Regenerate!

As I get some time to breath, sitting in a client’s office in Chennai, I see.

Coming out of Channai airport and getting on the arterial road to city, I see with a mixture of pleasure and a bit of jealousy, pedestrians crossing the road with a brisk but not a frantic walk. Of course there are two policemen on either side of the road divider who help this happen. I dream of pleasures of walking in amche Pune.

I see people developing technologies and business models for  providing banking, shopping, and travel services as and when needed. I dream of me not having to repeat my preferences every time I need to bank or travel or buy something . I see that I do not have to negotiate road traffic and aisle traffic in malls and the humanoids there if I choose not to. I see that I do not have to remember to do a web check-in at midnight just to book an aisle seat. Choosing and buying gifts does not have to be such a huge decision making and nerve wrecking exercise. I see around me, hapy people while shopping. That makes me happier too.

In between my work at the client’s place I get some time. I log into our Learning Leadership to coach senior industry people remotely. I see that people in their forties, fifties, or sixties building new businesses and transforming existing ones. I see their commitment for developing themselves even after being successful. I see them coming out with their follies and vulnerabilities just so that they can think better, dream bigger, decide better, and act with purpose. These business leaders are willing to be challenged about their thoughts and they are willing to be corrected. I feel their passion for learning. I feel the energy that their dreams play out.

I see short cuts taken and corners being cut for pennies and careers and lives being sacrificed for some fortune. But also I see people committing themselves to what may come to fruition years later. There are smug people and there are some who  criticize but do not devote their talents for creating. But there are people who dream and create.

I get frustrated with the walls of vested interests that hoodwink us with dubious economics and science - whether for cutting carbon or for Bt Brinjal or for promoting automobile industry or for promoting nuclear energy. But I also see  ethical hackers, RTI activists, and profesionals with heart  -gamely breaching the walls that keep coming up.

I hear about very young people driven to desperation and I see some of them getting too wise and too practical. But I also see young people with gleam in their eyes about their game changing efforts. I see them setting aside limitations of education and asking ‘why not’ to challenges.

I dream too. Dreams, mine & others, make life lively.

As always, change is in the air, I want be part of it.

“We are the best brand in this vertical for delivery of enterprise  computing and we have a global delivery model -this is what our VP told the that big prospective client. I was required to attend our presentation” Mitchell said sounding unhappy.  John nodded as he pressed the cappuccino button for her.

“Do you know what is so special about our brand?”

John looked bank. He said,” Mitchell, this is a typical elevator pitch”

“Is the elevator pitch valid only for the duration of the transit? I constantly get clients’ reminders for pending work and for fixing errors. It is very frustrating. I do not know what a brand means and I no longer wish to know”

It is just as well that the coffee machine capers are not heard in the elevators. For the VP has perhaps no clue to what a brand really stands for. His brand is the market leader so it has to be the best as far as he is concerned.

There are not many companies who can afford to be smug about their market leadership. There are none.

It takes a while to think and act on what a brand really means and how to get there.

Branding is what your customers think about you  and what they think about your market offerings in simple words (great \ so so \ mediocre \ very reliable  and  meticulous \etc). It is obvious that, what customers think flows directly from your offerings and their delivery processes and other customer touching processes.

If these processes are not lead by effective leaders and are not geared to fulfil your promises to customers, your brand value will start slipping and your people will not stand behind your brand.

Coffee machine capers are more potent than elevator pitches. Pay heed.

Learning Leadership offers e-learning and e-coaching services that help in dealing with above issues. Its Regenerative Leadership  model covers business process improvement competencies. On-site or face-to-face engagements are also available in the US and in India.

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.

“My people work really hard. Many of my top managers stay up late and then take their laptops home. But somehow we are not turning out any superlative performance. Our customers think we are ok type. Our employees…the other day I overheard one of our bright team leaders say -Oh! forget what the client says. Listen to your boss..  I was shocked.  I do not understand…”

Somewhere deep in her mind the CEO knows something is not right. Many things may not be right. But there is always the next meeting, the next budget, the next forecast, the next report, and the explanations to be given.

Why do your top managers have to slog? Why do your brightest people appear to have given in?

There are more than one factors behind all this. But I think there is one factor which is almost always there. And one can always get down to doing something about it.

This factor is your business processes.

Now when was the last time you used this phrase? During the ISO 9001 or CMM audit? While pitching for a deal? Or while waxing eloquent on the “learning process”?

What if you take this ‘processes’ thing more seriously and actual start getting a fix on them by

-defining some key business processes e.g. client acquisition, order fulfillment, recruitment (call it talent acquisition if you feel better that way), complaint resolution, product creation etc. Your gut feeling will tell you which are the top two or three vital processes for you as of now.

