NHRD Network Journal - National HRD Network

NHRD Network Journal

ISSN - 0974 - 1739

NHRD Network Journal April 2013

Volume 6

Issue 2

National HRD Network

The underlying philosophy of the NHRDN is that every human being has the potential for remarkable achievement. HRD is a process by which employees in organizations are enabled to:

Estelle Metayer Dr. annie Mckee and abhijit Bhaduri dr. Venkatesh Pamu santosh desai Technology and HR

The National HRD Network, established in 1985, is an association of professionals committed to promoting the HRD movement in India and enhancing the capability of human resource professionals, enabling them to make an impactful contribution in enhancing competitiveness and creating value for society. Towards this end, the National HRD Network is committed to the development of human resources through education, training, research and experience sharing. The network is managed by HR professionals in an honorary capacity, stemming from their interest in contributing to the HR profession.

Technology and HR

anita Bhogle and harsha Bhogle s V nathan

• acquire capabilities to perform various tasks associated with their present and future roles;

dr. Vishal shah

• develop their inner potential for self and organizational growth;

gautam ghosh

• develop an organizational culture where networking relationships, teamwork and collaboration among different units is strong, contributing to organizational growth and individual well-being.

dave gray Bill fischer April 2013

www.nationalhrd.org

harish Bijoor

A Quarterly Publication by The National HRD Network

www.nationalhrd.org

ABOUT THE JOURNAL


T

he National HRD Network publishes a semi-academic quarterly journal where in each issue is dedicated to a theme.

Technology and HR Volume 6

Issue 2

April 2013

The journal publishes primarily three categories of articles :

NHRD Network Board Members

• Conceptual and research based

National President:

Sy. Siddiqui, MEO (Admn - HR, Fin & IT), Maruti Suzuki India

• Contributions from thought leaders including a limited number of reprints with due permission

Some of the Past National Presidents :

NS Rajan, Partner, Human Capital and Global Leader – HR Advisory, Ernst & Young

• Organizational experiences in HR interventions/mechanisms.

Aquil Busrai, Chief Executive Officer - Aquil Busrai Consulting

Dwarakanath P, Director-Group Human Capital - Max India

Dr. Santrupt Misra, Director - Aditya Birla Group

Dr. T V Rao, Chairman - T V Rao Learning Systems

Regional Presidents: East:

Sourav Daspatnaik

South:

S V Nathan, Director U.S. India Talent, Deloitte

West:

Rajeev Dubey, President (Group HR & After-Market) & Member of the Group Executive Board, Mahindra & Mahindra

North:

S Varadarajan, Executive President - HR, Tata Teleservices

National Secretary:

Prince Augustin, EVP – Group Human Capital & Leadership Development, Mahindra Group

National Treasurer:

L. Prabhakar, Head-Human Resources (Agri-Business Division), ITC Ltd.

Director General:

Kamal Singh

Editorial Team

Pratik Kumar and Abhijit Bhaduri, WIPRO Ltd. (Guest Editors for this issue)

Dr. PVR Murthy, Managing Editor, CEO, Exclusive Search Recruitment Consultants, [email protected]

Dr. Pallab Bandyopadhyay, Director - Human Resources, Citrix R&D India Pvt. Ltd., [email protected]

Dr. Arvind N Agrawal, President - Corporate Development & Group HR, RPG Group

Publisher, Printer, Owner and Place of Publication

Kamal Singh, Director General, NHRDN on behalf of National HRD Network, National HRD Network Secretariat, C 81 C, DLF Super Mart, DLF City, Phase IV, Gurgaon122 002. Tel +91 124 404 1560 e-mail: [email protected]

Printed at

Nagaraj & Co. Pvt. Ltd., 156, Developed Plots Industrial Estate, Perungudi, Chennai 600 096. Tel : 044 - 66149291

The views expressed by the authors are of their own and not necessarily of the editors nor of the publisher nor of authors’ organizations

Copyright of the NHRD Journal, all rights reserved. Contents may not be copied, emailed or reproduced without copyright holders’ express permission in writing.

About this issue : Publications so far include on themes of apparent relevance to HR fraternity like: Performance Management, Coaching, Employee Relations etc., while the theme for the current issue on “Technology and HR” is chosen as technology is increasingly playing a vital role. This theme is aimed to stimulate our thinking about the advancement technology has made in further enhancing the role of HR profession. In the editorial note and the articles, these thought leaders challenge us and raise interesting possibilities. Editorial Board Members : Dr. P.V.R. Murthy, Managing Editor is a product of I.I.T., Kharagpur and IIM, Calcutta with close to thirty years experience in H.R. field. He founded and runs an executive search firm Exclusive Search Recruitment Consultants. He is associated with a number of academic institutions. He is trained in TQM in Japan and in human processes from ISABS and NTL, U.S.A. He is the Past National Secretary of National HRD Network. Dr. Pallab Bandyopadhyay is Director - Human Resources Citrix R&D India PVT Ltd. A doctoral fellow from XLRI and AHRD, he is trained in OD and Human Processes from NTL, USA and he believes in applying HR concepts to practice to make it more meaningful and effective. He is a mentor and coach to many young HR professionals. Dr. Arvind N Agrawal - Dr. Arvind N. Agrawal, Ph.D. serves as the President and Chief Executive of Corporate Development & Human Resources and Member of Management Board of RPG Enterprises. Dr. Agrawal has worked at RPG Enterprises since 1999 and his current responsibilities in RPG comprise of HR and TQM. Agrawal held senior positions in Escorts and Modi Xerox. He was the past National President of the National HRD Network. Dr. Agrawal is an IIM Ahmedabad alumnus and also an IIT Kharagpur alumini, and also holds a PhD from IIT Mumbai. NHRD firmly believes in and respects IPR and we appeal to the contributors and readers to strictly honour the same. For any further clarifications, please contact : The Managing Editor Dr. P V R Murthy, CEO, Exclusive Search Recruitment Consultants, #8, Janaki Avenue, Off 4th Street, Abhiramapuram, Chennai 600 018. [email protected]

Dear Readers, The National HRD Network has been bringing out a semi-academic, theme based, quarterly journal for the last few years. It aims at compiling and publishing the professional views and experiences of reputed HR professionals, line professionals, CEOs, researchers, academicians in each theme area. We carry out extensive research, identify and invite persons who have eminent publications or have rich experience in the theme area to contribute articles for each issue. Through the journal, we aim to build a body of knowledge in all facets of HR which is not otherwise easily available for the current and future HR Professionals. So far, close to 350 eminent authors have contributed articles. Each issue is guest edited by a person of eminence in the concerned theme area. This journal is circulated free to the members of NHRD Network to stimulate their thinking and towards their professional development. Publications so far have been based on themes such as : • “IT in HR” • “Performance Management” • “Attracting and Retaining Talent” • “Career Management” • “Organizational Change” • “Global HRM” k Journal • “Women in Corporate Leadership Roles” NHRD Networ k Journal NHRD Networ • “Organization Development” • “Learning and Development” • “Leadership” • “Work-Life Balance” • “Institution Building” • “Coaching For Performance and Development” • “Human Resources Management in Rapid Growth Organizations” • “HR Competence” • “HR and Employee Relations” • “CEO and HR” • “People Power – Draw, Drive and Deliver” • “Getting HR Ready for Gen Y” • “CSR & HR” • “Shapes and Structures of Organizations - Today and Tomorrow” • “Managing Change, Transformation and Enhancing Competitiveness : The HR Role” • “Dots and connections: winning hearts and minds through internal communication” • “Skill Building and HR” ISSN - 0974 -

1739

NHRD Network

Issue 4

Journal

October 2012

Donn Doongaji

National HRD

National HRD

Issue 1

S Ramadorai

Network

M V Subbiah

in 1985, is an Network, established to promoting

Arun Maira

and minds through

internal communication

Lakshmi Narayanan

Skill Building and HR

Dr. K C Reddy R C M Reddy

Manish Sabharwal

n

Ramya Venkatarama Dr. Mukti Mishra

Dr. Santanu Paul n

T Muralidhara

and Megha Aggarwal Dr. Devesh Kapur

January 2013

October 2012

by The National

S Mahalingam

R

winning hearts

Divya Bajaj & Ruchi Prasad

A Quarterly Publication

Dr. Sharda Prasad

Skill Building and H

Dots and connections:

Dots and connections: winning hearts and minds through internal communication

resource professional in enhancing capability of human Ramesh Ranjan an impactful contribution Towards them to make value for society. ess&and creating committed to the Bhattacharya competitiven Prasenjit HRD Network is end, the National resources through education, thisGulati Yuvika t of human developmen sharing. The network Monippally and experience capacity, Dr. Mathukutty training, research in an honorary HR professionals to the HR is managed by in contributing Dr. Richa Pande from their interest stemming profession. that P Munshi the NHRDN is of philosophy for remarkable The underlying N Dr. Usha Devihuman being has the potential employees in every by which HRD is a process achievement. J Krishnan to: are enabled tasks organizations to perform various V C Gopalratnam future roles; • acquire capabilities their present and with associated for self and Harish Devarajan their inner potential • develop growth; Sue Dewhurst organisational networking culture where on organisational • develop an S Srinivasan and collaborati to ps, teamwork relationshi is strong, contributing K Krishnan, different units Dr. Sandeepamong well-being. growth and individual Shruthi Bopaiah, organisational

1739

Volume 6

January 2013

The committed K& professionals Anil Sachdev enhancing the association of in India and A N Bhattacharya s, enabling the HRD movement

onal HRD Network

Nati in 1985, is an Network, established to promoting The National HRD committed professionals enhancing the association of in India and the HRD movementresource professionals, enabling on in enhancing capability of human an impactful contributi for society. Towards them to make and creating value committed to the is competitiveness on, onal HRD Network through educati this end, the Nati of human resources development sharing. The network and experience training, research an honorary capacity, professionals in HR the HR by is managed contributing to their interest in stemming from profession. that the NHRDN is philosophy of The underlying potential for remarkable in being has the every human by which employees HRD is a process achievement. are enabled to: tasks organizations to perform various future roles; • acquire capabilities their present and associated with for self and their inner potential • develop growth; organisational networking culture where organisational collaborati on • develop an teamwork and contributing to relationshi ps, units is strong, erent diﬀ well-being. among growth and individual organisational

al NHRD Network Journ

ISSN - 0974 -

Volume 5

Network

e National HRD blication by Th

A Quarterly Pu

HRD Network

lhrd.org

www.nationa

lhrd.org

www.nationa

www.nationa

lhrd.org

lhrd.org

www.nationa

The copies of these issues of the journal can be accessed from www.nationalhrd.org. The current issue is on the theme of “Technology and HR”. Some of the guest editors for future issues include R.Elango, Emerging Geography SBU and Global CHRO at MphasiS, An HP Company, Srikantan Moorthy, Senior VP, Group Head of HR and Member, Executive Council, Infosys and Dr. A.K. Balyan, MD and CEO of Petronet LNG. This is your journal and will be as rich as you want it to be. In order to further enrich it, we would like to receive your 1. qualitative feedback on issues brought out so far, and 2. suggestions for themes to be covered in our future issues; 3. Any other suggestions. Kindly send in your thoughts to [email protected] Dr. PVR Murthy Managing Editor (On behalf of the Editorial Team)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Our profound thanks to all the contributors of articles, who have taken time off from their busy schedules out of their passionate interest in the field of Technology and HR. We acknowledge the excellent contribution of the Guest Editors - Pratik Kumar and Abhijit Bhaduri for conceptualising the entire issue and inspiring all busy experts in the field to share their thoughts. We acknowledge the support from Sunathy of Exclusive Search for passionately working with me. – Dr. PVR Murthy, Managing Editor (On behalf of the Editorial Team)

CONTENTS S.No. Title of Article Author

1 Picking up weak signals in the new digital

estelle Metayer

Page No.

1

Age: challenges for the hr Professional

2 resonant leadership for results

3 enabling learning through technology

dr. annie Mckee and

7

abhijit Bhaduri

dr. Venkatesh Pamu

13

santosh desai

19

5 stale Beer and the new workplace

harish Bijoor

24

6 Mentors and coaches

anita Bhogle and

28

in the Corporate World?

4 the employer Brand: A truth lived everyday

harsha Bhogle

7 gemification possibilities in hr

s V nathan

32

8 learning and development- Providing the

dr. Vishal shah

40

gautam ghosh

46

strategic edge

9 hr, Social Media and creating the organization of tomorrow

S.No. Title of Article Author

Page No.

10 a Business within the Business

dave gray

51

11 what if ideas Mattered?

Bill fischer

58

Editorial Comments Dear Reader, What is the role of HR in a world that is disrupted by technology? That is what we asked our writers to think about.

Pratik Kumar, EVP HR, WiPRO Ltd. & President Wipro Infrastructure Engineering

Abhijit Bhaduri, Chief Learning Officer, Wipro Ltd. (Guest Editors for this Issue)

Facebook, Inc. held an initial public offering on May 17, 2012, negotiating a share price of $38 apiece, valuing the company at $104 billion, the largest valuation to date for a newly listed public company. It is run by a 29 year old college dropout whose net worth is more than $13 billion. The company has a user base of more than a billion users. Technology has disrupted many aspects of our life. Our lives in organizations are changing and with it the world view of the Human Resources professionals has to evolve. Then again who is responsible for making sure that these shifts are managed well – the HR function? Should it be driven by the employee? Maybe even the society? We thought that this special issue of NHRDN magazine should actually be written by people who may go beyond the traditional boundaries of the human resources discipline. We invited some well known thought leaders and practitioners to see how each aspect of HR has an opportunity to be reinvented in view of these changes. All around us the world of work is getting challenged with ideas. Innovation guru Bill Fischer opens the conversation by asking how leaders ought to behave in a world where ideas need to be nurtured and developed. His view, “It is not surprising to find that every aspect of an organization’s culture needs to be changed, and simultaneously, if such daring visions are to be realized in a coherent and effective manner, only leaders can do this in an effort to unleash all of an organization’s talent.” With information being available on demand, it is hard to filter out the noise from the emerging trend. Our expert advisor, pilot and culture junkie, Estelle Metayer wants the HR professionals to build two capabilities: “first, to be able to spot and hire those

professionals who will have a keen eye for those weak signals, and second, to train the organization and ensure processes exist to interpret those weak signals.” Dave Gray, author of The Connected Company says that “To succeed in uncertain times companies must organize differently. They must reorganize from hierarchies into holarchies, where every part can function as a whole unto itself. A connected company is flexible and resilient, able to adapt quickly to change. The path from divided to connected company is not simple or easy. But in an increasingly volatile world, it is also not optional.” According to an analysis of 4,200 companies by McKinsey, social technologies stand to unlock from $900 billion to $1.3 trillion in value. Two-thirds of the value unlocked by social media rests in “improved communications and collaboration within and across enterprises,” It is no longer a toy that teenagers use to post their pictures. It is a serious business tool. To participate in this process, HR people need to acquire new skills says social media evangelist early adopter Gautam Ghosh. To manage online communities – HR people would need to become community managers. That may need a different mindset. Dr Annie McKee has been well known for her seminal work in the area of Emotional Intelligence. In this article she teams up with Abhijit Bhaduri, Chief Learning Officer of Wipro to suggest that when the business environment gets tough, “it is Emotional Intelligence, not IQ, which differentiates great leaders from their average, run-of-the-mill colleagues. And EI goes beyond individual effectiveness. Emotionally intelligent leaders create resonance–a powerful, positive emotional reality in teams and organization that is marked by hope, enthusiasm and the collective will to win.” How do we change the way people learn in organizations? Dr Venkatesh Pamu’s argument is that the evolution of self-service technologies and emergence of tech-savvy generation of employees will have a long-lasting impact on the way organizations think about learning. Technology enabled learning offers an

opportunity for organizations to go beyond traditional training and development to making it easy for every employee to learn wherever, whenever and (from) whomever. That is the new www of learning. Dr Vishal Shah examines how the role of the L&D function can become strategic based on how its agenda is crafted. The L&D specialist’s role today needs to be multi-dimensional. It requires the learning professional to train, facilitate, coach, provide justin-time knowledge, align a group, provide perspectives, develop competencies as well as leadership … the list goes on. Traditional learning expertise is becoming less and less important. How should L&D practitioners see their role in the organization? Gamification is not a new concept in India. The Mahabharata’s plotline makes a game of dice overturn a kingdom! Gamification concepts are now being leveraged in every aspect of the organization. SV Nathan’s article outlines ideas on how this can be used to redesign every process from hiring to employee engagement. This has several ideas that you can try out in your organization. Brands and branding have been associated with the marketing function. We asked two marketing gurus Santosh Desai and Harish Bijoor on what this could mean for HR professionals. Harish says, “Internal branding that is all about creating that distinct identity that will set apart one work environment from the other.” Santosh suggests, “Branding needs to deeply internal for it to be even mildly successful externally. Increasingly, the traditional marketing definition of the brand as a promise is becoming outdated. The brand is no longer a noun, safe in its lofty perch, issuing statements but a verb, in the trenches, performing all the time. A brand is what a brand does, quite simply. And what is does is increasingly visible to all - there is nowhere to hide.” Anita Bhogle and Harsha Bhogle draw on their bestselling book “The Winning Way” to tell us about why even a star player like Sachin Tendulkar needs a coach. What does Sachin expect from

a coach? That can be a great insight for the HR professional who has to be a coach to the top performers in the organization. The Bhogle duo says, “In a world of quarterly results, of margins, of political unrest, maybe our brightest managers need a friend who has no agenda.” These thought leaders challenge us and raise interesting possibilities. We do hope that this issue of the journal will long be remembered as a collector’s item for Idea Hunters. We loved bringing it to you. Pratik Kumar & Abhijit Bhaduri

Dr. PVR Murthy Honorary Managing Editor on behalf of the Editorial Team

Dr. Pallab Bandyopadhyay

Dr. Arvind N Agrawal

Picking up weak signals in the new digital age: challenges for the HR professional Estelle Metayer About the Author Estelle focuses on how managers, CEOs and board directors can build their strategic process and competitive intelligence functions to avoid strategic blindspots. She is a reputed public speaker in international conferences (on “Sensing weak signals” in Davos in 2012) and facilitates strategic workshops on future trends and industry disruption. She is the founder and president of Competia.

