Search firms and Trust

Krista Bradford has an interesting take on why the level of trust in a client and executive search firm is so low:

As a former investigative journalist, I know all about confidentiality. In fact, unlike search partners, I had to be willing to go to prison to protect a source. If there are some details that a candidate would rather not share, it is easy enough to redact from data exports and update reports to the client. That is why I suspect that the primary reason search firms refuse to share the data they gather over the course of a search is pure self-interest. They simply don't want to help their clients build their own database. Another reason is that some firms may be afraid to "show their work" quite simply because they haven't done it.

Interesting take. I wonder what recruiters and executive search consultants would reply to that?

In my opinion, there are certain things that are taken to be the 'norms of operating' in an industry. I wonder how the growth of jobsites and increase in transparency is changing the way executive search firms conduct their business? Is trust increasing or decreasing?

This blog has a page on facebook now

If you're on facebook you might want to check out this page :-)

Hope to interact with you there.

Would love to hear your ideas on how this Facebook page can be used to connect the readers with each other and to have a better many-to-many dialogue.

In Chennai tomorrow addressing TAAI

I'll be traveling to Chennai tomorrow for addressing a gathering of the Travel Agents' Association of India (TAAI).

The talk would be on how to have a strategy to deal with an uncertain environment, and the people processes to help one's organization negotiate change.

So if you are anywhere near the Ambassador Pallava hotel do give me a call and we can meet either before or after my talk.

Why are managers such jerks?

I have always believed that most managers are never really trained to be managers. Management schools actually teach us business skills and not management skills. There's a difference. Business skills are the hard skills of knowing how to make a cash flow statement or calculating the net present value of an investment or how to segment your target audience.

Managerial skills are the softer skills of building relationships with employees, suppliers and customers. These skills call for emotional intelligence, which we never get round to consciously building throughout our education - which stresses the hard skills thoughout.

However, this blog post by Bob Sutton where he quotes a research by Dacher Keltner who explains why perfectly normal people turn into jerks when they become the boss:

My own research has found that people with power tend to behave like patients who have damaged their brain's orbitofrontal lobes (the region of the frontal lobes right behind the eye sockets), a condition that seems to cause overly impulsive and insensitive behavior. Thus the experience of power might be thought of as having someone open up your skull and take out that part of your brain so critical to empathy and socially-appropriate behavior."

So what's the solution? How can you take away the heady intoxication of power away from a manager?

Could turning an organization that is more democratic and consensus driven yet focussed on responsibility and accountable be the answer?

On why RFIs and Proposals are so lengthy

S Anand, one of the first business bloggers I started reading has an insight into why things are so long in work life...specially consulting. Hat-tip to Alok for sending this gem by email.

I got involved with a proposal. I wrote a few bits of it. (One page, actually.) Others wrote a few bits of it. And then some standard appendices were added to it. Finally, it ended up as a 180-page document.

The interesting thing is, I can bet no human ever read those 180 pages end-to-end.

I know no one at our end did, because we turned it around in 1 week, and I was the last to assemble the document before sending it out.

I'm guessing no one at the client end did, because they'd have gotten 5 such documents, and had a week to shortlist down to 3.

So if we didn't read it and they didn't read it, why did we put it in?

An innocuous sounding statement: do more. I tremble whenever anyone suggests it. There's no defence.

There's a fundamental belief at work here. That more is better.

This is fueled by a lack of confidence. Put in high-sounding words. They look impressive. What's missed is that experts use jargon because they understand what it means, and it conveys a lot in few words.

Firstly, you've got to believe that less is more. The response to "What's the harm in adding...?" is "It dilutes the message". There's two things here. Believing it. And having the courage to say it. Trust me, you really believe it only when you say it.

Next, you've got to understand -- really understand -- before you write or speak. That requires not fooling yourself. And it requires a lot of practice. I've had nearly 20 years of training in fooling myself, so it's an uphill task. Many people are worse off, never having tasted true understanding.

Third, you've got to be brave enough to shut up, or say "I don't know". Initially, this was tough for me, but I learnt from a friend. I always thought him not-so-smart, but honest. He'd ask, "But why?" and when I'd explain, he'd say, "I don't understand it." After two hours of trying to get him to understand, I'd realise that I was the one who never got it in the first place.

So will the consulting methodology change? Maybe not. On saturday my CEO and I were involved in redoing our firm's marketing presentation. It was 12 slides long. And it was made a couple of years ago. So instead of adding a couple of slides here and a couple of slides there, we focused on our message. Putting the client at the centre. And not talking about us too much. I remembered a powerful sales message from my pharma marketing days....features, advantages and benefits of our products/services is what we like to say. However the client wants to hear the benefits first. Sometimes just articulating the benefits is enough. You get distinguished from your competition :-)

when you hear a presentation about too much "we are this" and "our people have done this" maybe the presenter hasn't really given a thought about how his/her clients will be benefited.

It's not just about blogging

Recently I came across this post at Technobabble 2.0 which linked to a while paper which tries to quantify the impact of social media. It calls it Distributed Influence.

While blogging remains at the center of social media, social media is increasingly being seen as lots of different tools like Twitter for microblogging and presence at social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Orkut. It also means photosharing sites like Flickr and YouTube.

In some way, it is a welcome development, as different people prefer to get their news in a different format, and while text remains important, building a personal context of the individual behind the blog is also important for a lot of people. That personal context is built by the photos and videos we upload and the ones we like. It is defined by the applications we access and ignore on Facebook. It is defined by the 144 characters and less we write on Twitter to answer the question "What are you doing?"

So if you are relying on only blogging to build your personal brand, I would suggest going a step further and look at other tools available. Remember there are no set ways you need to utilise these tools. You can make your own rules. Like this post illustrates on how Twitter can help your blogging. (Which I got from Anita Bora when she Twittered about it :-))

So what other things are you adding to your mix of social media? And if your organization is looking at social media to build either its employment brand or customer linkages are you considering the other tools? And now there are tools that enable you to work on all the different social networks seamlessly :-)

Will NotchUp catch up?

That's the question I asked myself when Joel invited me for the beta. And then I read his blog post about it.

The site is currently in beta and invite-only. I joined recently. Your LinkedIn profile conveniently serves as your resume, or your can do it the old-fashioned way. The technology is pretty impressive for a beta. You pick a price for being interviewed and payments are made via PayPal.

On the employer side, there is no fee to join and “when you find an individual you’re interested in, make them an offer to interview. If they accept, they’ll share their contact details with you so you can finalize the details of your interview. You don’t pay anything until the interview takes place.” The site also offers a 100 percent refund for interviews-gone-bad, as well as stats and feedback on candidates from their previous interviews.

Techcrunch calls this a “really good idea.” Longtimers may be a bit more skeptical. Industry pro Susan Burns says, “which employers are going to be lining up to pay for interviews?”

