Eight random things

Nimmy has tagged me, so here goes, eight random things about me:

1. Someday I hope to write a book, dunno what kind of a book, maybe fiction, maybe management and careers related. But, someday...
2. I've always dreamed of pursuing a PhD, another dream for another day...maybe..
3. I am a Harry Potter fan, and have already pre-booked my copy of the 7th book, which comes out on 21st July. Am waiting impatiently for 3 weeks to pass :-)
4. Am a big DC Comics fan, and have already ordered two classic books, The Dark Knight Returns, and Kingdom Come via Barnes & Noble. I wish there was a DC Comic with Frank Miller's writing skills and Alex Ross' artwork. I'd pay a premium for that graphic novel !
5. I've taken some risks with my career and have experienced first-hand the learning that risks will bring reward. Mostly more than you hoped for :-)
6. I believe that one's media consumption habits constantly need to be changed, so that one always knows what's happening in the peripheries. That's important. That's where innovation comes from.
7. I love helping people and groups learn to change. Maybe that's the basic need that has driven my career decisions.
8. I prefer being an optimist, and my motto in life echos John Naisbitt's statement - "What a fabulous time to be alive"

So here's passing on this tag to eight friends:

Dipta - Who I am sure will talk about Kolkata and Bollywood, if he accepts the tag ;-)
Soumitra - friend from school who apart from his day job, plays the guitar in Gurgaon, professionally.
Abhijit - who just had a great vacation and is making us envious with all those perfect pictures.
Vulturo - We know so many random things about him, that we'd love to know 8 more :-)
Shivam - 8 more things on the National Highway, please?
Evil HR Lady - who's now a PHR. Yay ! Congrats!
Abhishek - An entrepreneur who blogs. Just like
Sanjeev - yeah the same one who's asking you to revolt against Hari Sadu.

The rules....
-Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
-People who are tagged, write a blog post about their own 8 random things, and post these rules.

The Manager's role in development

One of the least spoken roles of a manager is regarding the development of an employee. There are tonnes of written stuff about the role of a manager in planning and evaluation work but not much help in how should a manager really help his employees to develop.

The manager must first realise that the development of his/her employee is part of the manager's role. Most managers think it is the onus of the employee to develop oneself and the organization's role to provide the learning input. However, linking both these becomes the role of the manager. By focusing on giving assignments and work to help translate theoretical classroom learning into practice, managers can help both the employee and organization truly utilise learning.

The manager must also focus on continually having developmental discussions (in addition to more frequent performance related discussions) on focusing the employee's thoughts and effort on long term growth and performance.

Great San Francisco jobs await you at San Fran Jobs.

Jobster, RecruitingBlogs.com and Non-Competes

It's always painful to hear when two good friends have a disagreement that leads to lawyers calling, getting featured on TechCrunch, but thankfully, all's well that ends well.

I consider both the Jasons to be online buddies, Jason Davis, founder of Recruiting.com and now behind the MySpace of recruiters, RecruitingBlogs.com as well as Jason Goldberg, CEO of Jobster.com

In all the learning from this episode seems to be that a very heavy handed approach towards communities does not work. It might not be a great idea to call in the lawyers without trying to work it out between friends.

It shows that even when a CEO gets blogging and social media, the rest of the 'management' might not. And sometimes that traps even a web 2.0 company in a dual bind, between the openness of the collaborative world and the old control and command ways of the past.

Attrition, Engagement and Commitment

Regina Miller in her column spells out the difference...

It takes very special companies to create environments were employees are committed to their work, the company and the brand. I seem to hear less and less about trying to create a committed workforce. I hear much more about and an engaged workforce. Do both engagement and commitment create the loyalty employers are now once again striving for? Does one engender more loyalty than the other? So does engagement become the default for commitment?

Whatever the difference be, pick one and stick with it. Your employer brand depends on your employees as advocates about how excited they are to work in an organisation as cool as yours– that cares about engaging people at work and that at the end of the day relies on engaged and committed employees to make the brand come to life for customers.

Organizations I think should strive for engagement since for Gen Y and X, commitment might be unthinkable at least from the work context. Commitment is missing from the Indian workplace specially private enterprises post-liberalisation. And one sided commitment is never fair.

So engagement it has got to be. And that is something that has to be worked at by both sides of the equation. Organizations need to continually strive to make employees more engaged and employees also need to engaged to work on a daily and even hourly basis.

However, starting a relationship means both parties have got to view the other as equals and draconian non-compete clauses or forced bank guarantees are not the way to go forward. They essentially state to all the prospective employees "We don't trust you". That can sound the death-knell for workplace morale and culture.