I

n 1996, Ralph Stacey said “At least 90% of the textbooks on strategic management are devoted to that part of the management task which is relatively easy: the runnings of the organizational machine in as a surprise-free a way as possible. On the contrary, the real management task is that of handling the exceptions, coping with and even using unpredictable, clashing countercultures. The task has to do with instability, irregularity, difference and disorder.” (Strategic Management & Organizational Dynamics). I have taught now for over 15 years to managers and senior executives, and have found little evidence in the business school of training that focuses on that skill. How can one help and train corporate executives to cope with unpredictability? One of the crucial stepping stone into making sense of the world’s unpredictability is the ability of managers and executives to be able to pick weak signals early and to know how to act. Weak signals are particularly tough to deal with. It is crucial for the credibility of a weak signal that it comes from

acknowledged experts – yet most will be spotted first by those on the fringe. Hence the challenge for Human Resource professionals and in particular for those involved in talent management and acquisition is twofold: first, to be able to spot and hire those professionals who will have a keen eye for those weak signals, and second, to train the organization and ensure processes exist to interpret those weak signals. Four sources of information to pick-up weak signals My definition of weak signals is quite simple: “Weak Signals are events or issues with ambiguous, possible multiple interpretations of their origin, meaning and/or implications that can have a major impact on the future”. The key to weak signals spotting is the ability to find the outsiders who can look at your industry, company, or sociodemographic trends with a different eye. I am hopeful that with the explosion of social media, it has never been easier to tap into new pools of expertise, be part of April | 2013 NHRD Network Journal

1

new communities, or attend conferences without being there physically. You will find below my pick of the four reliable sources of information & inspirations to spot weak signals: 1. Listen to the fringe by attending unusual and eclectic events One of my favourite examples is the Burning Man festival. Situated at the heart of the Black Rock desert, this festival does not have any program, speaker or official sponsor. Yet each year, about 100,000 people gather for a week, creating a gigantic melting pot where imagination and creativity blossom and where future trends emerge ( see a video here https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=1USEj8XV0 Lc&list=PL45314DC680515E45 ). Few can afford to take a week and spend it in the American desert. Thanks to the ability to mine social media for insight, I have used a simple cloud builder (www. wordle.net ) to summarize the keywords generally attached to the Burning man conversation: weak signals can be found in the “fine prints”

2

April | 2013 NHRD Network Journal

This analysis highlights some interesting signals: for example the words Northern, precursor of the current issues developing with the opening of the northern sea routes, or with the inclusion of aboriginal communities. This might be irrelevant for many companies. Yet, this will have a lasting impact on global trade (the opening of new sea routes), shift of political power (to Russia, Canada or Finland), prices of commodities (oil...), etc. Another keyword of “free”, in relation to new business models (so called “freemium”) which are emerging where products might be “free” but components or services are paid for (think about the car sharing schemes in major cities). 2. Take part of these four vibrant, innovative communities Communities are blossoming on social media allowing fringe experts and listeners. They offer a unique opportunity to linkup with people you may not meet naturally. Here are a few I recommend: On Twitter, a list of futurists: https:// twitter.com/Competia/trend-spotting

l

or https://twitter.com/rossdawson/ futurists or https://twitter.com/ justindlong/futurists or https:// twitter.com/LSchlehuber/futurists.

take the form of images, this is the ideal tool to take the pulse of what is touching the heart and imagination of the population worldwide.

On Google+ a series of communities: Futurism, Alternative Futures , Science Fiction Prototyping & Creative Foresight .

I like to use interest as a way to spot weak signals. As an example, the following images have been shared in the “education” category as I write this article. I can see many weak signals emerging from this one page only. The people who pinned those images are typically not HR experts or professionals, and therefore tend to offer a new vision of what education is- or might become.

l

On LinkedIn, discussion groups> SESTI - Weak Signal Scanning, The Futurist Group, HorizonWatching http://www.linkedin.com/ groups?gid=1817327&trk=group-name .

l

On the web, a glossary of Science Fiction Ideas, Technology and Inventions http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/ ctnlistalpha.asp , or Explore the inventions, technology and ideas of science fiction writers at Technovelgy http://www.technovelgy.com/

l

3. Visualize by leveraging new social technologies such as interest Pinterest (www.pinterest.com) started as a digital scrapbooking tool. Members could “pin” images that touch them on a personal level and share them with a larger community. Lately, it has been used by professionals to also share insights about trends in a wide range of industries. Because the ideas are shared globally, and

4. Get out of your zone of comfort by reading differently To help you to get out of your zone of comfort, I suggest that you buy a magazine you have never read before every time you are passing by the newspaper and magazine stand in a train station or an airport. By picking up an antique, a teenager, a kit-surfing magazine and reading it cover to cover, new ideas will without doubt emerge. I have done this exercise countless times with the participants in my leadership programs around the globe, and have witnessed many “aha” moments, such as: – An operations manager in a garbage removal company who realized how


3

dashboards can help him get closer to his clients (he was reading a pilot magazine) – A chief financial officer understood why shipping wedding dresses on time and building “personal social capital” can help his B2B department as well (he was reading a women’s fashion magazine) Two challenges to overcome to be able to spot weak signals First challenge: swim upstream Most companies I know rely on secondary (published) data to understand their market and the future trends. They scan the media and clip relevant press releases and newspaper articles, subscribe to expensive databases to get a collection of data, buy market research reports, and listen to experts in international conferences. Those sources are typically the last ones I’d recommend to identify weak signals, as the graph below shows. As an example, these are some of the subjects currently discussed in the media today: 3D printing, Cyborgs, Genetic engineering, Embryonic stem cell research,

4


Robotics, mobile. These subjects are all already well documented emerging trends. On the other hand, science-fiction authors are discussing today Artificial General Intelligence (greater-than-human), Neuro/ Brain simulation and enhancement, post scarcity society, DIY science, existential technology risks, radical lifeextension/”immortality” and technology singularity. The implications for the HR professional: When you recruit a new strategy analyst, do you ask if they have an MBA or the type of books they are reading? When you analyze and map their LinkedIn network, do you find mostly school friends, colleagues, or do they also connect with people outside of their sphere of interest? Do you try to attract those reading sciencefiction? Second challenge: interpret the data The key of the process lies in the interpretation of the signal. – What does it mean for my company? – What is the likely impact? – How strong a signal does it have to become to start acting on it?

In a company, this “making sense” phase can take many shapes. Some use a full fledge scenario planning exercise; others play “red teams” an exercise used during the war by the British army to review strategic plans and ensure no blind spot has developed. When internal resources are not available, one can always rely on external consultants and their work. For example, the following WI-WE database has taken the first step into spotting potential weak signals, but also in interpreting what they mean: Six practical tips on how to build the ability to spot weak signals in your organization Tip1: Create a ”Crow’s Nest”: this term was developed by IBM as a reference to the crow’s nest situated on top of sailing ships. It is designed to be able to spot upcoming danger or weather changes. This is a good image of the process companies need to implement to scan the horizon beyond the next quarter, and have a team who will have credibility within the organization to challenge common wisdom. This “crow’s nest” concept has given birth in the social media age to “command centers” such as the acceleration Team at Nestle: a room dedicated to spotting signals on social media. Tip2: Hire those with imagination The 9/11 commission findings were quite direct: The 9/11 Commission Report “We believe the 9/11 attacks revealed four kind of failures in: l Imagination l policy l capabilities l and Management.”(p. 339) Talent development and acquisition professionals should therefore aim to identify who in the young talent they are hiring have imagination. Maybe a piece

of creative writing should be part of the interview? Some companies provide candidates with a few random concepts (bionic man: apple: teacher), and ask them to write a short story, or create an impromptu improvised theatre piece. Tip3: Open social networks to let ideas flow, and allow your employees to develop networks outside of their sphere of comfort: if your company is still today restricting access to social networks during work hours, change this policy. Those tools are as essential to the personal development of your employees as using a computer or a phone is. Tip4: Train to develop networks: very few executives have been trained in the art – and sometimes science- of developing a network. Training should be planned, but companies could also incorporate the notion of the network into the performance evaluation (with a focus on internal as well as external networks). Tip5: Create time to be creative: we all have heard of Google employees dedicating 20% of their work time to work on “pet” projects. You need as a talent management professional to ensure there is time and space for employees to flex their creativity. This can take the form of meetings without PowerPoint slides (triggering discussions rather than passive listening), or applying reverse meeting techniques (like in an MBA class, reading the documents and the case in advance, and using meeting time for questions and discussions). Tip6: Recruit from outside: companies need to include in their workforce employees who can bring new fresh perspectives to the business. While industry knowledge is important, candidates from adjacent or even drastically different industries can bring a wealth of new ideas to a business. One of my clients in the transportation industry is hiring professionals from the April | 2013 NHRD Network Journal

5

customer goods or the banking industry. They bring a new view on how customer relationships could be developed and how to use data analytics. Conclusion Spotting weak signals requires companies to set-up the processes to spot the signals, and invest time to interpret them. The new

6


social media tools and technologies offer an essential and an unparalleled window to spot those weak signals. But above all, success depends on the ability of those companies the ability to recruit and retain those managers and senior executives who have an inquisitive mind, a wild imagination and an insatiable curiosity.

Resonant Leadership for Results Dr. Annie McKee and Abhijit Bhaduri About the Author Annie McKee, Senior Fellow and Director, Penn CLO Executive Doctoral Program. She is a bestselling business book author and advisor to top leaders. We recommend her book “Resonant Leadership: Renewing Yourself and Connecting with Others through Mindfulness, Hope, and Compassion.” Abhijit Bhaduri is the Chief Learning Officer for Wipro. Prior to this he led HR teams at Microsoft, PepsiCo, Colgate and Tata Steel. He has written three books that have all been bestsellers. He writes regularly for The Conference Board, Economic Times & blogs for Times of India.

S

” oft skills are the differentiator.” This simple yet powerful mantra is what drives learning and leadership development at top companies like Wipro, one of India’s most successful businesses. What are soft skills and why are they so important? The term “soft skills” is a holdover from the Tayloristic approach to management that has permeated organizations for close to one hundred years. In this model, only technical, easily measurable skills and IQ are valued (e.g. How much coal a man can lift on a welldesigned shovel, or intellect, as measured by things like grades in school). And, while technical skills and intellect are important, the research is conclusive: emotional intelligence competencies such as self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management are at the heart of leadership effectiveness— and business success.

In recent years we have learned from neuroscientists that emotions impact our capacity for creativity, adaptability, and quick decision making. How we feel is linked to what—and how well—we think, as well as to our actions. It is EI, not IQ, that differentiates great leaders from their average, run-of-the-mill colleagues. And EI goes beyond individual effectiveness. Emotionally intelligent leaders create resonance—a powerful, positive emotional reality in teams and organizations that is marked by hope, enthusiasm and the collective will to win. A resonant climate makes people feel good: committed, willing to work hard, and passionate about results. In the end, there is nothing “soft” about skills that enable us to understand, motivate, and inspire people. This is why wise business leaders, Chief Learning Officers, human resource professionals and learning leaders April | 2013 NHRD Network Journal

7

to promotions, developing as our boss thinks we should and the like. It is also true that many achievements-oriented people want to advance their careers and will work hard to do so. However we have found that getting the next job or pleasing the boss are, for most people, not powerful motivators over time.

help their people to focus deliberately and unabashedly on developing EI. But can people learn to lead with emotional intelligence? The answer is a resounding “Yes!” Despite the fact that folklore would have us believe that leaders are born, not made, it is in fact possible to develop EI. It’s not necessarily easy, however, and most conventional learning and performance management programs do not help people to develop these competencies. There are many reasons for this, including the following: l

l

l

Many leadership development programs simply don’t focus on the right skills. There has been a proliferation of organizational competency models over the past two decades. The socalled “competencies” in many models are often an amalgamation of skills, values and vague language around organizational objectives and/or trendy jargon. When, as is often the case, these complex models are used as the basis for training, people leave programs confused and unable to translate the learning experience into changes in behavior. In addition, many of these models do not include the very competencies that really do make a difference—notably those linked to EI. Leadership development programs are often designed around organizational objectives. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, of course. But, organizational outcomes are rarely compelling enough for people to engage in the hard work of changing themselves. programs are often designed with an assumption that people will learn and change if career advancement is held out as a carrot. It seems logical that learning can and should be tied 8


l

Learning methodologies (whether online, face to face, or blended) are often archaic. We’ve known for decades that adults learn best when the learning experiences include theory and models, reflection, dialogue, experimentation and application. This means that the learning experiences have to be just that—experiences. Far too many leadership development program designers force people to sit in chairs listening to lectures and/or watching endless PowerPoint presentations. The outcome: Billions wasted on leadership development programs that don’t foster learning for individuals or their companies.

So, how do we solve these problems? How do we provide meaningful learning experiences that result in real change for people and organizations? How can we help people to develop the competencies that matter—like emotional intelligence? In this article, we have teamed up to share a summary of Resonant Leadership for Results, a learning program used to develop EI and achieve organizational objectives in stellar companies and institutions such as an international bank, a well-known government, pharmaceutical companies and many more. This program was developed by Annie McKee and her team at the Teleos Leadership Institute and has been conducted all over the world with thousands of people. Resonant

Leadership for Results has touched people from South Africa to Italy, Cambodia to the United States and many countries in between. In fact, key aspects of the program were developed as part of a complex project in India with a large fast moving consumer goods company. Some key outcomes of the program: 1) people developed EI, as measured by pre-and post-tests; 2) organizations improved on key performance outcomes such as top-line revenue, customer service and employee engagement; and 3) communities have more successfully tackled extremely difficult social issues such as HIV and AIDS. Resonant Leadership for Results and the innovative programs at Wipro make a difference. Why? Because they focus on the right things (EI and resonant leadership), in the right ways (learning designs that tap into people’s desire to grow and change). As you read, consider your own personal journey to better leadership as well as the successor opportunities for change—in the learning programs provided by your organization. Resonant Leadership for Results Resonant Leadership for Results enables people to develop their emotional intelligence competencies, create resonance in teams and organizations, and build a compassionate, results-oriented culture. It is designed in such a way that it can be conducted in as little as three days, or for as long as three weeks, over one year. For the purposes of this article, we will review the three-day program, as it is most appropriate for middle managers in busy organizations. Day One–Discovering My Motivation to Learn: Adults learn best when they are fully engaged and committed to personal and professional development.

Said another way, we cannot force our employees to learn–especially when that learning involves complex competencies like emotional self-awareness, selfmanagement, empathy and organizational awareness. We put this maxim front and center on day one of Resonant Leadership for Results. We start with somewhat typical activities and move toward deeper reflection and dialogues as the day moves on. For example, facilitators engage participants in kick-off exercises that help them to see their strengths as leaders. One such exercise, called “Me at My Best”1 calls on people to tell a story about a time when they were truly successful as a leader (at work or in personal life). When these stories are “analyzed” in small groups, it becomes completely obvious that emotional intelligence competencies, such as those in Figure 1, are essential for great leadership. This, then, is how the business case is made for developing soft skills–part one of motivating people to learn. We have found, however, that a business reason to engage in the hard work of learning EI is never enough. If you doubt this, quickly list twenty eight things you would like to do or experience before you die–and then count how many of these are directly related to your current job! So, with this in mind, the rest of Day One of the program is dedicated to engaging people’s hearts–helping them to get clear about values, personal and professional history and where they want to go in life and at work. Facilitators adeptly guide the group in a series of activities that help them to explore themselves and get comfortable talking with other people about what is most important to them in life. Slowly, people build a picture of an “Ideal Self”– who I am when at my best, the values I will take forward in my life, and the kind of leader I want to be. The theory behind this April | 2013 NHRD Network Journal

9

approach–called Intentional Change–has been developed by our colleague Richard Boyatzis. It’s been used as the basis for dozens of development programs, helping tens of thousands of people to learn, grow and change. Day Two—Understanding Myself as A Leader: By the end of the first day of the program, people have built surprisingly strong and trusting relationships. Once this environment is set, people feel safe and can begin to look at the “Real Self”: who I am as a leader and a person now. It’s not always easy to look at oneself honestly. For this reason, we help people to see that there are often factors in the environment that interfere with their personal effectiveness. Sometimes, these outside forces seem to be beyond people’s control but in fact are within their power to change. 10


For example, organizations can be intense and sometimes brutal places. As smart, adaptable human beings, we often learn how to deal with things like power, politics and dysfunctional leadership practices by behaving in ways that make us less than proud. To help people explore these kinds of “hot” topic, we create activities and simulations that unleash real behavior and reactions to scenarios. People can then see themselves in action, and they also see what drives them to behave as they do. Debriefs of activities and simulations tend to be intense and personal. Conversations further learning about how each individual deals with hot topics like power (his or her own and others’), bad bosses, ambition, competition, success and failure. As people become aware of these dynamics, they are in a better place to make good choices about their own behavior.

