Am in a comic !

Well I never thought this dream of mine would be realised. Yeah, Amitabh Bachchan had his own comic. So did Sunil Gavaskar and now even Sachin Tendulkar does.

So I am in good company, as Jim Stroud has made me a guest cartoon character in his comic series The Recruiting Life ( if only driving in Hyderabad was a qualification for getting a job at Geektech!).

Congrats Jim, for 100 comic strips. And don't forget to check out AK Menon in another comic strip as he gets recruited for the role of a software engineer because of his cricketing skills ;-))



Updated: My video interview with Jim on topics like business blogging and HR and OD. You can find the video on Jim's site and also see it below :-)

Please excuse the long pauses and excessive gestures. Seeing and hearing oneself talk is a huge and crushing blow to one's self esteem and ego, I have discovered :-(



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जी हाँ ! हम आपसे बोल रहे हैं !

Managing external constituents

Ram Charan in his column talks about the skills and "know-hows" of a CEO in managing external constituents. It's particularly important in this age of social media (which puts, as someone said it, "word of mouth on steroids"). He even touches about the Pepsi-Coke pesticide controversy in India.

As he says:

For all the time and attention it requires, managing external constituencies is not likely to create value for your company. On the other hand, if you fail to manage these groups and issues and instead let them manage you, you may very well destroy value

In today's world, there's no escaping the need to deal with external constituencies directly, fairly, and with the courage to do what's right even in the face of conflicting agendas.

So what are the skills and know-hows that Ram talks about?

• Being psychologically open.
• Understanding that perceptions trump facts.
• Keeping your antennas up.
• Being proactive.

I guess that's one of the difficult things that people experience when going from a support role to a leadership role. You move from controlling things you have direct control over to a role where there are things that you barely have control over. It's very imperative that finance, HR professionals who want to lead organizations have 'market' experience in sales and marketing to prepare them for the role.

some interesting links

Noticed this blog, and I hope the anonymous author posts some of his/her "surreal" HR experiences in a plant. Looking forward to it :-)

The Evil HR lady (love that name!) goes to a Mexican restaurant and thinks about equal opportunity and affirmative action. A deliciously evil and tongue-in-cheek post.

Penelope stresses on the fact how self-esteem is critical to career success and holds up Paris Hilton as an example. Though I disagree that millenials are the self-esteem generation. Well, maybe, at an average level self-esteem is moving up after generations, but there still will be people with low self-esteem and people with high self-esteem in each generation. It ultimately boils down to the culture of the place one is born in and the quality of parenting one is given.

Dub Dubs looks at how early career can be a time of learning and that organizations are not always closed to ideas and innovation. This post also touches on generational issues in the workplace. Of course, it's not always easy for organizations to embrace innovation, specially if it flies in the face of everything that the organization believes in and has made it successful in the past.

Russ Eckel also things that generalising about generational issues is not smart, and that work ethic is not really dead, unlike what others may believe.

JAM starts a JobOKplease blog

Remember JAM's foray into job boards with JobOKplease ? The update is that they've started a blog too.

My first reaction is "why a blogger template?".

It makes it seem like it's a blogspot blog (it's not). Well, I hope the template is modified to go along with the overall JobOKplease design too.

Interesting posts by Amit Panhale on his first job (quite funny actually) and by Rashmi on how to land a writing job.

If you think you'd like to contribute to the blog just contact Rashmi. They're looking for perspectives from both employers as well as jobseekers.

AK's first video interview

Jim Stroud, who is a 'searchologist' in the Microsoft Recruiting team was recently in Hyderabad to train the Microsoft recruiters here on the intricacies of sourcing passive candidates over the internet. (by the way, if you are a recruiter and are interested to know the tricks of the trade, you can buy Jim's training videos)

While he was here, he met up with my good friend and client AK Menon, and invited AK for his first ever video interview.

You can see the video here, and hear what AK has to say about recruiting in India, expatriates coming back home, life in Hyderabad and blogging in India.

I personally found his insights into how the recruiting needs of the Indian subsidiary of US IT firms have changed over the last few years, and how blogging is helping him connect with executive search consultants from countries in Europe and other places.

The most interesting bit was how AK's discovering new professions by connecting to people across the world. Who would have known that there is a career in carbon credit trading ?!!

What exactly is talent management

Anuradha was recently visiting us in Hyderabad, and she regaled us with stories of how she went to one of the top HR institutes of India and during campus interviews asked the graduating students "So what do you want to do in HR?"

And the majority answered "Talent Management", and when she asked them what that meant, nobody could explain that to her.

Er, I must confess, I still don't understand what Talent Management means.

I mean, on the one hand there are stories like this, which says that Talent Management tops the list of HR issues faced by corporates, and a European study which says that Talent Management is the HR activity that has most impact on the performance of a firm. That makes me feel quite a nincompoop, since I don't know what it means.

So what is Talent Management? Getting the right people in the right job? Helping them deliver the right performance by giving them the right developmental input? Having a great succession and business continuity plan for emergencies? Staffing and Resourcing? Recruiting?

I'm lost.

Do you know what this beast called Talent Management is?

