Roots!

“People have more confidence and comfort to move to an unknown future when they carry forwards parts of the past”

This line stared at me from the page of an old notebook that I was sorting through today afternoon.

The line stuck!

How do people who get displaced behave? I have heard people displaced by partition keeping some relic of their past with them. People who migrate to different countries retain some relic of their past or keep on with some tradition of theirs which survives across generations and hence acts as a link to their roots. A friend once told me what he had encountered in Trinidad: 3^rd/4^th generation migrants from India who carried relics of their past (including some old and dusted photographs) and who practiced some of their old Indian traditions but who could not remember which part of India their roots lay in. He supposedly encountered similar things in Mauritius – descendants of Indian origins with French names which were pronounced like Indian names. Indian parents in Fiji supposedly call their children “putra” and “putri”.

What are the implications of this observation for change? For people to change, they should be able to carry forwards parts of the past – if you threaten to annihilate their identity (and our identities are past based) or what they identify with, in all probability they would not budge.

An example from the past comes to mind.

A year back a colleague and I were conducting a workshop. We were trying to anchor the group towards using “certain kind of situations” to make decisions (a new approach in our context). There was a section of the participants who wanted to stick on to the old approach – decisions on the basis of past behaviours. This section of participants had been practicing this old approach for a long time and it provided them comfort. They consequently resisted our efforts to introduce a new approach. They finally agreed to move when the group decided that decisions have to be taken on the basis of responses to “certain kind of situations” (the new approach) but the evaluation would have to start from analysis/understanding of “the past behaviours” (the old approach). J .. people had more confidence and comfort to move to an unknown future when they carried forward parts of the past.

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Sourav

About Performance Systems

A few months back I, along with a colleague, were facilitating a session for a group of around 30 employees. My colleague was trying to explain our performance system to this group. The participants expressed heartburns about the bell curve and its impact on individuals. I felt it was important to explore along with the participants the origin and objectives of a performance system, and what options we could look at.

The contents of the discussion, in retrospect, have cleared a few of my fundamentals about Performance Management:

• Why do we need a Performance Management system? What objectives does it serve? Can we do without it?
• Is it possible for anyone to be happy as an outcome of the Performance Management System?
• Can we do without a Bell Curve?

When I asked the first set of questions, I got a stoic silence for a reply. The first few answers I gathered were “You obviously require it”, “ How can you do without it?”. …Ah! Hmm! Err!!! , etc, etc.

A Performance Management System serves 3 purposes:

• Mutual expectation setting exercise - Its an exercise for setting of mutually accepted goals and tracking progress against it.
• It’s a work planning exercise – what will get done, when, how and by whom? What resources would be required and how would they be got?
• It’s a mechanism through which how rewards would be shared is decided.

You need a performance management system because you need a system to set goals, plan for how will they get done, and periodically track progress against it. The problem comes with linking rewards to it – that’s where the bone of contention lies!

Now the organization has 2 choices:

• To reward differentially
• Not to reward differentially – in this case you would not need an individual rating system.

People want differentiation because it gives them a chance to benefit from it but at the same time they don’t like it when they are at the receiving end of it (a premier B school alumnus would talk of the lack of a performance oriented culture when he finds his vertical growth is limited to certain time boundaries but ask him if he would like it if his junior from campus were to become his boss, and he usually would fumble for answers). On the other hand, if you have a system in which there is no performance based differentiation, then employees say it’s akin to a government organization.

Hence it’s a question of choosing the less worse of the 2 bad option. Rather because people want differentiation; we seem to go for it.

But what happens when you have differentiation? The guy who gets the highest rating feels there is not enough differentiation between him and the guy who has got an average rating. On the other hand, the guy who has got an average rating feels that the guy who has got the highest rating did not really deserve it. Hence people at either end of the bell curve are not really happy. What options does one in such cases?

I am reminded of Stacy Adam’s equity theory. In performance management there can be no distributive justice, one can aim only for procedural justice. Hence the need for focus on goal setting, work planning, and reviews.

The other source for heartburn is “the impossibility of knowing what standard of performance would guarantee me a highest rating”. When the goals are set for an individual, they are set on an absolute scale but when the rewards are to be decided then relative performance is taken into consideration. Hence there would be a sense of powerlessness which an individual would feel (both the boss and the subordinate). Does anyone like to feel powerless? What possible reactions can play out in such cases? A boss might go ahead and blame the system which HR has put into place and his subordinate would believe him, it not lose respect in his boss’s leadership.

Can we do without a bell curve? Bell curve is about relative rating – we can do without it but then employees would say that there is no performance based differentiation. The only way we can do without a bell curve is if we could provide differentiation without having a bell curve – but how do you do that? I don’t have an answer presently. The things you can play around with are the rating scale, the %age distribution across the bell curve, and how the rating would affect different salary components. But even then distributive justice would be elusive.

