A couple of interviews

Dear blog, I know I've been neglecting you. Am sorry. I have no excuses, except that I am travelling and on a capability building project for a big client.

But I haven't been totally offline however too :-)

Scoop Onlive - India's online HR magazine conducted an interview with me - and you can view it at this site. However you might need to register (free) to do that, however.

The Pakistani Spectator has a series of blogger interviews and they interviewed me on my blogging related life - some interesting questions. You can read that here.

By the way if you are on Facebook you might want to check this blog's network page and interact with the other readers there. You can also join the Gautam Ghosh page there ;-) Only 31 fans there however :D

And another thing, have you joined the HR professionals' network? There are close to 300 fellow HR professionals there now!!

Free ebook on recruitment

Mohan Kannegal, co-founder of MeritTrac services sent me an email recently that said:

I recently wrote an ebook titled "A Beginner's Guide To Recruitment". This is an ebook (at 45 pages more like a min-ebook! ) written specifically for students interested in joining HR/Recruitment roles in companies. This is an effort from my side to crystallize the learnings from my own experience processing job applications and make it available freely to students. The bbook is available as a free download on my blog - tractalent.com.

My interest is in using the web to make sure the ebook reaches everyone who would be interested in it. I feel students interested in purusing recruitment and recruiters will benefit from the book. I looked up google to see who is the HR guru on the internet in India who can help in making this book available to a lot of people and your name came up. Is there anyway you can help me in making this book reach more people?

Well I don't know about being a HR guru. But the effort is truly laudable. You can download the pdf from this site. I went through the ebook and it would be useful even for startup companies who have a lone person taking care of recruitment and wondering how to streamline processes related to recruitment.

Broad banding and Skill based Pay

Reader Poonam asks:

Dear Gautam,

 

I am a frequent visitor of your blog and enjoy reading the articles posted on it. I wanted your reflections on the "Difference between Broad Banding and Skill Based Pay" and how can this difference between the two be understood in the context of a start up organisation with an expanding employee strength.

 

Looking forward to your views on the topic.

 

I'm really not a compensation and pay expert what I do know is that broadbanding  refers to clubbing various pay levels into a smaller number of broad pay bands. According to this site:

Broadbanding is still around, although it is getting far less press than it did in the nineties. Like all tools, it's great for achieving specific outcomes, but can cause great damage when misapplied.

Definition:

Broadbanding (or 'broad grades') is the consolidation of traditional pay structures, consisting of many, narrow pay ranges into a few, wider ranges or bands.

Purpose:

Broadbanding is intended to support agile, flatter, faster-paced, de-bureaucratized organizational cultures.

Use:

Broadbands are imperative for companies with competency-based pay programs, but are also used in companies with longevity- and performance-based pay programs. Companies employ broad banding to:

• facilitate change
• avoid multiple pay structures
• drive pay decision-making downward (empowering managers)
• provide greater latitude in management pay decisions
• promote lateral moves or in-grade promotions
• reduce use of promotions to increase pay
• promote career development / learning
• reduce the need for precise job analysis/evaluation
• promote fewer, broadly-defined jobs
• focus on the person instead of the job
• facilitate quick responses to changing goals and circumstances

Any one has experience working in a broad band pay environment? How does that compare with a traditional system? My guess is that people in such an organization must get used to a new culture.

While Skill based pay according to this website is as follows. Prima facie it seems like a good fit with broadbanding pay. Any thoughts?

The payment of additional salary or hourly pay to employees for learning, and being able to perform, additional tasks or skills. It is sometimes expanded to compensate employees for demonstrating relevant competencies.

Training has failed the business

That's not what I said but someone who has facilitated learning and OD sessions for the last 18 years. Was meeting him last weekend and he asked "Have you ever asked someone what their biggest learning experience has been and been answered with 'a training program'?"

No. Really.

Think about it.

What has been your biggest learning experience?