Get the Feedburner feed to this blog

Hi, if you're subscribed to the Atom feed of this blog, I'd invite you to move to the feedburner feed which comes with interactive links (called FeedFlare) that you easy ways to email, tag, share, and act on the content. Hope you like that sort of stuff :-)

If you are getting this blog via e-mail, then you don't really need to do anything :-))

Bloggers being mean and disgusting

I am a devoted follower of the Creating Passionate User blog. I think what Kathy has done with her insight into technology and marketing is amazing. Consistently high quality content and lots of insights that go beyond common place.

So it was with a growing sense of despair that I read this post by her, where she describes her feelings of fear, danger, violation after receiving death threats ! Not just by unnamed trolls, but even other bloggers (well known bloggers, like Cluetrain author Rageboy) who had gathered for "puposeful anarchy" at a site called meankids (now down)

Purposeful anarchy?

How much of an oxymoron is that !

Here's Doc Searls' thoughts. Scoble's reactions.

Definitely disgusting.

Hope Kathy gets back to blogging after this. But that's a selfish wish. If she chooses not to continue, I'm sure all her grateful readers would understand.

What do you look for in a job?

That's the question someone on campus asks Surya who was there for the B School placement season.

A chance to fatten my cv. Some call it getting exposure, but I connect it to the final outcome. I dont want to put anything on my cv which I cannot claim as mine or which I cannot speak about knowledgably, so that means grabbing opportunites and accepting them when offered.

So that if in the future I have to choose my personal life over my company - without zilch personal life, I dont see that happening anytime soon - I can pick and choose what I want to do and where I want to be.

I did not .ell him this:
Fun. This is a no-brainer. If I am doing something ten hours a day, I better have fun doing that. This means being challenged, appreciated, ragged, teased - I guess a better word would be to feel alive.

Family. I think that more and more, I substitute my work colleagues for my friends and well wishers. Well, atleast a significant chunk of them anyway.

Fun, Family and Ownership, and an international placement. Phew ! Young people sure have big expectations from organizations and organizational life.

Maybe Surya is a fortunately lucky one. After all, how much can "fun" be built into organizational process. Certainly not "family". What can however be possible is for organizations to enable true and authentic human connections and conversations between employees. And hope they like each other :-)

Saying No

Knowing something intellectually and actually doing it are two different things.

When starting off on our own, I had anticipated that there would be a time when I would have to say no to a client. I thought I was ready for it. You know the whole routine of "You are as defined by what you don't do as by what you do" kind of thinking.

So when last week someone called from one of the world's largest IT firms if we could come and meet them in connection with a 2-3 hour game to conduct for their 80 developers in May, I realised that while it was do-able it was not something I wanted to be known for.

But I kept off trying to say no.

I reasoned and I justified to myself. "Oh I'll meet them and get to reframe their problem and make it a OD consulting intervention" was my dominant thought. "Even if I can't, I can always walk away and I would have made some connections in this large IT firm for future business development"

In my heart of hearts, I knew I was fooling myself. So today after a week of dithering I mailed the lady who had called me saying that the need does not fall in our expertise area and we would love to work with them in the future on OD and HR consulting needs.

Yes, knowing it and doing it is a totally different kettle of fish, I discovered again :-)

How do you say no to clients and customers ?

An OD practitioner reflects

Kartik mailed me yesterday that Sushanta Banerjee, one of the stalwarts of the OD movement in India (from the early 1980s!) has recently launched his organization's website and I rushed over there to discover this amazing gem of a paper reflecting on his last 27 years' journey in the field of OD in India.

The paper covers a whole host of issues, from a professionals personal journey, to how OD consulting assignments developed, to models and frameworks he has used and the Eastern and Occidental approaches to viewing human processes and organizations.

Time for new HR structures and processes

Have you ever wondered how funny the structure of most HR groups is?

There are two distinct groups, the specialists and the generalists, and the unwritten assumptions are that if you are the cerebral kind you'll become a specialist and if you are the "dirty-your-hands" kinds you'll become a generalist.

The specialists design the processes and interventions, while the generalists implement them, and their options of customising the same are very limited. In fact the focus of large firms which are geographically dispersed is to minimise the variations in implementation.

The big issue in this kind of HR structures is that their is an implicit assumption that the 'specialists' are the 'thinkers and designers' and the 'generalists' are the 'doers'. When the structures become rigid, they overlook the simple fact that most HR professionals can contribute to making various designs robust. Silos are reinforced and "this is my job" and "that's not your job" mentality takes over.

How can HR functions and professionals guard against this?

Issues of turf and power and authority are set by the HR leaders of the organization. When the various functional heads of HR are insecure and not confident of their expertise they would set examples of such behavior that's emulated by their team members.

The example has to be set by the HR head of the organization to make his/her first line drop their defenses and work as a true team. That means not just critiquing but also collaborating and contributing.

A career ladder for HR professionals that zig and zag through the various functions would also go a long way in sensiting them that there are no "more important" and "less important" functions within HR. In fact there should be two or three mandatory stints for HR professionals out of HR too, in functions that are client facing (like marketing and sales), vendor facing (like procurement and supply chain) and operations.

