their day to day activities such as attrition, falling productivity, negative talk in the team, failing customer service etc.

If we just take attrition as an example, Google throws up nearly 25, 10,000.00 (25Lac+) search results when you type the phrase-“cost of hiring a new employee”. Similarly, if you type the phrase- “cost of employee attrition” it flashes about 583,000 results (nearly 6.0Lac). There is so much being said about the financial impact of attrition and how it affects the bottom line. If only our managers remembered that- Prevention Is Better than Cure, we would have been looking at a different story. A self aware manager i.e. one who understands his/her managerial style (& pitfalls) and at the same time understands his/her team members better would not need so much research to understand what he/she loses every time a team member walks out of the door. A self aware and sensitive manager can identify the team members’ hot buttons and work towards creating a work environment which challenges and adds value to them every day. Thereby, impacting the employees’ wellbeing at the workplace & beyond and creating a work environment which creates an internal pull and thus prevents an employee from attriting.

Similarly, falling team engagement and/or poor role fitment could be a cause of dropping productivity and poor customer service and hence if our manager is pro active in understanding his/her people, makes sure his people have adequate support to carry out their duties effectively and provides regular positive reinforcements to them, the situation will be very different. These very people could be utilized to their fullest potential in jobs that they love. Once again, creating an environment which prevents negativity and leverages a pro-active approach to team management, which in turn ensures that we have a set of engaged people looking to delight their customers every time they touch them.

These little pro-active and positive strokes which just require some conscious doing on the part of our managers could go a long way in helping us create teams, organizations, communities and subsequently nations of people who follow an approach to life which prevents negativity and creates a positive impact in every life it touches.

So next time your team mate comes back to you and tells you that he could not meet his number for this quarter, just before you decide to wear your ass hole hat, remind yourself- Prevention is better than cure, prevent feeding your negative side and ask him why he could not meet his target and you may actually see a different story in the next quarter.

Advice for life: Prevent negativity and you will cure your life of all ills, till there aren't anymore ills to cure and you have a life full of positive energy.

Asking the right questions to get the right answers: A book of questions!

Consultants, research experts and industry leaders would tell you that if you want right answers, you have to ask the right questions. In this book from the Employee Engagement Network, 96 members of the network come together to share their views on the right questions to get the right answers which can help you create a truly engaged and productive workplace.

Members of the network have contributed to help you find questions that leaders, managers and organizations need to ponder upon to create a work environment which creates a engaging experience for its stakeholders.

Please click here to read the book.

In my contribution to the book, I have posed a question for our managers to think about:

• For the manager: Does everyone in my team have the opportunity to maximize their individual talent? 

Special thanks to the great David Zinger for putting together this network of like minded people and contributing so much to the subject.

I hope this gets you thinking and encourages you to identify and define questions that will get you the RIGHT answers!!

"Execution" advantage for growth

He graduated at the top of his class from Harvard Business School and started his career as a management trainee at Gestner Electronics, one of the world’s leading consumer durables manufacturers with operations spread across five continents. His hard work, dedication and commitment saw him grow to the position of COO of the same company in a short span of ten years. He was recognized as a “hi-po” and a “fast tracker” by all.

With such an impressive track record, Mr. Skinner had all the makings to lead a growing organization into the next era of growth. His experience of handling size, scale & diversity and his ability to overcome cultural barriers was seen as his greatest asset.

The board at Nate Electronics saw him as their first choice to replace their retiring and very successful CEO Mark Weiner. Headquartered in New Jersey, Nate Electronics was a growing consumer durables company. Ranked number three in the pecking order of the best in the world in terms of sales, Nate Electronics was seen as a progressive organization, always at the forefront of bringing game changing products to the marketplace. Mark Weiner was seen as the chief architect of this success story and Skinner was seen as a capable successor to usher in the next phase of growth at Nate and make it number one in the world.

Mr. Skinner took over from Mark and promised to carry forward the legacy of innovation and fast growth.

Before his first meeting with his team, Skinner spent time reviewing the numbers and outlined the targets that he wanted them to chase for the next year. After all, he was a fast tracker and nothing excited him more than to see that sales graph move upwards and it had to move very quickly for him, to showcase to the board that they had made the right choice.

After a round of customary introductions and a brief download on the progress in the various departments, Skinner outlined his vision for the organization for the next year and put forward the figures he had worked out for his team. There was a silent acceptance of what was put forward for them to chase and Skinner felt confident of his ability to achieve the aggressive target he had set for himself and the team.

