Regenerate!

Yesterday I met a bright young man. He is remarkable in many ways. An NID (National Institute of Design) alumnus,  he runs a small outfit for conducting research in customer experiences. He has as his mentor (sort of) a senior business leader. This mentor of his had asked him to get in touch with me regarding some business idea that he had. ” Meet Hemant, he has done some very intersting work in user interfaces design ..”, his mentor had told him.

The young man said that he was approached by a reputed and well established company (not in customer research space) for setting up their customer research group. “should I take this up?”, he asked me.

Before this, he had told me his story. He wanted to be an artist, but his parents ‘pushed’ him into NID. As if that can be done! Any ways, once out of NID, he discovered that ‘design’ is subjective and clients put up only that much money as much they can without worrying about returns. He found that while many design firms talk about ‘researching customers’ mostly the design that they like are back fitted into the ‘research’.

He said that clients treat research as real and are willing to pay for it if done properly. That is the reason he focused on research.

Now about his proposal. I told him, ’since you believe in research and clients pay for it, the proposal should be pursued. ‘However, ‘ I cautioned him, ‘It will be good idea to decide what all you will not do and that can include design itself…. Also please find out whether the company is serious about it and that it is not just someone’s whim.’

He nodded.

You would have noticed many remarkable things about this young man. Remarkable indeed.

Think of the company which approached him. Isn’t the company also remarkable?

That is the point.  People like this young man and the company which approached him embody the changes.

Leadership is not just about vision, values, and communication. Important though these are,  great leaders do much more -create brands, create great products, and achieve process breakthroughs. Here is an example. The Tata Swach. Design Directions, our associates, provided industrial design to Tata Chemicals for Swatch -water purifier based on nano technology and rice husk.

I work with Design Directions on several projects involving branding, user interface design, industrial design, and product design.  You get a lot with us… Leadership Learning, process breakthroughs, product, UI, and communication design!

Read on for more details….

The chances are that you never come back to it. That’s your fear, so you try to attend to every mail and every call in real time. You stay late and carry your blackberry and your laptop around. (Why do you need both?)

Deep down somewhere, you know that you are not the boss. Those mails, calls, and now sms or tweets are setting your agenda. But at other times you let your designation fool you.

This is not another piece on time management, it is about you taking a lead.

If think reading mail or responding to calls and messages is work, think again.

Let us be ruthless about what qualifies as work:  Work of value happens when you execute a repeatable process generating a result that is of value (expressed in money terms or through ready acceptance for subsequent value generation) for someone inside or outside the organization. OK, there is more. If you do a one time activity that clearly supports the above kind process then that too is work of value-though indirect.

Work of value happens only through processes and projects.

Now, if you examine what you call as work with help above filters, you may have horror on hand. Much of what passes as work is nothing but reminders, repetitions, repairs, and rework.

One CEO whom I was coaching, told me to reschedule our coaching session due to year end sales pressure. I said, ‘Fine. But what is your Head of Sales doing and why do sales need last minute pushing?” “Oh you know how it is..” The CEO was repeating the work that his head of sales was doing. The head of sales was doing a good turn to the organization. He was repeating what his sales executive was doing or supposed to be doing.

I was walking on a shop floor and I could not spot some supervisors. I peeped in the production manager’s cabin. He was away in stores, I was told. ‘Oh there were errors in the parts received..and the supervisors were busy in the quality department for getting clearances”, I learned from him later.

“We have decided to leverage our factory space and the idle machining capacity by taking up job work” another CEO who was heading a machinery business told me. They had a good product portfolio. “But how did you reach this conclusion? Is that your strategy?”, I asked. “That was not our strategy (till yesterday) but it has become necessary” , was his answer. So they were undoing and trying to repair their own strategy. Their machinery portfolio was crying for attention while they had a good customer base.

Think carefully before you brag or wallow about your work or overwork. You may horror on hand!

