Feel the heat.

The million-dollar question is why people change? People don’t change easily. They are driven by the habit they follow. Habits can be hard to break and hard to create new. However, we continue to acquire & create new habits unknowingly all the time. Accordingly, we demonstrate the behaviour. The behaviour is seen by many people but very few give the feedback to correct the wrong behaviour. This needs courage, courage to challenge self, challenge the status quo and challenge the overall assumption we follow every day.

It starts with the tasks and jobs we do, questions we get and answers we give. In our life all the events, all the tasks, jobs, question etc can be classified in three categories as under:

• Doable
• Stretched
• Broad possibilities

Doable: You do it easily. You have required skills, competence, and experience to handle such events or questions. 60% employees, 60% people in this world are happy doing things that they know. They are happy to handle regular jobs, in fact, maintain what they get in the legacy. You have the knowledge, skills, and experience. If you are a production engineer, you don’t go beyond that and the same applies to others. This doesn’t mean that you are not doing your job good. You are perfect; however, you are not eager to stretch yourself.  

Stretched: You have the right skills, competence, and experience but you have to take extra efforts to perform. You have to do some research, benchmark with peers, learn from others, network and influence others who are not related to you. You have to find the solution based on your skills, competence, and experience. But your current knowledge, skills, experience may not be enough to get those answers. For example, you are comfortable working with the customer to whom you are working for the last few years and all of sudden your boss assigns the new customer who is very notorious and difficult to manage. 20% employees, people come in this category.

Broad possibilities: Sky is the limit. You don’t know anything. This is a new territory, new company, new function, new geography, new people, new customers. Your existing skills, experience, competence may work or may not work. You have to reinvent yourself. Growth mindset is the requirement of such events. You have to stretch beyond your limitations and beyond your imaginations. For example, working on a greenfield project in another country, or taking a different role, which is not your functional domain, or handling the strong union, strong situation and leading the team during crisis events like pandemic. 

There are no ready-made answers, but you have the mindset where you use your skills, experiences, and competence to find the new solutions. In this process, you have pressure and stress. You feel the heat, but you learn a lot. The heat you feel may burn you, but you become comfortable afterwards. If the heat is not comfortable, you are doing too much and take a pause to think and ask the question, what are you looking for and what is the purpose? Great leaders and successful people go through this process. If you are managing such events, questions, situations, you are among 10% of employees. 

If you want to do something extraordinary find out your possibilities.

The question is where the remaining 10% have gone? Do you know them?

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What is there in the future?

Staying ahead of the game to be able to stay in it: Top trends to follow.

“The future is already here; it's just unevenly distributed.” ~ William Gibson

I am always saying that Covid19 has just accelerated the transformation in areas like digital transformation, new ways of working and different areas of business. In view of different global, technological, workplace and workforce trends, the total narrative will change. If you want to distinguish between high performing organizations and average organizations following are the focus areas, high performing organizations have. It is just not for their corporate presentations, but they have strategic intent which is very much weaved in their corporate strategy.

I have spoken with different leaders/CHROs during pandemic, participated in different webinars and studied different research done by top consultants like McKinsey, PwC etc. and I have interesting findings. Following are those imperatives & trends if followed, chances of being successful is more.  

“People First” Focused Strategy

Speaking about “People First” strategy is very good. Most of the organizations are already speaking about it, but very few organizations are working on this. It is very sad that organizations are laying off employees who are working with them for long. However high performing organizations are now consolidating on talent strategy. They have already incorporated 3P (People, Planet and Profit) elements in the strategy.

People: I have read and listened to a lot of CEOs quoting that people are their asset. The statements of those CEOs like, “We can’t be successful in the society which fails”. Or “Business can't succeed in a failing society” are popular in the media. However, very few organizations have pragmatic policies on this and integrated with their purpose and mission statement. Organizations which have integrated are doing great today. Taking care of people who are working with you and people around you in society is novel thought. It is not just about employees but society at large.

Sustainability & Planet

Sustainability is a long term. It is avoidance of the depletion of natural resources in order to maintain an ecological balance. Lot of organizations are working to reduce their carbon footprint and trying to maintain the ecological balance by manufacturing clean products and focusing on 3R (Reduce, Reuse and Recycle). It is very important to understand which planet we want to transfer to new generations.