A new structure

Structurally HR people can work on processes than functions. Making each employee experience a process, HR teams can work on maximising the employee experience and engagement. In fact I had heard of a IT company that organized the HR teams according to their purpose. However, I am not sure how successful as to how it actually played out.

What are your thoughts?

Attrition and Aspirations

[Post Contributed by regular reader R Karthik. Got a view, an experience to share.? Mail it to me and I'll post it on the blog]

One Sunday i was invited by a few acquaintances to join a party.

A seasonally brewed beverage of northern India favored much during Holi-putatively held as a 'prasad' (religious offering) of/to Lord Shiva, Bhaang is a tradition here in the northern part of the country.

And that is good reason to swig a little occasionally!

I got to meet a bunch of b-school grads who have had their initial 1 or 2 year tryst with industry.

That is exactly when I thought this deserves to be the subject of a social if not business blog.It was a tête-à-tête that lasted 3 hours and the discussions ranged over an array of topics covering organizations, work, people (and i thought of Gautam's blog) and so on.
And then we ventured into the much-debated topics of salary ranges in IT industry, employee attrition & issues.

MBAs they were all; working on technologies, consulting and other solutions.

"So what do you think makes people quit?" I quipped
These guys (all our partyers) as cases in point, have themselves changed jobs once within a span of 2 years!

I conducted an appreciate inquiry on each of their cases deftly throwing a probing question or two wherever required during their narrative.What came out was that their aspirations (for life & career) were greater in all terms which they nurtured in isolation renouncing the
backing of their organizations/managers.

No! It is not the archetypical HR cliché "aspirations mismatch" that I am talking of. A young and fairly shrewd professional gauges what kind of growth trajectory the organization holds in store for him/her. If the articulation of the same is not loud and lucid to the knowledge worker
he does what he is best at doing...networks, floats his CV and manages to pull off another high-priced job offer over the weekend.

Given all the right circumstances in personal life/family too, they admit they would have made the leap sooner or later. And it is only this slice (occurring due to inadequate aspirations mgmt) of the attrition pie which we can possibly address or manage. To a great extent employee aspirations can be managed and exploited to a mutual benefit with the right management and practices.The organizations' articulation of career growth for its high-potential employees can't
be bleak (or even perceived bleak). "A better offer" is everywhere and for everyone who decides to quit a job but that can't be the sole cause attributable to all the attrition.

If you think through, you realize that salaries are only the vegetable dressing on the meal laid down. They can only create the visual appeal.

The proof of the pudding is only in the eating!

All this over a glass of 'Bhaang'; it did bring out a lot of thoughts from its connoisseurs!
Well, it was not a bad way to have spent leisure time on a holiday!

Networking is not about you

Most of the time I think why people wrinkle up their noses when someone says "networking" is because it is seen as selfish and self-serving. It kind of reminds you about all those used car salesmen jokes.

However, true effective networking means reaching out to people and offering your help. That's what works for me. It would work in a slightly different way depending on your interest areas. As Penelope Trunk says:

So you can be good at networking by caring about other people. And you can’t fake being interested — it’s almost impossible. That means you have to genuinely care about other people.

And as Slacker Manager notes the Golden Rule

Treat other people as you’d like to be treated. If you are an avowed sadist, then you’re not going to have much luck with this (though you may find some cool masochistic people to hang out with). The rest of us will be able to make our own luck with this method.

And no, sometimes networking is no fun...the way I practice it. You get emails and scraps or Orkut asking for help, and if you are busy, people assume you're just a haughty guy and don't reply to emails. Or they send another email that sounds like a boss asking a poor secretary for a phone number, the How-dare-you-take-so-much-time-to-reply routine.

So why do I do it? Because doing it is satisfying to me at an internal level and once in a while you have a conversation that's meaningful and build a relationship that could be professionally and personally rewarding.

Yes, it's a paradox, while networking is not about you, how you do it says a lot about who you are।

Update: Check this post by Jason Warner of Google at the Brazen Careerist on building your network out of work.

Sensemaking and Insights

Shawn at Anecdote points to how narratives and storytelling help people to make sense of their learnings and (in my view, more importantly) make that explicit.

He also links to Weick's definition of sensemaking:

Sensemaking involves turning circumstances into a situation that is comprehended explicitly in words and that serves as a springboard into action.

As learning facilitators/OD professionals/HR professionals or even managers helping people make sense and meaning from their experiences and turning them into plans for further action ought to be a key skill. Building time and space into organizational processes and skills to make that happen is very important to gain the insights that makes a virtuous cycle come alive.

Private Equity firms on a roll

Are PE firms the new strategic consultancies?

Seems so, looking at how Warburg Pincus has chosen McKinsey's Leo Puri as one of its MD in Mumbai (hat-tip: VCCircle)

So what do Private Equity firms do?

According to the wikipedia:

Private equity firms typically manage a family of fund vehicles which are used to make investments in companies or other assets. These funds can be structured in a number of different ways although the most common form for an institutional private equity fund is either the Limited Partnership (LP) or the Limited Liability Company (LLC).