It is also a sure way of hurting your employment brand in a market where the war for talent is on at full swing.

In addition, it also ensures that your ex-employees will never be your goodwill ambassadors!

The Problem with HR Metrics

Over on the EBM blog Joanne says:

HR has used metrics for a long time. However, their typical metrics at best can be used to manage the HR function and fulfill compliance requirements. And they rarely operate 'at best'. More commonly their metrics are used in a vacuum with no view toward the impact on the business.

An example is time to fill. Is is really important to reduce time to fill if we consequently reduce quality of hire? Most organizations don't even connect the two measures. We need to evaluate time to fill in the context of time to productivity, performance, 1st year turnover, LOS, and potential so that we do not chase a target that may be detrimental to the organization. The goal is the balance of time and quality - same for cost per hire.

This is what I call HR's tendency to measure "input metrics". Time to fill, number of new hires, number of training programs conducted, number of salary revisions carried out, percentage of workforce completed the performance management system, etc.

Or at the most, they go up to efficiency metrics - yield ratio of recruitment, percentage of training programs done on schedule, budget overruns etc.

However, what really holds HR from being a 'business partner' is measuring the impact of its role. How is recruiting really contributing to the higher performance. How are learning initiatives really impacting productivity and how are organizational change efforts really unlocking people and group potential.

Unless HR comes up with a way to measure the "impact or outcome metrics", they will continue to chase the wrong numbers and never really get seen as "business partners"

On business fads

Why is having a blog such a great thing? One can respond quickly to questions by readers. Consulting thought leader and author David Maister responds to a question by one of his readers about Phil Rosenzweig’s book The Halo Effect . As David agrees:

My book, Practice What You Preach, is not covered by Rosenzweig (it wasn’t a best-seller) but I have no doubt he would make a similar critique of my methodology. I surveyed people in 139 businesses on 74 questions and explored the statistical relationships between that opinion data (on what was and wasn’t going on in their office) and the financial performance of those businesses.

I think I would argue two relative strengths of my study: By allowing the statistics to tell me which of the 74 questions had explanatory power, I allowed the data to be discriminating between which aspects of office culture was correlated and which wasn’t.

If you were nit-picking, you COULD argue that all I discovered is which characteristics have a high halo effect (i.e. are given high ratings by employees when things are going well) and those that have a low halo effect. But that’s a pretty complicated argument.

Secondly, I did use a statistical methodology (structured equation modeling) – used by none of the authors Rosenzweig examines – which allows you to test for causality (and the direction of causality) not just correlation. (Which is one of his big concerns.)

So, net, net, net – I think he’s written a terrific book to remind all managers to beware of quick fad conclusions, and to remind all researchers and consultants that many (if not most) relationships in business that we think we know for sure actually don’t have much of a solid research backing to them.

Hmm... Rosenzweig’s book is on my reading list (thanks to the blog hunt prize) and I intend reading it soon. For people interested in more such "fact based business research" you can follow management professor Bob Sutton's (co-author of Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense) blog here and the related website here.

Consultants Atriition Reasons

According to a research by Top-Consultant.com:

"* Consultants want to secure better remuneration. Once applied across the firm this can prove very expensive—and easily negated by a competitor's counter-move. 51% of firms taking measures to improve retention in last 12 months have raised remuneration.

* Consultants want greater influence over the projects they are assigned to. This is likely to lead to more time on the bench and lower utilisation rates if applied across the firm—but could be selectively targeted at staff deemed to be 'at risk' of leaving.

* Consultants want a change in culture so that evening and weekend work is discouraged and work/life balance is improved. Looks like the most cost-effective measure, but needs leadership and buy-in from the most senior figures in the firm.

By contrast, overcoming a problem of 'Early Leavers' is predominantly a question of tackling management problems within the organisation.

'Early leavers' cited lack of face-time with management, lack of guidance, poor management/consultant relationships, uninspiring leadership as top factors for leaving.

Long-serving consultants are most likely to move on because of a lack of career development and uninspiring consulting assignments.

'Long-servers' cited a lack of actual career progression combined with a perceived intransparency in their intended career path; plus dissatisfaction with the variety and challenge of assignments being won. "

Which reiterates that one of the key drivers for retaining intelligent and hard working people is to give them high quality work. People need to be engaged by their work, their superior and peers and their organizations. In that order.

