Setting up Teams

Well! I've been part of setting up of a completely new team this year. 

 

The team members are going to be spread across atleast 3 countries and time zones. Most of them are new to company. There will be little overlap in working hours of this regional team and parent organization (in India). 

 

We have managed to get the first set of employees onboard.  Upcoming challenge is to build a team from a set of employees spread out geographically.  So what should be next steps?

 

We obviously need common goal/s- something to which people can relate and rally around. We do have common goals. We need to ensure that employees understands and acts on those goals.

 

We need enough team members to connect regularly with each other.  So necessity to set up regular team meetings. Given that it is a high context culture, face to face presence might be more beneficial. Possibly technology- webex, etc - can play a role here. We also need to have an agreement on frequency at which this team gets together.

 

We have a manager, new to company. We need to hand hold manager  for atleast one annual cycle. We also need to involve other managers in organization in setting him up for success.

 

We need to be able to integrate this team in existing regional offices where their members are based out of. Ensuring alignment of policies to regional practices is minimum requirement. We already have ensured this. Ensuring connects with key stakeholders is another requirement. We have initiated this. But what more?

 

We also need to be able to integrate team into parent organization (based out of India). Visits of team members to parent organization, sync with key stakeholders, and including them in key conversations in parent organizations are first steps we have taken. But what more?

 

These are some of the things that we need to work on in next few months as we go about trying to build a team from geographically spread out and remote team members.

 

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Sourav

Leaders

What works with A doesn’t seem to work with B? But I meet them and work with them frequently. And then there also are C, D, E, and F.

I realize I am partnering 6 leaders for either their businesses or in specific projects.

While basic steps in partnering leaders don't change much, what certainly does change is way one partners. This revolves around way one gets work done while working with these leaders.

Let me illustrate through a few examples.

• How does one build working trust with leader? -through task completion or through first focusing on relationship
• How does leader take decisions? - does s/he prefer problems being stated and figuring out his/her own solutions or does s/he prefer hearing recommended solutions too?
• How does leader prefer interacting?-
• In person or comfortable with virtual meetings too
• Prefers agenda being shared beforehand or is ok getting a meeting without a pre-shared agenda.
• How does leader prefer hearing bad news? How does s/he prefer being disagreed with?- in person or comfortable over phone /emails too?
• What is level of structure/unstructure leader prefers? How much data/feeling/intuition driven is s/he?
• How far or near does leader draw organization boundaries and how permeable are those boundaries?  How does one ensure one's acceptance and effectiveness through those boundaries?

These are some of initial questions I have formed my workable answers around. I want to explore and develop these answers further in upcoming months.

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Sourav

Communities!

How does one build a community out of a large group of managers?

 

I am not talking of just setting up a body and asking them to meet in regular intervals. The members must feel they are a part of the community and they are invested in success/failure of community.

 

Well!  Over last few months we took our first steps towards creating a community of managers.

 

We have rallied leaders/managers around a common purpose. So relevance seems to be there.

 

There was high business involvement in creating community. Leaders and managers are actively involved in running community.

 

So basic design elements for a successful community - relevance and business ownership - seem to have been taken care of. This is getting manifested in predictable periodicity- community has determined frequency in which it meets and agenda items for their meetings.

 

 

So what next? What should be imperatives in remaining months?

 

A core managerial/leadership group has been involved in designing and launching the community.  How do we get even more managers invested in success of community? That surely is an upcoming agenda.

 

We have made decent progress in facilitating sessions. 

But I feel facilitator’s needs upskilling in facilitation skills. Additionally discussion need to be more conversational – this will ensure higher peer learning during sessions.. These two surely are focus areas for next few months.

 

I like the term go-dos. It's catchy and it brings in element of transfer of learnings to workplace. We have made go-dos a unit of conversation of this community. 

But how do we know whether these  go-dos are getting done? How do we enable community members to egg each other on in execution of go -dos?  Are go-dos actionable enough?  These are areas we could further look at.

Technology can play a role here. We can create a virtual community space where managers come together and exchange notes at regular intervals (how do we build consensus around frequency?) on progress against and further learnings from go-dos.

 

 

A related thought – manager community is a large group- consisting of around 90 managers.

‘Large group interventions’ is a separate field of study. I am not sure whether this means that I need to do different things for this community or do things differently. That's something I want to explore further too.

 

-

Sourav

 

Diversity and Inclusion

Mid-year is a good time to pause and reflect on progress made and what to do ahead.

 

My blogs this month will be reflect this theme.

 

Diversity and inclusion (D&I) is one space I have been working on.

 

First and foremost you need to be able to assess comprehensively as-is phase and to track progress. Hence necessity for creating and putting a calendar/rhythm around a reporting mechanism. 

I have managed to get buy in for such a reporting mechanism. I have created sustainable reporting structure.

The next steps are to ensure timely report preparation and using the reports to drive relevant conversations.

 

Second you need to be able to introduce D&I conversations in every HR process.

This is something I feel I have made decent progress in.  I have managed to introduce D&I conversation in almost every HR process. Different stakeholders (business and HR) are increasingly getting bought in to the idea of having these conversations too.

But then progress has mostly in space of representation in all HR processes. Either we are ensuring fair representation or keeping visibility on representation.