-fixing some process performance parameters, guess current values, and fix a goal

-appointing some as process leaders and form a team of players

-give them powers and resources to run and to improve processes

-ask your top managers and experts to step back and provide support when needed or take direct process responsibility as process leaders

-review process performance and improvement actions in routine management reviews (you can leave out many other review points)

It is not easy.  But if you stick to it you will be amazed to find performance going up and yes, good (talented) people and not so good people will get marked. Many borderline cases will improve and you will know what to do with the remaining minority.

Process management provides your leaders powerful levers to for shifting gears for future. It makes them leaders.

I conducted a workshop Leadership -How Regenerate and Rejuvenate Your Business at the Renal Unit of K.E.M. Hospital, Pune, India on Nov. 16, 2009. The renal unit’s team had identified the need for delivering better services to patients by upgrading their staff’s leadership skills, improving inter-relationships  amongst the staff and team spirit.

The workshop consisted of selected workouts from Leaning Leadership’s various programs. Doctors, counselors, and other staff of the renal unit participated in this workshop. The participants liked the broad and in depth coverage of leadership principles and workouts that were directly relevant for their work situations.

This workshop once again showed the applicability of Learning Leadership’s learning methods to various sectors and to people with diverse backgrounds.

Sounds familiar. The signs were all there.

She would come up to you and make some good suggestions. You would say ‘great’ and give her a know-all look and an indulgent smile. She would speak with conviction in meetings.  But she would not get a clear mandate from you. At the times of important decisions, she would observe you silently but relentlessly. You would of course indulge her once in a while.

Then one day she quits and you say ‘Oh!I was going to promote her.’ You even make an offer to her. But she has a better opportunity and she has made up her mind.

Sounds familiar. But preventing this takes much more.
-Do you promote people for performance (you can see that) or for potential (not obvious)? One needs to be clear on what additional competencies are needed to perform the next job. Your people too need to be clear about what do they need to learn for their advancement. Read this career planning.
-Do you have an ongoing mechanism for finding out the leadership potential of your people? And for ‘improving’ their potential? For knowing more about a tried leadership development process available, register at Learning Leadership and join the free program Leadership -learning, coaching, and developing.

If you do not a have a confident YES as an answer to each of the questions the above familiar incident might also be a recurrent one.  It is difficult to handle talented people as compared to the mediocre. The mediocre would be happy to plod around.

The talented people must be engaged with twin challenges of learning new skills and taking on more responsibilities. They also need to be coached well.

Learning Leadership brings such leadership coaching to your people through the internet.

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.

You are a CEO and you are weighing options for filling up the position of the Operations Head, which has fallen vacant because the previous occupant left his job. The previous occupant could not cope with the job pressure.

You have a couple of successful project leaders.  Should you chose one of them or should you look beyond?

The usual tendency is to reward good performers by a promotion. That would seem fair. But it is better to ask yourselves some questions. Here are they and some thoughts too.

What are the additional skills that the Operations Head needs to have over above what a competent project leader needs to have?

I think that the foremost skill a good operations head must have is the ability to assess, select, and develop competent project leaders. A strong project leader may be good in use of project management tools and may also be resourceful in solving day to day problems. The operations head, on the other hand, needs to be skilled in dealing with longer term needs like developing more versatile pool of resources, establishing ealry warning systems, cost management etc.

Another critical skill that an operations head needs to have is the ability to influence things horizontally. Even a good project leader may not have been tested on this.

One more skill that project leaders may not get tested on is the ability to diagnose (processes) and take preventive actions.

Why did the previous head fail to meet job pressures?

It is likely that the previous occupant of this post lacked the above skills. It is also possible that your operations group lacks some capabilities that are needed to meet client needs. It is possible that the previous head did not have the diagnostic skills to spot the deficiencies and skills to build new capabilities in your team.

It is very risky to choose someone for promotion on the basis of success in previous job. The risks go beyond immediate failures. Sometimes hardworking people overcome their lack of above skills by resorting to working extra hard (but still in their old areas of comfort), making their people to work unreasonably harder, and other such heroic methods. These can be damaging -talented people may leave, your organization may become more susceptible to shocks.

What is the way out?

1. For every important leadership position, identify differentiating skills needed at that level compared to lower levels. See e.g. Career Planning. Use these to evaluate candidates.

2. Establish ongoing leadership development programs. These programs will not only develop people but they will also provide you with more informed answers when you evaluate people for promotions.

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