VUCA

Somedays back I came across a new term VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) which supposedly characterizes present economic environment worldwide.

What might a VUCA environment mean for mindset a company adopts to deal with environment?

On one hand, it could trigger fear and lead to ‘defending your territory’ actions.

On contrary, companies could start focusing on becoming better at adapting to change.

But companies could also choose path of seeing change as an opportunity – and pursuing, shaping, and exploiting these opportunities.

Which option should your company choose?

I think answer is context specific.  Answer could be different for different companies and different for same company at different points of time.

Intuitively though, principle of ‘if you can’t avoid something it might be better to enjoy yourself at it’ might be applicable here.

So 3^rd option – of seeing ‘change as an opportunity’ – might be better go-to option in most cases during these ‘VUCA’ times.

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Sourav

Transitions

We usually use terms induction and onboarding in context of new joiners to companies. But these terms do have relevance to even employees transitioning across roles.

What all might be important to look at when we consider employees transitioning across roles?

There needs to be a focus on:

·         Effective transitioning off from current role:

o   There needs to be a focus on effective hand over of responsibilities to new/stand-in incumbent.

o   Every team also needs to re-center itself when there is a change in team member.  

·         Effectively onboarding into new role:

o   There needs to be a focus on role readiness. This will be a combination of learnings required, contributions (early successes) that give a boost to confidence, and establishing networks required for role.

·         Effectively inducting into new team/org sub-cultures – need for team to re-center itself with new team member.

All of these steps can be facilitated through processes.

How is this different from onboarding and inducting a new joiner to company? It is different in sense that in second case one also needs to factor in ‘inducting into company’.

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Sourav

Talent Development

In last few weeks, I have been in midst of some ‘talent development’ work.

A few thoughts have been running through my mind.

Someone is identified as ‘talent’ because s/he will be demonstrating differentiated performance consistently, behaviors/abilities that company is betting on in future, and/or demonstrating behaviors/abilities for higher order/critical roles for company.

Development options charted out for a 'talent' have to reflect atleast last two of above.

These options again can be in form of classroom trainings, development experiences (e.g: projects), and/or learning for leaders/coaching/mentoring.

What we attempted, as a first step, was learning from leaders.

We had 3 leaders speaking to ‘talent’ and what they left them with were clarity, inspiration, motivation, and reflection. Additionally having all ‘talent’ in one room provided them an opportunity to ‘extend personal networks’.

Question I am left with is ‘what’s next’.

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Sourav

 

Importance of Conversations for Change

Change formula nicely captures conditions required/necessary for change, viz:

D*V*F>R where D- Dissatisfaction with current state; V- Vision of the future; F-First Steps; R- Resistance to change.

What formula doesn’t seem to capture is ‘how of/process' for change.

‘Inclusion of’ and ‘conversations with’ affected parties are the two how's that seem to be important.

All affected parties/stakeholders need to be involved in change process. 

They need to see ‘need for’ change and be involved in ‘creating solutions’ for change. This involves ‘conversations’ with them.

‘Conversations’ need to invite two way flow of information and peer exchange.

These ‘how's’ form the bedrock of change process.

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Sourav

Pacing

Through work and life, you need to be able to pace yourself.

Visualize a bottle of water that’s full in the morning. Slowly water starts emptying out and by end of day there’s almost nothing left. In the night and during early morning of next day you fill up bottle again.  This cycle repeats itself every day.

Let’s visualize another scenario. Same bottle of water has an equitable inflow and outflow through the day. There might be slight variations in water level but overall water level remains constant. 

Which scenario is more sustainable?

I vote for second scenario. 

First scenario will work in a situation where you know that you will have enough time every day to fill bottle back again.  But that may be a flawed assumption – we may not have the dedicated time available every day.

Second scenario requires self-awareness- you need to know how to ‘pace’ yourself so that outflow and inflow rates more or less match. Secondly you need to know ways to ensure adequate inflow.