Given a choice, dear reader, where would you work? Consulting firm or a PE firm?

On emotions

It's a pleasure to welcome a friend Ishita to the blogosphere, and her first post is about acknowledging emotions in the workplace.

As she writes that bit about swiping one's card and leaving emotions outside is so true in organizations,

that's why words like Human "resources" and "talent" management are such buzzwords

people seem to shy away from calling employees as "people"

what has changed from the industrial era where people were called "hands" ? As she says:

We hire a complete human being into an organization. One human being, who is complete with competence, capability, experience and emotions. We expect several such complete human beings to stay and work together in a confined space (at times very large confined spaces) for several hours and yet we preach – “Don’t bring emotions into the workplace”

On the other hand, most of the workplace conflicts arise out of different emotions having being expressed at the wrong place. Stands true not only for negative emotions, but also for positive emotions.

A key skill for anyone growing in the corporate jungle, as I have posted earlier, is recognizing emotions (both of self and others), managing it and expressing it appropriately.

Double Dubs completes two years of blogging

Here's wishing him a lot of more years of fruitful and engaging conversations.

I've found him to be an insightful mind for HR issues and someone to learn the systems part of HR.

Human Process work

One of the question that I always struggle to answer people who hear that I have gone to human process labs is "But what business use are they?"

Process work, or T-Group or Sensitivity Groups are all similar methodologies for "learning from living"

Now I merely have to point at Ed Batista's great post that explains the complex experience one goes through with amazing clarity and simplicity. And for theoretical learners like me, linking it to the double-loop learning principle.

In India, the organizations that do similar work are ISABS, Sumedhas and Aastha.

Remember, radical change and learning can happen only when assumptions are held up for questioning. It's an uncomfortable process when that happens.

No thought leadership from HR consulting firms

So says Fiona Czerniawska, the author of White Space 2007, a research report that evaluates the latest thought leadership published by the top global consulting firms. (Hat tip: Mike McLaughlin)

If you take a look at the article which says that more HR related thought leadership is driven by the strategic consulting firms than by HR specific ones.

Interestingly, McKinsey produces by far the most material on organisational design and change with 37 percent of the market, and Accenture produces as much as Hewitt Associates and Towers Perrin on recruitment and retention.

Amongst the HR consulting firms her verdict is:

Most of the HR firms struggle to find anything new to say about the issues they focus their attention on. Mercer and Hay Group stand out from a wide array of specialist HR firms, largely because they have something a little more original to say. Hewitt Associates produces more commercially astute material than most of its peer group: it succeeds in presenting issues that clients might choose to act on rather than just think about. But none of the specialist HR firms appears in the White Space top ten ranking of thought leadership quality.

I guess the writing is on the wall as far as thought leadership goes. You produce more value as a HR or Organizational practice in a larger strategic consulting firm than as a standalone HR specialist firm. Isn't that the advice the same firms give to their HR clients in organizations: that they should link more with business to produce more value? Looks like they need to follow their own advice :-))

The partnership model

David Maister who is one of the thought leaders in the area of professional services firms (we studied his model when I was an employee of the large 4 psfs) asks a question whether the "stewardship model" of the professional services firms is outdated.

In the old days, when professional firms acted like they cared, many of them ran on the principle of stewardship or “legacy.” The firm was run not only for the current generation, but with an eye to building an institution that would flourish and survive in future years. Partners, so the argument went, held the firm in trust for the next generation.

This was not just a cultural issue. Under the stewardship model, equity in the firm was transferred at book value – in at book, out at book. Partners made their money from the income they earned while working at the firm, not by equity appreciation.

But what do you think is going to happen in the UK when the Clementi reforms are (finally) implemented and outsiders can buy the equity of a law firm? How long do you think it will take for the existing partners to rethink (even more than they have been doing) whether they want to admit new partners without forcing them to buy in at fair-market value? Why give away a part share of ownership in your law firm when you can sell it to Goldman Sachs?

In accounting firms, it depends on the size of the firm. Big global firms still pretend they are “passing on the heritage”, while many small CPA firms owners are unapologetic in saying: if you want ownership in my firm, you have to buy it from me!

I first started thinking about the ownership model of such firms when AT Kearney partners carried out a management buy-out (or whatever it is called) from EDS. I read a quote by Prof. Ashish Nanda of Harvard (also a specialist when it comes to professional services firms) where he stated:

"When your principal strategic assets are your people, private ownership is the better model," said Ashish Nanda, associate professor at Harvard Business School. "It has the advantage of binding together capable professionals into a shared organization, in which they each have a financial stake, which in turn delivers genuine commitment to produce results."

Yes I know, private ownership of consulting firms that Prof. Nanda is talking about does not directly relate to the stewardship model, but it surely rules out that some firms can be traded on the stock exchanges. Which gets me thinking, IT services and BPO firms are also dependent on the strategic assets called "people". Why are they public and not private? Is it the nature of work that really says whether the people are strategic assets or not, or is it a function of size of the organization and the industry also?

Talent Trap?

Niladri Roy feels that the growth of the KPO industry without adequate thought to career planning and development might open doors to a talent trap.