Profit with ethical standards 

We are grown listening that earning profit is bad. So-called leftist ideology and trade unions associated the business as a bad evil and conditioned the mind of people negatively like capitalism is there to exploit employees and society. But they totally failed to understand that you can’t survive on their principle and hence big communist countries themselves are capitalist mind exploiting the society.

High performing organizations have views that ethical profitability is far more than merely operating within the boundaries of the law. The true test of ethical profitability is whether or not the company is a positive example to its employees, to its customers and even to other companies. Such companies practice the truest form of leadership-by-example.     

Digital Transformation to Digital Integration

We have discussed a lot about digital transformation. We all know that Covid19 has accelerated the digital agenda in organizations. High performing organizations are not now speaking about the transformation but digital integration. It is about creating a habit of using and integrating digital platforms in our day to day life. You need to develop people on how to use those, how to present, how to sell and how to collaborate. It is about different behaviours than digital technology itself.   

Gen Z Will Take Over, (born between 1997 to 2016)

Organizations always struggle when there is an addition of the next generation in the workforce. Youth born between 1997 to 2000 are ready to join the workforce. We have seen a lot of challenges of generation X while managing the millennial generation. All generations are different and unique. Their style is different, and their ambition is different. Organizations have to work on inclusion and diversity and making the life easy of all generations. It includes training them on managing people, bringing the diverse view in talent management and talent development initiatives. Your talent management process which you used to work 10 years back will not work today. You need an action -based talent management system instead of just mapping the people in the talent grid and then forgetting them. Organizations also have to change their views on the definition of talent.   

The Gig Economy is the New Economy

We have seen gig workers in e-commerce, food delivery, travel aggregators like Amazon, Swiggy, Uber, Ola etc. Indian industry has been working with contract labour for the last 2 decades. The gig economy is now prominent in blue collar jobs. After covid19, it will still be popular. However, I am expecting this in white collar jobs also. The Younger generation will be more interested to find the joy and more income from different jobs with different companies with different skills. Free lancers, consultants and retainers will be more. Organizations have to frame policies on how to manage and engage those workforces. There will be social security and information security issues which have to be handled carefully in future.  

Innovation in Business Models

Business needs to be more innovative. They need to reinvent themselves and different business models driven by the technology. Companies also have to think about what those new models are. We have some examples improving the business with the help of technology. Disruptive innovations are changing the rule of the game and you really need to think differently if you want to be in this game.

Customer experience is in the focus,

It is not just selling your product or service. It is more about the customer experience. In the market where your product becomes a commodity over a period of time, you don’t have an option to differentiate it with the value and solution selling. Your customers will come back only when they are happy, satisfied and delighted with your services. It is not about the price and product itself but how it is sold, delivered and serviced further without any problems to the customer.  

Instant Reviews

Online reviews are a double-edged sword. Small mistakes can cost huge loss in reputation and revenue. We have a lot of examples in recent years. If customers are treated with respect and service well, they will be your brand ambassadors. Company CEOs and celebrity brand ambassadors need to be very cautious on what they communicate, write and speak on social and public forums. Instant reviews about your product and services will decide the future of your business.    

Meaningful career and not only jobs

Meaningful career is where you connect with the purpose of the organization and your job. You feel satisfied and happy by doing that in a stress-free, enriched, and ethical way. To do this you understand your interest values and skills. You identify your preferred style and find the community to help you to grow in the organization or outside the organisation. In short, a meaningful career is one where we feel an authentic connection between the work we do and a broader life purpose beyond the self.  Millennials and Z generation is more motivated by the purpose of the organization, career development, empowerment, and openness. They will continue and will be more demanding in this.

Few organizations have already started prioritising talent management agenda. Lot of organizations have to follow it to be competitive in the market.       

From skills to Human skills, Innovations in creating those skills.

To do all above we need talent. With the technology changes and new way of working, employees will have to work on human skills instead of just technical and functional skills. With AI, ML, Sensors, IoT, Additive Printing etc people will need skills where they will manage the automation speedily but also people around them.

Organizations will become more flatter; Organizations will move to project/product-based work groups without any formal reporting lines. Employees will have to work in a web and matrix environment where networking and influencing, collaborating on a virtual platform will be crucial. To do this every employee will have to learn fast. Hence if you want to stay in the course develop your people on human skills along with functional skills.   

A wise person said that only one thing is constant in this world is change. There are external forces which are forcing us to change. There are some indications we are already getting, and we need to take a clue from that.