Day Two, then, is highly customized to the nature of the external forces that interfere with good leadership and the creation of a resonant environment. The activities help people to understand who they are now and how they can impact their environments so that there is a better chance they can live their values and become better leaders. Day Three–Creating Bold Learning Goals: The last day of the three-day Resonant Leadership for Results program helps people to identify EI competency gaps– who I am now vs. who I want to be in the future–and then plan to change. The key to success of this set of activities is somewhat counter-intuitive: to develop most competencies, you can’t start with the competency itself. It is far more useful, and successful in the long term, to identify how you want to use a competency, and build a bold learning goal around this outcome. For example, one manager we know was having difficulty with peers and direct reports. He’d been told numerous times that he needed to be more empathic. He tried to learn to listen better, to be more understanding, etc., but nothing was working. It wasn’t until he set a more comprehensive learning goal that he began to truly change. His goal, interestingly enough, touched on both personal and professional life: “I want to be a more understanding father and manager”. Clearly, empathy was one competency he would need to focus on, as well as a few others such as self-awareness and emotional self-management. Day Three of the Resonant Leadership for Results program is also focused on ensuring that people will accomplish their goals. This means looking at obstacles. For example, it is often the case that an organization’s culture drives the wrong behaviours. Many managers and leaders can see

that the culture is counterproductive, but they throw their hands up in defeat partly because they don’t know how to “diagnose” cultural values, norms, myths, or taboos. So, we often lead people through a simple process of examining how their own behaviour is impacted by the culture, and then in turn which aspects of the culture are helping, or hindering, all sorts of leadership development and organizational effectiveness. Simply understanding the organization’s culture a bit better gives people hope–and tools to begin to change it, and themselves. By the last day of the Resonant Leadership for Results program, the learning community is strong and people have authentic, personal relationships that can be maintained long after the program is over. These relationships can help tremendously in the long learning process that starts once the program ends. Programs like Resonant Leadership for Results and many of those at Wipro are designed for 21st century learners. Learning programs at Wipro have the same aims and outcomes as the Resonant Leadership for Results: they are engaging, experiential, and focused on organizational strategy and demands. They also support meaningful and sustainable learning. Let’s look at how this works. First, programs cause leaders to refrain what a learning experience actually is, and where it can happen. For example, executives expect learning to happen in a classroom. So, as is the case in one very successful program at Wipro, when leaders are asked to create a play, they are pushed far out of the safe and predictable world of traditional learning environments. They are asked to write a script, stage it, design props and stage lighting. As they do this project, they understand that they can April | 2013 NHRD Network Journal

11

go out of their comfort zones and learn from the liberal arts. They learn about how to present themselves and others, how to make people feel valued, and how to structure a story (another important leadership skill). After this program, the head of one SBU said, “By adding small flourishes to a character that had an extremely brief appearance on stage, I was able to make the person feel engaged and valued. That’s just what I need to do for many of the junior members of my team.” She has since then become one of the active mentors to young women leaders. We also run several workshops on storytelling for our business leaders. Last year we decided to hold it in Jaipur to coincide with the Jaipur Literature Festival. The leaders heard and interacted with authors and editors and attended talks by their favorite speakers. One of the participants describes his experience of using “The story behind the storytelling workshop” to share the impact of the program in the words of the leader of the business unit. He goes on to say, “It was a 30 minute opening session where I had to share credentials, gives the client a reason to buy from us. I told my team that I would like three slides with just the three themes on them. This in itself was a departure from

1

the way my team made slides for client meetings. But they put the three themes I gave on three slides and in the body added all the supporting facts! In my review I told the team that I would make life even simpler. I asked them to put the three themes now in one slide in a line each. They were quite shocked that it was all I would take for the 30 minute session.” This learning may seem obvious–create simple messages and communicate them clearly. However, in a world where information is in abundance, this can be difficult. It is the leader’s role to make meaning and convey it in a way that makes it memorable. Leaders who are able to connect with the stakeholders at a meaningful level are the ones who will be able to lead the organization tomorrow. The research is clear: emotional intelligence makes a huge difference in individual and collective success. And EI can be learned. But for this to happen, we need to move beyond outdated learning methods and training programs. We must help people to learn the right skills–particularly EI–by engaging in experiences that are both personally and professionally compelling. When we do this well, people change. They become much more adept at creating the kinds of cultures in their teams and organizations where everyone can be at their best. And when everyone’s on their best, an organization can soar.

“Me at My Best” and many other self-directed exercises can be found in Becoming a Resonant Leader (Annie McKee, Richard Boyatzis, and Frances Johnston, 2008: Harvard Business Press)

12


Enabling Learning through Technology in the Corporate World? Dr. Venkatesh Pamu About the Author Venkatesh Pamu has design, development, delivery and facilitation interest in self-awareness, leadership development, team dynamics, and performance feed-forward. In his role with Corporate HRD at Wipro Ltd, Pamu is responsible for Wipro’s Flagship Leadership Programs, Leadership & Behavioral Research, and Learning Technologies. Prior to joining Wipro, he was associated with Cognizant Technology Solutions, UBS, and The Arvind Mills Ltd. Pamu has qualifications in biomedical engineering and is an alumnus of IIM-Bangalore, India (postgraduate program) and IIM-Ahmedabad, India (Fellow program)

O

rganizational leaders, HR, and L&D professionals grapple with a dichotomy - while learning tends to happen most on the path of maximum resistance, an average learner is more than enticed to take the path of least resistance. As more organizations look up to technologyenabled learning (TEL) for addressing their emergent and dynamic learning needs de-mystifying this dichotomy becomes more relevant than it ever was. Thus, the question of “why do certain individuals (and therefore organizations) adopt technology-enabled learning, whereas others don’t?” assumes importance for leaders and organizations attempting to offer technology-enabled learning. The Corporate Learning Factbook (2013) indicates that most organizations are providing nearly 2/3rd of their learning through digital content, mobile devices, video, and other technology based offerings. A quick review of the L&D

space indicates that many organizations that have traversed the TEL journey from awareness-acceptance-action have made some fundamental directional changes including, 1) Making learning a declared and reviewed dashboard priority 2) Ensuring organization and individual level self-governance around learning are in place 3) Making all learning needs to emanate from and link back to work context. 4) Measuring top management for doing/ not doing their mandatory learning 5) Tasking L&D to be agile and respond effectively at short notice 6) Ejecting technology based learning roles from the regular structure of the learning function and wiring these roles into the business units while tasking it with milestones. April | 2013 NHRD Network Journal

13

However, the proof of TEL is in delivering on the ground and technology has played a balancing role between the content, learner, facilitator, and reach by responding to 1) Online on-demand learning at the fingertips 2) Personalized learning for dynamic individual development needs 3) Distributed co-learning requirements 4) Contextualized learning Embarking on the TEL journey: Initial Steps As more organizations experience and understand the potential of mobile learning eventually we will see a gold rush when the tipping point is reached. This only indicates what the future of learning is likely to be - move away 70-20-10 and make way for 10-90 learning. The new thinking is 10% formal learning and 90% informal learning with the support of technology. This requires organizations to consciously work on a) rethinking how the learning domain is evolving, and b) shifting mindset to informal learning. a) Rethinking Learning As the learning & development space evolves and tightly aligns lockstep with business efforts to remain competitive and react with agility to external economic pressures, sustaining workforce capacitycapability to be equally as agile and resilient to ‘change’ will require a rethinking of how learning is happening. Some of the trends that are likely to have a long-lasting impact on the way organizations think about learning capacity and capability are – a) business-readiness, b) evolution of selfservice technologies, and c) empowered tech-savvy generation. Often, we come across L&D professionals commenting that the learning attitude is missing in the participant groups. While 14


this may be true, the larger question then is – if this is a given and a constant, is the L&D professional learning to change / adapt in the context of the new givens and/or the existing constraints. L&D professionals will also be required to have a more hands-on approach to use analytics to drive L&D offerings from the current ‘learning outside of work’ to one where learning is “embedded into work”. This requires a mindset change from ‘analytics- wary’ to ‘analytics-savvy’. Yet another aspect of looking at this challenge is how the two key stakeholders – the learner and the L&D professional view their respective roles. It is common knowledge that humans tend to evaluate self with respect to the effort expended and returns on effort. While the mindset of the L&D professional is an overt focus on self-effort), the learner is looking for something which matches his/her imagination (returns on effort to learn). Therefore, the mindset to look at L&D effort will always fall short of the expectations of the learner who is looking for his/her idiosyncratic value. In the context of evolving trends, what limits the march of L&D into the technology led era? Several complex factors have a contributory effect, but a few things stand out – a) overemphasis on facilitator led L&D approaches, b) Internal IT dependency architecture, c) Excessivefocus on technology as a magic-wand for L&D, and d) Organizational onus to make individuals learn. These factors have to be flipped around from the above two – a) social learning, b) WhereverWheneverWhoever learning, c) shifting from technology to applications, and d) onus on the individual to keep updated. This will require the organizations to move the model from one which emphasizes on push versus one which emphasizes on the pull. The L&D professional needs to sync up by

letting go the control mindset and move to a curator cum facilitator role, to operate in a pull world. b) Shifting the mindset Organizational leaders, HR and L&D need to be first adopters of technology in order to transform the organization and reap the positive impact of technology on the human factor Selling learning (more so TEL) to employees with the hope that they are in the ‘learning mood’ is far likely to be a win-win than otherwise. For TEL and informal learning to take deep roots cultural changes that create a favorable platform and environment are required. Employees already spend a disproportionately large portion of their wakeful life at work. With a 24X7 environment, where the overlap between work, home, and socializing is increasingly blurred, organizations which have a strict differentiation between work and play will need to revisit this mindset. Therefore, a large part of the learning needs of the individual are better met while on the job in a spontaneous manner largely emanating from a serendipitous discovery of an emergent learning need. In the age of information overload – L&D professionals need to figure out the optimal ‘byte’ size, large enough to ‘bait’ the attention of the audience at the right time. This requires pressing the right levers for bringing in a shift of mindset. A combination of internet, mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets will hover at what we may label as ‘just-in-time’ training. Rather than sit in a classroom and learn, people would like to learn in real-time. Learning is best done when the recipient is hungry for it. The first lever for a shift in mindset is the need to realign L&D to JIT based training.

The second lever for a shift in mindset is accepting that gamification with its aspects of a) learning self-diagnostic (for skill level and progress), b) interacts (where people are actively engaged), c) immersiveness (using scenarios versus), d) competitiveness, and e) focus will change the way people will like to learn. The third and last lever for a shift in mindset is the adoption of YouTube like platforms. Social learning enables sharing and allows the learner to shift between the expert and learner roles. Creating an internal competition for adoption of TEL in learning will create the need for utilization of these levers and if reported on the appropriate forums will get traction for action. The impetus to action will come from the way the L&D professional (and cascading to the organization) looks at his /her role. Most organizations review the L&D function in terms of the number of days of training / no of people covered. These metrics are self-destructive for the L&D professional as they focus on resource /asset utilization. Such a metric will spiral into a selffulfilling trap for the average L&D person. TEL adoption can be hastened successfully with a regular self-check for technology readiness. Embarking on the TEL journey: Assessing Technology Readiness Level 1 Leveraging technology to help people learn is essentially about adopting technology. The adoption journey for most TEL innovations can be categorized into four overlapping stages – comprehension, adoption, implementation, and assimilation. Organizational readiness for leveraging technology to help people learn can be categorized into any of the April | 2013 NHRD Network Journal

15

above four stages and an additional fifth stage – ‘yet to start’. Most organizations are likely to fall into the fifth categorization for the reason Jim Collins mentions in his book Good to Great - organizations find it difficult making the initial decisions and taking the first steps as the internal cry for demonstrating actual benefit echoes around from myriad quarters. Assessment of readiness for leveraging technology for learning can be directed around the organization’s ability or the lack of it to manage any complex individual (behavioral) and/or organizational variables. Borrowing from Lippitt et al

(1958), who articulated five key indicators in the form of a dashboard – readiness can be assessed with respect to – TEL vision, Learner and Facilitator skills, TEL Adoption incentives, Access to TEL resources, and TEL Action plan to reach in the context of the larger ‘organizational learning plan’. Level 2 Assessing the readiness or feasibility of adopting TEL has to begin with an understanding of how the TEL works and its scope at the operational level. The question often asked is – what have been the experiences with TEL. What may work

TEL adoption readiness - Based on Lippitt et al (1958) Model

effectively in one setting may not work as well in another, so it is important to consider factors such as context, setting, and circumstances, along with evidence of success/failure. Issues that are likely to indicate the organizational readiness for leveraging TEL through self-reflection are l

l

Does TEL fit into the organizational culture with respect to Congruence and Compatibility? Can the L&D function articulate the business case through a potential costbenefit and risk analysis? 16


l

l

l

Has momentum been built for change readiness to embrace TEL? Have the structure-process-workforce changes aligned to changing readiness for TEL? Is the blue-print for pilotimplementation-evaluation journey of the TEL environment communicated organization wide?

Readiness for leveraging technology to help people learn at an organizational level can also be understood from the strength of ‘enablers’ and ‘inhibitors’. Organizations that end up scoring high on enablers and low on inhibitors are more likely to be

exhibit a positive view of the technology based learning on offer. They will be the chief-advocates of TEL. Organizations that end up scoring high on inhibitors and low on enablers are more likely to exhibit a negative view of the technology based learning on offer. Most organizations will fall somewhere in between these two extremes of the enabler-inhibitor distribution with respect to readiness for leveraging technology to help people learn. At a broader level, readiness can be assessed based on organizational and individual feelings of ‘self-efficacy’ or the lack of it. This is linked to a ‘sense of adequacy’ as experienced within the organization and often indicated by % of key people using l

l l

l

Technology based tools to engage and interact (physical meetings vs virtual) Social learning platforms etc,. Technology applications available on Smartphones TEL

Varying levels of organizational readiness will require a reconsideration of learning Application

as it exists today in the minds of the organization’s stakeholders. Embarking on the TEL journey: Experiences As learning moves towards online and blended approaches, organizations cannot remain insulated by the external trends and changes. With pressure on organizations to improve productivity, the route to higher productivity is continuous learning more so through TEL. The mobile phone adoption trend will only catalyze TEL. The good news is that TEL can offer a generous portion of the benefits that places like Crotonville at GE or Clay Street at P&G help in tapping organizational potential. Positive experiences of organizations that have experimented with TEL offers hope if you are aiming to make space for your organization in the list of the best organizations for leadership and TEL learning. Starting from AT&T, which adopted E-learning as early as 1997 to the present, we have several companies that have experimented successfully with technology enabled learning. There

Organizations

Focus

Online performance support and job-aids

US Geological Survey, Tyco International, Inc etc

Job-Aids for enhancing performance

Learning on the go

Microsoft, etc.

Cloud based Mobile learning – podcasts and Videocasts

Connect through social / expert networks

Deloitte LLP, Deloitte TTL, UN, Intel Corporation etc.

Reach-out between learner and the expert

Learning & Collaboration in a BP etc. 3-D virtual world

Immersive learning and collaboration environment

Create, Publish and share knowledge

Motorola

Knowledge access at fingertips

High Impact Virtual Classrooms & Webinars / Webbased training

CSC, Mittel Networks Corporation, etc / FedEx, ING, F Hoffman-La Roche

Interactive Virtual Classes / Workshops / Training

Gaming and Learning Simulations

Sun Microsystems, DAU, etc.

Experiencing real life scenarios


17

are a number of organizations that are highly successful at using a spectrum of technologies to deliver effective learning solutions that have a positive impact on both their businesses and the people. Nick van Dam in Next Learning, Unwrapped, has documented how technology has been successfully used.* Closer to home as BYOD and BYOA are gaining strength companies like Airtel, Essar Oil & Energy, HUL, Mphasis, Philips India, RPG Group, Saint-Gobain, SBI, Wipro, Wockhardt , etc. are exploring the power of TEL and the challenges of managing the expectations around TEL. Conclusion Learning in general and TEL in particular is in safe-hands if owned by the larger organization and not by HR or L&D alone. In addition to the L&D efforts, TEL needs championing by ‘experts’ from

the business to create ‘Smartphone’ based video learning content which gets shared on a YouTube like portal. TEL will gain further momentum, if the viral aspects can be built into the campaign for TEL. Organizational leaders, HR, and L&D professionals can have a quick check for TEL readiness and rethink individual and organizational focus from shaping the ‘perfect water drop’ while also keeping an eye on the ‘ripples’ the water drop is likely to create. Embark on the TEL journey by taking the first steps 1) ‘Give’ time for employees to experience TEL through free MOOCs (or the likes) 2) Allow employees to experiment by flipping the classroom 3) Check for TEL readiness 4) Start with yourself – Enroll and Embark on the TEL journey

*There are several other organizations that use TEL.

18


The Employer Brand: A Truth Lived Everyday Santosh Desai

About the Author Santosh Desai is MD & CEO of Future Brands, a brand services and consulting company. He was previously President, McCann Erickson India, Having spent over two decades in advertising. He writes a weekly column “City City Bang Bang” for the Times of India and is the author of Mother Pious Lady- Making Sense of Everyday India.