So where does all of this leave us , assuming that hiring bright minds for KPO jobs is a reality and the immediacy of financial pressures will make it difficult for the employers to recognize the long term ramifications of this hiring ….. the only solution lies in a structured process of Talent Development (not a fancy word , it's different from simply training ) , so that the careers and the abilities of these young people are not eroded over time ….what do you think ?

Well, I think that traditional career planning and development is dead. So the only thing one can do is prepare your best people and hope they stay. It's no rocket science, but it's harder to get it to work.

Making it mainstream

Well this week has been a significant one because I've got featured in the 26th March 2007 issue of Businessworld.

The reason you can see my picture and byline on page 72 is because I was asked to do a case analysis of a blogging and social media related case. Meera Seth who writes the cases for Businessworld was referred to me by a prospective client (who shall go unnamed here :-)).

It's an interesting case called The Music Blogger (link updated on 27th). It's about how a music company executive called Suvrat who is trying to explain to his CEO how blogging is helping "tribes" of various music lovers congregate over the web and how powerful it is becoming in shaping the typical music lovers' perception of what is cool and what is not.

I found these lines particularly interesting:

“The major insight is that there has been a splintering of communities, of society — siblings cannot relate to each other, friends cannot relate to each other. The state and national geographic boundaries, the attributes that we reiterate govern us, describe us, the culture and tradition that we insist defines us; all these are slowly but steadily turning inadequate as vehicles of expressing our identities. Today it is very frustrating to define oneself only by nationality or flag colours. That is good as an address, but how do I define who I am? To define myself, I need to define that core part of me that stands for all those things I feel, love, crave, enjoy and vibrate to… and the sigma of that cannot be expressed by geography.

“So, one has to reach out across the globe to find new siblings, new friends, new family! It is the reformation of tribes, the reverse of the Tower of Babel where God punished people to speak in different tongues, so they were splintered. Now these Babelites of the world want to come together into individual tribes that speak the same language!”

My case analysis essentially focussed on the final question left in the case "How can you validate blogging's verdict?" It also focusses on how marketers can engage with bloggers if they choose to. Have also tried to talk about blog search engines like Technorati and how they can help marketers reach to the correct blogs. My personal belief is state

The most important advice is: Do not try to manipulate blogs or blog readers by trying to ‘inject’ messages. Blogs thrive on interactivity, linkages and conversations. That means making your brand vulnerable and opening it up to criticism. Most businesses are wary of doing so, and yet that is the only way they can appeal to bloggers. That is the appeal of real, human and authentic conversation as opposed to crafted, polished, corporate brochure language. Unless businesses face this reality, they cannot leverage either the reach or richness of the blogosphere.

[Note: URLs changed on 27th]

Training and Facilitation

I attended a program in the beautiful town of Khandala (about 2 hours drive from Mumbai) along with 14 other learning partners of a large financial services company.

One issue we struggled with is the focus on making the transition from being trainers (which is what we all called ourselves when we began our careers) to facilitators of learning (which is what we are trying to become).

What's the difference? Isn't that just a clever name for an old skill?

Not really, because while training follows a "one to many" model, facilitation is "many to many" where the expertise of the facilitator lies not so much on what the content of the learning is, but also what is the process of learning.

Let's interpret this using an example. Suppose you are in a training program, and differ with the trainer on certain aspects of what is being taught.

What would a trainer do? Well, normally a trainer would ask you to politely keep shut and not disrupt the class with your clearly advanced knowledge. That would be rational because the onus of providing learning in that setup rests with the trainer.

However, if the same example is in the same class but with a facilitator, then the focus would be to draw upon your learning and add to the learning of the group. This might also result in contradictory learnings being given to the participants. But you know what, that's ok.

Reality is often complex enough not to be labeled in a set of binary instructions, this works and this does not work, or this is true and this is not true.

Yes, this approach also causes us facilitators to look at how our own opinions are formed and to always be aware of how our biases and notions might be impacting what we influence our participants with.

That is one reason why I never really react to opposing points of view, as I recognise that there is more versions of reality than just mine. That goes true with even opposing comments posted on the blog :-)

AK Menon gets quoted

Fellow blogger AK Menon, who as regular readers might know, is a client of mine too, has been quoted in the Indian Express newspaper as an example of how blogging can help differentiate one's business in a crowded competitive field. As it says:

Hyderabad-Based Achyut Menon runs a recruitment agency that specialises in
providing jobs to Indians returning from abroad. With hundreds of firms offering
such services countrywide, Menon realised he could cut through the clutter only
by creating a unique “buzz” about his services. He started an interactive blog
that sought to address queries on topics like work culture and emerging sectors
in India. This soon began receiving a stream of enquiries from not only
job-seeking NRIs but also international recruitment firms.

Oh, by the way, the article quotes yours truly too ;-))

Google India's cricket blogging contest

A friend pointed me to Google India's effort to make blogging more mainstream in India by riding on the Cricket World Cup. In fact, there's a blogging contest for cricket crazy fans.