Well that was the question I asked myself too. Has resume spam become so bad that companies will want a totally passive candidate base and then pay them to get interviewed?

Will NotchUp work? Well, that would depend on how you have priced your time for the interviewer.

But I still think a better model to fight resume spam is the ladders.com's counter-intuitive one. Check here for what Heather says about them

Self Learning and Generative Learning

A friend sent me a mail asking me if I could point him to any material on self-learning.

When I hear about self-learning I mostly think about how Dr. U. Balaji used to talk about "collaborative and generative learning" or as he named it, Sahaveda.

So I searched for generative learning, and found this.

Generative learning is the active process of saying, "Oh. That's like ..." It's the process of constructing links between new and old knowledge, or a personal understanding how new ideas fit into an individual's web of known concepts. "The essence of the generative learning model is that the mind, or the brain, is not a passive consumer of information. Instead, it actively constructs its own interpretations of information and draws inferences from them" (Wittrock, p348). Learning involves mental activity - thinking. For example, with respect to reading a textbook or paper, without active construction of relations between parts of a text, or between the text and personal knowledge, the student will pass over the words and wonder what has been read. How many times have we each finished reading a paper, page or paragraph and wondered what it was that we had read?

Yes, I think it is what self-learning actually is.

So there is a difference between knowledge which I believe along with Denham to be a social process and learning, which is more personal?

Yesterday I was watching a DVD of a talk by Jiddu Krishnamurti in 1982, in which he talks about holistic observation. There are various points he makes about observing and the nature of consciousness. Now I am fascinated enough to find out what his thoughts were on learning and knowledge. As his core message was:

'Truth is a pathless land'. Man cannot come to it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, nor through any philosophical knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation, and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection. Man has built in himself images as a sense of security—religious, political, personal. These manifest as symbols, ideas, beliefs. The burden of these dominates man's thinking, relationships and his daily life. These are the causes of our problems for they divide man from man in every relationship.

Shabbir Merchant goes independent

Shabbir Merchant, Executive Vice President of homegrown Indian HR consulting firm Grow Talent has now started his own Leadership consulting and coaching firm Valulead.

Looks like Grow Talent has started to bleed talent after the majority stake by Right Management, a division of Manpower Inc.

Amongst the other people who have left it post the stake sale are the ex-AVP Consulting Services Manjit Singh (currently Director of HR at Baxter India), Puneet Rathi who was VP of Consulting Services, and Head of HR Navita Deshpande.

Seems like an ironic situation when a HR consulting firm faces attrition? Not really. It is buffeted by the same employee issues and economic changes as its clients are. Sometimes focusing too much externally actually makes a consulting firm push its own needs on the back-burner. Sometimes, physicians fail to heal themselves.

But yes, it is not as amusing as an Astrological magazine which failed to foresee circumstances which were beyond its control!

Earlier post: Indian HR thought leader Shabbir Merchant

Satyam tries to buy consulting skills

The Talking Outsourcing blog feels the deal of buying Bridge Strategy Group was a knee jerk reaction from Satyam:

It seems like the team at Bridge has negotiated a great deal, but I’m not sure how this helps Satyam to start competing with the likes of Infosys and TCS – who are both well down the road of developing their consulting offering, but in a more organic fashion. If they can afford to throw a few million around here and there then why not go for some big name hires and develop the consulting service more organically? It takes guts to do it because there will be a long lead before the business rolls in, but in the long term surely that is where the real value lies, building your own brand to be a trusted source of advice.

I have to agree. Buying a 36 people firm for $35 million sounds extreme. I also don't see a fit between Satyam's strength of IT service delivery and Bridge's professed expertise. There are bits in their Operations design and Performance Improvement area, like Outsourcing and Global Sourcing/Offshoring and IT Planning and Management. There is mismatch even in Bridge's differentiated approach and the approach of a IT firm like Satyam. Things like partner involvement, not taking large projects, deploying small experienced teams are the exact opposites that outsourcers like Satyam offer. If there's a fundamental clash in the values of an acquiring firm and the firm getting acquired then I don't think there's a chance of that acquisition delivering too much value.

The acquisition by Satyam would also raise questions about how objective the advice offered by Bridge Strategy Group in the Outsourcing and Global Sourcing/Offshoring areas to their clients is. As the Talking Outsourcing blog says:

Satyam plans to continue using the Bridge brand in the US, but anyone who is an existing or potential customer will know that the company is really just a subsidiary of Satyam now. That can be seen as a positive - access to a large resource pool, proven expertise etc - or a negative - they can no longer give an impartial recommendation about the best place to get some IT work done.

Indian Stock Markets Deep Dive and the Media

The Sans Serif blog has an interesting perspective on how first time investors who were reading about the Indian stock market's earlier dizzying run are now blaming the media.

As the stock markets had soared, the Indian media had thrown all balance to the winds, painting the “India Story” as one which would never end. When the fledgling Reliance Power was making its initial public offering last week, television stations were offering advice on how to open demat accounts.

Little wonder first-time investors are blaming the media in an indirect sort of way for not cautioning them enough, for painting so rosy a picture that they thought there was no dark side.

The BBC’s Karishma Vaswani quotes one first-timer:

“I thought this (the stock market) was somewhere I could put my money safely and grow it, rather than putting in the bank like my dad did,” said Gauravi Sharma.

“My parents had never invested in Indian shares, they said it was unsafe. But I thought, after everything I heard on TV and in the news, that this was the right place to put my money. Now I’m not so sure.”

Which just goes to prove that media (whether mainstream or social media) is not the final arbiter of truth. Before you put your money/time into something (like stocks/employer/advertising), do some basic research independently. That means looking at more than one news and information source. The trouble with most of us is that we like to follow the heard and not use our brains. And then we blame the media. Remember that journalists are people out to make a living and media publications are turning into more and more of business entities.

the Times Group/BCCL picks up equity in young fledgling companies (as a '05 article in Business World explains, "these companies are in their growth phase and have other working capital priorities."

the company ploughs back that same money for advertising support in Times Group/BCCL (as the head of Times Group Head of Private Equity explained, this arrangement aims at "helping emerging companies realise the power of advertising")

Everyone wins... And after all there is no law that says that a media house cannot also be an equity investor in its advertisers!

so what is the catch?

Not that one needs to guess that, but as this article in Busines Standard explains:

"The “private treaties” can be defended in theory — on the basis of the claim that journalists in the publications concerned are free to write what they want about any company, and are not duty-bound to sing the praises of the companies whose shares the publisher holds. The bitter truth is that this is hogwash —the Chinese walls that used to separate editorial and business departments in most newspapers have become porous, and in some cases have been demolished without ceremony. Evidence that has surfaced supports the view that journalists in the affected publications are being asked to play the piper’s tune. So from a journalistic standpoint, there is nothing to be said in defence of space-for-shares barters."