To end with, here are a few other thoughts/observations:

• Sometimes I feel individuals attach too much importance to ratings. Should I take my rating as an evaluation of me, or as evaluation of my performance for a particular year – calculated to determine the reward that I would get for that year?
• An obvious outcome of linking the reward system to performance management seems to be that the major parameter against which success is measured today in our world is the amount of money one has.
• I was having a discussion with a friend a few months back. He was not happy with his performance rating at work– he had got an average rating. He said that when he gets an average rating he feels he has underperformed. I was surprised and asked him to elaborate. He said “I come from a family whose members are known for their intellectual meritocracy (true of a number of Indian families). In my family, being average is akin to underperforming. It makes me feel ashamed” The measure of success seems to be whether my performance is above average or not! J

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Sourav

What can B-Schools do?

Last year, I had gone back to my alma mater. I met up with one of my favourite professors from campus. As usual we ended having up a lengthy discussion. One of the things we debated on was “What can B- Schools do to better prepare students for the industry?”. I had shared a few ideas with him. He had asked me to flesh out my ideas more and send him an e-mail.

Below is an excerpt of the e-mail I had sent him.

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Dear Sir,

It was nice meeting you the other day .

I have been reflecting on the discussion you and I had about "What can we do more at the institute level, to ensure that when students graduate they are better prepared to meet the challenges of the industry?" (This is the way i have verbalized the intent of the discussion even though these were not the words used.).

You had asked me to flesh out the thoughts i shared and write to you.

The answer to the question asked would lie around 3 areas, viz:

· Admissions process- Profile of students who are taken into the system?

· Course Curriculum - What is taught to the students?

· Pedagogy - How is it taught to the students?

These 3 areas are inseparable and inter - related. But which one should we focus on?

When i look back at the times that i have learnt the most i realize that there have been some common characteristics:

· The situation was novel, and

· The answers were not forthcoming and hence I had to struggle through to find a solution to the situation,, or ..There was a lot of material available on possible solutions but i had to form my opinion because i knew i had to defend my opinion to the hilt, and

· There was an element of working with others to arrive at a commonly accepted solution.

During this process my own assumptions used to get questioned causing the learning to be much deeper.

What i have also consistently observed is that success on the job is a function of:

· Problem Solving - the individual's ability to arrive at a solution given a situation (novel situations are the ones which usually cause most difficulty to individuals).

· Openness to relook at one's own assumptions - when faced with contradictory evidence to one's own assumptions, how does the individual react?

· Being able to effectively relate with important others on the job.

I rely on my experiences ( including what i have heard relevant others say - Professors, Line Managers, Function Heads, Fellow Recruiters, etc) in different roles as a Student, Employee, Recruiter , Process owner for Induction of new joiners to arrive at the observations i have made above. These experiences include:

· Admissions interview for B-School - i remember being asked to back the opinions i had shared during the interview.

· Some courses in B-School- there was a lot of information which comes your way and initially there is a feeling of being overwhelmed. The subjects which left their mark on me are the ones where there was a strong focus on "struggling through to find your own solutions" and where my "assumptions got questioned".

· Hiring across campuses - many a times i don't find students making their own choices. They seem to select careers on the basis of what they have heard others say (peer groups, seniors, etc) but there is limited individual processing (What is my opinion? What do i want?).

Now let me get back to the 3 areas i had mentioned above - Admissions Process, Course Curriculum, Pedagogy.

Though i agree that focussing on the Course Curriculum is important, at the same time no course curriculum can be exhaustive enough. There is only so much you can learn at a point of time.

On the other hand if the "struggling through" way of finding answers to situations becomes a part of life for a student, then i feel we would have managed to bridge the gap between what the industry wants and what the institute delivers. This would be a function of the Admissions Process (Students who are keyed on to Problem Solving, Openness to relook at one's assumptions when faced with contradictory evidence, and being able to effectively relate with others) and Pedagogy (Consistent reinforcement of this "struggling through to form your own solutions" method of teaching would make a student comfortable with this way of working).

This is what i had on my mind.

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Sourav

Free Choice within Determinism!

A few months back a friend made a point which stuck with me. The import of what he said was that as individuals we don’t have any power. The situation decides whether we are of importance or not. So the situation would decide whether the role I am, or someone else is, playing today is important..…as individuals we don’t control anything.

The level of determinism is high. We are born into our families. To a large extent we don’t choose the people we grow up with or the school we go to. What we wear, we eat, the college or specialization we take up – all are subject to social forces. But does it mean that there is nothing we as individuals can choose?

Even the presence of a single alternative implies that there is choice. The strength of social forces might determine the number of alternatives we have at our disposal but what are the chances that we would land up in a situation where there are no alternatives. Can you think of a situation where you were left with no alternatives? I can’t think of any.

We do have a free choice and what characterizes we, human beings, is the freedom to choose our own course of action: our own alternative (even though our choice may be subject to social forces which have been embedded into our unconscious). The element of environment is always there, but how many opportunities in that environment I tap into would depend on my free choice and will. That is an act of choosing the state of “I know that the environment would be there but within that context what’s the best I can do? Can I change the environment itself?” over the state of “Life is deterministic. Let me take what comes to my plate.

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Sourav

Walking the Chosen Road!

Do we hire employees for the company or for specific functions or for specific roles? I have seen different companies choosing different paths for itself. PnG is known for hiring for specific functions – skill expertise is what they supposedly value. We are known for hiring for the company – for a manager the question is not about “where you will fit in”, the question is rather about “how will you fit in”.