T

here seems something about the idea of branding that seems to resonate with the times. We seem to be surrounded by brands of all descriptions. Today, everything is a brand- apart from product and service brands we now have cities, state, countries, political parties, celebrities, TV programs, sport tournaments, events, ideas and even individuals, all of which aspire to brandedness. It is hardly surprising, that in this context, the idea of employer branding should come into greater focus. The paradox, however is that, the more we speak of branding, the less branded we seem to be becoming. For what is commonly understood by branding something is to make it more visible, to promote it more actively by tomtoming its strengths and generating hype (only in the context of marketing does the word hip carry positive connotations). Which is why very often, the notion of employer branding seems to come to the forefront most when recruiting, particularly when an organization has to attract fresh graduates from leading institutes in the face of competition. Faced with a need to articulate the employee proposition delivered by organizations

in a consumable and desirable form, the employer brand here can end up becoming little more than a communication contrivance, a selling aid. Believing that by exaggerating the ‘strong points’ of the organization in a creative way, one is branding the organization as an employer, is a reduction of the idea of branding into puffery. It also underlines the fundamental misconception about branding- that it is an external device, used by slick marketers to seduce customers. As a concept in its purest form, branding has very little to do with marketing or business, indeed; that is simply the arena where the idea gets applied most often. A brand is a distinctive pattern in the mind, organized around a central idea that delivers meaning that is valuable to the receiver. Which is why we can describe so many things in the world as brands. When an idea leaves a consistent, discernible imprint in our minds that we come to recognize and value in some form, a brand can be said to have formed. A brand is an outward grasp of an inner reality, presented in a way that it becomes April | 2013 NHRD Network Journal

19

traceable to its source of origin. Brands need to be visible, identifiable, relatable; but these are attributes it must possess, they do not describe what the brand fundamentally is. The value that branding creates is an providing an additional layer of meaning to things that makes it distinctive,; it is the difference between flavored carbonated water and Coca-Cola and between Coca-Cola and Pepsi. The common understanding of branding as self-conscious promotion obscures this vital aspect of branding. Which is why so many so-called brands look, feel and sound the same. The problem is much more acutely felt in the case of the organization brands. Examine the alleged driver of these companies, their vision statement and you will find that most of them are versions of a desire ‘to be and to be recognized as the best provider of the best products and services providing the best environment for the employees to be at their best.’ In many ways, the mindless adoption of best practice is the opposite of branding; for every organization must find its own best practice rather than case the best practice, which by definition cannot be branded as your own. The idea that there is a mythical ideal way of dealing with employees that everyone must strive to emulate makes a mockery of the idea of branding. In that sense, the brand is the essential nature of a product, service or idea; the reason for the Coke-ness of Coke or the Infosys-ness of Infosys. When we talk of a company brand for instance, there is a common set of images and associations that come to our mind. If we were to dig a little deeper, we could, particularly in the case of strong brands, be able to identify a strong driving idea that produces these associations and images. Apple might 20


be seen as an innovative company with a deep understanding of the power of design, but its core idea has to do with its radically new imagination of what a machine is. The idea that machines do not merely produce work and reduce human labour but instead actively spark the human imagination and enable us to experience life in a new way, is what drives everything that Apple does. All its actions including the configuration of its product offerings, the lucid beauty of its designs, its desire to create closed ecosystems that respect individual brilliance, its advertising and promotional programmes, the work culture that combines creativity with driving pressure- all of these can be traced to the idea that drives the brand. The strongest brands in the world are based on powerful ideas that connect with some fundamental human truth. And communicated as powerful mythical stories that we want to hear. A brand derives its meaning from many sources, but all of them need to act in ecological unison to produce the final effect. Nothing lies outside the brand, nothing can be excluded from its ambit. It is by harnessing all the elements in the mix that a brand truly comes alive. The idea that the brand is ‘owned’ by the marketing function, is thus patently absurd. Since the brand is much more an articulation of an internal truth, its ownership lies with all stakeholders of the business. Marketing leads its interaction with consumers, just as finance would manage the organization brand for its constituency. It is only when we detach branding from marketing that its full power can be unleashed. That is not to say that Marketing is not critical in managing the brand only that the presumed synonymity that the two enjoy needs to be challenged.

In an ideal sense, every element in the brand mix is both a part and the whole. The brand is a system of meaning, but a system that is open, and fluid. Powerful brands stay current by deriving meaning from the changing context rather than by being submerged under their force. The traditional mental model of the brand was closer to that of a pond; something with fixed boundaries that needed to be protected. Today, the brand is better imagined as a river- free flowing, drawing from many tributaries, interacting with everything it touches, ever evolving, but never losing its essential nature. You never step into the same river twice, said Heraclitus, but after all these centuries all the changes it has witnessed], the Ganga is still the Ganga. In today’s world, the ability to stay true to one’s core idea in a highly fluid environment is becoming that much more important. In the digital world, everyone has a microphone and a camera, and the earlier ability of businesses to enact perfectly rehearsed postures in public has been effectively dismantled. Unless the brand idea infects the organization and everyone and everything representing it, the brand will be found out. Branding needs to deploy internal for it be even mildly successful externally. Increasingly, the traditional marketing definition of the brand as a promise is becoming outdated. The brand is no longer a noun, safe in its lofty perch, issuing statements but a verb, in the trenches, performing all the time. A brand is what a brand does, quite simply. And what is does is increasingly visible to all- there is nowhere to hide. If there is one constituency that the brand cannot hide from it is that of employees. Which makes the building of an employer

brand that much more challenging. The company as employer reveals itself every moment in a variety of big and small waysin the way it treats routine administrative issues, in the way it addresses employees, on how it deals with people in good times and bad and how much interest in takes in their careers and growth. Strong employer brands need to have a clear belief about the role of employees in the business and must act in consonance with that belief. Implicit in the formulation of a notion called the Employer Brand is a potential danger; that of treating it as a separate component that can be managed independently using some marketing techniques. The truth about the Employer Brand is that it is a direct outcome of the reality about the organization. Strong brands are more likely to be strong employer brands simply because they have a clear idea of who they are and what they stand for. This makes it easier to identify who they should employ and how they should work with them. Virgin as a brand is clear in its belief that it sees business as a way to have fun- it delivers to consumers products and services they can afford and enjoy, it marks its service with a distinctive ‘Virgin’ touch (Massages on flights, Harley as airport limo pick-up), finds employees that share this worldview and run its internal processes with the same sense of fun (its internal briefing document is called Viagra). It does not need to refer to the generic ideas of best practice in order to be seen as a good employer brand. What is needed is a clear understanding and in the case of a large organization, an articulation of the core idea that drives the brand. This is not a generic Vision statement, but a realistic sense of what makes the brand what it is. It is arrived April | 2013 NHRD Network Journal

21

at after rigorous self-examination, and by placing oneself in the larger contexts of the category, market, society and the world. The implications of this are then translated for each part of the organization, and some principles are evolved that look at the role of each stakeholder. For the HR function, which does not own the employer brand, but is its lead guardian, a clear articulation of employer brand idea guides all its actions. Human beings grasp the intangible through the tangible and the subtle through the grass; it is thus important to convert the essential idea into a set of graspable actions. Rituals and customs are key to create sense of brandedness. Branded rituals are those carry a compressed and coded form of the larger, more complex brand idea. In Big Bazaar, store managers are called ‘Kartas’ of their stores and actually go through a ceremony by which they are thus anointed. The ritual act of undergoing this symbolic transformation converts an abstract idea into a powerful experienced emotion and allows what could have been a somewhat esoteric idea to become a living reality. It works because it draws power from the larger ideology in which the brand is located, in that it accords respect to all its consumers and creates a sense of cultural accessibility to a new world in a completely non-judgmental way. The world is changing much faster and in a much more fundamental way than what is comprehended by most businesses. The big fault line of the times is the tension between centralizing power structures trying to retain their dominance even as democratizing impulses try to pull away. The employee is today one that is constantly judged, evaluated, regulated, monitored, trained and self-consciously 22


motivated. This will have to change and HR needs to lead this way. Without a conceptual push from within which seeks an active redefinition of some of the founding assumptions of business, the employer brand might well come under much greater pressure than any other facet of the organization. So far we think of the brand as a mask but there are two ways to imagine even a mask. Playwright Girish Karnad argues that while the Western notion of the mask is that of a disguise, where one hide one’s real self, the Indian idea sees the mask as the ‘face writ large’- an amplification of the true nature of the self. The employer brand needs to embrace this idea of branding- of finding the true nature of the organization’s brand and amplifying it with sensitivity and vividness. 1. Articulate the core brand idea in clear terms using not business jargon, but the full range of language. Arrive at this after a rigorous process of selfexamination from several different vantage points. A useful way of doing this exercise is to ask how uniquely does your organization view the category you operate in. Every strong brand has a distinctive take on the category it operates in. If the current brand idea is fuzzy, then sharpen it, but be careful to express it in realistic terms. 2. Do a similar exercise for the Employer brand. Read off all small and big signs that emit a signal about the brand. Build a genuine understanding of what makes your employer brand what it is. Articulate a realistic goal for the employer brand in case it is not fully developed. Balance the need for change with an understanding of ground realities. Overreaching produces

cynicism, under-ambition sloth. Make sure that the product/company brand is the source that the employer brand. 3. Covert intent into action. Audit existing actions and create ownable rituals that bring alive the core employer brand idea. This needs imagination and creativity as well as an instinctive understanding of what works for your organization. Rituals are not only about having fun; they transmit your core belief in a dramatic way. 4. Handle the ‘big moments’ honestly. The real test of any belief is when the going gets tough. Employer brands in particular are cemented in bad times, for that is what human beings would remember and value most. If at this time, all lofty pronouncements come to nought, as is often the case,

building trust and belief becomes difficult. Employees might continue to say the right things and salute the flag, but real belief comes from acting with honesty in difficult times. What is most important here is alignment with the stated core belief. 5. Lead the thinking within the organization on its belief with respect to talent and people. Synthesise understanding of larger macro-trends and push for a strategic dialogue on the subject. It is vital to the discussion on the employer brand not becoming too transactional; the true value of HR and its ability to move up the value chain lies in its ability to lead fundamental business thinking. The question of talent is going to be a defining one in the days to come and HR must show the way.


23

Stale Beer and the New Workplace Harish Bijoor About the Author Harish Bijoor is a brand-strategy specialist & CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc. Earlier he was with Zip Telecom Ltd., Hindustan Lever Limited, Tata Coffee Limited in Sales and Marketing and Brand Management.

L

ife in the old days was simple and pure.

I started work as a Group Management Trainee with what is today Hindustan Unilever Limited. This meant starting work with a big name in the FMCG category not only in India, but worldwide as well. It meant working for a multi-national. When that terminology became a bad word, one started taking pride in working for a “trans-national corporation”. It meant the same thing, but sounded more politically correct. So be it. Life was really simple those days. You had a boss. The boss had a boss and the chain went on, right to the top. The boss was a human being. He had his follies, but nevertheless, the boss was normally right and correct. Right on many an issue in which he was learned and experienced. And correct on issues that came to ethics, way to behave and the softer side of being a manager at large. One therefore learnt the simple things first. The boss was a great teacher. Life in the new workplace, in contrast, is a different ballgame altogether. Life today is all about a different workable approach 24


and a different work ethos altogether. Life is really about change. Change in processes and approaches. And guess what, in most of our cases, the boss is not even a human being. The boss is today a technology, a process, an approach and in some cases even “a way of doing things”. The boss is therefore not one anymore. In some organizations we work with, the boss is not one as well. The guy sitting in the corner cubicle where he gets his tea delivered at the table (as opposed to the other cubicle-Wallahs who have to go to the corner vending machine to top up their mugs) may be called your immediate boss, but then, is he your real boss? Think. Your boss at times is the client you are working for. And he sits some 8000 kilometers away, and comes alive normally on video-screens, Skype chats and long and laborious telecoms. He is the guy you rarely see as well, but hear all the time. And then, your real boss might as well be the guy who is really at your own level in terms of work-profile, but the one who has been designated the virtual peer project lead. And then your boss may as well be the piece of technology you work for.

In short, life in the workplace today is different. Different, diffused, amorphous and fluid. Change in many ways is your real boss. Remember, your boss in real terms is the position you report to, the remote client you work with, and at times it is also the end-product your software finds itself an integral part of. In many ways, from softer world of FMCG, it is like saying that your real boss is not the man you report to or the company you work for, but the consumer who actually bathes with the cake of soap you peddle. In any case, the boss you report to is a position, and with attrition being what it is, this position has a new face every year. Right? If change and the technology you work on are your real bosses, how do you survive and how do you thrive in the New Workplace? How do you build your personal brand as well? Or for that matter must you at all? Must you as an employer encourage personal branding as well? What are the key principles here at play? What must you focus upon, and what must you gloss over? Are there also marketing concepts you as an HR practitioner can use to advantage?

and most certainly how comfortable her personal life is and looks to be. HR therefore is just too broad a domain to be managed by the HR function at large. The best HR practice is possibly the one that offers the HR function as a generalization and possibly not a specialization. The HR department that is manned by a cross functional team of the core HR specialist, the recruiter, the marketer, the technology specialist, the process control specialist and the communications specialist is possibly that much more broad-spectrum a department than the narrow-spectrum specialists’ orientation in what I call OLD HR. Let me not belabor this point though. The point is made, and let me move on and delineate a set of thoughts that I do believe are critical to manage the future of the future. POINT 2: Internal Branding is a must for everyone!

POINT 1: HR is just too important to be left to the HR guys. Ouch! That pains.

Most certainly it is. I promote internal branding in an end-to-end services company and a BPO enterprise, as I do in a consumer durables marketing company. Internal branding that is different from the overtly external branding one is normally exposed to in our contemporary commercial lives.

I do believe HR is an all-embracing domain. HR is not only about the humans you deal with, it is also about all the Resources that make your Human Resource what they are. To that extent, your human resource is a function of who she is, what her educational background is like, what her experience profile looks like, what technology governs her work, what processes systematize her, what approaches guide her at the workplace

Internal branding that is all about creating that distinct identity that will set apart one work environment from the other. And guess what, the distinction points that create for this difference can be many. In a recent project, we have identified as many as 347 different points that add up to the big picture of a wholly different end-to-end services entity that will stand out like an exclamation mark. God is in the details of Internal branding.

Let’s go. Let me lay out two points I do believe an HR practitioner needs to follow.


25

Internal branding is a cusp process one can create. A cusp process that involves equally the marketing discipline as it does the HR department. The two marry seamlessly to provide this seamless brand experience that will be seen, heard and impacted upon the employee at large. Do you want your employee to think thrice before she quit your BPO outfit to join your cousin’s outfit across the road? Internal Branding within the organization will involve the services of a whole different evangelist for the brand. While the brand manager is capable of managing the external environment for the brand, the internal hierarchy-based structures as we see today in organizations are best catered to by the CEO of organization as a brand evangelist. The CEO is best positioned to contribute in this domain, provided he himself is sold on the idea of the brand at hand. And I am sure there are many unwilling CEOs who have brands thrust down their throats by predecessors who have been hasty in launching brand programs that are half-baked and quartergrilled! CEO-passion for the brands of the company is something that needs to be encapsulated not only for external communication purposes, but for internal as well. It should indeed start with the internal objectives being met fully first. Communication is therefore a powerful tool to use. Communication that will take the proposition of the brand into the heart, soul and gall bladder of every internal employee. The CEO as an internal brand evangelist must communicate much more frequently with his internal customers. Yes, it is snazzy to be talking to the external customer. It is easy as well to dominate the mind of the 26


external customer. Selling a proposition to the internal customer who knows quite a whole tad more, is that bit more difficult than telling the external customer that you have a better mousetrap or a toilet - seat or whatever. The guy within the marketing organization is that much more cynical, that much more wary than the girl next door who is your potential customer. The CEO must communicate cogently and with coherence within the organization. More frequently than he does now. Involve the entire set of internal employees from day one. Does not matter whether the employee is a driver or a draughtsman. Time to talk to him about your all-new intelligent toilet seat. The objective: build passion! Build passion internally in every employee, irrespective of rank, to avoid rancor of any kind. Every employee must believe in the brand the market is going to receive tomorrow. This communication needs to be multidimensional. The CEO needs to cascade down a communication through her ranks. Every employee in turn needs to get interactive. Debates must happen. Issues must be sorted. Ideas must be acknowledged and picked. A positive dynamism in the process needs to be established. The communication must get lateral as well. Employee-to-employee communication on the new-improved mousetrap must be encouraged. Dissent must be open. In short, communication must be real and multi-dimensional. As real and multi-dimensional as the people within organization. Internal Branding can build passion and value as well. A well-informed and satiated internal customer is going to be a valuable asset for the organization. Every external customer interface on the brand is going to be packed with a greater degree

of knowledge, passion and ownership. What’s more, customer delight is going to be a norm to practice. To the frowning Finance guy sitting in Ivory Tower II, let me assure that customer delight means positive equity of the brand at hand. And positive equity means an endless flow of revenue and profits. Internal Branding is therefore as important as external. Do you have an internal branding budget then? Do you have internal branding evangelists? Does your internal audience even know the basics of your brand proposition? If not, time to get going and set right the wrongs. Internal Branding pays. Try it for size. In Conclusion: Someone once asked me to illustrate my Management style and mantra by using an analogy. I was staying at the Taj Bengal in Kolkata on that occasion. I looked around my room and picked up the soda-water

bottle opener from the top of the minibar and brandished it around. I represent that. I am the soda-water bottle opener. In many ways you and I are just that. The fizz belongs to my team. The soda is my team. I am just the catalyst who allows the soda to bubble up and flourish. And I shake the bottle quite a bit. And quite often. That’s my role. Good organizations and homes alike that boast of team spirit are units that are like a bottle of soda that is forever being shaken up to create fizz and bubble. On the contrary, organizations and homes that do not foster team spirit are like a bottle of old and stale beer that has been kept open for days. No bubble. No fizz. No nothing! The HR man, woman and child, by my simple definition, are just that. A very important catalyst. Let’s play that role with finesse and care as the future of the future unfolds ahead of us.


27

MENTORS AND COACHES Anita Bhogle and Harsha Bhogle About the Authors Anita Bhogle and Harsha Bhogle run Prosearch Consultants and have done upwards of 350 corporate speaking programs to India’s leading companies on learnings from support for managers. Their book “The Winning Way” has been a big national best-seller.