At the quarterly leadership team meeting the numbers showed a significant drop in sales, the PE ratio also had taken a beating and the customer satisfactions scores were also witnessing a not so healthy movement in the wrong direction. Something was seriously wrong with the way things were looking, Skinner was fairly confident of the numbers and plans he had laid out for his team and he was not sure what was it that was going wrong. Every time a division head got up from his/her seat to share his/her report he/she got crushed for what he/she was putting forth.

What was it that was going wrong with Mr. Skinner’s ambitious and aggressive plans?

He had a successful track record and illustrious educational pedigree to back him. His experience with the best in the world had taught him all the tricks of trade that were to be learnt, his marketing acumen was considered to be the best in the industry. In fact, Times magazine had ranked him as the 5th most promising young CEO in USA in their last edition.

One of the worst quarters in the history of Nate, right at the outset was not a pleasant sign. He had joined Nate amidst much fan fare and he was sure that one more such a quarter and he would be soon packing his bags.

So what was it that had led to this sudden demise of Skinner’s plans?? Is it the market, is it the people in his team or is it his ability to execute.

In my opinion, the program plaguing Nate Electronics is very much similar to what most of our modern day organizations are facing and i.e. lack of effective execution.

Before outlining the numbers and plans for growth of the divisions, Mr. Skinner never took into account the organizational capabilities to achieve those numbers and execute those plans. Organizational capability to produce the required number of products, service the customers, hire the right people and manage their expectations etc. was never considered.

I talked about aligning critical business levers for successfully achieving business results in my last post and that is one critical aspect of execution. Same plan could have been made into a success story with a focus on aligning business levers and achieving effective execution at the outset.

He would have benefited greatly, if he would have spent time with each of his division heads reviewing the ongoing activities and taking their progress and pace of growth into account before devising the organizational roadmap for the next year. This would have also given him a peek into the capabilities of people leading those divisions and thereby enabling him to better plan for effective execution keeping in mind the leaders strengths and areas of improvement.

In addition to defining the outcomes, Skinner should have worked with his team to identify critical in-between milestones and frequencies at which those will be tracked to ensure that the teams were on target to achieve their goals or not. Herein also, fixing accountabilities amongst his team members would have helped him  to pin point responsibilities and track progress to avoid unpleasant surprises at the end of the year.

Furthermore, he would have gained significantly if he was not only tracking the outcomes that his team was achieving (or not) but also by asking “Why” outcomes were not being achieved. This would have gone a long way in ironing out the hurdles that were holding back the progress.

Most CEO’s consider themselves to be responsible for devising strategies, interpreting complicated strategies and planning smart moves. They assume execution to be the job of the next line of leadership. This however, could prove to be a grave misconception as was proved in the case of Mr. Skinner. Hence, if a CEO wants to see results he better brace himself up for bringing execution capabilities to the table because without execution focus and ability to execute a strategy is simply “no good”. 

Learning's  for Mr. Skinner (and for all of us):

1. Take into account the organizational capabilities at every level before devising a strategy
2. Buy-in of the team is critical to ensure successful execution  
3. Have right people in the right roles and fix accountabilities  
4. Define critical milestones on the road to achievement of outcomes to avoid surprises  
5. Why and how of achievement/non-achievement provides critical lessons for improvement

Must Read: 12 Things Good Bosses Believe- By Bob Sutton, Harvard Business Review Blog

Bob Sutton, Harvard Business Review Blog: 12 Things Good Bosses Believe -  I have been a regular follower of Bob's work on his blog Work Matters and this article on HBR Blogs is a surefire thought provoking master piece. Bob puts himself in the shoes of the boss and identifies 12 things good bosses believe.

Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch (Source: Youtube)

Success in the marketplace through alignment of critical business levers

What makes an organizational successful? .... My immediate response to that question - "an organization with a sound strategy which it executes with excellence through its people with enabling policies, processes & technology framework in a supportive external environment may become successful over a given period of time"

So, if we look at the response mentioned above we may find that organizational success is an outcome of a combination of factors both internal and external to it which come together in harmony to create a successful venture.

Given the stage of existence at which an organization is, the impact of these factors on the success of an organization may vary, for instance, a small organization may be able to achieve success by relying more heavily on select bright and hardworking individuals but as this organization grows, it may become imperative to develop enabling processes and policies to support size and scale and reduce dependence on individuals. Similarly, if an organization visualizes innovation and intrapreneurship as its mainstay of growth, it has to have enabling policies and processes which encourage its people to innovate. One shining example of organizational processes encouraging innovation is Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Corporation or 3M as it is known to all of us. 3M processes allow every employee to actually spend 15% of their workweek pursuing individual projects of their own choices. The employees don’t even have to share the details of the project with their managers, let alone justify these projects. Furthermore, every business unit is encouraged to innovate, to the extent that as a policy matter it is mandated that 30% of its revenues most come from products introduced in the last four years.