Knowledge Circulation

Shawn at Anecdote is thinking about cases in the private and public sectors where an "up or out" policy exists. He calls for a set of principles around knowledge circulation to help such firms from not losing the knowledge gained.

For firms that compete mainly on the basis of their IP and knowledge of clients and industries, knowledge loss is not just a intellectual exercise. It is imperative for competitive success and even survival.

Most firms usually have processes that help to keep a track of such knowledge. Whether by explicit means (by means of an IT enabled system) or by socialisation processes where the "know-hows" are passed by seniors and experts to juniors.

What is also more encouraging is that firms like these are also looking at alternate career tracks for people to grow. Slowly, consultants and others are realising that 'partner or bust' is not the only way to grow, and one can move out of client engagement roles to become industry and functional subject matter experts.

Be activists Bill Gates tells Harvard students

Interesting talk by Bill Gates at the Harvard commencement of 2007

“When you consider what those of us here in this Yard have been given — in talent, privilege, and opportunity — there is almost no limit to what the world has a right to expect from us,” Gates said. “Be activists. Take on the big inequities. It will be one of the great experiences of your lives.”

Gates said one thing he did not learn at Harvard, however, was about the world’s inequities. He said he was shocked to learn that millions of children die each year of diseases that are absent from the industrialized world and that could be treated if the will was there.

After analyzing the problem, Gates said, he figured out the cruel reason that nothing had been done.

“The answer is simple and hard. The market did not reward saving the lives of these children, and governments did not subsidize it. So the children died because their mothers and fathers had no power in the market and no voice in the system,” Gates said. “But you and I have both.”

Gates urged graduates and others in the audience to work to create market forces that provide incentives — profits for businesses and votes for politicians — to help the world’s poorest and least fortunate.

Gates said he believes that the biggest barrier to solving the problems of inequity is not a lack of caring, as some believe, but that finding ways to contribute are too complex. Many people, he said, would help if they only knew how.

To do that, he said, requires determining a goal, finding the highest-impact approach, discovering the ideal technology for that approach, and continuing to do what works best now while those other things are going on. And above all, he said, don’t get discouraged.

“The crucial thing is to never stop thinking and working — and never do what we did with malaria and tuberculosis in the 20th century — which was to surrender to complexity and quit,” Gates said. “In line with the promise of this age, I want to exhort each of the graduates here to take on an issue — a complex problem, a deep inequity, and become a specialist on it…. You have more than we had. You must start sooner and carry on longer.”

The full transcript is here. Some more interesting words from Gates:

But if you want to inspire people to participate, you have to show more than numbers; you have to convey the human impact of the work – so people can feel what saving a life means to the families affected.

I remember going to Davos some years back and sitting on a global health panel that was discussing ways to save millions of lives. Millions! Think of the thrill of saving just one person’s life – then multiply that by millions. … Yet this was the most boring panel I’ve ever been on – ever. So boring even I couldn’t bear it.

What made that experience especially striking was that I had just come from an event where we were introducing version 13 of some piece of software, and we had people jumping and shouting with excitement. I love getting people excited about software – but why can’t we generate even more excitement for saving lives?

You can’t get people excited unless you can help them see and feel the impact. And how you do that – is a complex question.

Still, I’m optimistic. Yes, inequity has been with us forever, but the new tools we have to cut through complexity have not been with us forever. They are new – they can help us make the most of our caring – and that’s why the future can be different from the past.

The futility of employment branding

I've been thinking of employment branding and social media and suddenly it struck me - for the average candidate the employment brand is mostly about the success of the organization.

Only when two similar organizations compete for the same candidate, do other factors like the specific role, culture and openness come into play.

Think about it, given a choice would you join a large organization that is growing and amongst the top of its industry, or a large organization that is stagnating or a small start up that you don't know whether it would succeed or fail.

Most people (and I don't mean most bloggers!) would go for the first option. The ones looking for a challenge would go for the second organization. The innovative and creative risk taker who wants high responsibility would take the third.

Employment branding strategies would need to be therefore customised to the kind of candidate you want to hire.

Management Models

It happens to me quite frequently... I want to explain something to someone with the help of a model and the details of the model completely escape me.

So I was quite excited when Willem Moolenburgh from Amsterdam mailed me about their service called ProvenModels. However my enthusiasm was soon deflated- the annual subscription for it is a steep 499 euros. The price of a corporate membership is higher.

Given those costs, I don't foresee the service taking off on a mass level, but for individual consultants who can afford it, it ought to be a useful service.