Too bad, that there are not as many newspapers as there are blogs. And unsubscribing from a newspaper was as easy as unsubscribing from a blog.

The business student in me is fascinated however, by the sheer innovation of this approach. Any idea if something similar has been done outside India?

Blog's name remains same

I got a fair bit of feedback over email and on this post that I shouldn't change the blog's name ...

So "Gautam Ghosh - Management Consultant" is what it will continue to be called :-)

Book Review: 101 ways to Get Wild About Work

Curt Rosengren, blogger turned author has written a book called "101 ways to Get Wild About Work"

As Curt says:

The book was actually born in the blogosphere, as many of the ideas were inspired by posts in my old blog, The Occupational Adventure.Written with the busy professional in mind, the book is designed to allow the reader to work through it one small, manageable piece at a time. It will be available both in paper form (via lulu.com) and as an e-book.

The book contains bite sized pieces of advice that most of us instinctively know, but fail to act upon. Ideas that you are the expert who actually has answers to your queries about work (and not bloggers like me ;-) ) Which is why when people mail me and ask me "What should I do about my career?" they are disappointed with my response which is usually on the lines of "What do you want/like/dream of doing?"

Yes there are really 101 chapters on various aspects of work and being passionate about it. The chapters are divided into topics like Self-Exploration, Getting Unstuck, Overcoming Obstacles, Internal Assets, Support, Creativity/Intuition, Awareness, Change, Taking Action andStaying Energized.

The writing is upbeat, and the message is written straight from the heart. If you are looking at charts and data, you might be better off looking at another place. These chapters are a couple of pages long with inspirational quotes by diverse achievers like Da Vinci to Elvis. There is a strong bias towards tools to help yourself too. People who like to focus on "so what" from a book, would gets lots of techniques to deploy it.

In that way, it's a book for the dreamer and the detail-minded. I think the message from Curt's book is that to be passionate about work you have to be both.

You can find more info and purchase the book at http://www.passioncatalyst.com/101ways .

The shepherd of indigenous Indian Innovation

There are some people whose name equals innovation in India. And a lot of them are unsung. However, a lot more of them might have remained unsung if it were not for Prof. Anil Gupta and his HoneyBee network. His former student and CEO of Naukri.com Sanjeev Bikhchandani writes:

In the last twenty years HoneyBee has documented in its online database more than 70,000 inventions by innovators in rural India. These include – a cotton stripping / plucking machine, a manual milking machine, a coconut tree climbing device, a garlic peeling machine, a device to draw water from wells, herbal remedies, a cowdung powered cell phone charger, a plow and weeding device that can be attached to a motorcycle, a low cost cell phone based switch for household appliances and farm pump sets, a beach cleaner made from an adaptation of a groundnut separator, and a walnut peeling machine among others.

The Network has filed for more than 142 patents and more than twenty have been awarded.

HoneyBee gathers ideas by staying in touch with people in rural India. Apart from a continuous stream of ideas that now walk in through the door the Network conducts Shodhyatras every six months. Basically a group of Networkers led by Prof. Gupta travel through selected parts of rural India over several weeks meeting people, uncovering innovations and recognising and rewarding inventors.

Several companies have come forward to license some these innovations and commercialise them. The Network thus is able to disseminate the innovations while protecting the intellectual property rights of the inventors and ensuring that they get a financial reward.

So how did the Network come about. Prof. Gupta was working in the area of agricultural economics and rural development at IIM in the mid eighties. He spent a lot of time in villages talking to farmers to gather data for his research studies. He would publish his research papers and would travel all over the world to speak at conferences. However he was always plagued by a sense of guilt – he was doing all this but the farmers who gave him the knowledge were getting nothing out of it. He wanted to rectify this injustice.

When I was his student at IIM around that time Prof. Gupta once told me that there is a lot of indigenous knowledge in rural India that is undocumented and may be lost to future generations with the advent of modern technology from the West and he was planning to document it. At that time I did not realise the importance of what I dismissed as a noble idea casually suggested over a cup of tea in his home.

Over the years however from a small beginning in a cubicle at IIM Ahmedabad, the HoneyBee network has created an entire ecosystem where indigenous knowledge and rural innovations are documented, inventors are recognised and rewarded and innovations are marketed to companies.

My earlier post on Indian Innovations.

Prof. Anil Gupta is doing a remarkable service to document and share the Indian's traditional way to innovate - which some call jugaad. A work around - because resources are scarce and work needs to be done. In a world which some say is going to be characterised by a scarcity of resources, are Indians better prepared because of our "jugaadu" ways? Here's something I wrote on a similar topic around two years ago.

Booz Allen Hamilton Change management podcasts

I always get a kick out of seeing large traditional firms embracing social media, however tentatively.

After Deloitte's podcast series, now Booz Allen Hamilton has launched it's own podcast series on transformation and change management issues. The press release says:

Booz Allen will post new podcasts to its TLC webpage on a monthly basis and retain older productions in a catalogue on the same site. David Humenansky, a vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton, will kick off the webcast series, reflecting on how to avoid some of the common pitfalls associated with transformation as well the increasingly complex requirements organizations face, which drive many change efforts.

"Recent world and national events are pressuring our government to transform itself in many areas -- military operations, homeland security, intelligence analysis, airport security, immigration and disaster preparedness -- just to name a few," said Humenansky. "There are also many changes happening in our government that are not related to defense and security. In fact, over 80% of government agencies and departments describe major strategic changes for themselves this year. In the aftermath of Katrina and amid Iraq, performance expectations across the board are higher than ever, and there is also a lower tolerance for 'transformation as usual.'"

However, I am wondering what the overall objective of such initiatives are. Do these large consulting firms look at building brand awareness at CXO levels or at the associate consultant levels?

Do CXO level people actually download and listen to podcasts?

Your Suggestions for naming this blog

Am realising that the name of this blog "Gautam Ghosh - Management Consultant" is quite lame.

So help me out.

You know the kind of stuff I blog about...(see labels on the right hand sidebar)

If you could name this blog, what would you call it?

Paul McKinnon joins Citi as Chief Talent Officer

I noticed a lot of searches today landing on my blog for Paul McKinnon who I met earlier when I was working at Dell. Paul who had quit Dell 11 months ago was hired by Vikram Pandit the new Citi CEO as their first Chief Talent Officer.

On Monday, the bank announced that Paul McKinnon, formerly senior vice president for human resources at Dell, would become the company’s first head of talent management. The appointment represents a lesson learned for the company since it fired CEO Charles Prince without having a ready successor and reflects the new priorities of Pandit, who was named CEO in December.