I

ncreasingly, when we do our corporate speaking events these days, we are asked about mentors and managers, about coaches and captains and sport presents a wonderful laboratory to study how the two roles work. Often they do, but when they don’t, the results can be painful. And we have found that while there might be the odd difference, the parallels in the corporate world are many. And often relevant. Cricket is an unusual sport in these matters in that it is the only one in which the captain is actually on the field. In almost all sport leaders demand performance, indeed they must, but it is in cricket alone that they have to perform and deliver in conditions that are similar to those that players under them experience. The manager of a football team has the power to demand, to substitute, to drop, to penalize but he doesn’t himself have to take on the opposition center back who is six inches taller than him. By contrast the captain in cricket must demand that his batsmen stand up to the opposition fast bowler on a fiery pitch but then when it is his turn to bat, he has to do the same. 28


And that is why in cricket, it is understood that the captain runs the ship and the coach acts as the support staff; valued, even reasonably powerful, but eventually he is the support staff. It works better like that though it can lead to gnash teeth and long evenings in the bar. And so the job of the coach is to show the way, suggest a path where a player might see a wall. His role is important because the captain may have his own battles to fight and it is difficult to be a performer and an adviser, especially when the kid being advised might one day become better than the captain on the field! And so it is said that the coach must take players to places they haven’t been to before. It is a lovely line because a coach has the perspective that comes with age and experience but he is also watching the game from a hundred yards away and so sees it differently. Critically, the coach doesn’t compete with his players and that can allow him to be benevolent. That is where the coach most mirrors corporate mentors. And you can see why the mentor in corporate life must necessarily be older, have a more relaxed perspective than say, a line manager, and must have enough

time to offer to an executive riding an uncertain wave. I guess it must help also if the mentor doesn’t sit in judgement over his mentee. One of the contentious issues in sport, and you can already see this is an HR issue, is that the player goes to the coach with a problem, whether technical, mental or simply personal, and the coach uses that knowledge to make a judgement on a player and declare him not right in the side. If a corporate mentor has to win the respect, and confidence, of a mentee, he cannot sit in judgement over him. Essentially, the coach must bring to a side something it doesn’t already possess. India was a vastly talented but, let’s put it respectfully, mildly chaotic side. The new coach, John Wright, came from a culture where you had to distill the maximum out of yourself to make a mark and so, training and work ethic were crucial to their success. By contrast, India worshipped talent, whether on the sports field or in corporate life, and to a large extent still does. But talent is only the starting point of success and no more, if not married to work ethic it can actually be destructive. Wright cajoled them into accepting that discipline and a rigorous work ethic could take their talent to another level. So how did Wright gain respect in a new culture. Senior HR professionals will probably have experienced this but he just worked harder than his words. If practice was at 10, he was on the ground at 9 to see that the pitch was ready, that the gear was in place and that once the players came to train, nothing would come in the way. By giving so much of himself to the team, he earned their respect and won them over. Some years later, India had a coach who came from another country but had a similarly admirable work culture. Gary

Kirsten said that when he asked himself what he could do with a team that had so many stars in it, he came to the conclusion that he could do no more than offer all of himself. And like Wright, he often worked harder than the players themselves to create an environment they could flower in. Can a mentor do that in corporate life? It was important too, for both Wright and Kirsten, to understand the culture of the team, and therefore of the land, they were working in. Paddy Upton, the mental conditioning coach who worked with Kirsten, once said that he based some of his work on the knowledge that India, as a nation, had never in its history invaded another. It had been attacked but had never initiated an attack. He said it helped him understand the culture of the people he would work it. Neither Wright not Kirsten was intimidating, neither was in your face. They were more consultative and Kirsten said he believed that rather than forcing people to work on their shortcomings, and in doing so focussing on what they were not good at, he preferred to talk about their strengths and how to ensure that they could be channelled into delivering superior performance. It is an interesting parallel for HR leaders to study. In mentoring do we merely ask for weaknesses and work on them or do we play with strengths and the confidence to deliver them for it is out of strength that victory emerges. It should make for an interesting debate. Between Wright and Kirsten, India had, as coach, the straight talking Greg Chappell. He was a legend, one of the greatest players in the game and a man with deep insights into cricket. He was a gifted cricketer but with an almost scary work ethic that came out of deep thought. In his personal life April | 2013 NHRD Network Journal

29

he had challenged himself hard. It had worked wonderfully for him and he now put that knowledge into practice. And so he challenged his players to go to another level, urged them to be fitter and advocated picking younger, fitter players into the team. It led to two things. It produced two centers of power and rather than driving the players into finding a new peak, it made them insecure. The challenge presented was: here is a new crop of players, if you don’t shape up, it will be time to ship out. On the face of it, there seems little wrong with that. It happens every day in corporate life but it delivered an important lesson for those dealing with highly gifted players. Often, the uniquely gifted players have not only a deep understanding of their own game but also crave the freedom to do things their way. It has worked for them and they are happy with it. Such players, who are often matchwinners, need a little more space, a little more freedom. Often, they are highly strung because they are so competitive and their vision is different from anyone else’s. They can do audacious things because they define risk differently. It was said of Sachin Tendulkar that he played shots others couldn’t, or didn’t think were safe, simply because he didn’t see them as risky at all. He saw gaps in the field where others saw fielders. He could not be coached the same way as anyone else and maybe it is important for organizations that define fast track career paths to understand the kind of people they are dealing with and tailor programmes that challenge them rather than constrict their flair. Chappell’s message wasn’t wrong. In the context of the culture he was in, the delivery was. And that can often happen, that we dislike the messenger but, as a 30


result, we lose out on the message he/ she is trying to deliver. Chappell tried to lead the change his way, maybe even force it down people’s throats because that is what worked for him. More lately, England had a problem with a maverick, the temperamental genius in Kevin Pietersen. England’s coach, Andy Flower, was a no-nonsense man, he spoke little and demanded much which was exactly what England didn’t have. He formed a very good partnership with the captain Andrew Strauss who was cut from the same cloth. England demanded discipline of their players and everyone had to fall in line. But Pietersen was different. He came from a background of rejection, had migrated to another country to fulfil his cricketing ambition, was maybe a touch insecure and was extraordinarily driven to perform. He was different from the others but he won matches like few others could. When he didn’t fall in line (and it is too long a story to narrate here!), he was disciplined and left out. When we spoke to him and asked how he would like to be treated, he said very simply, “Trust me”. He promised to work very hard, train hard and be completely match ready but couldn’t stand the constant discipline. You see the likes of Pietersen in every organization and it raises an interesting issue on how to handle them. There is obviously no one-size-fitsall solution but often reaching out to such people, making an effort to understand them and giving them a bit of space works. Interestingly, when a new captain came along, his first action was to open a line of communication with Pietersen. It was no longer: discipline first, player second. It was: I need him to win a test series now how do I go about doing that. There is also a very interesting case study from Australia with their coach John

Buchanan. With a team of uniquely gifted players, many legends of the game, he stood apart in that he was an average firstclass cricketer and possessed nowhere near the kind of skills that those he was coaching did. He said his job was to make cricketers grow as people, nudge them along, set challenging goals for them and take them along the path of excellence. Many Australian cricketers enjoyed working with him, some others couldn’t stand him. It is interesting to see this polarization given that in corporate life you could have a mentor who may not possess the domain skills of those he is mentoring.

The key then is understanding people and in an era where popular culture is changing very fast, where attitudes towards spending are different, it is important that the mentor is in tune with those he is assigned to mentor. It is very possible that there could be a generation gap, or many generations actually, between the two and the mentor could end up being irrelevant. As we have seen the presentation of the challenge is almost as important as the challenge itself and mentors must see that. In doing so they might be able to give “all of them” as Kirsten did.

The players that were a bit insecure, who sometimes couldn’t see the peaks they were capable of ascending to, found him excellent to work with. Others like Shane Warne, possessed of extraordinary skill but also of huge self-confidence looked down on him with intensity. They thought he merely talked a good game while they actually played it! Maybe Warne, and those like him in corporations, do not need mentoring at all but once again it is critical to understand that different people think differently and that you need each of them to deliver for you.

An interesting insight to end. When Kirsten first met Sachin Tendulkar, and remember Kirsten had made his debut after Tendulkar had, he asked him what he expected from a coach at this stage in life. Tendulkar said he wanted a “friend”. I wonder how often we realize that very high performing but fairly highly stressed stars, even in the corporate world, really only need a friend and whether that is an under-appreciated value. In a world of quarterly results, of margins, of political unrest, maybe our brightest managers need a friend who has no agenda.


31

GEMIFICATION POSSIBILITIES IN HR S V Nathan

About the Author S. V. Nathan is the Talent Director for Deloitte U.S. Firms in India, with over 27 years of professional experience in Human Resource management, and working across businesses such as Manufacturing, Services, Telecom and Information Technology. Nathan led the team that helped in building of the India US Region in his career of over 8 years with Deloitte. He graduated in Mathematics and did his post graduation from XLRI, Jamshedpur.

G

amification appears to be one of the hottest emerging trends in business and technology today. It is a topic of global interest with a rapidly expanding scope that is making HR leaders and managers sit up and take notice. 32


Gamification concepts such as simulation, challenges, scoreboards, and rewards have been used for centuries. Games are as old as the Mahabharata! The outcome of a game of dice overturned the destiny of an entire subcontinent. Why was the game so pivotal in this story? One reason could be that the game represented the unforeseen challenges that every ruler has to navigate during his reign. In my childhood, I remember my grandmother playing the game of ‘Pallanguzhi’ with me while teaching me how to master numbers. I had to count seeds, distribute them evenly across cups on a wooden board, and add and subtract during this process. The old lady was teaching me strategy and counting at the same time !! Bless her.

This paper seeks to demystify gamification and provides examples where it can be used in the HR space to good effect. Gamification concepts such as simulation, challenges, scoreboards, and rewards have been used for centuries. Games are Where it can be used in the HR space to good effect.

There is nothing new in gamification from an instructional design standpoint. It is a new and fancy name that has rapidly captivated the industry as a marketing term to push new products and services. Gamification is NOT turning everything into a game. And it needs a cultural infrastructure.

What is gamification?

Let us understand gamification better through an example.

Gamification is the use of game design and game mechanics in Nongame contexts to increase user engagement and behavior adoption. A system, process, or application is said to be “gamified” when it includes one or more feature commonly found in games. It can instill challenge, the payoff, and perspective into routine tasks, tapping into the same human instincts that have led to passionate competition and engagement over centuries — our innate desire to learn, to improve ourselves, to overcome obstacles, and to win.

Great beginnings can pave the way to long-lasting success. That’s the philosophy behind Deloitte’s signature on-boarding program Welcome to Deloitte, which underwent a full refresh for professionals across the organization. But what prompted this change? The early induction model had two full days of back-to-back death by PPT sessions, overloading and overwhelming the new hires. The feedback from the new hires was not at all encouraging. When this issue came up for discussion at a leadership meeting, a leader asked a few basic questions, “Who is our audience? What is their background ? What would appeal to them? Why do they think our induction is boring? This started the search for a new approach which culminated in the current worldclass Welcome to Deloitte on-boarding program. New employees are made to play various games, act in roleplays, and work in small groups in simulation. The interactive pedagogy of the new method appeals to the audience without diluting the objective of the induction — learning about the company, its core beliefs, and familiarizing employees to different tools and technologies. The enhanced new hire center website provides a customized dashboard that details required tasks for their first 365 days with Deloitte. The success of this program can now be seen April | 2013 NHRD Network Journal

33

through the high level of engagement and learning the professional experience. This is an excellent example of a larger emerging trend — the use of game techniques and design to induct professionals into the organization in an interactive manner while the organization meets its business objective of preparing professionals to excel in their roles. This new trend is called gamification.

Why is gamification important in today’s world? The emergence of Generation —Yers and Millennials as significant elements of the Indian workforce is driving dramatic change in education, technology, and work. These two groups that total up to 65% of the overall workforce are digital natives who live and breathe online. They are accustomed to technology at home and expect similar levels of technology interactions in the workplace. Games are integral elements of their lifestyle

since childhood, thus they can relate effectively to the language and metaphors of gamification. Additionally, in our ‘always connected’ world, the dichotomy between personal and professional personae has shrunk over time. It is no secret that most professionals start and end their day by checking emails on their smart phones. Professionals are spending close to 16 hours a day at work or at least thinking about work. As the workforce becomes younger and increasingly mobile and working days get longer, it is imperative for organizations to actively engage with young and technology-savvy employees during their tenure in order to maximize productivity.

Why gamification works Game mechanics and game dynamics are able to positively influence human behavior because they are designed to drive players to take specific action. Successful gamification converges the following factors:

l

34


Joy of self-expression: Self-expression converts passive recipients to active participants. In a passive approach, people are ‘pushed’ to take action thereby causing resistance and disengagement. Games use a ‘pull’

A few examples where companies have used gamification

approach to create opportunities for learning through experimentation and practice. l

l

The thrill of competition and accomplishment: Whether we’re competing for a championship title or just tossing a ball around for fun, games create excitement. The adrenaline rush that spurs at the starting block, the sense of achievement felt upon crossing the finish line or scoring the winning point — these are the experiences that make games so vital for us. Real-time assessment and feedback: A move in a game provides real-time feedback. You find your king in check. You rescue the princess. You collect the last gold coin and complete the level. Individuals get short- and long-term feedback that is vital for reinforcing behavior. Without real-time feedback, knowing does not translate into doing. Constructive feedback reinforces good behavior and enables players to learn quickly and adjust.

Developing insights through behavioral business intelligence: Although traditional business intelligence provides powerful information, it provides little insight into the fundamental component behind business success: people. Understanding people and their complex behaviors provide great business benefits when making strategic business decisions. Datadriven decisions help organizations make informed choices which in turn increase the transparency of organizational processes.

Organizations worldwide has made tremendous progress in gamifying their HR processes. Here are some examples: l

l

Microsoft built an Office application — Ribbon Hero 2 — that uses gamification to motivate users to learn MS Office without the routine and boredom associated with training. It is a winwin situation for users as they are playing a “game” and doing something productive at the same time. The application provides instantaneous feedback on various learning missions and marks completed areas with an overall score on the main page of the application. Such an application puts users out of their normal “work mode” and into an “explorer mode,” where it is fun to discover new things, safe to fail, and where users feel accomplished for having completed something difficult. Another example of where Microsoft has successfully used gamification is in their Windows 7 language quality game. Rather than assign language testers, Microsoft invited their employees to test the application for their respective national languages. By positioning this as an international testing ‘competition,’ volunteer testers of multiple nationalities began a friendly game of finding the largest numbers of application errors. Within weeks, over 4,000 employees identified more than 7,000 errors — all in their free time.


35

idea is commercialized, employees are awarded sole ownership of the intellectual property and receive a royalty. Some of Google’s most successful products such as Gmail and Adsense are the results of such personal projects. Deloitte launched

l

Gamification is cleverly used at Google and 3M. Employees are encouraged to use 20% of their time to ‘play’ with ideas of personal interest. If an

‘The Maverick’ challenge at campuses as a branding initiative. Over 2,000 students across India’s top business schools participated in a contest that was comprised of business cases and simulations of real work scenarios. This gave students an opportunity to connect with eminent business leaders, experience the role of a business advisor, and the chance to win a grand prize. It also gave the organization a chance to identify potential hires.

Tapping innovatively into gamification Recruitment

l

Create a complex challenge and divide it into smaller puzzles. Each business school can get one piece of the puzzle. The business school that is able to crack the challenge first by collaborating with other campuses can be recognized as the winner. This helps not only in creating a buzz across campuses but also helps students understand the importance of collaboration.

l

Develop an online portal that can be linked to social sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Provide gamification features such as a progress bar and ‘like’ buttons to encourage candidates to submit complete profiles for further review.

l

l

36

Launch an online case study contest that replicates your organizations’ work scenarios. Potential candidates can enter this contest and key in their responses. If their responses match with your expectations of future employees, you can shortlist candidates for the next round of your recruitment process. Make employee referral programs efficacious. Create an employee portal containing all open job positions. Segment each job description into key attributes, technical and professional competencies required, in order of priority. Employees play a game where they match their referral CV against these ideal attributes. If a match is identified, the portal allows for CV upload.


Learning

Employee engagement

l

Send a mystery box to new hires prior to their joining date. The mystery box would have a set of questions and cue cards that familiarize new hires with information about the company. The curiosity and wonder provided by this treasure hunt integrates the new hires into the organization even before they join.

l

Create a portal that allows employees to customize their learning needs. Have a real-time Leaderboard that reflects each user’s 10 closest competitors. Provide rewards like badges, certificates, or ‘achievements,’ to be posted on social media sites or on company intranets.

l

Introduce role plays and scenarios within e-learning modules and design it such that learners have to find a solution to proceed to the next level.

l

Use unconventional techniques like music to teach business concepts like teamwork. Bring large diverse groups to a room and take them through a systematic process of playing musical instruments in synchrony. As participants transition from noise to music, they experience the power of teamwork.

l

Encourage employees to register in groups and contribute towards a company-wide fitness goal. Teams can support one another by posting progress about their overall weight loss, exchange ideas around healthy snacks and in the process, create friendly competition. This helps employees to focus on their health in a fun manner.

l

l

l

Introduce ideation contests focusing on themes where an organization needs process improvement. The contest can have multiple elimination levels and top ideas can be implemented across the organization. Winners get a chance to take on leadership roles. Organize rapid fire quizzes on topics such as policies, company values, leadership changes, etc. to engage and inform large groups of employees. Design a game where employees are introduced to multiple career ‘pathways.’ Each pathway could contain a list of milestones, job responsibilities, and possible challenges. Employees get the opportunity to visualize future career scenarios and make informed choices of where they want to go. It also streamlines the succession planning process in the organization.