However, if I had to design a site like this I would flickrize it, so that anyone can comment and download. An annual fee is quite a lot of ask when there is no original content and most of the models can anyway be found after searching on the web.

On CNBC Awaaz

A friend called last night to say that while channel surfing he had noticed this blog was covered by CNBC's Hindi channel CNBC आवाज़ on the evening of the 18th of June.

I suspect it might be in connection with their career related program हम होंगे कामयाब

Let me know if you managed to see it too.

On Learning

My six year old daughter refused to go to school today. On asking her why, she said she was scared of school.

Well, my wife and I tried to reason with her. We went with her to her school. She came along but her eyes were downcast and she refused to stay if we moved from there. She missed her cousins whom she had met last week during her vacations and she missed her teacher who taught her last year.

Sometimes, I worry about schools too. Most schools anyway. As Jeff Hunter says, what schools teach by how they teach, is more important than actually what they teach.

Normal schooling is about fitting in. It's about coloring inside the lines. It about making life structured and orderly. Its about building intellect and not empathy. It teaches a fear of mistakes than learning from mistakes. It also scares children if they think they are different from others.

However the skills we need for tomorrow. For succeeding in life, is different. In more cases than not, being the exact opposite of what schools teach.

My daughter's discomfort even in familiar surroundings reminded me of another truth. If we have fun with friends, and have a mentor we look up too, most places are great to be in.

Mindset needs to change

Thomas asks whether this concerns us.

52 percent of companies don’t have a chief human resources officer or equivalent executive assigned to such people issues as developing a high-performance culture or meeting talent needs.

Deloitte and The Economist surveyed executives from 468 companies on several continents, including 104 HR leaders and 155 senior business executives.

Only 23 percent of corporate leaders see their HR departments as currently playing a crucial role in coming up with corporate strategy and having a significant impact on operating results.

Yes, it is a concern. However I'd argue that HR people shouldn't really wait for these 52% of companies to change - I guess they don't have HR leaders because they probably view people as 'costs' and have someone from the finance group or legal group look after HR functions. A bean counter who resists hiring until he/she can help it.

Good HR people would rather work with 23% of organizations that see their HR as crucial. Why waste your talent where one's value is not appreciated. Everyday the workforce tells us that, whether we are hiring people or conducting exit interviews.

HR can be a change agent. However, it's better to be a change agent where the CEO wants you to be a change agent. Have you seen great marketing people work for a place where marketing is not valued? Or great IT managers working in a firm that has no faith in technology?

Why should great HR talent work with organizations that don't believe in the importance of people?

How Microsoft thinks about talent and leadership

Mathew Jacob, who works as Microsoft's senior director for corporate learning and development sent me a link of an interview he gave recently to Training Magazine on how Microsoft develops leaders.

Microsoft began by looking at competencies, starting with two basic questions: What does "differentiated performance" in a leader look like today, and what must it look like in the long term? Using interviews, focus groups, and other techniques, "we conducted research worldwide," Jacob says. That research identified 11 leadership competencies for the present and the future. One sample competency is "deep insight," which Jacob describes as the capacity to see systems, patterns, and connections beyond the obvious information contained in data. Another is "building organization capability, part of which involves the capacity to see organization as a competitive variable rather than just a way to structure work and people, to build sustainable organizational success and self-renewing capability, to think and execute with a systemic organizational view. Interestingly, leadership itself can be viewed as an organization capability rather than in its narrow notion of something embedded in certain individuals," Jacob says.

What is the best way to develop such leaders with these competencies? That question, Jacob says, led to another: How do leaders actually grow at Microsoft? Here, the company's thinking was influenced by the work of Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter, and James Noel, whose 2001 book, "The Leadership Pipeline," described six distinct career stages through which people may progress, each representing a significant transition.

Read the whole article, it's quite a fascinating one :-)

"The competencies, the career stages, and our taxonomy of experiences—those three pieces drive the way we think about leadership development and everything associated with it," Jacob says, including talent management, assessment, formal training, succession planning, coaching, performance evaluation, job-rotation schemes, international assignments, orienting new managers hired from outside the company, and how to spot and groom high-potential leaders at every level.

What's more, Jacob says, "We utilize the same framework with differing content for all employees—not just leaders—across each discipline, such as sales, engineering, finance, and human resources. We are not just concerned about growing leaders, we are equally committed to and passionate about growing deep individual technical and functional expertise."

Today, virtually every person in Microsoft can do a self-assessment; get feedback from peers and managers against competencies, career stages, and experiences; and document their development and career plans—all using one tool.