In a memo announcing the position, Pandit wrote: “Attracting, developing and retaining people at the most senior levels of our company is one of my top priorities and requires concentrated attention.”

McKinnon will be responsible for recruiting, developing, reviewing and retaining Citigroup’s senior talent, Pandit wrote in the memo.

Interesting move. I wonder if there will be any turf battles between Paul after he joins from1st February and the current HR head John Donnelly. And would someone with Paul's experience and profile report to John or will a separate power center be created?

Work, Sex and the Urban Gen X and Gen Y Indian

Recently after we replaced our defunct DVD player, we've been catching up on quite a few movies that we missed.

In this post, however, I'd like to talk about two movies in particular. Delhii Heights starring Jimmy Shergill and Neha Dhupia, and Mumbai Salsa starring stand up comedian Vir Das along with a bunch of relative unknown actors.

The movies give us a bunch of insights into the urban Generations X and Y in the Indian metros.

• Note that both of the movies have the name of the cities in them. Pointing out that the stories are of the urban Indian as opposed to being for a pan-Indian audience.
• Delhii Heights is about life in a high rise apartment complex where DINKs like corporate executives Jimmy and Neha live, while Mumbai Salsa is the name of the discotheque and bar where Mumbai's hotshots gather, the increasing prevalence of The Third Place being brought out in the movie.
• The family, usually such an integral part of the Indian movie, plays no role in both the movies. There is no "Ma" or "Pitaji" to take the attention away from the main roles.
• While the female leads in both the movies are driven career women, and the male leads look like they will support them. However when push comes to shove, it is still expected by supposedly enlightened men that the woman will sacrifice their career (check video embedded below). However, both movies end in happly ever after tidings.
• The rocking dudes and dudettes are the ones with corporate careers. Advertising and Marketing seems to be the one that movie makers seem to identify most with. Vir Das even earns a Rs. 30 lakh salary in an advertising firm! His girlfriend seems to be a HR person, but it's never stated. However, Mumbai Salsa also shows characters pursuing 'alternative careers' like a tattoo artist, salsa dance teacher and gym instructor.
• While in Mumbai Salsa sex is the starting point that lead to long term relationships, Delhii Heights shows how couples even after knowing each other for 5-6 years may not actually 'really' know each other.
  

Ratings and Rare Key Skills

Roma Ahuja left a comment on my previous post Performance Ratings - the real scale. She asks:

what would you do in situations where skill sets are rare and highly specialised.

A superior may often want to give excellent ratings to their average subordinates, with the intention to be in the limelight/ have an enhanced work space for a longer time. The regular excuse being that "we donot get the right kind of talent in the market"

Any inputs on the appraisal process in a highly specialised environment?

Well, in such cases, instead of being dishonest with the employee and inflating his/her sense of contribution to the organization, the organization can set aside a portion of the payroll budget during the salary revision time to give out to employees who have "hot skills".

While I am not totally satisfied with this approach, note that explicitly stating that the salary increases are for the skills the employee has (and is hopefully using) and not for exceeding performance expectations will also implicitly make it clear to the employee that once the skill is available in the market in large numbers, or it gets obsolete, then the "hot skill linked pay increase" would also go away in the future.

In fact, in a large MNC where I worked, worldwide when pay was either stagnant or downsizing was taking place, some countries including India were labeled as "Hot markets" where pay increases had to be given. What that did was make it clear that when India headcount would no longer need to be increased in quantum growth terms then that salary increase would also go.

The other point that I keep harping on is for managers to build skills in goal setting taking into context the business realities, subordinate's maturity as well as team goals. And then to put it across in a SMART manner, keep giving regular one on one feedback, provide support and finally assess during appraisal time. Only when all the steps before appraisal have been done correctly does the manager have a right to look the employee in the eye and say: "You messed up"

Other things that organizations could do is to create a knowledge management system that tries to minimize the impact of a loss of a team member with rare/key skills.

What other strategies would you suggest to Roma?

Manpower's Melanie Holmes starts blogging

Melanie Holmes, VP of "World of Work Solutions" at Manpower North America has started blogging. Welcome to the blogosphere, Mel! Looking forward to some insightful conversations.

The blog is titled the Contemporary Working Blog and Melanie says it's meant to be:

a companion on your journey through the changing world of work. Here you'll find tips, tools and information on topics as diverse as the workforce itself: the aging workforce, working women, professional etiquette, generational diversity, the talent crunch, and more. So whether you're an employer or an employee, and whether you're beginning or close to finishing your career, I hope you find the information here useful for navigating the contemporary world of work.

Right now the blog has only a few posts, but here's hoping that a senior executive like her can find the time and energy to blog regularly and share stuff from her vantage point. Here are some interesting posts on body piercings and tattoos in the workplace.

And another thing Mel, let's see a blogroll of the blogs you follow. :-)

Performance ratings - the real scale

In his post "Who gets promoted - Mr. 3.76 or Ms. 3.79?" Mike points out the heart of the issue:

Well, first off, nobody is terrible at everything (and even if they are, who will have the heart to say so?), so the lowest overall scores across your company will probably sit somewhere in the range of 2.0-2.5 (remember, "3" is supposedly average).

On the other end of the continuum, you have more hope. After all, who wouldn't want to give their star player all 5's? Still, you're probably looking at overall highs in the 4.0-4.5 range. So suddenly your scale has shrunk from 1.0-5.0 to around 2.0 - 4.5, and 70% of your 40,000 employees fall somewhere between 3.2 and 3.6.

So what should you do? As Mike suggests you could use Behavioral Rating Scales for taking the decision. However, I would also suggest that for a promotion using a rating of a current job is a little useless piece of data.

Lets take the classic example of promoting a salesperson to a sales manager position. The competencies needed for the new role is fundamentally different from the past role's? No matter how well you've done the performance appraisal for the current role, promoting on its basis for the next role is fraught with danger.

One thing you could do before a promotion is assess the person for the competencies for the next role. However that is easier said than done, specially when there are 40,000 employees up for promotion. And what if the person is really not interested in that role? Can you give the person a growth in complexity of the role rather than the hierarchy of the role?

Unfortunately organizations are really not thinking along these lines. One reason is that would mean giving up control in the career development area to the employees.

But, would that really be such a bad thing?

Change your actions or attitudes

What do you change so that you can change? As Steve Roesler says:

• Some people act only after they've gained an understanding of theory and context. Impacting their attitude is the first step in gaining action.

• Others start acting immediately, then step back to see what it all means. Action plus reflection creates context and understanding for the bigger picture.

In part, that is the difference in views of the behaviorists - who believe that if behavior changes, it can lead to internal value changes too, while the other school - what to call them? Individualists? Or Gestalt thinkers? - believe that only when internal change is brought about, would there be real change in the context.