Similar cases in point of successful interaction of people, process, technology and policy levers to achieve organizational success has been seen across organizations such as Wal-Mart and Dell. These organizations looked at the eventual outcome to be achieved and then aligned the people, process, technology and policy levers to churn out the desired output.

If you want to be a customer centric organization, make sure that your people know what it means for them in their day to day interactions with the end customer and at the same time everything from the organizations product display, distribution & exchange policies to promotion plans, incentive schemes and pay raises etc. mirror that.

Hence, while designing organizational strategies it is critical to understand the nature of impact these strategies may have on each of the business levers and how the organization intends to better align these changes to achieve its strategic goals. The impact on critical business levers and the organizations ability to manage that impact, can actually act as a crucial filter for the organization to decide whether a particular strategy can be successfully executed or not. By building this self correcting evaluation mechanism at the strategy design stage itself, the organization actually brings execution focus right from the outset and hence eliminates the most critical problem facing organizations today i.e. lack of execution excellence.

To summarize, it can safely be said that for an organization to achieve success and continuously beat the bourses it is critical to focus on end outcomes while constantly aligning its internal management systems to talk to each other and aim towards achieving the desired end outcomes.

Improving channel partner throughput with Strong Relationships

It is increasingly becoming imperative for an organization to focus on its core value proposition and build a network of channel partners who act as extensions for the organization and help them multiply their presence and offer non-core services without leading to challenges associated with size and scale.


These channel partners are the interface of the organization for the end customers, be it in the form of franchisee owners or sales and service partners. These channel partners must mirror the brand promise that the organization is working towards delivering to its end customers and at every touch point with the customer, deliver on that brand promise.

The confidence and credibility of the organization in question can be strengthened or eroded by the channel partner with whom the customer is interacting. So, every time a customer walks into a channel partner outlet or speaks to a call center representative he/she feels he is interacting with brand in question and it is the brand’s ability or inability to resolve his/her queries that is being subjected to a test.

With this growing focus on channel partners and their direct impact on our business as they touch our end customers, what can organizations do to ensure that they have a channel partner network which is committed to building and growing business with them and mirrors the organizations core values to its end customers and at the same time acts as a key differentiator for them in this crowded marketplace?

The answer to this question lies in building Strong Relationships. Just as strong customer relationships mean sustained business growth similarly strong relationships with channel partners help ensure creation of an ecosystem which reflects organizational values and is committed to building the business through increased customer acquisition, better servicing and improved cross sell/up sell.

For an organization to positively impact this relationship strength, it may look at building customer like relationship with its channel partners which go beyond rational satisfiers and are held together by a strong emotional connect.

In a complex business environment, businesses continue to rely on gut feel and impressions to impact and improve channel partner performance. If we do not make any major investment decisions without going through the numbers then how can we make decisions that impact our business so directly without going back to numbers, identifying areas of improvement and then acting on it.

Hence going forward, one of the key differentiating factors for organizations may be their ability to objectively assess their relationship strength and work on areas which have a maximum impact on business.

Two critical aspects which impact any relationship and hence need to be evaluated are Rational and Emotional aspects. While rational aspects indicate an organizations ability to satisfy a channel partners on hygiene factors of a relationship such as product, price, promotion etc. emotional aspects (such as trust, integrity, pride and passion) help an organization assess the commitment of channel partners in building a business and has a direct impact business outcomes.

An objective assessment of the channel partner & company relationship strength is needed. This can be done through various research based frameworks available through reputed agencies. Most critical aspect to be kept in mind while evaluating a framework should be its ability to assess the critically important emotional bonds of trust, integrity, pride and passion and its linkages to business outcomes. This framework may then be coupled with other organizational and business environment variables; this would help an organization get a complete picture of their relationship across both rational and emotional aspects.

A complete approach to relationship strengthening may encompass the following steps- measure, plan & implement and review & monitor to help organizations experience improved channel partner throughput. The complete approach may be designed with a view to assess improvements made.

Thus, the paradigm shift of strengthening relationships should focus on measuring the key outcomes and drivers which impact channel partner relationships and instituting steps to ensure effective improvements which are then assessed for effectiveness for further improvements.

Friendships at the workplace- do they harm or help?

In a battle between organizational policy and human nature; human nature would always win. If you try and restrict social bonding at the workplace, you would eventually fail. The need for social bonding and relationships is very basic to every human being and will also surface at the workplace. A whole lot of studies have proven how having a network of friends at the workplace positively impacts outcomes such as customer service, safety incidents, sharing of information, suggestions and opinions etc.

