Regenerate!

“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.

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 conducted a workshop “Leadership -How to Regenerate & Rejuvenate Your Business?” at the Indian Merchants’ Chamber, Mumbai on August 1, 2009. It was a day full of interactions with senior level participants from industries like financial services, logistics services, mineral trading, manufacturing, and others.

There was a huge interest in the emotional aspects of leadership, something that never fails to surprise me. Display of emotions is considered a taboo at work -this was apparent when one of the participant made distinction between being passionate and being emotional. But how does one reconcile this with the fact that great leaders are passionate about their work and that passion, excitement, pride and other similar feelings are central to leadership? What happens when you equate display of emotions with emotions themselves?and end up in suppressing them? Participants said that the workshop showed them the ways of dealing with emotions and using their emotional abilities as strength.

On another plane, thinking about their own work processes helped them apply various leadership principles to day-to-day work. How to leverage work related values was also tried by them. All this work led to their own agendas.

When their attention was turned to ideas that would make big difference to their businesses, the “creative tension” in the air was palpable. Various workouts help them draw ideas from ground realities and yet use imagination to question the status quo.

For me the big take-away from the workshop is to learn in what ways leadership principles work across a diverse range of industries. Another take-away was when you provide means of focusing on various aspect of work, how almost everyone can come up with good solid thinking and tangible actions for improving things. It just shows that all of us have huge untapped potential.

It is our right and obligation to discover our potential. It was very satisfying to me that I could be of help in this.

Recently, I was speaking to my client who was evaluating options for design services -he was planning their annual report. During the conversation, he mentioned the words ’selection process’ several times and alluded to the difficulty in making all design houses and agencies to agree to a common method of evaluation. He thought that designers’ individuality and ego were the culprits.

I asked him some questions (his answers in brackets)

-how often do you need to use this method? (once a year; I am doing it for the first time)

-when was this process established?(I decided on this process last week)  how many times has it been used? (never)

-do you expect repeatable output (design) of the process ?  (how can design be repeatable? -he was sensible!)

-is the process of actual design defined? standardized? (no, no)

I told him that the word ‘process’ is causing confusion. In the strictest sense of the word a process and other processes connected with it must be standardized to produce repeatable outcome.

For something like ‘design’, you may have a general sequence of steps with workarounds or iterations. That can hardly be called a process with strict norms. Such kind of work often requires that someone takes a call without waiting for all information and standardization.

Indeed, such situations can also arise in deciding on features of a new product.

A leader’s role is to take a call and not hide behind questionable processes.

Hemant

Personality tests are very popular amongst users as well as corporate HR people. Personality tests seek to profile people. They make sense to the extent that they supplement a chaotic personal interview by something in which one will not miss asking obvious questions. They also make sense when large number of people have to be screened by automating the task.

For a low down on personality tests, visit wikipedia .

But personality tests have limitations. In addition to the limitations the above link mentions, I would like to say that personality tests neither provide diagnostics nor do they offer any action-ability. They are like your health report that tells about your cholesterol levels and other indicators. The report may itself be incomplete (needing more tests) or the report may need an expert’s diagnosis that prescribes a course of actions.

Personality development, leadership development and in general, developing people is far more complex than that. If your aim is to develop your people, you will need a development process which combines training, with exercizes and coaching. You need to pace your people through such process.  This requires a commitment by the CEO andthe management team. That’s why there very few companies who achieve success in this area.

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