Finally, I would like to quote Darwin, (researchers say that Darwin never said it) “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”

Please read the print replica of my latest book written for leaders on amazon kindle,  Vitality in Human Resource, Adding human dimensions in HR processes

(Opinions are purely personal & does not represent my organization)

High Performing Culture : Cover Story in Business Manager (March 2019)

Do you think that developing and maintaining a high performance culture is practically possible and easy in organisations or it is merely a buzzword far away from reality and difficult to achieve?

VB A high-performance culture is a set of behaviours and norms that leads an organization to achieve great results by setting clear business goals, defining employees' responsibilities, creating a trusting environment, and encouraging employees to continuously grow and reinvent themselves.

It also means that high performance culture is possible if the top management is willing to do the same. But the Top management should be not being tolerant with mediocrity.

Organizations having focus more on performance get better business results and it is proven. High performance culture is possible with dedicated efforts.

After all, we need to understand that business is set up for specific purpose; the main purpose is to make the impact on something and it is not possible without profits. You need money to make the larger positive impact. It is important to understand how employees are aware about such impact; how they understand that their each action has the consequences on the future. Understanding this creates the culture of high performance.

What should be the key initiatives for creating high performance culture in your view and how do you define them?

VB It is a journey. If the organization and teams are dysfunctional and are in the trap of mediocrity, you need to do the surgery. It is about creating the example in the organization. It starts with C level executives. If top management favours somebody at the cost of performance, then it is very difficult to create the culture of high performance.

You can start this journey with

• Identifying core values and behaviours expected from everybody in the organization;
• Translating these values and behaviours in actionable points;
• Communicating these values and behaviours on a daily basis with some examples while speaking with employees;
• Incorporating values and behaviours in your performance management system;
• Role modelling by management and managers is very important to create the culture;
• Creating the system of feedback and two-way dialogue in the organization and system of handling poor performers. Strict but human approach while handling poor performance is necessary.
• Creating the eco-system and mental safety nets so that employees take risk, there is no high-performance culture without taking risk.
• Reward & recognition system.

In this complex process, what challenges and issues do you expect HR should be ready to address?

VB HR role is to be a change agent and catalyst in the process. Main challenge of HR is their understanding about the business and their ability to respond to the new a way of working. Main accountability of the change is with C-level executives, but HR role is to drive such change in the organization.

HR also needs to know about the political and bureaucratic dimensions of the organization.

Another challenge to HR is about understanding of human behaviours. Unfortunately HR professionals are not properly trained on the concept of HR business partners. In India the term HRBP is widely used but rarely understood, hence the big issue.

Does high performance mean high pressure and more stress on employees? How do you propose to handle this side effect?

VB Oh no. Not at all. High performance culture doesn't mean pressure and stress. You need to create the culture so that employees enjoy the work. There are organizations which have high performance culture with less stress. Optimum stress is necessary, but this does not mean pressure. It is the part of life. The question is how organizations support to handle this with best practices, policies and freedom to employees.

Having a high performing culture is a matter of direct influence from the top? In such absence, what strategies should HR adopt to keep employees' morale high to maintain high performing culture?
VB HR also can create the high-performance culture by 

• Hiring for the potential,
• Creating the learning culture in the organizations,
• Having strong performance and talent management practices,
• Being gatekeeper and helping manager to deal with poor performers,
• Educating line managers to be leaders and not just supervisors.
• HR also can investigate following areas
• Too many layers slow down the decision making and energy of employees?
• How much time employees spend on internal issues instead of their core jobs or customers?
• How much employees are busy with conflicts and just ticking the processes?
• Are employees empowered & managers willing to take risks on their talent?
• Are there too many initiatives and people are spending their energy handling those?

In organisations having diverse workforce and multi-generational effect where technology is fast coming in to mainstream employee processes, what kind of obstacles and psychological blocks you foresee in creating high performing culture and their possible solution?

VB People fear because they think that they will lose something. People resist change because of fear; fear of losing power, job, position and status.

I already said that creating learning organization is the key. Culture of learning and agility will support to have bigger impact and change.

People change because of Pain, Gain and Vision. And these three also can be the psychological blocks. They don't understand that what they will lose, if they don't change, what they will gain something if they change and they don't see the larger, bigger picture of the change.

Solution of psychological block is in same pain, gain & vision. Help them to realise this.

(You can also read this article at Business Manager)