See? Nothing in the classroom qualifies as a great learning experience.

Yet, tonnes of money get poured into training programs by organizations of all shapes and sizes across the world.

Here's a hint. If you want great learning focus on what happens before the training and what happens after the training.

Of course, as this person shared, maybe we have to evolve a new paradigm for learning totally different from training too.

HR Talent supply gap

Rohit Jain has a take on a topic I have frequently posted on in the past. Have even been quoted in the press about it.

Apart from what Rohit suggests, I would also take a look at redefining HR processes so that "HR people" are really not required to implement them. That would mean also redefining managerial roles to incorporate more and more HR aspects into them. HR should become like quality Prof Udai Pareek noted 11 years ago.

It should be a responsibility for all managers and leaders to be focused on attracting motivating and developing great people. HR people should be minimal in organizations to merely act as facilitators. However, the tragedy is that talent gap is not making organizations and CEOs think creatively about the issues. As Rohit notes - that's because HR is associated mostly with pay increases and promotions.

Rohit suggests:

The overall situation looking at numbers above does not look too good for sure. Perhaps the most important element of this demand and supply situation is the fact this demand is maximum at the middle and senior level in most organizations. Gap is even more acute at that level.

One of the solutions to this problem in my view is “HR for Non HR”. We need more and more business and cross functional people to be trained on aspects related to people challenges. In my view not only will that improve the situation, many of these ‘inside business’ guys will go on to become more successful HR professionals :)

Checkout new jobs online.

Distribution of Headquarters?

Indraneel Roy sounds the death knell of the Galactic Headquarters. The model of the top-down approach for an organization is of the industrial society. In the 21st century organizations will need to evolve a much more decentralised model of organization - Swarm Intelligence or Emergence ?

I hope other global firms realise this before they face the same problems.

As Indro posts on his blog:

To most of us who live and work in the real world it is clear that the all-American GHQ is a dinosaur waiting for a meteor shower.

Interestingly enough, the process has started already.

- A major FMCG major has decided to spread its senior leadership team in multiple locations around the world - one in the US, one in Europe and one in Asia.

- A leading global bank has broken its headquarters into 2 parts - one in London and the other in Singapore.

- A retail major has shifted all its governance for emerging markets to Brazil and China - a much smaller GHQ handles only the US business

- A leading consulting firm recently announced the end of its corporate HQs, instead choosing to locate its global Chairman in the Middle East, CEO in NY and other senior leaders in various offices around the world.

I can go on, but you get my drift. American companies are slowly waking up to a new world where 'one size does not fit all'. A multi-polar world where diverse and distributed leadership is the only way to succeed. A world where decisions need to be taken now, not later, and leaders need to stay connected to the real world of business.

How Socialmedian uses Offshore development

Jason Goldberg ex-CEO of Jobster blogs about learnings from his 2nd Stint as a Startup CEO - socialmedian

I specially would refer to how he approached offshore development. Note specially the third point about shareholding.

So, we decided to set up things differently at socialmedian. First, our decision to go offshore was certainly based on costs, but it was equally based on abilities and mutual respect. I had worked with the future socialmedian team in Pune before socialmedian on other projects and only chose to work with them on socialmedian because I was impressed with their thought process as much as their work product. We chose to work with them because they know how to solve problems and how to figure out how to respond to customer/user needs. And, they passed the most important test of all, an earnest early interest in the problem we are trying to solve at socialmedian and fantastic ideas on how to tackle the problem.

Second, I personally committed to travel to Pune, India nearly monthly for the first year of socialmedian (I've been there 6 times thus far in 2008 and am headed back in a couple of weeks). The logic here was that if the team was there, I, as the lead product manager, should be there too. As per our hunch, we learned early on that in-person time was critical for planning. As such, we have evolved into this regular cadence wherein for 1 week out of every month we plan together in person, and then for 3 weeks we are more tactical as our interactions are over skype. Sure, all that travel is tough (ask my spouse who hates me for it), but it has proven to be very effective for us at socialmedian.

