For leaders aiming to make organizations perform better on the whole, an under-appreciated area that holds great promise is recruitment. People generally look to training or performance management. But the right recruiting gives you an opportunity to set everything right. Why? The simple reason is it all begins with recruitment. When you decide to make your recruiting effective, you focus on what are the right things to do (the things that matter) 1) In order to arrive at which people are ‘right’ for your organization, you are compelled to articulate the essence of why you exist & what you have set out to do. You can hope to recruit the right people only if you have clarity of purpose. Knowing what exactly you want in terms of mission & results helps you identify the right actions, the right tasks, the right skillsets & the required people capability. 2) With right recruiting, your training needs will qualitatively change. The more you recruit the right people, the less would there be mass skill-deficiency. Right recruiting can help save your training budget or…
Peter Drucker – On the first job
“On the whole young people have a tendency to hang on to the first job…beyond the time when they should have quit for their own good. Your first job may turn out to be right for you—but this is pure accident. Certainly you should not change jobs constantly or people will become suspicious rightly of your ability to hold any job. At the same time, you must not look upon the first job as the final job; it is primarily a training job, an opportunity to analyze yourself.” – Peter Drucker Drucker also advises people to leave their first job if they are not learning enough or if the company is not willing to heap responsibility on people in junior positions. In few words, Drucker liberates readers; he takes them to a vantage-point from where they can see things most clearly.
Narendra Modi’s leadership & electoral success: A systemic appreciation for leaders & organizations.
By leading the BJP to a thumping majority in the recent Lok Sabha elections, Narendra Modi & his core team have scripted a success story worth studying. The victory was not unexpected, but its margin invites positive exploration. How did they pull it off? Does this story have something to offer students of leadership & organizations? Let us dive in leaving aside both political affiliations & political grandstanding. People all over the country were deeply discontent with the Congress. But that does not mean electoral victory was a cakewalk. The political scene has too many players of various hues & colours, each owing its emergence to a cause or a support base that lends itself to mobilising power. How could Narendra Modi & his team break through the clutter in such a fractured polity? Four key actions stand out. Sustaining & building upon the Core Foundation – What is the one thing that made it possible for Narendra Modi to take charge within the party & establish primary credibility with voters? Take this one thing away & Modi did not…
Infosys: Making sense of leadership & organizational challenges
When the numbers accumulate & a trend is discernible, we can make a conjecture or two. The current CEO of Infosys, S.D Shibulal has said that at 18.7%, the attrition rate has reached uncomfortable levels. He considers this to be more worrisome than the exit of nine senior executives, quite a few among them being C-suite contenders. Both instances are of course, related. No two ways about it. Why is Infosys facing so many challenges? A significant part of the answer lies in the decision to rotate the top-leadership among all company founders. This is the primary conjecture. Let us trace the journey from then to now. Emotions have a big role to play.We are all emotional beings.The story of Infosys is cherished corporate folklore.It has inspired millions of success stories in India. We rightly revere people like Narayan Murthy for their integrity-bound achievements. Founder-owners make tremendous sacrifices in the cause of their enterprise success. It is their baby. The world invariably respects their commitment to safeguard their baby. Keeping the top-position in the company founders circle was a reflection of…
The Most Powerful Words for Guiding Human Resource Development in Organizations
In the fewest possible words, can we get a guiding principle for developing people in organizations? In my search for something that works, something not necessarily lofty, but nevertheless validated by success, I can think of no better one than the one below. Every organization develops people. It either helps them grow or stunts them. – Peter Drucker The power in this profound observation escapes the casual reader. Make no mistake about it. For those who haven’t yet grasped the significance of these words, there is a new world waiting to be born! These are the most powerful words for any leader in any role to really reflect on, be it CEO, HR Head, L&D Head or a Business head. What makes them so powerful? They illuminate a truth we seldom consider & act upon. Our most over-used cliché is that people are our best asset. We accept that developing people is the key to organizational success. But do we really think that by not helping people grow, we are stunting their growth? To stunt is to permanently impair the ability…
Designing a (corporate readiness/ campus to corporate/ soft skills for work) course curriculum – Three Key Questions
India’s educated youth lack the basic skills to become employable; ready to be absorbed into work by various sectors. According to Higher Education in India: Vision 2030, a report made by Ernst and Young for FICCI (Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry), 75% of IT graduates are deemed ‘unemployable’, 55% in manufacturing, 55% in healthcare and 50% in banking and insurance. NASSCOM says that only 10-15% of other graduates are considered employable in the IT/ITES segments. These are staggering statistics. What is meant by being unemployable? Quite simply, it means even though the job candidate has all qualifications on paper, companies do not consider them job-ready. They lack the basic skills to communicate & participate in a team, to understand the context of what their job requires, & to adapt what they know into specific output on the ground. A skills-gap of epic proportions. This crying need has led many colleges, educational institutions & corporate companies to try their bit & plug this skills-gap by imparting skills-training, especially in soft-skills. The result is the emergence of corporate readiness…
Triggering the ‘active’ in Active Listening. What scuba-diving & the hospital emergency scene teach us?
