Have you heard this said about a movie,”It was so bad that it was really good!” Many people actually celebrate this ‘so bad,its good’ movies & even make money by spoofing or reviewing it.That is value-creation! People scrounge for value once they accept going in for the experience.As audience in a speech or trainees in a learning event, we can do the same.Why not? What else is there.Can you raise the bar for yourself as a learner.The measure of doing so would be to transcend & go past the ability of the content,process or the trainer.And to create meaning & value by identifying substance!
Putting a Price Tag & Losing out on Intrinsic Value – in Life & at Work.
A social experiment in Israel is a good reason to explore the after-effects of putting a price-tag on desired behaviour. Our performance assessment & reward structures are built around paying good money for a job done – on specification. And a penalty or lack of increment for sub-par performance. The system works. Or does it? Here’s what happened. Parents in day-care centres in Israel used to keep anxious kids & a tired teacher waiting well past the pick-up time of 4 pm. They were habitually late. Economists monitored ten such centres for four weeks. On an average, there were eight late pick-ups per week per day care centre. The parents hurried onto the scene half guilty, half worried. Fifth week onwards, they imposed a penalty of 3$ for a more than ten minute delay. The parents were paying $380 per month. By the twentieth week, the average pick-ups per week per day care centre had shot up-to twenty, more than double the original average! Daniel Cohen, French economist puts it well, “There are things we do because we cherish them.…
When warring sides played football on the battle field: The remarkable Christmas truce of World War I
In the days leading up to Christmas in 1914, soldiers from all sides began to realize that the war was going to drag on. It was not going to be all quiet on the western front for some time to come. Soldiers had dug into trenches, six to eight feet deep; and fired when the enemy sought to move forward from their own trenches. This trench-warfare of World-War I created a situation of perpetual physical proximity for enemy combatants. The Christmas season triggered off unusual acts of reaching out to the enemy. Soldiers started shouting out tentative intents of venturing out of the trenches. The first ones to believe and keep the faith survived and soon got talking with each other. The initial confidence-building hurdle out of the way, there were spontaneous outbreaks of unofficial ceasefire all along the trenches! The Germans & the British started exchanging Christmas gifts & souvenirs. They recovered & buried dead comrades, lit candles, decorated their trenches, sang carols, and started chatting & bantering. They showed each other photos of dear ones, offered cigarettes, food,…
Right Recruiting: How it aligns organizational performance
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…
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…
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…
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…
Traffic woes & Organizational response
Traffic congestion is assuming nightmarish proportions in all big cities. And yet, how many organizations believe it is a crucial part of the ecosystem in which they function? And how many reconfigure how they work in response? Adaptive companies see an opportunity to redesign work – flow, demonstrate faith in the work force by creatively exploring flexible work-practices. Staggered work timings, Work-from-home, Virtual collaboration are just a few. The shift occurs when you look at the challenge in terms of effectiveness rather than mere efficiency. When you are effective, you ask, ‘ What are the right things to do in the face of such traffic woes that dent employee energies by the time they reach the workplace?’ Efficient ones will ask, How can we do the usual right? ‘ The usual means – getting employees to be on time at the designated work hour. What holds leaders & decision-makers back? Familiar reasons – Loss of control & predictability. The Routine is so comforting! And yet, so much is possible if only we are willing to cast aside the routine. It…