37

So how do you start “play?” Work becomes play when the task is so satisfying and rewarding that its mundane nature is of secondary importance. Here is a quick checklist that you need to address before you GAMIFY processes at your workplace. 1. Goals: A common mistake is to get so preoccupied with “techniques” that you don’t think sufficiently about the problem you’re trying to address through the gaming solution. Which core processes or strategies are the ones that gamification is expected to streamline? Are there comparative examples from other progressive organizations? 2. Audience: Who is your audience? What motivates them? What aspects are likely to appeal to them? Why would they like or dislike a certain type of game? Modify: Users may get tired of the system. Organizations needs to learn to adapt as data is continuously gathered. This means that you should have a plan to modify/ 38


update new content. How can you use gamification to create greater engagement and foster the right kinds of change? How can you move to new business areas and enlarge the scope of the initiatives? 3. Infrastructure: For designing the right solution, you need clarity of organizational goal, inputs on measurement and analytics, considerations of incentives, and possibly technology expertise. Not only should you touch base with your business-line strategists and managers, you also need to develop networks of support from game designers, experts in data analytics, marketers, and even social scientists. 4. Form: How do we form/design a lifelike game? How do we engage our audience through elegant design and fun? People will lose interest if they feel stuck perpetually at the bottom of the scoreboard. Similarly, people will get bored and switch off if there is little or no challenge. The game design should be such that the audience is able to see progress toward mastery.

5. Yardstick: An HR professional cannot quickly declare victory after successfully launching a game. Your efforts will continue as you measure results and improve processes. This requires capturing the right data and coming up with meaningful analysis. Does the game design provide return on investment? Have you considered all the costs and benefits?

So, playing games can actually be very serious work. So, as they say at the start of the Olympics - “Let the games begin!”

It’s time to play! Experiences are stepping stones to cognition. Real world errors come at the price – professional, financial or emotional. Gamification on the other hand creates a fail-safe environment. Players can afford to fail in the process of solving simulated real time business scenarios. Make-believe has been an important way to prepare ourselves for the real thing since childhood.

References 1. Gamification community resources at Deloitte 2. http://www.deloitte.la/welcome/ 3. http://www.bunchball.com/ 4. http://www.reveal-thegame.com/ 5. http://www.gamification.co/ 6. http://www.emee.co.in/ 7. http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2251015 8. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ 9. http://www.mindtickle.com/ 10. http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Ten-years-in-how-Google-raced-ahead 11. http://www.strategy-business.com/article/00078?gko=121c3


39

Learning and Development – Providing the Strategic Edge Dr. Vishal Shah About the Author Dr Vishal Shah is currently General Manager, corporate HRD at Wipro. His work experience spans roles in Sales, HR and Leadership Development. He has worked in multiple industries like Consulting, IT, BPO and Retail. He has published papers in international journals and presented in international conferences. He is an alumnus of IIMB’s PGDM and FPM programs

The Context

l

T

he business environment today is characterized by what the US army calls VUCA conditions – Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. Change is the only constant and the speed with which old business models are failing and new ones arising, has increased substantially. Internally too, organizations are having to balance the challenges of downsizing with the challenges of delivering to demanding customers, all the while facing the pressure to build new knowledge and stay ahead. In such a scenario, the ability of the L&D function to rise to a strategic level provides an organization a valuable resource for navigating the rapids. The Changing Expectations from L&D To play a strategic role, the L&D function in organizations needs to actively contribute to business results. It needs to support the organizational mission and prioritize its contribution to the organizational strategy. Some of the fundamental principles that characterize this shift in the function’s priorities are 40


l

Partnership with Business – HR has had a history of partnering with the business functions. L&D needs to take on this role actively too. If learning is recognized as a key organizational capability then the L&D function can at best ‘’facilitate” this process of capability building. Line and Business functions thus have an important role in partnering with the L&D function for maximizing learning effectiveness. Eliciting Real Needs - L&D interventions need to be based on assessed needs. Needs analysis is a non-trivial process and requires skillful diagnosis and elicitation from internal clients and stakeholders. The “team– building” problem is a well-known malaise in this field. Even senior business leaders are known to struggle while articulating the nuanced and layered development needs of the business and the team. Most end up asking for some kind of ‘teambuilding’ activity and it then falls on the L&D person to act as a consultant and help the stakeholder arrive at the right need and the problem.

l

l

Move beyond formal learning processes - The ‘what’ or the formal training content may be easy to build and acquire, it’s the “how-to” or the structured and unstructured learning processes that determine the effectiveness and impact of the learning. To leverage the power of organizational learning the L&D function needs to focus on the learning content, the learning processes as well as the informal learning that happens in an organization. Focus on performance improvement - The days of training for the sake of training and covering as many participants as possible are long over. No longer are “happy sheet” ratings sufficient to demonstrate effectiveness. L&D needs to tie into hard business metrics like growth, profitability and customer satisfaction.

The Role and the Positioning of L&D The L&D specialist’s role today needs to be multi-dimensional. It requires the Learning professional to train, facilitate, coach, provide just-in-time knowledge, align a group, provide perspectives, develop competencies as well as leadership … the list goes on. Traditional learning expertise is becoming less and less important. Which brings us to the crucial question of how L&D practitioners see their role in organizations. Do they consider themselves to be passive providers of L&D solutions or as proactive seekers of problems and facilitators of change? To play a strategic role, L&D specialists today need to develop competencies related to Business Acumen and even Consulting Skills. Training and Learning solutions have their limitations when complex business problems need to be solved. To earn a seat at the “table”, L&D needs to win credibility and the respect of business functions through a deep understanding of business as well as

problems solving skills. In fact, just as the expert consulting professional was advised to become a ‘T-shaped’ professional a decade ago, today’s learning professionals need to demonstrate a grasp of breadth as well as depth related expertise. The positioning of the L&D function within the structure of the organization is a crucial element that determines, influences how strategic a role it is able to play. In most organizations the function is linked to the HR function, though the degree of the coupling varies from organization to organization. Whether it is tightly or loosely coupled to HR, a matrix structure will best serve the purpose, especially in a large organization. A matrix structure would imply direct and indirect reporting not only to HR but also in the business. This proximity to business then places an additional imperative on the L&D expert and shapes the function’s world-view. On the one hand the specialists begin to see the larger picture and the difference they can make in the overall scheme of things. On the other hand they start appreciating the need for a greater degree of flexibility and multi–Skilling. In Wipro for instance, while the L&D team is loosely coupled with HR, each of the business functions has a single point of contact within the L&D team. This matrix structure ensures that the different business units get the required attention. It also requires the L&D team to make a demonstrable impact on business metrics. Another structural element that impacts the functioning of the L&D function is whether it is treated as a cost center or an internal profit center that needs to sell its services to internal and external clients. In the case of a cost center model, depending on whether it is a centralized or decentralized entity, in tough economic times the function may April | 2013 NHRD Network Journal

41

either enjoy relatively greater immunity or may be more vulnerable depending on how strategic a position it has been able to carve out. However in both the cases typically it would enjoy exclusivity and would not have to compete with external service providers. Hence this tends to keep the function in an operational and a training program orientation. As an internal profit center the function would have to compete with external providers and hence would have a compulsion to prioritize internal brand building as well as quantify value delivered. The function would make delivering ‘value’ its key priority, since it would be a matter of survival. As an internal team, it would have the advantage of understanding the ‘context’ much better than external providers, which would be the source of its competitive advantage. Hence this model tends to enable an outcome related world-view rather than a process related one. The importance of multiple lenses A key strategic area where the function makes a difference is related to the decision of “building” vs “buying” human capital. The complex development needs of a large employee population necessitate that the function applies multiple frameworks to address this issue. A few such frameworks are discussed below. Using multiple such lenses would help the L&D function address the organizational needs in a VUCA world. One such framework is to look at three distinct categories of employee capabilities needed in the organization– l

Strategies – aimed at supporting the organization strategy as well as the top 42


leaders of the organization who need to carry out the strategy. This would include L&D efforts that build future skill sets and capabilities as well as leadership development initiatives. l

l

Implementation – these initiatives need to aid the implementation of the organizational strategy. Hence it would require developing managers who use resources to deliver results, in the process coordinating and mobilizing teams, units and departments. Tactical – Frontline and beginning of the chain level, these interventions would support employees to grow as individual performers and learn the ropes of business internalizing the need for quality delivery and result orientation.

Another lens that can be applied to the L&D work is the following 1) Skill Building –This is the classic function of L&D and especially useful at the beginning and intermediate employee levels. Efforts are aimed at building specific skills in the participant, say related to communication and personal productivity. 2) Problem Solving – This kind of work is done at the individual and at a team level. Focuses on increasing their resourcefulness, increase their confidence in their ability to tackle business challenges and move towards acquiring expertise in running a business. 3) Perspective building – A third level of development involves building leaders that take a systemic view, understand nuances of business in-depth and are

having the ability to hold the tension inherent in dichotomous, conflicting situations.

A) Competency based Development

Competency based leadership development provides a systematic and real world based approach to development. Competency frameworks also connect employee development efforts to organizational strategy. A competency framework forms the vital foundation upon which the entire leadership pipeline building takes place. Most organizations use rigorous methods for building such frameworks and make them sustainable by including current as well as future relevant competencies.

A study on corporate governance for instance, identified five competencies that are essential in today’s business environment. These consist of systemic thinking, embracing diversity, managing risk, balancing global and local perspectives and emotional awareness. At Wipro we base our entire development work on a strong competency foundation. Four leadership competencies are regarded as essential - strategic leadership, customer focus, collaboration and building talent. These help Wipro in developing leaders required for a multi-business, multigeo and multi-function business.

And a third approach to categorizing L&D outputs could be to look at the following levels a) Individual – for e.g. an employee may build negotiation skills over a curriculum of modules focusing on a skill b) Teams or groups – Groups would also need to develop specific skills or they may develop a specific perspective or process for e.g. an impactful customer satisfaction process c) Organizational – At an organizational level entire group of employees may need to imbibe certain values or competencies in times of change. For e.g. a large section of workforce which was internally focused may need to become externally focused and acquire the capabilities of getting new business. In a large organization the L& D function uses these multiple lenses to ensure that varied stakeholder needs get addressed and no gaps remain. As the function takes on a more central role, one should find a percentage shift in emphasis from the Tactical to the Strategic, from Skill building to Perspective Building and from Individual to Organization level initiatives. The Building Blocks As L&D functions evolve in their quest for a more strategic role, some elements are emerging as enablers in this journey. While there is a long way to go and lots of room for progress, these elements discussed below could form the initial set of differentiators.

B) Strengthening the Performance Management Processes

In many organizations, performance management processes generate cynicism and are regarded as biased and politicized processes, by employees. However the emergence of tools like 360 feedback and assessment and development centers has restored the credibility of these processes to some extent. The use of such tools significantly increases the quality April | 2013 NHRD Network Journal

43

of talent development efforts. 360 feedback systems give an all-round perspective for managers to see themselves as they are. The use of 360 feedback, implemented as a structured process is likely to result in a culture where accountability is prized and continuous and constructive feedback is given. Assessment and development centers use a systematic approach for identifying success profiles and competencies and then assessing against these in a reliable format. In general, they have a high acceptance by the targeted audience. C) Lifecycle Based Development programs

Across different levels, employees need a mix of operational and strategic competencies that vary according to the requirements of a role. Lifecycle based leadership programs help leaders navigate through critical transition stages. Typically these are divided into – first time leader, leader of a large group, leader managing P&L responsibility. Organizations that adopt this approach deploy a series of programs that address the needs and gaps at each critical transition stage. Such programs combine multiple methodologies like active learning, formal skill building modules, coaching sessions and IDP based development in order to ensure that development is transferable to the workplace and sustainable.

44


D) Team leadership and Team building

The development of teams and team working is regarded more and more critical to organizational success. Cross functional teams, self-directed teams and virtual teams have become integral to achieving organizational goals. Teams function well if the leaderfollower relations are healthy, if the team members relate to each other and the team learns collectively. In a strategic role, this requires the L&D function to go much beyond the traditional ‘team building’ activities. It involves helping teams to form a collective vision, align strongly and seamlessly and learning to solve business problems collectively. L&D specialists need to take a team performance view rather than a teambuilding view, similar to sports coaches.

Conclusion There is plenty of room for progress in the L&D function’s journey to becoming a voice that is taken seriously by business. Fortunately, the current environment presents huge opportunities that we can capitalize upon. Never has the importance of people and talent development in business success been more strongly recognized. It is up to us as L&D professionals to rise to the challenge and reshape our functions to deliver real business value.

HR, Social Media and creating the organization of tomorrow Gautam Ghosh About the Author Gautam Ghosh is GM- HR strategy and Projects at Philips India. In this role he owns and drives the key strategic objective of making Philips India a strong Employer Brand by leveraging new emerging media & technology. Gautam is one of India’s earliest HR Bloggers and an avid Twitter user.

A

ccording to an analysis of 4,200 companies by McKinsey, social technologies stand to unlock from $900 billion to $1.3 trillion in value. Two-thirds of the value unlocked by social media rests in “improved communications and collaboration within and across enterprises”. Over the last few years the external facing groups of companies have embraced (enthusiastically or in some cases- gingerly) social networks and online communities to connect with external stakeholders. Marketing, Customer Service and PR groups in organizations have leveraged it to build an army of fans and advocates. However, many feel that getting an organization ready internally should be the first step to being a true “social business”. Social can scale only if employees are engaged and connected to each other and external stakeholders. However, the reality in most organizations is that the budget of the external facing groups is much higher. Social there also shows more immediate benefits and

benchmarking is easy (however can get misleading). So if there is budget available and executive sponsorship then an organization should focus on getting internally ready and externally focused at the same time. However for the vast majority of organizations the “social competencies” would be learned by folks in marketing, sales, PR, customer support and then travel to the other parts of the organization. This is not to advise HR and other people in organizations not to focus on social far from it. But to recognize that once top management understands the value of social media they would expect that other groups then leverage the tools for their business ends. However there are differences. Externally social media campaigns can be done again and again to get across to more and more customers/fans. However when launching a social initiative internally, it would need to be successful in a far smaller group and would need to be designed to succeed. April | 2013 NHRD Network Journal

45

Often you’ll hear Social Business (or Enterprise 2.0) enthusiasts say - like we said in the days of KM - “The key to success is people, process and technology”. And then followed by the statement “Success is dependent 80/90 percent on people”. I believe that “people” issues have a whole lot of other issues that get hidden behind that word that companies might miss. I have mentioned “culture” in the title of the post which is itself like “people” a composite of many other things. Using social technologies (like internal blogs, wikis, micro-blogging, social networking etc.) will not help you to increase the employee engagement scores of your organizations.

Factors that can help drive adoption of social technologies by employees. l

l

l

l

Employee engagement is impacted by three factors: l

l

l

The engagement between the person’s skills, passion and purpose with the role he/she is working in. If you have a person in the wrong job, no matter what you do, the person’s engagement level is unlikely to go up.

l

The relationship between the manager and the person - and the team the person works with. Organizational culture.

Social tools can help a person do his/ her work faster by making a discovery of information and expertise faster. However if any of the above three factors cause disengagement, it’s unlikely that the employee would be using social tools unless the tool is embedded in the way of work. As in, it auto updates details and updates when the employee updates a business record. These kind of “social glue” technologies is still early stage. 46


l

Vision : Leaders and employees need to know why social technologies are being deployed and how do they link to the existing vision of the company. Role Modeling: Leaders need to exemplify the sharing and collaboration behavior on social tools that they expect employees to display. Rewards and Recognition: Social tools have to be in the “flow of work” - but traditional reward systems that do not recognize and reward new behaviors would be a hindrance to widespread adoption. Linkage with goals: The team focusing on implementation needs to learn with each and every group in the organization to map how social technologies can help them achieve their goals - in a faster and better way. Without articulating that, the support of crucial group leaders and middle managers would be a pipe dream. Finding and empowering employee advocates: Data shows that according to various studies that most large workplaces the majority of the employees are not engaged or disengaged. Expecting them to adopt new tools without being clear of future value is going to be difficult at best. Organizations must map the actively engaged employees who are active creators and sharers of content and showcase how the platforms have helped them achieve their goals. Organizational values: These are the big ways in which shape the behavior of employees. Is dissent encouraged? What happens when people make

mistakes? Can leaders be questioned and criticized openly? How do they respond to such questions? These are the “norms of behavior” which operate on the ground. Answers to such questions determine whether social, openness and transparency would thrive in the organization. l

Education and Training: Even though social tools seem to be intuitive to use – but the purpose and how of using would need to be communicated.

media to “Broadcast” vacancies and several applications. However the next level would be actively creating and nurturing communities of practice shaped around skills where hiring managers can gauge the level of skills of people and also develop them. l

Companies who expect such employees will get engaged and involved in sharing and participation need to address the root causes of disengagement and then expecting the tools to increase engagement. While companies come to terms with the employee usage of social media and HR departments start working on “regulating” social media usage and come up with “policies” – I think they are missing one key point – leveraging social tools to make HR itself a social activity.

l

In a certain way, HR is ripe for social disruption. It impacts external perception (employer branding) and internal employee engagement unlike any other part of the organization save the CEO. Let’s start with the policies themselves. Using a social tool which leverages crowdsourcing ideas from employees can help HR in co-creating processes and policies – and raising acceptability when they are finally rolling out. Dell’s EmployeeStorm is a great example by which employees give ideas on everything in the company. l

Recruitment – Since it’s an external facing part of HR the Recruiting teams have been quick to leverage social

l

Learning: Social technology can make learning more of a continuous process than the 2-3 day event it currently is. These tools can also be used by trainers to add more in the classroom and create a community of learners who can continue to share experiences and be a support group as they implement learnings in their workplace. Marcia Conner’s book “The New Social Learning” shows how various firms are using tools to augment employee training. Employee communication is often the most ignored aspects of HR initiatives without too much thought or resources being dedicated to it. HR people often forget that communication is a two way process. In my view it is critically important to listen to what employees are saying, and that is an aspect that is usually not done in organizations on a regular basis, apart from an annual or semi annual satisfaction survey. Communication is the bedrock on which the success of change initiatives depends. More and more listening to employees. I foresee large organizations will soon start analyzing data on which employees are thought leaders, experts and influential amongst the workforce (like marketing does for external customers) and try and build them as employee advocates.