India gets mentioned too :-)

On the assessment side, large global firms are more sophisticated in the intake process and often use assessment centers. "Internationally," McAteer says, "the larger high-growth firms in Asia-Pacific with cross- border markets such as Satyam and Tata are looking aggressively at talent management. Smaller firms with a local market focus are not; they rely on hiring. One consistent trend is the difficulty of finding qualified leadership talent in the scientific disciplines and high-tech areas. The question becomes, 'Which of my engineers will be my leaders?'"

Globally, there is much more talent segmentation. "In India, for example, you don't have an aging workforce—there are lots of people under age 25," McAteer says. And with the growth of outsourcing, more resources are outside the company. The question, McAteer points out, is becoming, "Should I be worried about talent management at my suppliers?"

Of course, the acid test for any leadership development program is when the firm gets into the second generation of leaders, and as the firm ages and grows and faces competition like never before. So yes, leadership development is critical and oftentimes looking at competencies that made a firm successful in the past is not the smart thing to do. Glad to see that Microsoft is looking at the future and the behaviors that might make it successful in the future.

Why HR should matter

From Consulting Times:

consultants have been responding to comments made recently by Merck CEO, Dick Clark. In an interview Clark suggested that “culture eats strategy for lunch” if a firm does not possess the “enabling systems and structures” that support and co-ordinate with a desired strategic direction. For some observers, the comment might seem surprising, or even provocative. For those who appreciate that culture is often a significant driver of behaviour and performance in firms, Clark’s comments are common sense.

First, however, an organisation must identify, define and understand the core ingredients of its culture better than anything or anyone else.
Strategic imperatives must be built from there. To proceed in any other way is one of the riskiest moves an organisation can make.

And guess which is the only function which impacts organisational culture everyday? Yes, our humble friendly HR function. Every person hired, every compensation cycle changed, every performance management change impacts the overall organizational culture.

Doing the daily activities without reflecting on how they are impacting the overall culture of a firm will ensure that HR always gets seen as a transactional and reactive function.

To act as advisors to the business, HR has to build expertise in cultural issues and advise business leaders on how any business initiative impacts the culture. If you're not doing it, you're not really acting as business partners.

Strategy Consulting Marketplace

From Kennedy Info:

Almost half of the Strategy consulting market is consumed by just 18 players, each with Strategy practices of over $200 million in revenue. This attests to the global nature of Strategy today. The majority of this market segment is made up of Strategy and Operations centric firms; however, multi-service consulting (MSC) firms also control a large share of the space. In effect, virtually all MSC firms have Strategy practices larger than $200 million. Firms at the head of the market have international activities that spread across the full range of strategy services. They need this combination of wide geographic scope and depth of strategy services portfolio to build scale within the Strategy practice.

The projects that are driving significant penetration and growth: Outsourcing Advisory, Operational Transformation, Strategic Innovation, Strategic Risk Management, Innovation Capability Building, Customer ‘Insight’ Analytics, Value Based Management.

And these are the top strategy consulting firms, while most are well known names, others are in the list thanks to their niche specialisation like TPI in the outsourcing market. Haven't ever heard of Marakon Associates or Prophet. Must do some research on them

• A.T. Kearney
• Accenture
• BearingPoint
• Bain & Company
• Booz Allen Hamilton
• Boston Consulting Group
• CapGemini
• Deloitte
• Gartner Consulting
• IBM Global Business Services
• KPMG
• Marakon Associates
• McKinsey & Company
• Mercer Specialty Consulting
• Monitor Group
• PA Consulting
• Prophet
• PricewaterhouseCoopers
• Roland Berger Strategy Consultants
• Strategic Decisions Group
• TPI

Interesting links

Looks like the HR Carnival has impacted my blogging habit :-)

This post is a collection of some interesting articles I came across on the blogosphere.

Rashmi Bansal has two posts on jobs. In one she blogs about how the perception of employment brand might suffer if a company starts hiring people in large numbers. I am not sure if I agree, but yes, people with a high need of achievement might not like it so much if they are college toppers and the guy who scraped through the exams also ends up working for the same organization. However, people with high need for affiliation (that includes a sizable group) might really like it. In the next post she shows how larger sections of society are getting impacted by the economic growth and nature of jobs changing.

AK Menon speaks from a executive search consultant's perspective on the hottest search for a job candidate in India. No, not the President of the country but the Coach of the Indian Cricket Team. I personally think Graham Ford is not to be faulted for refusing the offer. If he saw the chaotic operations of the BCCI and heard about the one year contract, he is within his right to refuse. There is no guarantee that just because one has chosen to come to the interview that he/she will take up the job the offer. The other thing is - are there some jobs where the challenges far outweigh the rewards? If the perception is so, then selling that job is a tough proposition!