Next steps are in sustaining D&I conversations in HR processes and steering conversations towards inclusion too.

 

A related point is leadership and managerial buy in for D&I. We have kept conversation going in space of what’s and how’s in D&I.

Going ahead we need to surface and discuss the why with the leadership and managerial team. The discussion needs to also include an exploration of their beliefs/values around this space.

 

We are in process of setting up a D&I committee. This committee will consist of members across organization and is another step in integrating D&I into fabric of organization.  Getting this committee to action on D&I agenda will be another goal. Hence need to see them through to norming and performing stage within a month? We usually use the term onboarding for a new joiner – getting an individual employee ramped up quickly enough to do his/her job independently. In this case I have to ensure onboarding for a team.

 

Fourth, we need to have clarity on priority action areas in D&I. I think we treaded right path in using analytics/data to identify possible action/outcome areas. We now have clarity on priority areas. Next steps are how and when.

 

A few further related thoughts.

We already have a community where 'diversity' employees come together.  These employees do feel a sense of identification with this community. How can we leverage this group better to execute D&I initiatives?

I also feel that we can do more work in space of inclusion. We can look at beliefs behind our actions and how or actions can be inclusive/non-inclusive.   As shared earlier, we need to work with leaders and managers. But we also need to work with other employees/peers.

 

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Sourav

Value Chain!

Should we look at only role content when charting out our career plans? What other factors should we consider?

I feel we should also consider what is portfolio of contexts we are building for ourselves.

We can look at life stage of an organization- start up, high growth, mature, or declining.

We can also look at where in value chain is context? Is it

• Closer to customer- pre-sales, sales, delivery, post sales service?
• A little higher up in Supply chain? - secondary distribution (to customer)?
• Much higher up in supply chain-primary sourcing/distribution to factories.
• Product design/R&D?
• Central function -governance of value chain?

 

I have worked in a central org, manufacturing org, sales org, and delivery org.

 

Why is working across different points of value chain important? Well, for one as we see different points we understand the value chain better. For another, different parts of value chain hold different values.

Some values a central org may hold are integration, standardization, bet practices, etc.

In a manufacturing set up values may be Right First Time (no errors), predictability, reliability, process orientation, etc.

In a sales org values may be outcome orientation, resourcefulness, etc.

A delivery org might have values similar to a manufacturing org - focus on processes, quantitative orientation, large scale implementation, etc.

I've worked in mature and high growth phases. I've worked in HQs , with sales orgs, with manufacturing orgs, and with delivery orgs. I’ve worked in HQs as well as in subsidiaries. I've started experienced handling international markets.

What are some of contexts I have not experienced? Service (should be about customer orientation/delight) and R&D (creativity, knowledge); start up and declining phase orgs; and regional and HQ (international) roles.

These are some lines I am thinking on, along with content of next roles, as I plan my next career steps.

-
Sourav

Excellent Managers

What are enablers for managerial excellence?

Let’s make an assumption - focus of excellence is on what managers are doing today.

Hence focus becomes - what are HR processes manager is supposed to manage for his/her directs.  Some of these processes are across employee life cycle (e.g - joining, onboarding, development) some across team life cycle (e.g- storming, forming, norming).

I've come across two ways of ensuring this focus.

• Organization clarifies what is expected of Managers and measures them on basis of outcomes (subjective or objective).
• Organization institutes project teams to drive outcomes/improvements related to focus.

Both ways can work. In the first way, consistency in outcomes across managers may be a challenge.  In the second way, there is a danger that responsibility for managing is abdicated – responsibility for managerial outcomes is perceived to have moved to project teams.

But obviously, managerial outcomes still need to emerge from Managers doing the right thing for their employees.

That's a focus one has to maintain in the second way.

 

-

Sourav

 

Behaviors

A few years back I got interested in individual and group behavior. I wanted to explore 'why do individuals/groups behave the way they do?'

I read works of a number of psychologists - Freud, Adler, Jung, Ellis, Frankl, etc. Each of them seemed to have different answers for WHYs.  Who got it right?

Determinism didn't sound right- we were shaped by our biological instincts but we did have choice.

I could resonate with some elements of collective unconscious- sometimes I could evidence of it in similar decisions taken by people far removed in space and time. But I did value uniqueness – the fact that sometime I did take decisions on my own too. Again I felt that Jung’s theory sounded deterministic.

Fictional finalism sounded right.  I did find people setting and working towards a better future -even though they may not reach it.

I could find evidence of suffering and meaninglessness in stages of our lives, but life was not all about suffering and meaninglessness.

Concept that neurosis was an exaggeration of normal things we do seemed relevant.

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But then again – who got it right?

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I chanced upon biographical works of some of these psychologists. I realized they were trying to find meaning of their experiences/lives and their theories brought sense to their experiences/lives.

So it seemed all of them were right but only in certain contexts/situations.

Hence these theories might have application at different points of our lives. They might be applicable to different people in different degrees.

Every theory seems to provide a possible explanation to behavior. But none seem to be comprehensive in scope.

But that's possibly what reality is.  

Each situation can be same as or different from a previous situation. Every human being is unique in some way and I am not sure whether a theory can encompass all human beings.

 

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Sourav