47

l

l

Recognition : Companies like Rypple, Globoforce have started the concept of social peer recognition and it can be a powerful factor to excite employees than traditional reward and recognition. Knowledge Sharing: Forget the idea of databases acting as “repositories” of knowledge, internal social networks can capture employees’ work activity as social intranets connect deeper into business applications – and team members can follow what others are doing on their activity streams. Newer tools like Opzi and MindQuilt can also emerge as an enterprise version of Korea, the popular Q&A site.

Let’s think about the aspects of HR work and what can be done “social”. The skills needed for HR people to become savvy socially To manage online communities – HR people would need to become community managers. Community managers are online facilitators who understand how people connect and share online and understand what kind of discussions and content gets people to open up and share. Community management is a subset of roles incorporate various disciplines - and can best be described as Technopologists - a combination of marketing (or recruiting/ HR), technologist and social anthropologist.

As more and more younger workforce enter organizations, their expectations shaped by consumer social applications like Facebook, twitter and blogging, they would want access to similar tools within the workforce.

The focus of the online Community Managers would be to bring in members leveraging the weak ties between people - and providing content around the social object of the community - so that they help members develop strong ties.

The next step would be mobile. For example many internal networks are already available as a mobile app. This would be a key aspect for organizations with a large sales force who are distributed and need constant communication.

Communities and Learning

Communication would lead to collaboration – as more and more employees connect and communicate with each other, they would change work processes itself, making things work faster better and changing processes. Organizations have to continue being open and continue the trusting processes earlier. Can employees and HR professionals and management folks together work together using social media - to do work that was only done by HR people? 48


Talent communities are where people go to connect with fellow professionals and learn. Hence they are more “communities of practice” than anything else. Talent communities are places one goes to find experts and also to build their own personal career brand. Companies must engage in talent communities by letting their internal experts connect with and build their own networks. The best Talent Community Facilitator would be an expert in the roles – not necessarily a recruiter. The Talent community is a place to discuss, solve other’s problems, share war stories

and visions of the future, to look at where the field is headed and what are the skills needed tomorrow. The focus on jobs/recruiting has to be secondary to the above. The skills a Talent Community Facilitator would be a combination of facilitation, teaching, guiding, triggering conversations, mapping the skills of community members and of course skills in the domain of the community. How to Implementation an Internal Social Network

Leadership Readiness Survey – Identify areas in which the leadership can support the internal network. This survey would be administered to the department heads and other leaders identified. The survey would identify the following: 1. The goal what they want from this implementation. 2. The challenges they have in communicating with the employees. 3. Their own readiness to be role models in implementation and usage of the tool.

Create a Social Media Policy – This is a comprehensive document that spells out in detail the behavior expected from the people with access to the enterprise collaboration network. This would include the ways they can use access to the software and what kind of information they should share and also the kind of confidential information they should not share. It would also clarify that they have to be civil in their online discussions.

Survey Finding

Social Network Needs Survey – Conduct a survey of the employees who to find the following:

Implementation and Set-Up

l

l l

l

l

l

The challenges they face in information sharing and accessing expertise The level of openness in the organization Their comfort with using social tools to share information and engage with others The challenges in keeping track of changes to information and version control The challenges of managing email overload The familiarity of colleagues who are not in their immediate team

The focus would be on the following: 1. The culture and processes that support the enterprise collaboration software 2. The needs of the organization where information sharing will have the immediate and most impact. 3. The strategy and planning for the implementation of the tool. Decide on: l

Content to be profiled on the software

l

Access Controls

l

Department Creation

l

Project Creation

l

People who would have administrative controls

The modules in the tools that need to be activated and which ones do not need to be. Who will have access to which content and module would also need to be decided. Other processes which need to be moved to the tool would also need to be decided and users trained on how to use the social technology to do that process. . April | 2013 NHRD Network Journal

49

2. Ongoing Community cum Engagement Management Choosing Community Managers and training them on community management is critical to adoption of the internal network. Designing a communication plan (like a contest, internal campaign) before launch so that people are excited when it is launched and signed up. Launch internal social network by implementation of the designed Communication plan. Use social recognition to incentivize desired sharing behaviors Design a content plan for senior executives to share content like blogs, photos, updates on the enterprise network. The focus and objectives of these would be: Share company updates. Suggested Content Plan. 1. Company Updates 2. Client wins 3. Rewards & Recognition. 4. Ideas/Suggestion 5. Press Coverage of leadership/ Company. Assess: Ongoing assessment of employee engagement – and driving engagement by triggering conversations on a regular basis. Outcomes: Survey of users after 6 months to find out if the network is helping them do their work better and faster. Do they: l

Know more about colleagues

l

Know more about their company

l

Join and engage in internal communities. 50


Other outcomes could be: 1. Metrics like how much time has come down to turn around a document. 2. Tracking projects and assigning tasks are doing on the network and not on emails 3. People create interest based communities on their own and share interesting content on them. 4. Employees give each other recognition and therefore raise motivation and engagement. Implementing external online communities Before implementing external community organizations should conduct a “listening exercise” using third party tools (simple to complicated, free to paid all available) and find out if there are any conversations about it and if there are, what is the tonality of that conversation. Once a listening exercise has been conducted a purpose of external communities has to be articulated, why, which target group, and which channel. After that what content and conversations need to be created and therefore the roles assigned to people either internally or to an outsourced partner. An escalation and response plan also needs to be in place, if questions and doubts are articulated. In conclusion In conclusion, social media can be used in a variety of ways, and it is not a question of if but when, all companies would need to respond and react to it. The ones that make the initial moves will be the winners over the laggards. HR has a critical role to play and also one of the critical functions that would be impacted by business being social. To be relevant HR needs to build its own capability in social as well as facilitate the change that organizations will go through.

A business within the business Dave gray

About the Author Dave Gray is the founder and CEO of liminl, a design consultancy focused on change and innovation. Dave has authored two books on designing change and innovation. Dave is the founder of XPLANE, the visual thinking company, Dave is also a founding member of VizThink, an international community of Visual Thinkers, and serves on several advisory boards.

A

lot of problems in business could be solved if we could align the interests of employees and managers with owners. The idea of aligned incentives is kind of a holy grail: to align the interests of managers and employees with the owners of the business. Why do so many incentive plans fail? We pay commissions to salespeople because we want them to get energized about selling things. We use profit-sharing and stock options to get people excited about increasing the value of the business. We try to align executive pay with incentives like earnings growth, revenue growth or stock prices.

But too often these attempts fail to get people to think and act like owners. Why? Short-term thinking. Since we have to reward people within a reasonable time frame, many incentives tend to focus on short-term measures. Optimizing incentives for short-term results discourages longterm thinking that may be necessary to ensure the survival of the company in the long run. For example, in the rush to earn commissions, salespeople make deals that the company can’t make a profit on, or push customers to buy more than they need, or offer too much because they want to squeeze in a deal at the end of the quarter. Too vague. Stock-option and profitsharing plans reward employees when the company does well, but the larger the company, the more difficult it becomes for people to feel that their efforts have an impact on the stock price. Frontline workers often have a hard time believing that anything they do can affect stock prices or profits one way or another. Their impact is just too small relative to the actions of the company as a whole.


51

The industrial era was built on the kind of carrot-and-stick management that rewards some behaviors and punishes others. This has been successful in a world of predictability, where work can be broken down into routine tasks that can be done according to a prescribed formula. But in the coming years, we will need their heads and hearts as well as their hands.

Drive: The Surprising truth about what motivates us, Dan Pink points out that in a world which increasingly requires people to think creatively, solve problems and remain flexible in uncertain environments, extrinsic incentives don’t work, and we should instead focus on the kinds of intrinsic motivation that drives artists, inventors and other creative professions: mastery, autonomy and purpose. Intrinsic motivation does indeed motivate people and drive creative success. But a quick look at the history of inventors and other creative people will confirm that, while creativity and invention may be necessary components of innovation, they are not sufficient if you want to achieve both innovation and business results. The great innovators in business did not succeed on creativity alone; their success was a blend of creative thinking and business logic. There was no lack of creativity and invention in Xerox PARC, but Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were able to translate that creativity into a tangible product that people were willing to pay for. The great innovators in business – Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Walt Disney, 52


Sam Walton, Ted Turner and so on – blended creativity with business sense and a deep understanding of customers and market dynamics. The challenge in aligning incentives is threefold: First, incentives must be real and tangible enough that people can see the impact they have on the business as a whole; second, they should balance long-term and short-term thinking; and third, they should balance rewards so they reward people for things that make the business as a whole healthier and more successful. A good incentive system should reward people for thinking and acting like owners. So is it possible to get every worker to act as if they own the business? The answer is actually quite simple. The way to get everyone to act as if they own the business is to give them a “business within the business.” The popular organization In a divisional organization, you divide the labor into functions and specialties. As you

continue to divide an organization in this way, you increase efficiency, but as a side effect you also disconnect the people from the overall purpose of the business. People in a functional group tend to identify with each other more than they identify with the purpose of the organization. How can you divide the labor in your organization to optimize for innovation rather than efficiency? The answer is to supplement divisional thinking with another approach: popular thinking. In a popular organization, you divide labor into “businesses within the business,” each

of which can function as a complete service in its own right. Since each pod functions as a small business, its focus remains outside the pod, on its customers. Those customers might be inside or outside the organization as a whole, but each pod delivers a complete service. A popular approach allows a large company to act as if it was a flock or swarm of small companies; it gives the whole a level of flexibility and adopts that would never be possible in a divisional organization. A popular organization is a fractal organization: every pod is an autonomous fractal unit that represents, and can function on behalf of, the business as a whole. How is this possible? Let’s look at four examples from four different industries: A food processing company, a retailer, a software company and a conglomerate. Morning Star’s self-organizing marketplace. Morning Star, a privately held company, was started in 1970 as a one-truck owneroperator hauling tomatoes. Today the company is the world’s largest tomato processor, with revenues of $700 million a year. At Morning Star, workers manage themselves and report only to each

other. The company provides a system and marketplace that allows workers to coordinate their activities. Every worker has suppliers and customers – and personal relationships – to consider as they go about their work. Every employee writes a personal mission statement that describes how they will contribute to the company’s goal, and is also responsible for the training, resources and cooperation they need to achieve it. Every employee also creates a yearly Colleague Letter of Understanding (CLOU), describing their promises and expectations for the coming year, negotiated in face-to-face meetings with peers. All the agreements, taken together, describe about 3,000 peer-to-peer relationships that describe the activities of the entire organization. Each Morning Star business unit also negotiates agreements with other units in a similar way.

Every two weeks, the company publishes detailed reports of finances and other measures, which are transparent and available to everyone. Business units are ranked by performance, and those at the bottom of the list can expect a tough conversation. At a yearly planning meeting, business units present their plans to the entire company and workers invest using a virtual currency which then informs the budgets for the year. Workers elect compensation committees who evaluate performance and set pay levels based on performance. Morning Star is a marketplace, where every worker is a business within the business. You can read more about April | 2013 NHRD Network Journal

53

Morning Star on their website or in this excellent HBR article by Gary Hamel, First, Let’s Fire All the Managers. The Nordstrom Way Nordstrom is a publicly traded high-end retailer, known for excellent service, with revenues of about $9 billion a year. Nordstrom’s employee handbook is so short and simple it can fit on an index card. It states:“ Use your best judgment in all situations. There will be no other rules.”

Nordstrom salespeople are free to make their own decisions, although Nordstrom’s strong culture of putting the customer first provides a guiding light for all to steer by. That customer-service culture is at the core of Nordstrom’s success. The entire system is organized in order to support that salesperson on the Nordstrom floor to help them deliver the best possible customer service. If Nordstrom stocks something, they will make every effort to stick it in every size available – they don’t want to disappoint a customer by not having something in their size. Salespeople aren’t chained to a department like they are in other stores. If a salesperson wants to walk through the whole store to help her customer pick out clothes, shoes, cologne, and anything else, she can do that. A Nordstrom salesperson might stay in touch with customers by Twitter, email, or whatever else is convenient. The message to customers is: however you want to buy it, however you want to interact with us; we can do it that way. 54


“Nordstrom has the faith and trust in its Frontline people to push decision-making responsibilities down to the sales floor, the Nordstrom shopping experience is “as close to working with the owner of a small business as a customer can get,” said Harry Mullikin, chairman emeritus of Westin Hotels. Nordstrom salespeople “can make any decision that needs to be made. It’s like dealing with a one-person shop.” Of The Nordstrom Way: The Insider Story of America’s #1 Customer Service Companyby Robert Spector and Patrick D. McCarthy. Nordstrom culture demands that the employee puts the customer before the company or profit in all decisions. Nordstrom provides a platform, the store, and each employee is treated as an entrepreneur who can set up a business on the platform. With commissions, Nordstrom salespeople can make six figures yearly on a base wage as low as $11 an hour. One worker stated: “The way I saw it, the Nordstroms were taking all of the risks and providing all of the ingredients-the nice stores, the ambiance, the high-quality merchandise-to make it work. All I had to do was arrive every morning prepared to give an honest day’s work, and to value and honor the customer.” Nordstrom employees can offer the best service in the industry because every Nordstrom salesperson operates a business within the business, backed by the full support and resources of a Fortune 500 company. Self-organizing teams at Rational Software. Rational software was founded in 1981 to provide tools for software engineers. The rational was acquired by IBM for $2.1 billion in 2003. The rational’s goal was very transparent to everyone in the company: “Make

customers successful.” Customers were served by small, autonomous pods known as field teams. Each field team operated as a fully functional, stand-alone unit, with technical and business experts working closely together. The same team who sold a product or project was also responsible for delivering it. The resources were distributed to teams based on their performance. The cross-functional teams at Rational were a great way to build entrepreneurial skills within the company, because every team member understood every aspect of the business. Team members worked closely together and learned from each other constantly. As the company grew, many technologists grew into new careers in sales, fielding their own teams in new territories. Many went on to start companies of their own.

intervened. The teams basically managed themselves” says Kernan. Teams made their own hiring decisions, and hired outside consultants or traded resources with other teams when necessary. “You had to be careful when you brought on a new member,” says Ray LaDriere, who worked in one of the rational sales pods. “If you hired someone and they didn’t pull their weight, the deal was that we had to carry them for a full year.” Since one poor performer could hurt the performance of the whole team, people were very careful with their hiring decisions. “It was an amazing experience for 17 years, and I would be surprised if you found anyone who worked at Rational for any significant period of time that didn’t feel the same way” says Kernan. “Our goal was to change the world by changing the way people design, build, and deploy software and we did it.

Rational management focused on managing the teams as if they were a portfolio of companies. Teams were evaluated on five things: First and foremost, customer success: Did the team help customers succeed in achieving their goals? Revenue: Did the team make or beat its revenue targets? Team development: Was the team optimizing for the career growth of each team member as well as the team? Territory growth: Was the team growing in reach as well as revenue? Business Basics: Did the team plays well with other teams? Did they spend money as if it was their own? Top-down intervention in team dynamics has been rarely necessary. When a team member wasn’t performing, the greatest pressure for improvement came from the team itself. “When I was a district manager I had 25 direct reports, but I rarely

Democratic management at Semco Semco is a Brazilian conglomerate that specializes in complex technologies and services like manufacturing liquids, powders and pastes for a variety of industries; refrigeration; logistics, and information processing systems; real estate, inventory and asset management; and biofuels. Semco’s revenues are around $200 million a year. Semco is a self-managed company. There is no HR department. Workers at Semco choose what they do as well as where and when they do it. They even choose their own salaries. Subordinates review their supervisors and elect corporate leadership. They also initiate moves into new businesses and out of old ones. The company is run like a democracy. Says CEO Ricardo Semler: “I’m often asked: How do you control a system like this? Answer: I don’t. Let the system work for itself.” Semco is organized around the belief that employees who can participate in


55

a company’s important decision will be more motivated and make better choices than people receiving orders from bosses. Workers in each business unit are represented by an elected committee that meets with top managers regularly to discuss any and all workplace issues, and on important decisions, such as plant relocations, every employee gets a vote. Semler says simply, “If you want people to act like adults you need to treat them like adults.” One of the principles underlying SEMCO’s success is the idea that every business should be small enough that each worker can comprehend it as a whole system. If a business grows to more than 150 people, SEMCO will split it into two. Another principle is transparency and trust. “The only source of power in an organization is information, and withholding, filtering, or retaining information only serves those who want to accumulate power through hoarding,” says Semler.

Once a month Semco holds open meetings for the employees of each unit, where all the numbers in the business are presented for open examination and debate. The company also offers courses to help employees better understand financial reports such as balance sheets, Profit-andloss reports, and cash flow statements. Nearly a quarter of Semco’s profits go to employees, but the company doesn’t decide how to distribute it. Each quarter, the profit contribution of each unit is calculated, and 23% of profits going to 56


that unit employees, who can distribute it however they wish. So far, they have always decided to distribute that money evenly to everyone. Employees who are particularly confident can choose to put up to 25% of their pay “at risk.” If the company does well, they get a bonus raising their compensation to 150% of normal; if the company does poorly, they are stuck with 75% of their pay. Does it work? Semco has grown from $4 million in 1980 to more than $200 million today. Can your company go podular? Although each company has done it differently, Morning Star, Nordstrom, Rational and Semco have all found success by organizing along podular lines. This kind of design won’t make sense for every situation, or for every division. But no company can afford to ignore its innovation efforts. To ensure its long-term viability, every company needs to find a balance between their efficiency and innovation efforts. The podular organization may be unusual, but it’s not a theory. It’s a fact. It can work in retail, it can work in manufacturing, it can work in technology, and it can work for a conglomerate. It can work for private as well as publicly-traded companies. It can work for a Fortune 500 company. Can it work for you? You can only find out if you’re willing to give it a chance. You might start by reorganizing a single unit, like an innovation unit, a single store or location, or an R&D group. Look inside any R&D department or fast-growing web services company and you are likely to see a form of organization that’s more popular than hierarchical. Podular organizations need to do a few things in radically different ways: First, they require information to be transparent

and readable by everyone; second, they require principles, platforms and culture to guide individual decisions and give cohesion to the company as a whole; third, they require people who are not territorial, who are capable of open discussion and who will hold themselves and others accountable; and fourth; they require owners and managers who are capable of trusting people and teams to make good decisions and manage their “business within the business.”