If something like the above happens with you or around you, you need to take lead and improvise on you leadership skills and build a good agenda. You can do with some coaching too. You can make a big difference.

“When Ajit joined our team there was a great hope. After all, he not only had top rated education but he had also worked at the market leader in our industry. I was very proud to net him. But six months have passed and I no more enjoy meeting him”

CEOs go through such disappointments.

Here are some thoughts before you go for your next prize catch:

-Agreed, Ajit came from the same industry. But working with the market leader can be quite different than working for a company which is trying to come up with better offerings. Being a market leader means that the way things are compared by customers has been set already. On the other hand, at a company offering some thing new, you have to change customers’ benchmarks. Your star recruit may not have done this before.

-Ajit’s excellent education: Great. But your company has been built around people with education from different kind of institutions. You culture is that of looking around and learning by trying things out. Ajit is not used to that. He tends to take many things for granted. That would be a cause of some friction between Ajeet and your other people.  And Ajeet being perceived as a new star would have increased the distance further.

It does not mean that a CEO should only recruit ‘our types’. Quite the opposite. People ‘not like us’ can be a good addition if what they bring adds to the business.One should know what it is.

But how does one find this about new comers when one does not know own people well enough -going by those botched up cases of promoting the favorites?

First thing to do is raise your own capability of developing people -you will start understanding people much better. A good resource for this can be Learning Leadership -it is flexible, accessible, and affordable.

The second thing to do is to prepare yourself well before you start looking for new people. If you do the first one well you will have much to build on for this.

What to do about Ajit who is unfortunately so off-color now?

Perhaps a short assignment to investigate competitive landscape to come up with some ground up thinking might bring him out of his shell? Perhaps.

Any more guesses?

There is no suitable way of making this expression applicable to both the genders. My apologies to talented women executives.  CEOs have their favorites. It is only human to take a liking to someone and develop some trust and comfort with the chosen few. CEO’s have good reasons for this.

The least a CEO, could do is to invest something in your favorite executives. A CEO could for example-

-send them to a Management Development or Executive Education program of a reputed institute and hope that this helps them to develop to those leadership skills needed to shoulder more responsibilities

-send them to an outdoor adventure learning program and hope that they pick up team building and communication skills etc.

-send them on another posting to add to their experience and hope that they pick the skills needed for the higher position

-send them on paid vacation and hope that this motivates them to learn those skills by themselves

-make them understudy of an existing senior person and hope that the current manager is indeed a role model

CEOs try above or variants of the above techniques. But not many give a thought to coaching a person in real work situations, partly because there is not much awareness and partly because executive coaching tends to be very expensive and impractical given the need for physical meetings.

But the fact remains that putting an executive through paces of systematic leadership thinking applied to work situations and with support by an experienced business leader as a coach can be very effective.

In workout based coaching programs, executive need to put in hard thinking about their responsibilities and the coach gives further impetus to their thinking through comments. All this provides opportunity for improvisation and evidence for learning.

You can take a look at Learning Leadership.

The web based workouts and coaching offer a very efficient, affordable, and flexible method for result oriented leadership development.

Give it a try.

The Regenerative Leadership achieves more from less, it embraces changes before they threaten existence, and it sets the organization on to the virtuous loop of higher and higher performance.

The Regenerative Leadership is a loop consisting of activities such as:
-making sense of reality
-understanding, articulating, and implementing general and specific values
-Leveraging small and big ideas
-learning and teaching
-articulating larger vision
-coming up with actions and taking actions that change reality (bias for actions)
-Learning from all above and revisiting all above periodically (the regenerative loop)

I have found that this loop releases energies for change and transformation in organizations that take up such leadership development programs.

For knowing how the regenerative leadrship helps you develop your leadership pipeline read about career planning.

Hemant

Leadership is often described in terms of vision, inspiration, courage, passion, dynamism, motivation, change & transformation, mobilization etc. While all these are important outcomes or facets of leadership they do not offer many clues about how to get there if one wants to develop leadership skills.