Now, if we were to reverse the situation where overall engagement of employees at the workplace is very low, and performance on friendship parameters is very strong; does this mean that this social bonding at the workplace is working against the organizations efforts to improve employee engagement? Where all the conversations through all these informal channels is centered around how the organization is trying to cheat the employees and take away their bonuses or how the new guys are being interviewed to replace the old ones. The friendships at the workplace are getting stronger with common misery bringing everyone together to fight and crib against a common enemy.

A disengaged employee is like an irate customer, he/she is actively trying to spread his/her disengagement around the workplace and in the process garnering support from all others who share a similar feeling. Unlike an engaged employee who is busy working hard and contributing to building the organization, this disengaged employee is talking a lot more, enjoying longer coffee breaks and is creating more such partners in misery.

Social bonding at the workplace which can serve as a great source of bringing together the organization for achieving greater goals is now working against it with disengagement being the basis of most of these social bonds.

The failure of the organization to provide an enabling environment and local level managers to create an engaging work environment at an individual team level created this disengaging epidemic which is gradually spreading across the organization through these friendships at the workplace.

So what can an organization do to curb such a situation? Trying to curtail the relationships at the workplace would do more harm than good and would eventually lead to spreading of more negativity. The answer may lie in the basics of creating an engaging experience for every employee and hence provide more positive strokes to the conversations thereby using the informal networks to spread more positivity.

Our managers have to play a very critical role in ensuring that they are talking a lot more to their teams and keeping them abreast of what is happening in the organization to eliminate the impact of gossip on employee morale. This talking is about informing the employees about what's happening, why is it happening, hearing from them on what is troubling them and painting a true & fair picture for the employees. Nothing can replace an honest, regular dialogue.

While the most natural reaction would be to try and curb all informal communication, my suggestion would be to create opportunities for people to come together and share their thoughts, feelings and aspirations in a more conducive environment. This may actually help in steering these negative conversations in a more positive direction and create a more enabling environment at the workplace.

Another critical aspect will be to completely refrain from playing any kind of blame game in any given situation. Strictly avoid blaming anyone for anything that is going wrong at the workplace, for this may create a cycle of negativity and blaming which would further add fuel to the fire. You may want to talk to and hear from the trouble makers in private rather than use any kind of public medium to reprimand them. While you should use public platforms to recognize all sorts of positive behavior which has contributed towards creating a positive experience for employees and/or customers, thereby, encouraging more such behaviors.

Research has shown how friendships at workplace contribute to building a more positive and candid workplace where friends tolerate and work out disagreements better, cheer each other up in the times of trouble and are more committed to achieving the goals of the group. Thus, it is critical for an organization to encourage friendly relationships at the workplace rather than see it as a peril of having "people" at the workplace.

Unlocking world class performance-one individual at a time

Every individual is unique and is blessed with certain inherent strengths which when put to use in a suitable environment may help him/her deliver a world class performance.


Now, if we were to assess you for these inherent talents and strengths through some highly validated and recognized psychometric test or any other form of assessment tools. Put you in a role which was totally in line with the way your brain was hard wired i.e. complete and absolute match with your internal strengths. There is very high probability that you will be delivering a world class performance at work every day. If in a organization every individual was in such a role where he/she was delivering a world class performance in his/her role; you would automatically have a world class organization which beats the competition hollow and is on the top of the table at every count.


In spite of several advances in industrial/organizational psychology and high degree of predictability that we claim with our psychometric and assessment tools we still continue to fail to create such a world class organization.


I am not against these assessment tools or the role of individuals’ strengths in helping him/her deliver a world beating performance. My thoughts on this revolve around the factors outside of an individual which may have a bearing on his/her performance and thus act as barriers or enablers.

In my mind, the first step on this journey of creating world class organization would be to learn from your best. Learning from your best may lead you to identify the typical traits of your star performers in a particular role and then create/modify assessment tools to identify how closely your future hire is exhibiting such traits if put in similar situations. This would mean that you are getting more of such people who mirror the behaviors of the best in critical situations and hence their chances of success in real world situations may multiply because their thinking patterns are closer to those of your stars. This actually may be seen as an extension of the age old adage of "recent past being the best indicator of future behavior". Thus, you may be filtering those people who do not fit the thought patterns of your stars at the outset itself. Critics may argue here that reactions in simulated situations may wary wildly from those in real life situations but this however may be seen as our attempt to get close to identifying future stars through the behaviors of our current stars.


