To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace - Doug Conant, CEO of Campbell’s Soup The people who work for you are the lifeline of your business. It doesn’t matter which industry you are, it’s the same. There is a very sacred relationship: employer-employee one. It has to be positive for both of them to be successful. It is a very sad state of affairs. This relationship deteriorates as the business stabilizes or scales to the next level. Might be that they get comfortable for their own good. They got distracted by other priority tasks. Whatever the reason, the worst thing they can do is to come across like organisations that don’t care. This is where the rubber meets the road, the employee decides on whether to stay or move on. The moment the employee exercises his veto power, the caring reappears magically. This does not come without a warning. There are several indications which come up. Let me list the top 4 and the most important one:
The list is endless; I accept, but these symptoms are easy to detect and stop the system from getting rot. Why should we do that? Isn’t it too expensive? In today’s cutthroat business world, Organisations do not care about you. They cannot take care of you. All the employee motivation and employee engagements are only on paper and theory. No one has time to put in place, even the first few lines of that policy. Let me take a very simple case, does the bank care about you. NO, they only want your money. They don’t care about you, it’s the plain truth. Neither does your hospital or your company cab service. Does your car dealer really care about you when they ping you for a service reminder? I am surprised that people get amazed when they discover this. Why this amazement? It’s because they are people, simple human beings. What does that mean, they can care. People care for people, but I do not think organisations can. It’s only when demands and regulations (Red-tape bureaucracies) get in the way caring fades. So do I mean to say that Organisations cannot care? No, I definitely say they can care. Then how? If the organisation can fill in caring people at sensitive posts. Simple, fill them in with people and get corporate out of the way. The caring culture will germinate and sustain for a long time. There is a simple way to get into this habit. When you free up your employee to behave like people, caring culture germinates. As opposed to looking at them as pure profit maximising machines. If done so, caring can’t help but grow. So let us put ourselves in the corporate shoes and think for a moment. In the short run, not caring saves money and brings profits. Don’t bother improving the facilities, let the cubicles become smaller. Don’t worry about those small customers, etc. It may seem to work, but only for a short time. They may be busy. Hiring people and improving infrastructure costs money, effort and time (Triple constraints) So what is my conclusion? In the long term, caring pays multifold by itself. Those organizations which put extra efforts, go the extra mile are always rewarded. Their reward is Sustainability and Loyalty. Finally, not to mention that caring makes us more humane, it’s worth it.
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As a recap of the last blog, let me start from there. Those who have followed the startups and their ecosystem for a while have always wondered. Like me about why many of them fail. Many of them have a good product-market fit, a good process in place, sound financials and yet they fail. The reason for those is present in the previous blog "Let's see the correlation".
Let me start from where I left. In the previous blog, I stopped at this message. Yes, it is very much possible to predict the time and the team size for a startup to fail. When the trajectory of the business will take a sharp U-turn. Let me show you how? Mathematics provides a lot of input for leadership and decision-making. It is not used as wise in the current context. The most common reason for start-up failures is bad organizational design and development. And one of the reasons why we often do a poor job of that is the subject’s inherent immeasurability. It is very difficult to predict the success of the measure - in the short term. Consider as an example, the stance which we take on many actions is not good. Consider on training or on infrastructure investments or organization culture. Also, consider restructuring or new technology. Is it actually making our business function better or worse? Worse, it plainly costing time and money to an otherwise neutral effect. Organizational complexity exists but the important one is the metric or data availability. In most cases, the data which is available is inadequate to make decisions. For example, it’s not enough to say that a bad organization will show up with bad revenue sooner or later. It's true that it will, but revenues are lag indicators like the iceberg warning. As soon as the captain goes down the deck, it hits you. So what do we do if we cannot measure? My advice is that if you cannot measure it fine but at least we can still model it. Qualitative models deal with cause-and-effect, relationships, and relativity. They are powerful in aiding our decision-making and understanding of the organization. Stop beating around the bush, where is the math? How can you predict the slump? Before I go there, wanted to only say this small concept. In mathematics, an environment has the Markov Property. The property manifests if all data required for a decision is available in the current state. In plain English, it means that we do not need to know the history to make a decision at the current moment. For example, in a chess game, we do not need the history of the game to access our possible next moves. Of course, some history is fine but all I am stating is that it is NOT necessary. OK, without wasting much time let me dive into where I left last time. I'm not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep ; I'm afraid of an army of sheeps lead by a lion -- Alexander The Great Drishyam 2 is a really good movie with a very simple plot. It is a gripping tale of a police investigation and a targeted family which is threatened by it. So what has that got to do with leadership lessons? Well, there is a lot of learnings that we can take from the protagonist role - Georgekutty. Mohanlal has done the role to perfection and what has he done is the main moot point of this blog. How well he has handled a crisis situation in his family in a very calm and composed manner. There has always been a question - what makes a good leader? There are 1000s of blogs and books that give you answers which to most of us (include me first) enters through one ear and flies through the other within seconds. Since there is no right way or a wrong way, everyone can have his or her point of view and the debate continues