Prasad O Kurian does an informal survey on who are the thought leaders in HR in India, and he comes up with some interesting insights and even more questions :-)

The Carnival of HR

Welcome to the Carnival of Human Resources hosted by yours truly. Today we have a scintillating spread of some of the best Human Resources and related subjects from around the "talent-o-sphere".

First off we have a post from Ann Bares at Compensation Force introduces us to CARS, not the automobile variety, but the Consortium for Alternative Reward Strategies. Some interesting facts about alternate rewards, like most alternate rewards is about meeting and rewarding business performance and is not focussed on attracting and retaining people.

At median, the organizations studied gained $2.34 (in performance improvements) for every dollar they spent on incentive payouts; thus a close approximation of net plan ROI is 134%.

Wally Bock at the Three Star Leadership Blog says that some experts think that the young people coming in to business today are narcissistic and addicted to praise. Are they right? And what does that mean for you as a manager?

This is a hard working generation, but they are showing up at your workplace with a high need for praise, an expectation for rewards, and not much experience dealing with negative feedback. That presents a challenge and, predictably, there have been some bizarre responses.

According to the Wall Street Journal, one company has a designated "celebrations assistant." Part of the assistant's job is to throw confetti at employees and distribute balloons. This is simply silly.

Anna Farmery at the Engaging Brand posts 10 "just one mores" that can make a difference to our daily life.

MabelandHarry blog about how making people connect gives more meaning and sense to help them perform.

Rowan at Fortify Your Oasis tells us how to deal with the dreaded interview question "What are your weaknesses?" (or as they are asked these days "What are your areas of improvement?")

If you have an interview coming up shortly and you don’t have a strong, fact-based, answer to this question, you need to do a little soul-searching. Failing that, ask your partner/spouse. Spouses are always ready to point out your failings and need very little encouragement to do so. Talk to friends and family. Ask them to tell you three strong points and one weakness about yourself. Tell them to do you the favour of being brutally honest. Do the same with colleagues from past jobs, or better yet, an old boss of yours. Therapists charge a fortune to help you along this sort of voyage of self-discovery; the information is there for free, if you have the courage to ask for it.

Debra Owen at 8 hours and a lunch blogs about how HR can become a business partner not by playing political games but by helping them listen to the employees.

because someone truly interested in the good of the company, the good of the employees, the good of the department, and even their own good, is going to recognize that sometimes things aren't rosy. and parties and give-aways aren't going to make it better. what will make it better? balance, of course

Jennifer at Business Toolkit looks at the question that even I did some time ago..."What is talent management?". Some interesting data from ASTD survey on who is actually doing TM in organizations.

60% of respondents indicated that training and HR operations are coming together in their organizations and 90% believe that the trends will continue. What does it look like in your organization?

Nitin has a philosophical question on whether we are sacrificing happiness in the pursuit of happiness...

The Evil HR Lady looks at the elusive quality of alignment and what HR can do to help organizations achieve it.

Get your management in line and get them to either enforce a policy or eliminate it. It's cute to have everyone doing something different when you are 3. It's not so cute for your shareholders.

Ask a Manager looks at the 9 ways you can ruin an interview. Such as

I once had a candidate tell me way too much about the sex column she wrote for her campus newspaper. If I had been talking to her at a party, I would have been fascinated, but it was inappropriate for a job interview.

Susan from About.com posts how real women get ahead.

Forget what you’ve heard about “being one of the boys,” “having it all,” and “going for the jugular.” Here is how real women get ahead. Not by asking how to get peer employees to respect their view point, but by having a well-expressed, admirable view point. See the difference?

Lots of good and thought provoking posts from all the contributors. Hope you like them. I had a blast hosting the carnival and hope to host it again.

The next carnival will be hosted by the HR Capitalist. See you there!

Google's HR focus in India

Well looks like Google is following in GE's footsteps, as far as developing its HR talent is concerned.

GE's been famous for its functional Leadership Programs where people are put through a diverse stint in various GE businesses to develop as HR/Finance and Information Management Leaders.

Looks like Google which in the US beat McKinsey to be the favourite employer of MBAs is taking a leaf out of GE's strategy by launching the Google India HR Emerging Leader Program.