Blogging about cricket with the reward promising to be on TV with Kris Srikkanth? Hmm, I think a lot of opinionated Indian cricket fans would take that plunge into blogging :-)

Apologies for the non-posting to the blog over the last 4 days, I had been travelling to the lovely hill station just outside Mumbai, Khandala, alas, only on work :-(


Recruiting is marketing. Try jobcasting.

Feedback Anxieties

Yesterday I facilitated a workshop for a client on how to give effective feedback during performance appraisal time. It was an interesting session because while they were expecting to be "told" what is the right way to give feedback, I made the whole process a totally discussion oriented workshop.

I did have around 40 slides regarding feedback, goal setting and coaching but a conversation with my contact person made me aware that what these people needed was not knowledge but to confront their issues with giving feedback.

Feedback is a tricky business, because the word comes loaded itself with negative connotations. "I want to give you some feedback" elicits a "Uh-oh" response from most people. Usage of the phrase "positive feedback" also focuses that mostly feedback is "negative".

Of course, some people have issues giving "positive feedback" too :-)

It must be stressed that giving feedback is not an end in itself. It has to be tied to business outcomes and performance. How does the behavior of an employee link to business results (positively or negatively)? If it links positively then that linkage has to be highlighted as why you want that behavior to be continued in the future. Negative linkages to businesses should also be given when a behavior has to be discontinued.

If as a manager one is not able to link employee behavior to performance, then it's better not to give feedback on that (unless that behavior is against the core ethics and values of the firm)

The workshop also brought the fact that senior managers yearn for consistency in their own managers' behavior in delivering feedback, and I had to stress the fact that like there are star employees and laggard employees there will be star managers and laggard managers. Giving feedback is shaped by the relationship between the two individuals, the time they have worked together and their preferred style of communication.

Organizations should only give broad outlines on "how to" and let people discover their own comfort level. There should be a second line of support for employees also to approach and for managers who either feel they are not assertive enough or too aggressive in giving feedback.

Too soon?

Phew !

Reading about stuff like this always convinces me that I was born ten-eleven years too soon :-)

Yahoo HotJobs enters the social networking realm

In a tribute to both Jobster and Linkedin, one of the biggest jobsites in the world, Yahoo HotJobs is moving to link social networking with job hunting.

If you go to the main HotJobs page, you will see Yahoo Answers which focus on job search and careers featured on the site.

I'd be interested to see if these would later be built into a person's profile as Linkedin does to showcase expertise, or whether they would go the Jobster way to aggregate how people feel about a certain firm or job.

Get the latest Internet recruiting scoop at Cheezhead.

My Media sources

Nimmy tagged me with this media tag meme that's been going around in the KM circles. Hmm, trust KM people to want to know how people keep themselves informed, heh, right?

So here goes...

• Books: I am always ready to devour a book. Any book. I was brought up on a diet of fiction from childhood and it always is great to get lost in imaginary worlds created by others. Recently at a second hand book exhibition I got some great Le Carre novels at throwaway prices, and the Dubliners by James Joyce. In the recent past I've mostly read fiction by Indian authors like Amitav Ghosh (his Circle of Reason is my all time favorite), Jhumpa Lahiri (both the Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake were amazing). I got hooked on to IWE (Indian Writing in English) after reading Midnight's Children in 1995 :-). It is also great to read a book that is about a place you know by someone you can call a friend too. On the non-fiction front I stick to the classical management books. Drucker, Tom Peters, Ram Charan. A recent buy has been Ram Charan's "Know-How", am still to read that :-) On KM, Nonaka's classic "The Knowledge Creating Company" has been a big influence. As well as Intellectual Capital by Tom Stewart. Other great books that have been big influences has been The Tao of Physics by Capra, Chaos by Gleick, Sensemaking by Weick, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Genome. Oh before I forget, I guess graphic novels have to go in this section. I loved "The Dark Knight Returns" by Frank Miller ...am a big Batman fan :-)
  
• Communication: My preferred mode of communication is by email. I do not like the intrusiveness of the phone unless it is by people close to me. I am not a big IM user too. Can't really express myself with clarity and with dodgy internet connections. SMS texting is a good compromise between the phone and IM. But my vote goes for the email anyday over the others. Hey, but that's just me.
  
• TV: I am a eclectic TV watcher. Mostly ESPN-Star Sports, CNN-IBN, NDTV, CNBC-TV18. Love Storyboard when I get the chance on what's happening in the advertising and media industry. Also like to catch the gadgets and tech programs on the channels even though I can't buy anything :-) Love "No Reservations" on Travel and Living. Always wanted a job where I could go around eating in exotic countries and get paid for it :-)
  
• Films. Am hooked to predominantly Hindi movies. The whole spectrum, from Nagesh Kukunoor to Aditya Chopra. Though I'll gladly miss a Barjatya movie anyday :-) Am looking forward to the Namesake's movie release (there's even a blog about it). In English movies I like the action movies with some kind of plot. No Vin Diesel for me. I'd rather see a Denzel Washington thriller. Haven't seen too much of the world cinema, though I loved the trilogy of Kieslowski's called Red, White and Blue
  
• Magazines - I read magazines when I am travelling. Outlook, India Today, Business Today, Time are my airport buys. Also keep a tab on what Training and T+D are saying.
  