What are the consequences of choosing either of these alternate paths?

What happens when a company chooses the “we hire for the company” route? Can we say that expertise is not needed anymore in any of the roles? I feel expertise is needed but in a scenario where cross-functional assignments/movements are the norm, there must be other ways of ensuring that expertise comes in. You might need to work with “knowledge or skill” expert firms to get the expertise inside your firm. Or you might need to have strong career movement or succession processes in place. One manifestation of this might be a lengthy career planning and development phase – before someone moves into a new role in a different skill area, s/he picks up the knowledge/skill required for that role over a period of 12 months before moving into the role. This would necessarily mean that the knowledge and skill pre-requisites for a role are charted out and learning systems are in place to deliver learning content to an individual at a time and pace suited to him. Without systems and processes to ensure the availability of skill within the system, the system would be permanently hungry for expertise. You may see a situation where situations are getting adequately addressed (individuals are good at identifying problems and addressing situations through adequate solutions) but the solutions are not best-in-class or not as effective as they could have been. In such a situation the system would be in a constant state of infancy/adolescence – the wheel would be re-invented over and over again.

Let us also try to appreciate how prospective employees might evaluate such a company as an employer. If a society were to value skills and expertise, would a “general managerial” employer be highly valued in such a society? How would such a company fare in skill based societies like USA or Western Europe? If the Indian society were to become highly skill/expertise focused over the next 20 years, would such a company be able to hold on to its philosophy of valuing “general managers” only?

What happens when a company chooses the “we value expertise and skills” route? I have not experienced working for such a company but a possible drawback does occur to me:

• What about inter-group collaboration? Would people from different skills/expertise areas be able to work together? A possible answer here would be to remove individual based performance incentives and have cross –functional teams as the units of performance.

So which alternative is better? I don’t think that’s the correct question to ask.

I remember a colleague once saying “It does not whether we choose the general managerial or the expertise route. What matters is whether we have made up our minds one way or the other and have executed our intent well. Execution is what would make a difference.”

I agree! We have to choose our own roads and walk on it. Irrespective of the road we take, we would face hurdles. The challenge lies in overcoming those hurdles. At the end of the day “All roads lead to Rome”. The question is “are you willing to walk on the road you have chosen”? or “are you ok being perennially at the cross-roads debating on which is the better road to take?”

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Sourav

Management by Exception & Symptomatic Treatment

Here are some thoughts I had penned down a few years back about the need for pro-activity in HR processes.

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“Prevention is better than cure” – is a maxim we hear oft but the relevance of this statement, in our day-to-day lives’ & especially outside the realm of medical sciences, is seldom appreciated. The words “prevention” and “cure” come to fore when there is a “Problem”. There essentially are 2 kinds of problems:

a) the root causes of which are "finite and predictable"– Hence these constitute a set and when we speak of “dynamism” it can only happen between the different points on this “finite and predictable set”.

b) The root causes of which are “infinite and unpredictable”- Hence there’s no fixed set which can be defined here and hence this is a case of “unpredictable dynamicism”.

In the 1^st case different “fault control mechanisms” can be designed and implemented “at a single point of time” to ensure that prevention is there. Till the time no symptoms arise, everything is running fine. But if symptoms arise, let’s cure it!!. Hence there is a requirement only to “manage the exceptions’”, and you would do that only when the symptoms arise.

And then I am reminded of Pavlov’s dog experiment - 'Conditioned Behavior'. We get conditioned to respond in a particular way to the environment. If we aren’t wise or self aware enough to understand “subtle changes” in the external environment – then we would continue responding to two different situations requiring different approaches in the same way. What would be the consequences? Not pleasant to say the least!

In my immediate environment I see a strong focus on reliability of services, and hence on scenario 1. But somewhere I see a “stretch – over” of the scenario 1 behavioural pattern when it comes to people related decisions (which fall in the realm of scenario 2). If you have a cough, I’ll get you a cough syrup. But I wouldn’t look at preventing the cough. The problem is at times the cough becomes so acute that the cough syrup just doesn’t work. Hence “cure” as a strategy fails as “prevention” was never focussed upon. Hence scenario 1 response is made for a scenario 2 case – set up systems and get into the Management by Exception trap. A self-defeating but self-reinforcing circle!

Sometimes I hear the term ‘intellectual discipline’ being used to justify scenario 1 responses. I find it more of ‘color blindness’-in the same picture, one isn’t able to make out the different hues, and colours, and respond accordingly.

“Hey, this guy is cribbing too much. All these years he has performed well but has never cribbed! What should we do? Transfer him? Give him a role change? Recognize him in some other way ?”

But what do you do if you are from the school of thought “performance speaks for itself”?

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We have a certain image in our minds when we think of systems and processes. That image is about stability and predictability. HR processes can act as guiding posts but every interaction is new and needs to be shaped. Secondly HR processes are designed around minimum number of interactions you need to have. What is required is pro-activeness? People management is much more than just handling and ensuring HR processes are in order.

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Sourav