It is slated to be a 18-21 month program with two six-month engagements that will involve on the job training on Staffing / Staffing Programs as well as Employee Engagement ( including Compensation Cycle )

In addition there would be a one 6-9 month cross-geography assignment.
Other things being promised are rich collaboration with peers and senior business leaders from across Google offices, globally. In addition there would be an identified Mentor from HR leadership for the participants.

By focusing on MBAs and Psychology post-graduates from the 2005/2006 batch, Google is positioning itself as a place that can be relevant to non-Engineers too :-)

The thing to watch out for is whether they would roll out Marketing/Finance programs like this too..

Carnival Time on Wednesday

Hey this is just a reminder that the Carnival of Human Resources will be hosted on this blog. This is the first time I'll be hosting any blog carnival, so wish me luck :-)

If you have any HR/Training related blog post you want to highlight, send me an email with the URL/permalink of your blog post to gautam dot ghosh at gmail dot com

Life after head of HR

If one becomes a head of HR in 20 years (I know of people who are achieving that milestone in 8-10 years !) what does one do after that, asks Prasad.

We have seen 'solutions' found by particular individuals. They include, inter alia, moving into larger firms, moving into regional/global roles, starting one's own firm, HR consulting, becoming an OD/Leadership Development specialist and branching into a totally different fields. Some people also become CEOs/Heads of other functions, though they constitute only a very small percentage of the population that we are talking about. Of course, there is always the possibility of 'retirement on the job' where one stagnates, disengages and still continues on the job. If we look at solutions 'within the organizations' (like moving into larger firms, moving into regional/global roles etc.), it would be interesting to examine if they really solve the problem (by providing positions of increasing responsibility/complexity/contribution) as compared to merely changing the context (by providing a different sort of mandate/experience). Some combinations of the above solutions/options might lead to something very similar to 'portfolio living' that Charles Handy talks about. We also need to differentiate between the solution(s) found by a particular individual (or individuals) and the career options available to bulk of the population that we are talking about. So where does this leave our senior HR professional. In some cases this could lead to some sort of a 'career crisis'. It is interesting to note that this career crisis might also coincide with a larger midlife crisis which brings in additional dimensions.

What do you think? I like the concept of portfolio living....

In 1981 British oil executive Handy quit his job to "go portfolio," a term he coined for what he believed would be the trend for many workers going into the twenty-first century, that of being self-employed, part-time, or temps of one sort or another, with a portfolio of many skills and a collection of clients needed to make a living. This is the flea that flits about between the elephant of large organizations, landing here and there but never desiring to become attached to any of them. In a combination of memoir and essay celebrating the independent life, in a love-hate relationship with government and big business, Handy waxes on the wealth disparity created by capitalism, the superficiality of the so-called new economy, and the balance of freedom and loneliness that comes with living the portfolio life. This is not another "how to start your own business" book, but rather one man's struggle to find meaning and fulfillment in work, latching onto elephants when needed, but mostly flying solo without a net.

David Siegfried

Some friends' articles

Mohinish Sinha in Times' Ascent Gyan Guru column talks about new approaches to leadership. In this article he blames Taylor for the issues facing organizations today:

My point is about how the die is cast for employees to be disengaged and
un-empowered. Herein, lays the challenge for the leader. So how do you as a
leader wake up your employees to their potential and freedom, while operating
within the same organisation structures and “norms” as prior?
A simple
answer is “By being the example of what you want your employees to be”. In my
work with leadership in organisations, I have found that this is one of the most
powerful catalysts for cutting through the limitations of the hierarchical
structure and which encourages employees to take charge of their own
professional lives rather than looking for it from outside.

Also in the Ascent Shubham Rai publishes the result of a survey he did along with a colleague on why people switch careers.

Out of the 100 interviews,
47 say their career decisions were
collectively influenced,
53 say, given a choice they would shift their
careers, after establishing themselves for at least 3 years in ‘conventionally
secure (financially)’ professions.
67 say that they were discouraged,
diverted, or influenced away from their dream careers and aspirations, early on
in life,
77 say that financial uncertainty is the key factor, which averts
them from selecting unconventional careers!

Blogging will resume from next week, as I am busy delivering training programs and traveling.

By the way, this is post number 1700 on this blog !

Déjà vu-Reflections on a Visionary co.

Post contributed by frequent conributor R Karthik

The first time i learnt of this word was years ago and i then thought there possibly can't be any such feeling which one gets and intuitively leads him to think he has been through a similar experience or situation earlier. And years later in June '06 when i read Jim Collins' 'Built to Last' there was Déjà vu. It occured to me and i believed that there could be Déjà vu indeed!