Both of these – self-awareness and skills at ensuring adequate inflow – can be worked upon by individual and hence are controllable by individual.

So how do you pace yourself through the day?

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Sourav

 

Contributions

Best ideas are best implemented ideas!

I do agree with statement above. The value of any idea is derived only once it has been implemented.

But does this mean you always should be in implementation mode? I don’t think so.

There are 3 different stages for an idea – ideation (or creation stage), building base (fleshing idea out), and implementation.

All 3 require their own space and time.

A good way of knowing whether you are doing all three adequately is to reflect on your workweek and see whether you got enough of all 3 in week.

Additionally you can pace yourself on different days – spending some days exclusively on one or more of stages. Else you can split day into periods and work on different stages exclusively during each period.

Implementation is important. But each of 3 stages require its own space and time.

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Sourav

Triad of learning

Is an individual responsible for his/her own learning? Most of us will contend yes.

But then what are responsibilities of other 2 stakeholders in process- manager and HR?

Other day I heard someone delineate succinctly the responsibilities.

'Employee owns, manager supports, and HR enables learning'.

Statement sounds simple and relevant! It resonates with me.

But how might this state manifest at workplace?

Employee will own initial identification of learning need and sharing same with manager.

Manager will explore along with the employee whether the correct need has been identified or not (e.g.- by using evidence procedure), facilitate effective choice of 70/20/10 learning mix, work with stakeholders (including HR) on ensuring relevant 70/20/10 learning opportunities materialize, and provide opportunities for transfer of learning back to workplace (for 20 and 10 percent).

HR supports the manager being  more effective in supporting employee through learning process.

But HR's also plays a role is enabling the process. So HR person needs to have an understanding/independent view on how process is running and intervene if process is stuck somewhere- with employee or manager.

But then HR's role is akin to a tight rope walk- you have to enable the employee and manager to drive the process and not to take over ownership of the process.

I also do feel manager has a role to play in enablement. Manager can clear log jams if s/he finds employee stuck somewhere.

A related point is that employee/manager may be stuck at what, when/where, how, or why of learning. A skill in 'enablement' is to figure out where is block/log jam and accordingly facilitate the process.

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Sourav

 

 

 

Participation

‘You can take a horse to the water- you can tell horse drinking water  is good for its health -but choice to drink or not to drink water lies with the horse'. This is a statement that I had formed early in my career when I was working on learning and development space.

Over last few months I have realized that this statement is applicable to situations/processes where the efforts and results are not linearly related in space and time and area spread out across time. Career Planning & Execution, and Development are 2 such processes – you make efforts today but results may not come in the same year.

My new tagline on careers is – ‘Performance is ensured over a year while a career direction is built at least over 2-3 years’.

We harp on relevance- we learn or we work towards a career goal if it is relevant for us. We say that the challenge for the resource provider or the manager is to create a space/opportunity for employee to find relevance for him/her.

Let’s say that as a resource provide you have done work on both fronts mentioned above-you and employee have figure out relevant aspects and you have provided required resources.

And then - employee resists turning up to utilize the resource! You are left perplexed! What happened?

Maybe it is relevant but other priorities are at play.

I had been working on creating for last few months a program – working along with intended audience to ensure relevance of resources. On day of session, we clocked around 50% attendance. I wondered whether we could have had at least 60% attendance – that’s what I had expected. But maybe that’s the wrong way to look at this situation. Those who attended seemed vested and involved in day and shared that they found session very valuable.

I saw them taking notes and thinking of how they will make use of learning's back at work.

Leaves me thinking – should we work on participation?

Sometimes we need to drive participation - to ensure people prioritize A over B where both are relevant and where they may not have realized importance/power of A. This is especially the case when A is career/development and B is performance.

Low participation undermines power of an initiative. High participation does not guarantee effectiveness. Relevance is critical.

Hence both relevance and participation are necessary but not sufficient resources by themselves. They go hand in hand to ensure success.