Third, we have made our Indian team shareholders in socialmedian, so we are one company building one product. It's an offshore situation, not an outsourcing relationship.

The Consultant's Guide to using Linkedin

Linkedin has a new site called Learning Center and here's a great resource for Consultants who wonder "how exactly can I use Linkedin" ?

Some more pointers that I think one can use - use your Linkedin recommendations on your own website - so that non-Linkedin members can see them too.

Use the URL/Q&A feature on Linkedin to expose people (and the Googlebot) to your website (check my Linkedin public profile to see how I've done that)

Use descriptive sentences to elaborate on areas of expertise and specialisation. Every word on the web (whether on your website or your Linkedin profile) is a branding and positioning opportunity. Use it after a lot of thought or get experts/Clients who you've worked with in the past to review it and give opinion on it.

Time to question potential?

Penelope has a great post on whether we are slave driving ourselves in the race for potential. It's a struggle that even I have with myself once in a while.

1. Recognize that it’s delusional. You are who you are, and you should just be you. Have realistic, meaningful goals for your life, like: Be kind. Be engaged. Be optimistic. Be connected. Most people who say they are not living up to their potential are not talking about this most-important stuff.2. Recognize that the world isn’t a race. A race assumes that everyone has an inborn ability to reach a personal best. If you stop racing, you stop wondering what that inborn ability is. I mean, really, “living up to one’s potential” is always relative. You are really talking about your ability to kick everyone else’s butt at something. And it’s not a pleasant thing to say. When you stop looking at the world as a competition, then you can stop wondering why you’re not coming in first place.
3. Recognize that you sound like your mother. “Living up to your potential” is a phrase from a grade-school report card. It is elementary-school speak. It is your parents saying you need to do more homework. It is your mother saying “Joey, you’re a genius. Why don’t you get straight A’s? Look what you do to your mother!” In almost every case when someone says, “You are not living up to your potential,” the proper answer is, “So what?” Because it’s always someone trying to tell you that the thing you should contribute to this world is something other than kindness.

How is training needs done

Abhijit Bhaduri has the inside info, from right inside the CEOs head in his "HR made simple" series:

Could it be Leadership skills that you should go for with the boys? Your reasoning is perfect. When they join you fresh out of school, they need Leadership training. When they are stuck in Middle Management for years, the cure is not cod-liver oil. It is Leadership training, my friend. Even the old geezers in the corner office could use that stuff. the President of the country could benefit from Leadership training if only he could sit still for two days.  And you know what, even the venue is awesome? It is at your favorite beach resort. While the lads rough it out in the classroom, you could settle down by the beach sip a beer while adding a few more stars to your already fully grown leadership style. After all, the sea has so much to teach us, you argue with yourself and lose hopelessly. You cast your vote. Leadership it shall be for everyone this year.

Wisdom and Knowledge

Have been reading Sutton and Pfeffer's Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense. One of the points that the authors make is that while Intelligence can be a predictor for future performance, the thing to really test is the wisdom of any manager.

Wisdom as they refer to it is the ability for a person of high intelligence to know that there are things for which one may not have answers or skill to do, and it's time to reach out to someone else and call for their expertise.

It might sound natural - but knowledge is the biggest enemy of wisdom. The more one knows one assumes one has  the answers to most questions. And wisdom moves a little farther away.

How do you systematically plan to build wisdom? I thought about it and came up with two:

1. Develop a sceptical attitude to yourself - and towards most assumptions
2. Have a few mentors who are never afraid to give you bad news
   

10 emerging careers and 10 years

Interesting story in Rediff on what are the new emerging careers in India. And I, ahem, get quoted in it also :-)

And DNA ran a story on 10 years of blogging and one of the features was professional blogging. Fellow business blogger Palin of India PR blog and I were also featured there.