• Music - Am not a big music buff. 1980s English music stuff. And Kishore Kumar.
  
• Radio - Only get to hear the FM when I am driving. Radio City is the cure for bad traffic in Hyderabad.
  
• The Web - Google search. Bloglines. Blogger.com. Ryze. Linkedin. Orkut. Recruiting.com. Google Reader. Flickr. Wikipedia. Wikimapia. The web is my virtual location. I keep reading most from here. This is where I respond and react to my various media stimuli.
  

So in turn I am tagging these folks (also to check if they really read this blog ;-) :

• Anuradha
• Bill Ives
• Michael Keleman
• Dina Mehta
• Sucharith Menon

Hey, anyone who reads it can take this meme forward too !!

MBA personal interview perspectives

It was almost exactly ten years ago that I faced three interviewers for my personal interview round before I got admitted to do my MBA.

So it was a different kind of deja vu when I crossed the line and became an interviewer for a B School as they had requested me (amongst others) as they considered me a "well wisher".

After a day of interviewing 12 MBA aspirants these are the thoughts I was left with:

1. A majority of the people were engineers with 2-4 years of experience. Most of them were from the IT services industry and of them 3-4 people were people who did software testing and quality kind of roles.
2. Interestingly a lot of these people talked about turning entrepreneur after 3-4 years of working.
3. Most people wanted to specialise in Finance but when asked why, they could not articulate the reason, except for a couple of them. If you have zoned on one, the panel will ask why you want to pursue that and therefore you should be prepared
4. The question "Why do you want to do an MBA" is a sure question, and yet very few people said anything that showed they were ready with a clear and crisp answer to that.
5. For budding business managers, awareness of things like the recently released Union Budget and its impact on individuals and organizations should be clear to some extent. That was sorely lacking.
6. It's great to have a big grand goal, but show that you can plan the intermediate steps to that goal as well. It doesn't have to be perfect or correct, but I would look for thoroughness in thought.
7. On the other hand just thinking of the job you'd like to do a couple of years after graduating from an MBA and not having a larger vision for your career makes it seem that you are in it only for the money :-)

On the panel was a software product person who quizzed the engineers on the kind of work they that done and there was a professor from the business school who had an eagle eye on the academic record of the students.

Recruitment Advertisements

Post contributed by guest contributor R Karthik.

I was hauling and hurling the newspapers strewn all over in my shelf when last week's edition of Times Ascent caught my eye.

Much as I always love to do, I leafed through its pages and something very interesting featured on the main page's story- Pink Slip Awards for Creative Excellence in Recruitment Advertising!

Times Group instituted this award blanket a year or two ago.

There are several categories (ad/campaign/headline and so on) in which individuals and companies lodge their entries vying for "The Best...Award"

I have wanted to (though I still haven't done) research on classification of recruitment ads-on what bases they can be classified, no. of and what types.

Let's think of some ads we have come across and see if we can observe patterns/commonalities and arrive on at least 2 bases for classification.

Makes for a very interesting student project; doesn't it?? (I wonder why I did not take up this as a project theme when I was a student)

Now, we have seen this common-place ad which carries an introductory paragraph about the organization's business interests and delineates the specifications for all open positions.

Then there is the employee testimonial ad; a guy/girl-next-door screams out of his portrait "my company is the best place to work for….."

Euphemistically though, they go on to state "I've been with ………for 8 years now; at……..we…"

None of us can have missed the 'Infoscions' who are featured as "meet the know-it-all face of new India/meet the challenges-are-fun face of new India"!

Why….they own the bottom half of every week's edition of job opportunities supplement of widely-read newspapers!

And then there is the ad done the other way around! Employer singing his associate's praise in a very subtle and intriguing way-

But these ones are a little rare; I have seen only Google's ad carrying a story/incident and profile of an employee, how he/she joined the organization and what is so special about the individual.

This was more of a campaign and did not talk about open positions at all.

Yet it is worthy of being counted in our list because the employee's childhood image or photograph is featured and that gives the ad a collage kind of appeal that comes with the tweaked photograph with edges cut unevenly and a scribbling or something else. Probably this also belongs to the previous clan of ads only. (Photograph and annotations used)

Next is the genre of ads in which a visual and a headline does all the talking or luring rather!

Provocative statements or rhetoric or an unanswered question will just do as much to make us sit up and scratch our nose.

Interested people surf or head to the directed space or web link to know more and explore.

The co. has a crystal clear profile of its prospects' (who it wants to attack and bring aboard) persona!

Something is said in the ad to that effect which will appeal to the senses of such individuals and those guys beat a path themselves to the co.s front office enquiring.

A brilliant ad by Saatchi brothers posting open positions in proof-readers/editors and Copy editors; a small 5 line paragraph with the 1 ^st or last syllable of every word jumbled.

Though spelt wrong the reader can make out what the right word is….

"fi oyu fnid sometignh worng abuot evrye wrod in tish wohel passeag it maens we'ev fonud teh rihtg preson in oyu; at Staachi & Staachi we'er hrinig"

The above is not the exact version of the ad which I only palely remember (why the damn didn't I treasure it when I first saw it?)