If required participation can be driven. If people choose to stay on as day progresses, that's a possible indication that efforts were worth it.

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Sourav

Dividing Limited Resources Appropriately!

How do we react to limited resources/win-lose scenarios?

Performance bell curve is a classic limited resource example. 

There are only a few slots for top performers- usually a manager wants just a tad bit more slots for his/her top performers and a tad bit less slots for his/her low performers.

What are different ways of dealing with this situation? Two obvious ways are:

• ·         Give limited resources proportionately to each team – everyone gains or loses equally.

• ·         Give limited resources appropriately to each team – some teams may get more than others.

Usually a leaders´ decision (1^st line of authority that both/multiple teams report up to) is required to drive non-proportionate/appropriate division of resources amongst different teams.

What happens when a leadership decision is not possible ?–maybe because leader isn´t there.  Is only solution to delegate decision higher up in hierarchy?

I would place responsibility on manager of each team. They have to come together and discuss allocation of resources. 

What are imperatives in such a process?:

• HR is facilitator in this process. I might be asked to recommend appropriate division of resources. But that makes it easy for managers to abdicate responsibility for decision taken. I would put responsibility squarely back on shoulders of managers – it´s your teams and you have to take a decision.

• Before we start discussion division of resources, managers have to debate and agree on principles on basis of which resources would be divided appropriately.  When there´s no principle, it´s difficult to find agreement.

But what does a facilitator do when he finds managers not willing to come on table and discuss?

• First, it´s a symptom of managers behaving ´territorially´.

• In such a case, discussion needs to be taken a notch higher. Discussion is no more about merits of coming to table and discussing.  Discussion should be about exploring with each manager ´why is s/he not coming on table and how might s/he being perceived because of that´. That is not an easy discussion but is certainly a necessary one. A Type A (go getter) person might respond to this process. Would a Type B person respond to this kind of a process? I think discussion with a Type B person would be about what is right thing to do.

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Sourav

Employee Sessions!

Certain HR processes are periodic and predictable in their occurrence, e.g. - Training Need Identification, different steps of Performance process, etc.

Is there a need to communicate with employees when such predictable processes are underway?

I would contend yes! Even if there is no new message to provide or skill to develop, still there is a need to reinforce key message or make employees update their skills.

How do we communicate with employees when such predictable processes are underway? 

We could use low-context mechanisms, e.g.- mailers, emails.  While mailers can reach large populations at one go, it doesn´t guarantee participation or interest.  In fact, as a process owner you would not even know how many people read the mailers.

We could use high-context mechanisms, e.g. employee sessions/town halls/nukkad nataks (street plays). In these mechanisms, you would know participation rates and you can get a sense of what´s staying with the audience.

But, how do we know whether these employee sessions have worked or not?

I think there are a few things that need to be looked at:

·         What is targeted message for sessions? Were these delivered during session?

·         Who was target audience? What was participation rate of targeted audience?

·         Who should be delivering session? I think a joint business-HR facilitation for employee sessions on HR processes leaves a powerful message.   I have experienced such facilitation a number of times, and always it seems to drive involvement and powerful conversations within room.

·         By end of session, did audience understand & internalize the action items for them?

·         Were these actions actually worked upon post session? When it comes to behaviors, it´s not easy but also not impossible to measure.  We may not even have metrics but indicators (even qualitative) might do.

An effective employee session does a good job in all elements of pre- session communication, session design, choice of facilitator, facilitation skills, post session closure, and processes/interactions to support actioning at work place.

Does this sound similar to a training workshop design? Yes, it does in terms of process. Intent of employees sessions is awareness, understanding, learning, and committing to actions.

But I experienced designing and executing these sessions as being different from doing same for a training workshop. Have not been able to place my finger yet on what´s the difference though!

What´s been your experience with Employee Sessions? How would you figure out whether these sessions have worked or not?

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Sourav