You are scared and excited about being underwater for the first time! As the scuba-diving instructor speaks on how to go about the whole thing one last time, you hang onto each word for dear life. You grab tighter as the instructor moves on to ‘trouble-shooting’ instructions. You ask anything & everything that comes gushing onto to you. You repeat instructions, paraphrase the meaning as you understand it, ask whether you got it right. You are determined to get it right & you care a little less of what others make of you! If you are going to do sky-diving or bungee jumping, you will likely be the same. You may have never heard or known about ‘active listening’ in your whole life & you still end up practising it! Active listening is listening in a way that reaffirms we are communicating; the speaker & listener both experience that they are making a real effort to understand each other. We are exhorted to learn it & get trained on tips & techniques. We don’t know any of it, & yet we…
The efficiency-effectiveness motif
When you fit bulbs onto lamp-posts along the vast stretches of an express way, the way to get the job done quick and fast is one after the other. The bulky crane-like contraption of a vehicle lumbers along as if nodding in agreement. Hardly something to think about in this set procedure. Indisputably efficient and alarmingly ineffective. Why so? Read on. The efficiency and effectiveness motif is well-recognized by most in business and social enterprises. Peter Drucker laid it out for us. Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things. He then admonishes us by saying “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all ” Effectiveness is the real deal. When the bulbs are fitted in a row, they start with the same shelf-life. They will blow out at more or less the same time, and plunge that patch of road into dangerous darkness for fast-moving traffic. The focus on effectiveness here leads us to the question, “What is the purpose of setting up these lamp-posts? What is the right thing to do in going…
Using Plato’s wisdom to recruit
You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation. – Plato Is it such a preposterous idea to arrange a game of sport for fresh recruits? Especially in college campuses where there are grounds available. Of course, not. A carefully chosen sport easy for anyone to play, difficult for the solitary star to win all alone, and requiring total team participation at all times. When we play, we cannot but be our true selves. And here for the HR recruiter, the wisdom of another age-old saying is a very good parameter to go by – “And it does not matter whether you win or lose, but how you play the game” And God help the ‘smart’ recruiter who goes about publicizing that! How many companies make the effort to get it right the first time? From the immune system in our body to the immigration counter at the airport, we can learn how critical it is to allow only the positive, healthy entity to get inside. Once they get in, it…
When the employee simply doesn’t get it!
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it. – Upton Sinclair A classic instance is company exhortation to the employee to share his know-how. You are touted to be a manager-in-the making, a leader of men, a generous star-performer, a team member to the core and what not. Come the next downturn, the insecure employee traces his vulnerability to his giving ways. And when the lay-off happens, in his mind, he contributed to his own redundancy by sharing his knowledge about the task. He is scarred by the interpretation of his experience. Another instance, a senior executive asks who is willing to take charge of the critical project or assignment. Why does no hand go up? Can they not understand the rich rewards that await success? But, what does the job depend on? The job depends on not taking risks! Companies are dimly aware of how they have set it all up. In a game perceived to be zero-sum, the employee will drag his feet from creating the perfect job…