Anyway! I hope I have conveyed the essence of it.

Intrigued by such ads I too once thought of an interesting headline for an ad I was to co-create.

To invite applications from Sales & BD Professionals for a co.'s nutrition biz I inserted a quotation at the header of the quarter-page print ad.

"He that takes nutrition and ignores medicine; wastes the skill of a physician"-A Chinese Proverb

In the over-communicated pages of any newspaper's appointments section, your ad if it has to stand out (despite the constraints of your dimensions and colors) will have to catch the imagination of readers.

Teasers though uncommon in recruitment advertising also elicit sufficient hype and finally manage to reach the audience intended for.

There are employer branding ads which besides calling for applications to a not-much-elaborated function/technology/domain also does communicate the boast-worthy aspects of the organization as a workplace.

We have seen automobile companies or manufacturing co.s come up with ad campaigns/series (not stand-alone ads) that carry info on their CSR initiatives, awards bagged, stand taken on larger issues of the world/country. However one insight here is that embarking on such campaigns makes sense only for those organizations that have a pre-defined employer branding agenda and objectives.

Well, think I have exhausted all that I have personally seen and managed to recall.

Now let's summarize the different bases for classification;

1).Content-based

(factual- no. of positions open, JDs/JSs, walk-in venue details- descriptive- less factual and more descriptive of desired candidate competencies and many more)

2). Communication objectives- based

(employer branding-employee/employer testimonials

Fun-at-work/culture

Benefits

Diversity at work

Articulation of stand taken towards issue/commitment to a larger social cause etc)

3). Target/prospect locked

(Age-group- e.g calling on freshers/octogenarians

Niche skill- Media professionals/RJs/VJs

Freelance opportunities-language tutors/part-time faculty)

Beyond and above all these, every excellent piece of creative ad communication crafted brings forth a newer genre.

It goes unsaid-there is much much more to recruitment ads that what has been deliberated about.

I wish to end this passage with this note- it could be that not all the bases of classification I have discussed here are mutually exclusive; nor is the above classification collectively exhaustive.

Pls. do add your own perspectives to this.

Wish you a colourful holi

On the occasion of the spring festival of colours, Holi, here's wishing everybody a vibrant, colourful and joyful Holi !

Blogging therefore will be light :-)

Have a great Holi-filled weekend !

Risks of Corporate Blogging

Patrix pointed me to this article yesterday and Praneeth to this one today. Synchronicity, I tell you :-) !

I agree with most of the points in both the articles.

As I told a journalist who asked me what my advice would be for corporates to utilise blogging:

"Organizations must answer these questions before they undertake blogging or any social media initiative: Can they be authentic? Can they embrace the conversation rather than dictate? Can they shift the mindset of "markets as a battlefield" to "markets are conversations"? Being honest and upfront is the only way to be.

Trying to manipulate or trick blog readers is not a good idea. It might lead to more blowback than gain. The purpose of the blog has to be crystal clear in the organizations mind. It should be a tool to generate conversation and influence. Mixing that with a sales pitch is a lack of integrity.

To anyone who wants to blog, you have to understand the philosophy behind it. Not the tool. Writing skills are very important. Ditching the corporate jargon will be a necessity. People have to be clear and humble. No matter if you are the CEO of a major corporation or the neighborhood barber. It's the age of the attention economy and being engaging is not a "nice to have" skill but a necessary one. Learn to connect. That's the currency of being successful in this medium "

Blog Readers

I thought you might enjoy this map (courtesy Google Analytics) of where the readers of this blog come from :-) Seems like the biggest "market" for this blog is India (obviously) and US along with Canada. Europe and UK have a few visits too.

Yes, language still determines the reach of the content. I wish online translation and search translation tools become more popular.

By the way, you can interact and know fellow blog readers by joining the community at MyBlogLog.

US job satisfaction levels going down

Sudhanshu points to an interesting report that states that younger American workers are least satisfied with their jobs.

Satisfaction is important, but I believe that the higher thing to aspire for is engagement with the job.

Satisfaction focusses too much on the external factors that an organization can tinker with. The pay, the benefits, the overtime, the job titles. I am not saying that these are not important, but focusing on these factors takes away the energy from focusing on the really important bit: the work and the innate talent of the person.

Once HR professionals and managers start to get that alignment right - because it can't be "templated" it is not an easy approach - external factors remaining the same, satisfaction will go up.

If you are an employee, you can help your manager to take that decision. Reflect. Look at what you do well, and what you don't. Think about the roles where you can really make a difference and which excites you. Communicate that as your career goal to your organization.

Your career growth is your onus. You need to steer it rather than waiting for your managers and HR professionals to guide you.

Decisions

A business school wants me to sit on its student selection panel.

I'm confused. It's on a Sunday.

And I dread to think that I could decide, nay, even influence on who gets to be in an MBA class and who does not. It's scary.

What do you suggest? Should I take it up?

Oh, another thing, keep an eye out on some Indian business mags in the near future. You'll probably find my ugly mug on one of the pages talking about business blogging ;-)