In fact, I believe that this difference is the key difference between ISISD (and later offspring, Sumedhas and Aastha) and the ISABS bodies.

posts to start the week

Some blog posts worth reading on a Monday to reflect throughout the week:

Why Sensemaking is vital - Anecdote Blog

Savor obscurity while it lasts and Beware of turning Hobbies into Jobs by Hugh.

Why do young people have more imagination in Blogspotting

and an article from Knowledge@Wharton - How investing in Intangibles like Employee Satisfaction translates into financial returns:

a correlation between employee satisfaction and stock returns need not imply causation. Although he controls for many observable variables, it is impossible to rule out the story that an unobservable variable, such as superior management practices, may cause both higher returns and satisfied employees. However, even under this interpretation, "it still remains that the market does not incorporate intangibles (whether they are satisfaction levels or good management) even when made publicly available, and that an investor could have earned significant risk-adjusted returns by trading on the Fortune list."

Strategy and the Fat Smoker - Book Review

There are only two words I have to describe this book - "Amazingly Insightful"

David Maister blogger and author of such masterpieces like Managing the Professional Services Firm, The Trusted Advisor and First Among Equals, takes a look at why individuals and organizations cannot do what they know should be done.

I was kicked when David's people contacted me to review the book, and when the book arrived in the mail last week, I was engrossed and read it from cover to cover taking small breaks to ruminate and think about it over the weekend.

The metaphor of the "Fat Smoker" is the organization, that needs to change, knows what should be done to change and yet does not change. In a simple, conversational style David Maister brings his key insights to tell us why change in professional services firm is so hard and what needs to be done to make it happen.

That's because, David tells us, that the objective of strategic planning should not be analysis, but resolve. Too many times, in too many organizations - and this holds true not just in professional services firms but in others too - strategy is about saying "this is what we will do" and "these are things we will not do"

The "we will not do" things are tough to imagine and organizations keep losing their focus on it. As an independent consultant I was myself a victim to this thinking. I wondered if I could do blogging consulting, as well as training in traditional HR and Leadership areas and I guess that's where I failed.

Building distinction and differentiation needs to be translated into both the statements. And as David reminds us, it is the leaders of the firms that need to be setting directions by their actions. Any ambiguity is perceived as a negative mark.

He also reminds us that people are of two types, those whose goals are short term and those who prefer a long term view. Then there are people who like to work alone and there are others who prefer to collaborate. Implementing a strategy through a diverse group of such individuals and their different needs can be a huge challenge.

Apart from Strategy, David also covers Client Relationships and Managing and how to tie them up all together.

There are so many gems in this book, that I can't recommend it enough. The part that really resonates with me is chapter 10, why (most) training is useless. I found myself nodding throughout as I read it :-)

If you are a manager, HR and Change leader or corporate Executive who is leading change and wondering why change is so difficult, then read this book. It will tell you what to do - and it can be painful truth. As one of the chapters says: It's not how good you are, it's how much you want it!

Now you can even get the book as a printable ebook. More reviews about the book here and there's a podcast too.

Top 25 HR influencers

The folks at the new and fledgling HRworld site have compiled a list of top 25 HR influencers of 2007 and it's an eclectic bunch, populated with management gurus like Peter Drucker and Tom Peters apart from HR guru Dave Ulrich, to bloggers like my buddies Evil HR Lady and Cheezhead to HR Technology folks like The Newman Group and Analysts like (blogger) Jim Holincheck, Watson Wyatt Worldwide, the consulting guys and organizations like SHRM.

I guess the list is US centric, and am amazed that HR bloggers in the US are being recognized as influencers in the HR field.

But I guess there's hope for India.

HRworld recently put this blog in their list of top 25 HR blogs - ranked 4th (and were kind enough to send me a picture to display that - see in the right hand sidebar :-)

UK training firm has my posts on their site

Phoenix, a training firm based in London, UK has some 48 posts from this blog listed on their site.

While the posts are all attributed to me, and links are given to this blog, still I was a little staggered to find them there.

I would value it more if they added a line or two of their own opinion on my ideas and rants, whether they agreed with me or disagreed with me. That would give me something to converse and engage with. That would be a first step to making meaning from an interaction.

When someone takes your content and does not add a word of agreement or dissent, they lose an opportunity.

Looking forward to the folks at Phoenix entering into a conversation.

Wipro to enter HR Consulting

From ET:

Wipro will offer expertise in training and leadership, process capabilities, people integration post M&As, learning tools and techniques and competency building. The company is not going to look at the recruitment part of the HR spectrum, but may take on contracts for management of development centres for some of its big-ticket clients.

Having built in internal capabilities in HR consulting front, Wipro is looking at taking it to third party and would offer services similar to the specialised HR firms such as Mercer and Hewitt do.
Apart from process capabilities and training, Wipro, with its string of pearls acquisition strategy, has offerings on people integration issues as well. Wipro vice-president (HR) Pratik Kumar told ET: “We are offering HR consulting to some of our clients with whom we have deep engagements. We may not go to market with this practice, but will cross-sell it to our existing clients.”

The consulting business accounts for 4% of revenue of the technology major. To that extent, HR consulting would constitute a minuscule part of the pie, at present. The company is looking at bundling HR practice with the overall IT consulting business.

It's one thing to have resources, but another to make a successful business out of it. The biggest challenge to Wipro's effort in this business would come from itself, ironically.

The branding of the company is so strong in IT, that the only HR consulting work that can come its way easily is HRMS consulting and IT based HR systems consulting.

The difficult part would be to reskill current HR professionals in consulting and also integrating it as a service for the business development guy to market. If it's easier to sell a large IT consulting and service project why should they make an effort to sell a smaller emerging practice in the first place?

And I wonder what will happen to Wipro's own relationship with the Hewitts and Mercers of the world. Will they shy away from offering their consulting services to a potential competitor?

I remember that Infosys also had a small group doing OD and change management consulting services that were bundled with IT consulting project. That practice also hasn't scaled up in Infosys to become any big.

As David Maister says in his book "Strategy and the Fat Smoker" strategy is also figuring out what we shouldn't do and maintaining focus.

Confusion about the Best HR Blog winner

Hey folks, looks like I may not be the actual winner in the Best HR Blog category as this post by Your HR Guy shows that he's been listed twice in the category and has bagged more combined votes.

That means he's the actual winner of the title and I hope I get a confirmation on this from the event organizer Jason Davis aka Slouch.

Congrats, Lance Haun aka Your HR Guy!

Don't worry, I won't do a George Bush to your Al Gore predicament !

Murdoch to buy Monster.com?

Seeking Alpha says that Rupert Murdoch apparently wants to buy Monster for $4.8 Billion. (Hat-tip VC Circle). There are reasons he says why Monster board might be considering it.