endlessly. So rather than pondering over what are the skills required I would like to change the perspective of trying to learn from every person or activity that we encounter around us. There is another school of thinking which even questions if leadership can be taught or learned. Basically, their approach is that it is an inborn skill that can only be sharpened and never created. Now let's drop all these debatable viewpoints and just try to learn small things from our everyday life - that is a better teacher than books, videos, and blogs (all put together) Most of us always think that leadership skills are much like any other normal soft skill but in reality, we are wrong. There is no one size fits all solution in terms of leadership. Let us see for example in the current political arena - there was Trump, you have Kim Jong-un, Putin, Modi, and Angela Merkel. All of them are good leaders but when you look at them closely - they all approach the same skill using different techniques and points of view. This means that leadership needs to be learned from everywhere and not from a single source. I do not wish to dwell on the movie or the plot but want to highlight a few instances from the movie and then connect them into practical corporate life and share a few lessons on leadership. Of course, Jeethu Joseph did not think of this story from the leadership point of view but he has certainly created a great leadership experience in the form of Georgekutty who is not well educated and hails from a remote village but has a great presence of mind - on a mission with a strategy to get his family out of a crisis. So let's get to the moot point before I forgot what I started. Are you ready? Ensuring that the benefits of globalization are shared widely remains a challenge. -- Sushma Swaraj Globalization has been a buzz word for more than 2 decades and also the most over abused buzz word in the corporate world. Even before I try to denounce it, let me try and understand what it is anyway. In this frame of mind I started researching on this topic and I landed upon a really great book titled “Small Is Beautiful” By Ernst F. Schumacher. Before I get into the book, let me tell about this author Ernst F. Schumacher, a renowned German-British economist and statistician who is best known for his proposal on the human scale. Mr. Schumacher wrote on economic topics for the Times (London) and slowly became one of the chief editorial writers. This book “Small is beautiful” is a collection of essays and was bought to the wider audience by one of his friends. The main theme of these essays was that we cannot plainly assume that the problem of technological production will be solved by capitalism which meant eroding the finite natural capital that nature has given us and depriving the future generations of its benefits. As globalization and its effects have been studies over and over again by many researchers and organizations, the subject has been divided into three sub-categories: political, economic, and cultural. Political globalization refers to the presence of the international governing body that acts as a world government. UN is the example of political globalization in practice. Economic globalization deals with spreading good, services, technology, and information among nations. Finally we have cultural globalization: there is a very strong trend in making all cultures around the world turn into Western lifestyle. This has be done via the pop culture, international trade pacts, communication and media via Internet and social media platforms. All these combined have made the modern world to be summed into one thing: Consumerism (Which was also started by the Americans) To put it simply, the east are slowly getting translated into a miniature west – slowly decaying the long lasted local heritage and culture. There are some good things in globalization but when added the negatives, it seem that the negative angle has a clear edge. There is a huge negative force which performs only one thing – the loss of national identity. This book argues the same and I will try to summarize the book in a crisp and concise mode possible. [Warning: Lengthy read] Too often we give our children answers to remember rather than problems to solve - Roger Lewin (British Author) Business or work is always about facing pressures which comes from domestic competitors, startups, low cost providers. We all have heard this phrase - "improve productivity" as the mantra and has been preached over and over again to us. Year after year I am pretty sure that each organisation has a key goal called productivity increase and associate a percentage to it. Let me take a step back and see what comes to the mind immediately as I say the word productivity.
These are a few of the things which every team member and middle managers get every year when this word occurs in their townhall. Senior management always tend to think that productivity increase has a direct impact of cash inflow or profit margins. This is a sad state of affairs across the world - teams works hard and squeeze that 3% target and before they can start to enjoy the next 3% comes as the next year goal. I read a case study recently and would like to condense it and tell you the extracts of it only. A large mineral extraction facility in the US was trying to squeeze more productivity and the team felt that they had reached the limits. The company was the best-in-class in its output which was its cost per tonne of ore moved, but investors wanted more. They then hired a prestigious management consulting firm to help them find opportunities to improve. The firm performed a benchmarking study between many aspects of this business and its peers: they came up with about 15% total possible price improvement, with about 10% of that being termed “achievable.” The opportunities included dozens of arduous or expensive changes the company could make to different parts of the business. It was nice to know that they were working at their optimum level but the teams were paranoid in approaching the investors again. So one of the engineering leads came up with a suggestion that they could approach their cost targets from an angle of problem solving. The team identified new problems in the business (strategy and process) that could be solved which could theoretically bring a 60% reduction in their cost per tonne. What made the difference? By dropping the dead weight of “productivity” efforts and converting to finding and solving hard problems, they radically changed their perspective. There were two steps to their success:
Your business can do the same. What to know how? |
AuthorVasudevan is a Leadership Mentor and an Executive coach. I run an online website geared towards helping creative entrepreneurs and future managers to build their dreams. Archives
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