'Built to Last' is about successful habits of visionary co.s (so easy to spell that out huh!-the authors & their team took 5 years to complete the ground research and lay the foundations for the work to be written). Not intending to review that book here anyway!
Scores of co.s have been researched and classified into 2 distinct sets.
Visionary co.s according to authors are those which could withstand and grow amidst the ever-transient dynamics of marketplace, industry, CEO transitions, stock market, economic cycles, technology obsolence and so on. Comparision co.s on the other hand are those businesses that did not stand the test of time, got budged from their position, fell down and got eroded by any one of the above factors.

Having defined visionary co.s that way, the authors have established with empirical evidence what it takes to build such businesses and organizations.Some of the key attributes they argue, of visionary organizations are as below

-Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals (BHAG): way of goal-setting
-Cult-like culture: only fit flourishes and a misfit perishes almost immediately
-Home-grown management: a committed approach to nurturing and grooming leaders from within as opposed to head-hunting talent from outside
-Guided & driven by a set of core values always

While i was engrossed in reading this work, with every chapter this feeling grew within me that i have experienced and observed such culture and practices...almost every aspect of visionary co.s that the authors were explaining. All my experiences were directly relating to the organization i was then part of. As a matter of fact...the book i was reading was borrowed out of the office library and i immersed myself into the book when on one of those recruitment tours for them. My understanding of that organization was indisputable and so any concept dealt in the book-i could accurately relate to similar concepts that which existed within that organization. Also as a HR professional i knew the DNA of the organization; i knew the thought and the underlying philosophy for all its moves.

As i completed the book i felt an increasing urge in me to go and discuss this with the VP-HR.
But I resigned saying to myself "i will definitely tell them sometime but not immediately", lest it is miscontrued to be some form of flattery or an exaggeration even.
Months ago, i was checking their website (i do it from time to time as i want to stay abreast of all changes that have happened with them ever since i left-new product launches, press releases and so on) and i found a new link was up on their site. It read BHAG #1....
I chuckled to myself and said "someone from the top team has read the book; the co. has found a reflection of itself in what is being talked about in the book...and now they are internalizing the learnings from 'Built to Last'.
It was heartening to learn that they began thinking the same way i thought much before then and my feeling was again of Déjà vu :)

I wrote to the VP-HR immediately saying these thoughts were on my mind too and expressed happiness about the coincidental matching of thoughts.( It would be presumptous to have called it like-mindedness even though it actually is:))
Such feelings are too hard to resist! Well...anyone buys whaI i have said above?


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Book Review: The Brazen Careerist

I was quite honored that Penelope Trunk, one of my favourite bloggers said she'd like me to receive an early copy of her book Brazen Careerist, and although it took some time and effort from her and her publicist's end to mail the book I finally got it last week.

First of all, I'd like to talk about the cover. It reminds me of the superhero comic books, and I think that's what Penelope is hinting towards, that we have to shed our mild mannered Clark Kent personas and become the Superman we were destined to be :-) I am a big fan of comics and therefore the cover appealed to me a lot. There's an incredible urgency and dynamism conveyed by it too. Hats off to whoever thought of it :-)

The book is actually a series of 45 'rules' that Penelope sets out for the Gen X and Y to be successful in one's career as well as in life. That's one truth. Careers and Life are not two-watertight compartments. They are integral to one's identity and impact each other. For that reason alone, read the book.

For me the biggest comfort that Penelope saying that in the start of your career give yourself the freedom of discovering and exploring. One does not really have the answers all the time of what one wishes to do with one's career. However, if you give yourself the freedom to make mistakes and learn from them, not look at money as the sole criteria for changing jobs, then maybe you will find what you are looking for.

There a quite a few rules that might not translate to readers not in the US, as business realities might differ from country to country. However, my advice to people, specially in India is to take the book and read it. It is a forecast also on how organizations and careers will evolve and we stand to gain from advice in it, before the reality dawns on us. For managers and leaders in organizations this book is a must-read. It would tell them what's important for their workforce are Gens X and Y.

My favorite rule? Rule No. 42- The New Workforce Currency is Training. I hope this book forces many employees to ask for training and therefore drives the need for relevant training from the organization's end :-)

As usual, Penelope's writing is as natural and as funny as on her blog, but this book does not feel like a series of blog posts strung together. It shows that it has a lot of research behind each rule, with thoughts and insights from a lot of university and career counselors as well as psychologists.

Do yourself and your career a favor - read the book.