Sal Iannuzzi was hired as Chairman and Chief Executive Office in April 2007 to set the co up just for that. Remember, he was the one who sold Symbol Tech to Motorola in Jan 2007.

Ianuzzi brought in his boy, Timothy Yates as CFO in June 2007. Note that Yates had served as the CFO of Symbol Tech.

So what would that mean?

Murdoch could then offer job ads on his newspaper and TV channels as a package deal along with Monster postings.

The real interesting part would be if he could integrate it with his MySpace property. Currently vertical search engine SimplyHired (run by a guy called gautam g ;-) powers MySpace jobs. And note that Fox Interactive Media had invested in SimplyHired in 2006 too.

Will the dream team combination of Monster and SimplyHired add the mojo back to MySpace which it seems to have lost to Facebook in the recent past? Imagine SH's Jobamatic on every Myspace page, with jobs powered by Monster :-)

I wonder if in India, people are walking upto Sanjeev and offering to buy out the company he runs? Like large media companies in the print and TV space? Or large businesses that have been trying to get a good foothold in the digital space.

Clients shape consultancies

And I totally agree with Mick James:

So perhaps the "challenge for consultancy" should be turned on its head. The real challenge is for clients, who so far have largely failed to design their businesses in a way that acknowledges the ongoing, if intermittent, need for outside assistance. Just as you wouldn't design a building without access to your utilities, so any major organisation should have natural interfaces for dealing with consultants. At the moment consultancy is still associated with a certain violence to the organisation, which is now being reciprocated by the increasing pressure from procurement professionals. One would hope that after a few more years of this argy-bargy, things might settled down a bit and that clients would have not just a clearer view of consultancy, but would have established a more explicit demarcation between the various levels of subcontracting and outside advice and assistance they employ.

Whether clients will ever attain this level of consciousness is debatable. At the moment the uncomfortable situation for consultants is that they work in an industry which is being constantly reshaped by people who a) have no expertise in the matter and b) don't even know they're doing it. Remember that next time someone questions your fee rates!

And the clients are being shaped by factors described in this post earlier, in addition to several others that are unique to the geography they're located in and the industry segment they operate in.

Top 10 risks for Global Business

From the Big Four Blog:

1. Regulatory and compliance risk
2. Global financial shocks
3. Aging consumers and workforce
4. The inability to capitalize on emerging markets
5. Industry consolidation/transition
6. Energy shocks
7. Execution of strategic transactions
8. Cost inflation
9. Radical greening
10. Consumer demand shifts
    

E&Y looks at risks in three broad categories across multiple industries:

1. macro threats arising from general geopolitical and macroeconomic environments
2. sector threats from trends or uncertainties in a specific industry
3. intense operational impacting the strategic performance of leading firms

I'd like to draw your attention to these risks:

Aging Consumers and Workforce

Areas such as asset management and insurance are experiencing dramatic shifts in demand as their consumer age. The auto sector is facing severe competitive challenges as a result of their aging workforces. Numerous industries are experiencing dramatic shifts in demand, often dramatic growth, as average ages rise in Europe, North America, and Japan. To be competitive, companies need to better understand specific needs of these new consumers

Emerging Markets

Emerging markets, while great areas for new growth, they also pose great risks. Global companies will need to partner/form networks with firms in many markets. There are also currency, operational, regulatory, language, and cultural risks in these countries, especially as firms manage outsourced business and supply chains in these markets.

Execution of Strategic Transactions

There is a major risk that transactions undertaken in response to industry consolidation may fail to deliver, not because they are poorly conceived, but because of a failure to meet operational challenges. Also, new types of strategic transactions, including divestitures in real estate, spin-offs in auto, and separation of telecom companies into utilities and service providers are driving further risk.

Consumer Demand Shifts
The failure to anticipate and respond to consumer demand shifts driven by
demographic shifts, such as growing consumer aging could be a strategic risk when the changes are significant, fast or unexpected.

The Next 5

E&Y spells out their next 5, equally critical, yet not making the top 10 list, and my choices amongst them are:

War for Talent - shortage of technical expertise; asset management and
real estate, which are seeing talented staff poached by alternative investments; and pharma, which is facing a ‘skills crunch. Especially in emerging markets , growing regional concentration/clustering of talent – while expertise can be found in more nations than ever, within nations it is becoming more concentrated in a small number of clusters. This phenomenon is particularly true in biotech and other high-tech areas. This leads to increasing wage rates, property rental, and competition for expertise.

Threat of Private Equity’s Rise. Especially in auto, where Private Equity firms are leading unplanned, hostile takeovers by consolidating, and forcing restructuring and creating spin-offs.

Inability to Innovate is significant for business in 2008. Innovation is becoming an increasingly crucial strategic challenge as markets mature. Stagnation in mature markets means that companies have to innovate to find profit. However, innovation is a substantial risk as nine out of ten new products fail.

Threat of a China Setback. China might experience volatility as it continues with an
extraordinary pace of development. A growth slowdown in China could leave oil & gas companies suddenly facing a low oil price environment. A severe slowdown could add to turmoil to world markets or threaten banks or insurance companies with large China exposures; or a natural disaster in China could disrupt global supply chains.

To effectively combat these risks, Ernst and Young recommends that company leaderships must:

• Conduct an annual risk assessment that defines key risks and weights probability and impact on business drivers.
• Go beyond financial and regulatory risk to consider the wider environment in which the organization operates and the full extent of its operations.
• Conduct scenario planning for the major risks that can be identified and develop a number of operational responses.
• Evaluate the organization’s ability to manage the identified risks, specifically that risk management processes are linked to the risks that the business actually faces.
• Effective monitoring and controls processes to provide both earlier warning and improved ability to respond.
• Keeping an open mind about where risks can come from.

If you are an employee of a global corporation how can these trends impact your career and employer personally?

What are you going to do about it?

Systems and the Individual Human

Some of us in HR always run into a dilemma that Prasad describes as the Paradox of HR Systems.

the question is that "how can standardized processes/systems be effective in managing unique individuals?" But we can't jump to the conclusion that HR systems/ processes are not required. Absolute chaos can result if there are no HR systems/processes - especially in the case of large organizations. Moreover, how can we forget what we have learned about 'procedural justice' ! However, it has also been established that human beings are managed most effectively in small units. This again brings us back to the importance of customised approaches to managing people - at individual and group levels. Thus we have a paradox in the true meaning of the term - multiple perspectives/opinions (doxa) that exist alongside (para)- each of which is true - but they appear to contradict/to be in conflict with one another.

Yes, as Prasad says, there are no neat solutions to paradoxes. However much, HR and business folks yearn for it. Dealing with people is complex enough without running into paradoxes.