TheHiringTool offer for Employers and Placement Consultants

This offer is by the new recruitment site the HiringTool for Indian Employers and Indian third party recruiters only.
The site already has 200 consultants and 23 clients on board.. and they inform me that they also had 2 placements within 10 days of the job being posted.

The promo they exclusively for the readers of this blog are:

Placement consultants - http://www.thehiringtool.com/ signup for beta using referral code gautamc to get 10 unique opportunities to work with marquee clients and make money

To qualify you should be a registered placement agency engaged in the  business of contingency fulltime placements

Employers- http://www.thehiringtool.com/ sign up using referral code gautame to post 5 jobs, it does not cost you anything to post jobs, after you fill the job through one of their 200 partners pay the fee you set for the right candidate.

To qualify you should be a recruitment stakeholder with a immediate funded full-time opportunity

Umm, well I guess that means being a reader of this blog can actually help you save - and make money? Who'd have ever thought that !

Heh.

On growth in HR Consulting

Am quoted in the Outlook Money/Rediff article 10 emerging careers to watch out for

Consulting services
Growth stimulus: With existing businesses growing more complex and numerous startups on the cards, there will be demand for consultants specializing in human resources (HR) and startups.

"Apart from recruitment specialists, another area of demand in the HR space will be 'employer brand specialists' as organisations move away from a me-too approach and actively seeking differentiation," says (Shabbir) Merchant.

Requirements: Considering that with every 50-75 people recruited, one HR job gets created, TimesJobs.com estimates that 28,000 more HR jobs will be created in 2008.

Gautam Ghosh, foresees an explosion in demand for start-up consultants and business strategists as more and more consumer-oriented portals mushroom across the country.

Ghosh stresses the
increasing demand for people who have a blend of two functional skills,
like a financial services person with business and marketing skills.
"In a dynamic job space in a growing economy," he sums up, "people with
the right skill sets will always be sought after."

Are you a Batman at Work

When I started out my HR career in 1999 my boss sent me to a process work lab called Role and Identity in Oganizations. It basically got people to start thinking about whether they want to be seen as a "manager" or a person - how you see yourself is essentially how you end up behaving. A kind of Pygmalion Effect on yourself.

Yes, roles are masks that we wear - and wearing different masks makes us feel conflicted and torn like Bruce Wayne in the Batman movies.

So I jumped for joy when I came across this article on Businessweek. Read it and ponder over it. And of course, it made me blog about Batman (my fave superhero) on my management blog :-)

Do You Hide Your Inner Bruce Wayne?

We all play different roles in our lives, and it's the rarest of people who can be the same person no matter what role he or she is in; to be fully authentic, all the time. We all feel pressure to put on a certain face, depending on the situation. We all wear masks some time, for we must. At what cost?

The mask is a boundary between the different parts of his life. Yet underneath it, there is but one man. We all need to draw boundaries among the different parts of our lives, of course. We have to find ways to shut work off, for example, in order to pay full attention to our families, and vice versa. But those boundaries can be too thick; the mask's costs can be too dear.

What Does the Mask Cost?

In the real world of work, we often feel as though we have to cut ourselves off completely from the other parts of our lives. But take a moment to consider:

• Is it really necessary to forsake what you hold most dear in your personal life in order to be the person you think you need to be in your life at work?

• To achieve important goals in your career, do you have to adopt a mysterious visage in order to be seen as powerful and effective, even if inauthentic?

• What masks do you wear? Is there a price for the invulnerability they seem to give you?

• What would it mean for you to reveal more of what lies beneath—what's to be gained or lost?

Book Review: The Halo Effect

We in HR are quite used to hearing about the Halo Effect, specially (but not limited to) related to recruiting. It refers to a particular characteristic/trait of the interviewee that biases the interviewer to making erroneous conclusions about his other skills. For example, the interviewee is from a premier school, ergo he/she must be better on the job than someone else who graduated from a lesser known institute.