Now, if we did have a tool which allowed us to slot individuals according to their talents and then helped us put them onto such tailor made roles, we would surely be setting them up for success. This however, is only one side of the story, one critical piece of this puzzle is our local level manager. Our managers have to ensure that he/she is giving all the individuals on his/her team an opportunity to maximize his talents/strengths on the job. A failure on the part of the manager to recognize people for their uniqueness would definitely prevent individuals from reacting in their most natural way and hence would curtail their ability to perform and leverage their inherent talents and strengths. Hence, it may be imperative for us as a organization, to create an enabling environment with the help of adequate managerial education, sensitization and support around improving their people management capability and recognizing them for their ability to encourage individuals to put their strengths to work. Furthermore, a manager must be able to create an engaging environment which fosters creation of more organizational builders and curtails value destroying behavior.


Another lever which we could look at putting to use to ensure superior application and performance is Recognition. Recognizing the right behaviors at the right time is one very critical piece of ensuring that we are getting the desired performance from all on the team. First step in this could be around defining the right behaviors and outcomes that would be recognized and rewarded. So, we need to define the right behaviors which propagate organizational philosophy at both organizational level and at the local team level. Once there is clarity and understanding on the expected behaviors it is time to recognize and create "heroes". These heroes would help you showcase the right kind of behaviors which revolve around maximizing your strengths and hence delivering world class performance.


To sum it all up, it may be said that in your journey to create a world class organization it may be critical to design assessment tools which draw on your organizational learning’s and help you identify the diamonds and it is the ability of your local level managers to polish those diamonds that may help you determine how sparkling they will be in their role given the right kind of organizational enablers to lead you down the path of world class performance.

Visit The Employee Engagement Network

Creating a Great Workplace!

Almost every OD professional and/or organizational leader has creating a great workplace as one critical KRA item for them. They resort to various tools and tricks to ensure that there is sufficient to activity to showcase when questioned on what they are doing to create a great workplace such as employee engagement initiatives, fun @ work activities (which essentially are only fun activities with no direct impact on creating a great workplace), recognition drives etc.

Seldom do we find our respected professionals trying to uncover what actually makes a great workplace and why do we even need a great workplace. A lot of organizations even with lousy people practices and totally disengaged and disillusioned employees may still be busy booking huge orders and delivering the numbers and in this era of 3 year long shelf life for CEO's if you are delivering numbers, does it really matter what kind of a workplace you are creating.

A lot has been written and argued about the need for creating a great workplace and it is always heartening to see every time a CEO puts his/her foot down and ensures that the whole organization is marching towards a common goal of creating a great workplace with a single point agenda of achieving SUSTAINED BUSINESS success. So, it can safely be said that the outcome a business may achieve by creating a great workplace is SUSTAINED BUSINESS success.

Now, coming back to the basic question, what do we mean by a great workplace?? Without an understanding of this basic definition I am not sure how successful we can be in our effort to create a great workplace.

To my mind a great workplace is one where employees have a psychological ownership of the organization, are willing to go that extra mile, look forward to contributing to the business success, have their personal goals completely aligned to the organizational imperatives, are looking forward to making everyday count at the workplace and see themselves as an integral part of a larger purpose.

If the above symptoms indicate that we have succeeded in creating a great workplace, what is that we need to work upon to make sure that the above symptoms start showing on the ground.

On a closer scrutiny of these symptoms you may find that all of them are actually outcomes of the work environment that we are able to create. The biggest player in creating this enabling work environment which necessitates exhibition of the above mentioned behaviors by our workforce is a function of how effective our local level managers are in their interactions with their teams. It is an established fact that managers are the lenses through which an employee visualizes the organization at large and hence it is the ability of our managers to create an enabling environment which can help our workforce exhibit behaviors which are congruent with that of the employees at a great workplace.

While the local level managers are the lead players in our effort to create a great workplace, they need to be supported adequately at an organizational level with necessary enablers to ensure that they are able to positively impact employees in their interactions and hence provide an environment which creates a great workplace.

In conclusion, it may be said that creating a great workplace is a function of creating great managers and hence our efforts of creating great workplace may bear maximum fruits if we were to root them in impacting, empowering and sensitizing our local level managers, with adequate support and role modeling from the organizational leadership. Every time we are faced with a question of creating a great workplace it may be our best bet to success if we were to keep our local level managers at the center of our strategy and design interventions around them. So, always remember, it is not the OD professional or the HR head who can create a great workplace, they can only be facilitators of change and it is our local level managers who can actually be the change and ensure that we are creating a great workplace for sustained business success.