What causes the desire for the simple, elegant solution for being the "42" answer :) ? Well, it's primarily driven by the desire to save time and money, and hoping that for once these paradoxes can be solved.

In fact I have a personal theory that goes that in the world of management, there are no solutions that are perfect.

Each solution gives rise to a different set of issues. To solve those issues we design solutions that give rise to other issues :) The most famous article related to this was Larry Greiner's HBR article on "Evolution and Revolutions in Organizational Growth"

Congrats to the winners!

Here's a big congrats to all the winners of the RecruitingBlogs.com and ZoomInfo's "Best Recruiting Blogs of 2007" contest!

1. Best Overall Recruiting Blog

Six Degrees From Dave

2. Best Recruiting Blogosphere Personality

Recruiting Animal (Congrats MK!!)

3. Best Third Party Recruiting Blog

Hiring Revolution

4. Best Recruiting Technology Blog

I, Donato

5. Best Job Hunting Blog

Wired & Hired

6. Best Corporate Recruiting Blog

WirelessJobs.com (congrats Dennis!!)

7. Best Sourcing/Research Blog

CyberSleuthing (Great work, Shally)

8. Best Group Blog

Xtra Cheezhead (great effort by Joel to get industry thought leaders on a platform to start blogging)

9. Best Recruiting Industry Blog

Six Degrees From Dave (Mendoza sweeps it again!)

10. Best HR Blog

Gautam Ghosh (ahem!)

Skills Development

Found that my slideshow at slideshare.net on Performance Management was being used for "skills development for busy managers" by a site called Fast Manager.

This is what I love about the internet.

There is no other way in the life before the net that someone like the site-owner Dariusz Debowczyk and I could have even come across each other's work.

By the way, Slideshare now makes it possible for you to make your slideshow visible only to a group of people by labeling it private. Slideshare has to keep on innovating as it might face stiff competition from Google Docs which recently added the ability to embed presentations.

So here's a presentation I put together on a History of Learning Theory

Another survey on attrition reasons in India

And this time it's by Yellojobs.com (yes, the same guys who partnered NDTV for ndtvjobs and then split from them)

The survey highlights that over 70 per cent of top IT & BPO companies face attrition in excess of 20%.

According to the survey, which was conducted among professionals irrespective of the career span, monetary gains are not the only reason for people changing jobs. Forty two per cent employees stated that they changed jobs due to non co-operating and bad superiors, 34 per cent said that they had left their previous job as the organisation could not provide any further growth and remuneration; while uninteresting job profile, office politics and work environment were the other reasons cited for changing jobs.

Among those who participated in the online survey, 56 per cent claimed to have switched their jobs in the past and 10 per cent of those respondents claimed to have switched jobs more than four times.

So the old adage of people joining companies and leaving bad managers continues to be true? Or are people in the current hypergrowth environment in Indian industries being thrust in managerial positions before being ready for it?

What do you think?

On High Potential employees

Some interesting research by the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) - found that 69% of the 469 responding organizations have a high-potential assessment process in place. 70% say that a development plan is part of that process.

The survey also found, however, that organizations are much less diligent about measuring the effectiveness of their HiPo assessment programs. A little fewer than half (47%) of those with such programs said they track the effectiveness of their assessment process.

However the survey also found that the assessment of effectiveness (like other HR interventions) is low. As their website says the following:

The survey also found, however, that organizations are much less diligent about measuring the effectiveness of their HiPo assessment programs. A little fewer than half (47%) of those with such programs said they track the effectiveness of their assessment process.

"It's a good news/bad news type of scenario," says Jamrog. "The good news is that companies are identifying and assessing HiPos, which is crucial in an era when leadership churns rates are pretty high and when Baby Boomers are thinking harder and harder about retirement. The bad news is that a lot of organizations don't really know how effective their HiPo assessments are today."

Organizations could do better in the areas of both development and metrics, suggests Leadership Pillar Director for i4cp, Dr. Mary Key. "The probability that HiPos will leave sooner rather than later is mounting since job and career changes are prevalent in the workforce. The best companies provide opportunities on the spot and assess their effectiveness on an ongoing basis."

Organizations should be able to quickly address any shortcomings in their programs because the vast majority retain control over the process. The study found that most companies prefer to keep the programs in-house, with 83% electing not to outsource the HiPo assessment process.

What do organizations expect from their programs? According to one respondent, expectations center on the "creation of a robust talent pool to achieve our current and future business objectives" and on retaining and developing "high performing employees to reduce our reliance on external hiring for management level roles." Skill-identification is also important. Another respondent pointed to the need to "discover strengths and weaknesses" and to identify technical, professional and soft skills. In short, most expectations are linked to the identification and development of talent, bench strength and skills.

The High Potential Assessment Practitioner Consensus Survey was conducted by i4cp, in conjunction with HR.com, in November 2007.

The India Management Consulting Market

According to Management Consultant International

The 2006 market for management consulting, exclusive of IT consulting, is estimated at US$720 million – a relatively small portion of the global market.

The revenue is being generated by a workforce of full-time management consultants estimated at over 20,000. Simple arithmetic yields a somewhat low revenue per professional, so there would seem to be a disconnect between the small revenue figure and the number of consultants. The figures are distorted by the fact that individual consultants and very small firms make up a significant portion of the market. Only a handful of firms employ more than 100 consultants, those being primarily the global consultancies.

And according to this news item looks like global firms are slowly looking at consolidating by acquisition of smaller local consulting firms.

KPMG India, which recently started its human capital practice, plans to acquire a mid-sized specialised HR firm. The firm is scouting for targets with a strong presence in the compensation space, leadership development and HR outsourcing operations.

The firm expects nearly 30% of its future human capital practice revenues will stem from inorganic growth. “We are exploring targets for acquisitions in India and in the Saarc region. An acquisition will help us trigger revenue growth to reach our target of $20 million from this practice by 2009-10,” KPMG India partner and head (human capital practice) Ganesh Shermon told ET.

Rant about Recruiting

Karthik Nath, a friend and an executive search consultant mailed me:

Hi Gautam....

Something that bugs me to no end & also thought you could take this up as an item to for your blog.

The HR profession seems to be ruining it's own reputation & credibility by repeatedly 'sending in a boy to do a man's job'. (forgive my gender usage - an old adage quoted here)

What I mean is the practise of thrusting high designations and salaries on junior candidates who don't have the business knowledge, professional competence or individual maturity to deal with key stakeholders.

How long can these people survive and grow in 'real' learning terms before they feel burnt out and seek job change?

Could this be the factor separating the 'churn' industries/employers from the real career providers?

This is further aggaravated by the pathetic methods used to source candidates (ref some horrible posts I keep viewing on the E-Groups)

I'm going to fwd a couple of examples to help you get my point....hope you understand what I'm saying here.