When you give people a business within your business, you are aligning their incentives with owners and management. Everyone is a business owner, and everyone is a manager. The rewards are real and tangible, short-term and long-term benefits are in balance, and workers are rewarded when they are good stewards of the business. If you want to unleash innovation, get closer to customers, manage complexity, and pods are worth a look.


57

What If Ideas Mattered? Bill Fischer

About the Author Bill Fischer is a Professor of Innovation Management at IMD. He also authors a regular column for Forbes.com entitled “The Ideas Business”. He was the President of the China Europe International Business School, in Shanghai (1997-1999). His most recent books include: Reinventing Giants (2013), The Idea Hunter (2011) and Virtuoso Teams (2005).

I

deas should matter! At least that’s part of the premise of life in the 21st century. Especially in a time of “big data”, we believe, or at least espouse, that knowing things has become more important than making them. Li & Fung, the world’s largest player in the apparel industry owns virtually no producing assets. What it knows – about manufacturing quality and capacity, about supply chains and design – has been, at least until now, sufficient to allow it to sustain its leadership in an industry where, formerly, manufacturing assets were by far the key competency for any firm. In fact, we live in a time that should be a “perfect storm” for idea-work: we are in the midst of an unprecedented period of innovation, Creation and proliferation; where we are the beneficiaries of a treasurebox of products and services that are the result of great ideas. At the same time, many of the geographic and cultural barriers that for so long frustrated ideaflow has been overcome, and more than 40% of the world’s population [in the four original BRIC nations] is finally 58


entering/reentering the world economy as consumers, as well as producers. Finally, we live in an era where we urgently need more ideas to deal with global problems, such as climate change, wealth disparities, energy, water and food shortages, an end to permanent war; where the potential of human intelligence offers us our best hopes for the survival of the species, if not the planet. This would appear, on the face of it, to be a marriage made in heaven: the need for good, new ideas plus the capabilities to create, find and deliver them! Yet, if we look at the world around us, it seems selfevident there is a disconnect between such hopes and the realities of what is actually happening. Perhaps, ideas don’t matter all that much, after all? If we follow the long-held Chinese admonition to learn truth from facts, then the “facts,” as I see them through many experiences with well-known companies, suggest that once you get past the corporate rhetoric, in the large majority of cases, ideas don’t matter to the degree that we might think. They are not universally welcomed in modern, complex organizations, nor are

those who routinely introduce new ideas into these same organizations likely to be celebrated for their contributions. Consider, if you will, that in the age of “big data,” there are relatively few organizations who effectively know enough about their customers to rely upon knowledge as a part of their value proposition; you can see it in your own experiences as a consumer. Somehow, we are failing to appreciate the opportunities inherent in knowing things, and consequently run the risk of missing out on innovating new business models that put knowledge and ideas at the very center of their value propositions. All of this raises a series of questions that are as troubling as they are profound: 1. What if ideas really did matter in our organization?

l

l

l

l

How would our value-proposition change? Would we work together differently? Is our present organizational metaphor [most likely “command & control”] appropriately or do we need a new one? Are there organizations currently doing this today?

2. What would an organization employing “the brain and organism” as a guiding metaphor look like? Would we hire the same people and organize them in the same way?

l

l

l

How would my job differ? What would it feel like to work here?

3. What is frustrating our moving to ideawork as the basic building block of a knowledge economy? 4. How does “leadership” work in such situations?

What if ideas really did matter in our organization? For the past 250 or so years, since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, the scale has counted for more than smart in the behaviors, strategies and designs of complex organizations. Perhaps this is naturally attributable to the rise of an economic middle-class and the lessons of mass production in the pursuit of economies of scale, but increasingly I also sense that it is partly the outcome of commonlyheld, but out-of-date stereotypes that characterize customers as simple (rather than complex), unsophisticated, and preferring price over all other product or service attributes. With such beliefs, new ideas are regarded as more of an irritant than opportunity, even when they suggest better ways of working and more efficient processes. Not surprisingly, the dominant metaphor around which organizations were constructed became, and remain, the command and control model that is so typically represented in our tables of organization, or in Gareth Morgan’s “machine” or “political” metaphors1. Ironically, our own work on Virtuoso Teams2 found that great innovative teams regarded their customers in just the opposite fashion: complex, sophisticated and discriminating; in short, much more interesting than the traditional industry stereotype! Such a natural inclination could never flourish in a controlled or oppressive organizational model, and so a new model would have to be adopted. Gareth Morgan’s work suggests some combination of “the organism,” where “different organizational elements [are allowed] degrees of freedom in which to find their own mode of integration,”3 and “the brain,” where ideas would be valued, and learning would be the ultimate April | 2013 NHRD Network Journal

59

organizing objective, as metaphors that might be chosen to guide organizational design. In fact, Lars Kolind’s efforts to reinvent the Danish hearing aid producer, Oticon, were interpreted by many as being very much in the spirit of brain and organism metaphors in its design4, albeit in a fairly small, but industry-leading organization. Oticon is representative of a small set of organizational experiments, including ABB and Morning Star5, where employed talent is unleashed through the authorization of self-organizing groups that take responsibility for creating new ideas and then executing on them. The extreme flexibility that is inherent in such an approach means that such organizations will have to adjust to varying-enlargement, rather than the variance-reduction that characterized the industrial revolution’s devotion to mass production, and that, as a result, project-based organizations will prevail, where the typical worker will be relied upon more for ideas than in traditional organizing models. The real question, of course, is just how much is this encouragement of new ideas translated into the value proposition of the organization? In our recent work on the Chinese whitegoods global leader, Haier, we found that creating new value-propositions to agree with changing organizational contexts, demands the complimentary reinvention of organizational cultures to support these value-proposition changes6. Without the synchronized changes in both business models and organizational culture, it is doubtful that successful and sustainable change can be maintained. What would an organization employing “the brain and organism” as a guiding metaphor look like? 60


We also live in a time of profound social and technical revolution occurring in the lives of our value-chain partners. Take the role of social media, for example, and its reliance upon openness and sharing that characterize so much of our social media behavior, not to mention the accelerated clock speeds that are associated with living in an internet age, is it not foolhardy to design and conduct organizations as if they are untouched by such trends? This was exactly the argument raised by former Nestlé CEO Peter Brabeck, when he looked upstream and downstream in their value-chain and saw a consolidation of suppliers and customers that threatened to shift the balance of value-chain partner from a geographically fragmented Nestlé to its more coherent partners, and which ultimately led to the initiation of the Globe project at Nestle7. Similarly, it was a concern about customers living in an internet world that led Zhang Ruimin to decide it was time for the reinvention of Haier’s organizational culture8 -- if consumers were used to instant responses in a networked world, how could Haier remain as a scale-seeking fortress? The real impact of such changes has to do with an increased reliance upon the employees as the source of initiative and change, and a profound shift in the role of middle managers from decision-makers to supporters (as a transition role), and ultimately disappear as a leadership role. In such an eventuality, it becomes necessary not only to license individual autonomy, but also to prepare the large majority of the workforce to regard themselves as “knowledge professionals”, if not Idea Hunters.9 Since such skills are typically not taught in formal education processes, there is a need to develop such

competencies as part of the organizational reinvention. Furthermore, this new role is not without its own challenges, and while many employees will feel liberated with such freedoms, others will be intimidated by the new responsibilities that go along with them. Addressing such challenges may become the future of the HR function, as it shifts from administration to the remapping of conversational flows and decision-making within an organizational format. What is frustrating our moving to ideawork as the basic building block of a knowledge economy? Being smarter is not necessarily easy, however. Many impediments arise to frustrate it. What if your value proposition was explicitly built around knowing more than your competitors and then delivering on that knowledge? What if you hired really smart people and then actually allowed them to be smart? What if you no longer made or served anything, other than knowledge? Could you actually do this right now? What would your business model look like? How would a manager’s role change? Such questions threaten to overwhelm the average manager and invite a complete rethinking not only of the organization, but also of his or her role and position. In fact, when Haier CEO Zhang Ruimin overturned his organizational pyramid, in an effort to remove any distance to the customer, he was faced with fundamental questions about the value of middle-management,10 and it is just such fears that have proven to be the primary source of resistance to organizational reinvention.11 Organizational fear is insidious, yet widespread. If there has been any surprise

in my professional view of the world over the past few years, it has been about how ubiquitous organizational fear truly is, especially in difficult economic times. Overcoming fear is a necessary prerequisite for liberating the soul and dreams of both management and workers, and this is all necessary to move into the future. How does “leadership” work in such situations? The key to all of this, of course, is strong, topdown, self-confident leadership. Without ambitious, visionary, unreasonable and decisive decision-making in the pursuit of organizational reinvention, none of this will be able to occur. It is not surprising to find that every aspect of an organization’s culture needs to be changed, and simultaneously, if such daring visions are to be realized in a coherent and effective manner. Only leaders can do this in an effort to unleash all of an organization’s talent. Five Ideas That Can Be Tried Out 1. Prototype a business model for your organization that is asset-light and ideacentric. You can do this by employing Osterwalder and Pigneur’s Business Model Canvas approach 12 , and prototype different business models. 2. Compare and contrast organizational designs and job descriptions for your organization that are based on the present metaphor that guides your organization [probably either machine or politics] and one that is based on a combination of organism and brain. Here, I would rely upon Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organization, and try different metaphors to suggest various organizational prototypes. 3. Be an Idea Hunter: work with the Venn diagram approach on this link13 to April | 2013 NHRD Network Journal

61

understand what sort of ideas you and your team need to hunt, and then hunt for them. 4. Map the idea-flows that currently characterize your organization. What do they look like? How effective are they? Then, engineer these flows to move more and more different ideas, faster through the organization. What would have to change to make this permanent?

5. Identify the sources of fear within your organization and suggest how and where you can alleviate these corrosive features. Finally, in the spirit that more ideas are always better than fewer, let me add a sixth: 6. What would leadership requirements at your organization look like if the job of the leader was to facilitate better idea flow, rather than controlling results?

1 Gareth Morgan, Images of Organization, Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE Publications, 1986. 2. Andy Boynton & Bill Fischer, Virtuoso Teams, London: FT/Prentice Hall, 2005. 3 Morgan, ibid., p. 78. 4 Lars Kolind, The Second Cycle, Upper Saddle River, NY, Wharton, 2006. 5. Gary Hamel, “First, Let’s Fire All the Managers,” Harvard Business Review, December 2011. 6 Bill Fischer, Umberto Lago and Fang Liu, Reinventing Giants, San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2013. 7 Charles H. Fine, Clockspeed, New York: Basic Books, 1999. 8 Peter Killing, Nestlé’s Globe Program (A): The Early Months, IMD case-3-1334, 2003. 9

Reinventing Giants, ibid

10 Andy Boynton and Bill Fischer (with Bill Bole), The Idea Hunter, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011. 11. Reinventing Giants, ibid. 12 Pekka A. Viljakainen and Mark Mueller-Eberstein, et. al., No Fear, London: Marshall Cavendish, 2011. 13 Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, Business Model Generation, New York: Wiley, 2010.

62


ABOUT THE JOURNAL


T

he National HRD Network publishes a semi-academic quarterly journal where in each issue is dedicated to a theme.

Technology and HR Volume 6

Issue 2

April 2013

The journal publishes primarily three categories of articles :

NHRD Network Board Members

• Conceptual and research based

National President:

Sy. Siddiqui, MEO (Admn - HR, Fin & IT), Maruti Suzuki India

• Contributions from thought leaders including a limited number of reprints with due permission

Some of the Past National Presidents :

NS Rajan, Partner, Human Capital and Global Leader – HR Advisory, Ernst & Young

• Organizational experiences in HR interventions/mechanisms.

Aquil Busrai, Chief Executive Officer - Aquil Busrai Consulting

Dwarakanath P, Director-Group Human Capital - Max India

Dr. Santrupt Misra, Director - Aditya Birla Group

Dr. T V Rao, Chairman - T V Rao Learning Systems

Regional Presidents: East:

Sourav Daspatnaik

South:

S V Nathan, Director U.S. India Talent, Deloitte

West:

Rajeev Dubey, President (Group HR & After-Market) & Member of the Group Executive Board, Mahindra & Mahindra

North:

S Varadarajan, Executive President - HR, Tata Teleservices

National Secretary:

Prince Augustin, EVP – Group Human Capital & Leadership Development, Mahindra Group

National Treasurer:

L. Prabhakar, Head-Human Resources (Agri-Business Division), ITC Ltd.

Director General:

Kamal Singh

Editorial Team

Pratik Kumar and Abhijit Bhaduri, WIPRO Ltd. (Guest Editors for this issue)

Dr. PVR Murthy, Managing Editor, CEO, Exclusive Search Recruitment Consultants, [email protected]

Dr. Pallab Bandyopadhyay, Director - Human Resources, Citrix R&D India Pvt. Ltd., [email protected]

Dr. Arvind N Agrawal, President - Corporate Development & Group HR, RPG Group

Publisher, Printer, Owner and Place of Publication

Kamal Singh, Director General, NHRDN on behalf of National HRD Network, National HRD Network Secretariat, C 81 C, DLF Super Mart, DLF City, Phase IV, Gurgaon122 002. Tel +91 124 404 1560 e-mail: [email protected]

Printed at

Nagaraj & Co. Pvt. Ltd., 156, Developed Plots Industrial Estate, Perungudi, Chennai 600 096. Tel : 044 - 66149291

The views expressed by the authors are of their own and not necessarily of the editors nor of the publisher nor of authors’ organizations

Copyright of the NHRD Journal, all rights reserved. Contents may not be copied, emailed or reproduced without copyright holders’ express permission in writing.

About this issue : Publications so far include on themes of apparent relevance to HR fraternity like: Performance Management, Coaching, Employee Relations etc., while the theme for the current issue on “Technology and HR” is chosen as technology is increasingly playing a vital role. This theme is aimed to stimulate our thinking about the advancement technology has made in further enhancing the role of HR profession. In the editorial note and the articles, these thought leaders challenge us and raise interesting possibilities. Editorial Board Members : Dr. P.V.R. Murthy, Managing Editor is a product of I.I.T., Kharagpur and IIM, Calcutta with close to thirty years experience in H.R. field. He founded and runs an executive search firm Exclusive Search Recruitment Consultants. He is associated with a number of academic institutions. He is trained in TQM in Japan and in human processes from ISABS and NTL, U.S.A. He is the Past National Secretary of National HRD Network. Dr. Pallab Bandyopadhyay is Director - Human Resources Citrix R&D India PVT Ltd. A doctoral fellow from XLRI and AHRD, he is trained in OD and Human Processes from NTL, USA and he believes in applying HR concepts to practice to make it more meaningful and effective. He is a mentor and coach to many young HR professionals. Dr. Arvind N Agrawal - Dr. Arvind N. Agrawal, Ph.D. serves as the President and Chief Executive of Corporate Development & Human Resources and Member of Management Board of RPG Enterprises. Dr. Agrawal has worked at RPG Enterprises since 1999 and his current responsibilities in RPG comprise of HR and TQM. Agrawal held senior positions in Escorts and Modi Xerox. He was the past National President of the National HRD Network. Dr. Agrawal is an IIM Ahmedabad alumnus and also an IIT Kharagpur alumini, and also holds a PhD from IIT Mumbai. NHRD firmly believes in and respects IPR and we appeal to the contributors and readers to strictly honour the same. For any further clarifications, please contact : The Managing Editor Dr. P V R Murthy, CEO, Exclusive Search Recruitment Consultants, #8, Janaki Avenue, Off 4th Street, Abhiramapuram, Chennai 600 018. [email protected]


ISSN - 0974 - 1739

NHRD Network Journal April 2013

Volume 6

Issue 2

National HRD Network

The underlying philosophy of the NHRDN is that every human being has the potential for remarkable achievement. HRD is a process by which employees in organizations are enabled to:

Estelle Metayer Dr. annie Mckee and abhijit Bhaduri dr. Venkatesh Pamu santosh desai Technology and HR

The National HRD Network, established in 1985, is an association of professionals committed to promoting the HRD movement in India and enhancing the capability of human resource professionals, enabling them to make an impactful contribution in enhancing competitiveness and creating value for society. Towards this end, the National HRD Network is committed to the development of human resources through education, training, research and experience sharing. The network is managed by HR professionals in an honorary capacity, stemming from their interest in contributing to the HR profession.

Technology and HR

anita Bhogle and harsha Bhogle s V nathan

• acquire capabilities to perform various tasks associated with their present and future roles;

dr. Vishal shah

• develop their inner potential for self and organizational growth;

gautam ghosh

• develop an organizational culture where networking relationships, teamwork and collaboration among different units is strong, contributing to organizational growth and individual well-being.

dave gray Bill fischer April 2013

www.nationalhrd.org

harish Bijoor

A Quarterly Publication by The National HRD Network

www.nationalhrd.org