Phil Rosenzweig's book The Halo Effect and Eight other business delusions that deceive managers however focuses on The Halo Effect that makes consultants, journalists and others make the same mistake when observing organizations and mistakenly make assumptions about why they are successful or not.

He uses the business press to highlight these mistakes and to show how the halo is shaped by an organization's performance. This is the trap that business researchers fall into, primarily by identifying "High Performing/Successful/Excellent/Great" organizations and then trying to study why they are successful. As Phil says - this is flawed.

 When a company is growing and profitable, we tend to infer that it has a brilliant strategy, a visionary CEO, motivated people, and a vibrant culture.  When performance falters, we’re quick to say the strategy was misguided, the CEO became arrogant, the people were complacent, and the culture stodgy.  Using examples like Cisco, ABB, IBM, Lego, and more, I show how the Halo Effect is pervasive in the business world.  At first, all of this may seem like harmless journalistic hyperbole, but when researchers gather data that are contaminated by the Halo Effect—including not only press accounts but interviews with managers—the findings are suspect.  That is the principal flaw in the research of Jim Collins’s Good to Great, Collins and Porras’s Built to Last, and many other studies going back to Peters and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence. 

He also focuses on my favorite wrong conclusions based on statistical studies. The interchangeable way in which people seem to infer that correlation is about 'causality'. He also reminds that in the business world success is always relative - and not dependent on the 10 things an organization needs to do to be successful. As he shows:

I provide a very striking example about Kmart: on many objective dimensions (e.g., inventory management, procurement, logistics, automated reordering, etc.) Kmart improved during the 1990s.  Why then did profits and market share continue to decline?  Because on those very same measures, Wal-Mart and Target improved even more rapidly.  Kmart’s failure was a relative failure, not an absolute one.

So what does he say? Well, that there are many reasons for an organization's performance, which are dependent on taking risks - risks about making strategic choices and risks to execute those choices. These are never certain - and recognising that business world is a probabilistic world can make managers and leaders cope with uncertainty better. I highly recommend the book, if you haven't read it. It has helped me to question all the business 'success formulas' I have studied so far. As he says:

I wrote The Halo Effect because during 25 years in and around the business world, I've seen so much nonsense—unsupported claims by famous gurus and self-described "thought leaders," sweeping assertions based on poor data, and simplistic stories that claim to be rigorous research. Worse, most people—including many very smart managers, consultants, and journalists— can't tell the difference between good and bad research. The Halo Effect is an attempt to raise the level of discussion in the business world, and to sharpen our skills of critical thinking about management.

To become a Talent Magnet

Talent strategy needs to be articulated as business strategy, and that involves making strategic choices. The thing with choices is that we never know in advance if they will succeed or not - only in hindsight.

Indraneel Roy blogs about how organizations can become talent magnets

The best magnets for talent involve 3 things:

1. Your story, told well - this involves a clear, simple narrative of your company's roots, its dreams and aspirations and the many challenges that are getting in your way to reach your dreams. The story must be personal, honest, simple and uplifting ... and the narrator must be believable.

2. The human face, literally - this part is about putting a human face, or faces, on the kind of talent you already have. Examples of people one can expect to work with. Picking the ones who most intimately represent the talent you need for the future will ensure the right people are attracted to you ... and the wrong people are repelled, naturally.

3. The 2 sided confession. The third, and possibly, the strongest magnet for talent is a confession. An honest, open disclosure that cuts both ways. It gives the talent you are trying to attract a view that your company's brand is edgy, not neutral. There are people who love your company, and people who absolutely hate your guts. You then proceed to share what kind of people love your company and what kind of people are likely to hate you. In the process, you are subtly asking the candidate to take sides, make a choice, and build up some emotional stakes. If the candidate really identifies with the kind of people who love you, he / she will likely love you as well. If not, you spare yourself a wrong hire.

So, the next time you think about why talented people should join you, make sure you also think about why they shouldn't.