The first email Karthik forwards, he mentions:

This reeks of desperation to hire...............even ITES doesn't give titles away like peanuts.... probably monkeys will apply!!!!

The incumbent should be Post Graduate in HR from premiere institute

from 1999/2000/2001 batch for General Manager

and 2003 / 2004 / 2005 / 2006 batch for Manager.

The second one is this pathetic attempt to entice people to apply, typos left intact:

I am with a search/ headhunting firm. We undertake searches for
middle and top level positions across indistries and functional
area.

We have Manager Role for a very reputed firm in Financial Services
the profile requires for candidates only from reputed Business Schools

The Profile requires the candidate to have the following:
- Should possess 5 - 8 years of post qualification

- Should be able to talk to people who are SBU heads, VPs for the
vertical / horizontal.

- Needs to be a key player in Hr Initiatives

- A person who is thorough in his functional area and an ability to
work in a highly demanding and democratic work environment.

Education Qualification: MBA ( ONLY FROM B-SCHOOLS)

In case of any query with respect to this job profile kindly feel to
contact me at the number displayed below or else you could ask your
friends who are looking for an opportinuty or are interested in
getting to know about an opportunity to get in touch.

Hmm, looks like there is a huge opportunity for people to get into language and grammar training for recruiters :-)

What's Anchoring your Career?

Guest post by frequent contributor R Karthik:
___________________________________

'Occupational self-concept' has it that all of an individual's career choices so manifested in their job moves and other key decisions pertaining to their industry or profession they take to are (consciously or otherwise) driven by a particular anchor! A 'Career Anchor' as established through research by Edgar Schein, would be that (opportunity or core competence or functional aspect or simply another employment element) which the careerists in them would never give up under any circumstance. In other words it would be the fulcrum around which individuals' careers would revolve; it would be the only (always not-so-easy to identify) constant in an otherwise transient and change-ridden career.

New Year's Eve is certainly a good time to reminisce about my career course thus far and configure the way forward (So, here is where I come from J ). For someone who graduated in sciences, took to a sales job right after college, drifted to business education within a year thereafter and finally landed in a corporate human resources department, making 'the' career choice has been as much an evolutionary and soul-searching experience. Engineering or arts, for that matter would not excite me as much as I always saw myself as being the 'thinker-communicator-innovator'. My self-concept had always been one of (or at least something akin to) a 'Functional Manager-Creative Strategist'. While all this conscientious realization has dawned on me only recently, how things have actually unfolded is very simple. So how and when did I figure that HRM was indeed my true calling? – Well, it happened prior to joining b-school during my stint in Pharmaceutical sales. The grind of field sales starkly exposed my strengths and limitations to me in the first few months after start as I found myself excelling in only select faculties of the job. I would do an impressive job of product detailing, competitive positioning and articulation of FABs (features, advantages, and benefits). But sales, as I figured shortly, was not all about doing just that; it meant much more in terms of making productive customer calls with due preparation, effective use of promotional material such as product brochures and samples. Not the least, it meant perseverance of the highest order (in the face of most intimidating challenges or set-backs) in contriving to achieve pre-set goals on monthly basis. 'Never Say Die' was the name of the game! While I firmly believed I was capable of doing something else or much more than this, an honest Introspection helped me realize I was not very good sales material after all. Having understood my abilities, I would rather not waste much time in taking to what I had vocations for. Of all the functional specializations offered my interests and inherent strengths lay in HRM so I took to it as a duck to waters. One another right move would be safeguarding my position as an undiluted HR career-aspirant; it meant opting out of the 'dual-specialization' trap, resisting temptations in not sitting for every other company's campus selection programme.

That sneak peek into the rear-view mirror has helped me trace my career trajectory from its very roots. It turns out that if there was ever a single dominant anchor through all these phases of my career it would be 'functional competence' (one of the 8 distinct anchors as defined by Edgar Schein). It gets interesting when one starts relating this concept of anchors to the careers of individuals we have known and followed. 'Pure Challenge' must have been the career anchor of Sherlock Holmes; 'Entrepreneurial Creativity' that of a 'Bill Gates' or a 'Steve Jobs'; 'Autonomy' for those free spirits who prefer portfolio living to subscribing themselves with one organization and working by its terms; 'Service/dedication to a cause' that of a 'Medha Phatkar', 'General managerial' for some, 'Security/Stability' for some and 'Lifestyle' for some.

So, what's yours?

On Recruitment - some thoughts

Murali Dharan emailed me some thoughts after reading my article:

I have been thinking and trying to write on the most desirable qualities which anyone wanting to win in recruitment need to possess... and the one word that comes to my mind is PASSION..... i see most people wanting to be in recruitment may be as it is easy 'percieved' and a desk job.....
My own experience is that to win in recruitment, the most critical ingredient is the ability to acquire knowledge by the day by the hour about contemporary skills, competition, client, candidate, aspirations, comp and ben trends... and much more.
What would your comment be??
Murali

I would surely agree with Murali, because the most valuable employee you can get is one who is passionate and knowledgeable about the area you are hiring him/her for.

However, the questions we in HR and as hiring managers grapple with is what happens when only one of the two qualities are present in an individual.

What happens when you get people who are knowledgeable and competent but don't have the passion? Can you help in igniting their passion? As people managers a lot of people might say yes, but when business pressures come, often the "developing passion in team" task gets relegated to the background.

Then there are the other thoughts - can you really develop passion in people? If a sales person is not excited making a sale, how much can one develop him/her?

What happens when a person has passion and knowledge or competence? At certain stages in certain organizations you can afford to have an 'academy setting' where people are training or educated from almost zero. However, in organizations that need to maintain a low cost overhead can you really afford to have a passionate person without knowledge - akin to having a bull in a china shop?

So how can you get the perfect recruiter (or any other candidate, for that matter)?

Using business networking to help your career

Have been quoted in the 15th January 2008 issue of Outlook Money on how people can utilise social and business networking sites along with blogging for career growth. Others quoted are chief blogger of WATconsult.com Rajiv Dingra (who explained how he hired an associate consultant after searching for the term "blog writer" on Orkut), Arunima Singhdeo of Brijj.com and Akhil Shahani who I've interacted on email and Brint's KM message board some time ago.

My take is that people should at least have a Linkedin profile and also use blogging to further their professional profile.


The article says that while social networking will never become the channels for mass hiring (there's campus recruiting for that purpose!) and there is no available data for how many people are being offered jobs using blogging or other social and professional tools, I think for the emerging digital and web 2.0 shops it would be a great way, since they are the ones using this tool.

Amongst the more interesting news from the article was that TCS (Tata Consulting Services) has a web 2.0 lab and the article quoted Dinesh Tantri who's listed as a web2.0 strategy consultant there. Does anyone know if there are practices like this in the other big IT services groups too?