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.

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.

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.

I got this idea from Srinivas Sridharan, my ex-colleague from Philips days. To quote from his profile,

” he investigates the nature of consumption and entrepreneurship exhibited by impoverished individuals and communities”

Indeed living is entrepreneurship for a large mass of humanity. Privileged people like us do not seem to reaize this. It is geat that people like Srinivas are exploring this. Travails of poor people has often been a subject of art, a recent example being the Oscar winner ‘Slumdog Millionnaire’.

People are very inventive and are great learners while waging the battle for existence. Nature ingrains these qualities in us. But the moment connections between daily bread and efforts snap, as they do when people earn some security the entrepreneurship deserts them…

Entrepreneurship when seen in the context of businesses needs to go beyond this desperate inventiveness and include qualities like

-learning, transferring learning into new situations

-connecting with value chains and other forces

-teaching the learnings to more people

At Learning Leadership, learners get to practice the above in their work situations.

Hemant

I am happy to unveil a new web based platform for learning leadership skills supported by coaching. You can register and enroll for various programs at Learning Leadership.

Learning and coaching will take place through a series of workouts specially designed to impart leadership practice.

These are paid programs. However initially they are available without any fees to qualified working executives.

Hemant Karandikar