When I think about leadership, I can think about feeling responsible and doing something about it. If I think of leadership in the context of organizations I can say that to improve leadership skills one needs to get better at a range of competencies.

A leader should be able to grasp and face reality in all its complexities. The reality must cover ‘own and internal’ reality. The leader should be able to both handle and harness emotions well. He \ she should be able to identify and implement values.  The leader should be able to generate and harness small and big ideas, generate excitement and develop them into overarching vision. The leader should be able to connect with the organization’s goals and generate breakthroughs in projects and processes. He \ she should be able to learn quickly and teach for developing people. The leader should be able to develop an agenda covering all above and should be able to communicate it simply and directly.

At different points of an executive’s career and depending on the organization’s situation the emphasis would shift, but I have come to believe that above competencies remain core.

Having defined the competencies in these specific terms it easier to think about ways of getting there.

There are many facets of leadership -vision, values, transformation, and others. Leadership competencies include ability to understand reality, ability to see the larger picture, ability to marshal resources, passion for developing people, and more.

But if I am asked,  “what is a leader’s ‘output’” or “what is the ‘outcome’ of leadership?”, I will say that on a day-today basis the outcome of ‘good’ leadership is inspiring people to accomplish something, making a routine job worthwhile.

And what is ‘inspiration’? It is feeling which gives that booster dose of energy. If the primary outcome of good leadership is inspiration, can there be able leadership without good emotional capabilities?

Emotional capability is that X-factor behind successful leadership. Emotional capability is not just emotional intelligence.

Without the ability to understand emotions, without the ability to deal with them, and without the ability to harness them, much of a leader’s thinking will remain just thinking and every action will need exercise of formal authority. No matter, what position a leader occupies there are many crucial aspects that are beyond his formal powers. He or she must have that X-factor.

Given the way in which people get their education and ‘training’ on the job, most have learned and have come to believe that emotions are bad, particularly in business or in serious work. This becomes a major factor that hinders capable people from realising full potential -theirs’ and others’.

Development of this X-factor, therefore, is one of the cornerstones of developing leadership skills.

If yes, then give it a little more thought. Your business metrics can make a big impact on your strategic and tactical decisions.

Metrics or measurements used for reviewing and planning various aspects of business have a lot of bearing on the results because what is measured and inspected is considered important by people. Metrics can be classified as historical or forward looking. Bias for historical data and analysis needs to be overcome. Customers, employees, and cash flows can provide vital clues to CEOs aiming to establish more forward looking signals and metrics. One can derive actionable points from even historical metrics if root-cause analysis for coming up with pro-active actions is done. Will all this take CEO’s attention away from vision, innovation, and inspiring people? No. The above methods provide a springboard for day to day innovation and path breaking ideas. They also support realizing the vision.

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First the disclosures: I am not an Apple user \ fan. But I admire ‘design’ aspects of the products.
Apple’s success is design led (with spend in tech to back that). Much has been written about this. To many it appears that Apple does not mind limitation on its market share (due to price levels and \ or proprietary nature) since it gets better margins.
Coming to its strategy I see following factors
1. Limited market share (premium - exclusive positioning) is great for branding and can be a valid strategy if you have ability to unleash product after product that users love.
2. This ability is by no means a given thing even if Steve Jobs is around.
3. Windows or MS is not a great factor -they might sink under the weight of their success.
4. Google docs \ Android or Linux may change landscape once again.
5. If Apple’s product creation waves peter out, it is in a dangerous game of having to fund your ‘attitude’
6. Who knows tide may turn against the current absurd patent regime (read a fortnightly in BS) due to shift of center of Gravity from western civilizations.
7.In any case today there are many non-Apple touch screen based devices and Apple’s uniqueness will wear off unless it keeps come up with something new.
8. It may be the sign of times that Apple had to open of API for Iphone to encourage third party applications. But according to some mobile application developers, it is a pain to deal with Apple.

That’s the way things appear to be at this time. What do you say?