The Right Team....

It’s an early morning in Philippines for a person who works UK hours, and lives in India. Breakfast is great, with spoiling choices of Japanese, Chinese, Pilipino and Indian treats. Thought in my mind, is to get as healthy breakfast as possible –since it’s Monday and will be a long day.

I love colours (though professionally, word out there is I only believe in black and white!) I like to decorate my plate, then start with one end and complete the circle. While doing my routine, what struck is a thought about how essential is to build a great team. A lot has been written, yet I still chose to write my perspective.

Like my healthy breakfast plate (image on right), building a great team can be a creative but a long and demanding job. But then what differentiates great organizations from ‘ok’ or bad organizations are right teams.

Hire people you know, or people who are known.

One of the greatest pitfalls of hiring is recruiting someone you know and are friends with. This is majorly driven by little or no faith in head hunters. Two benefits of hiring someone you know is that you are sure about the competencies and behavioural aspects of the person. But sometime this evolves into conflict or for lack of better word a power ‘tussle’. In my experience what has worked better is to hire someone who is known to a close but reputed colleague or a friend. Although this has to be substantiated with thorough validations by you and your HR function. The advantage is that the person who recommends this candidate, his reputation is tied into the performance of the recruit (unsaid part of the equation). We can also recruit with a short term-say a 6 months contract, so its easier to get out-if there is a requirement.

Develop confidence and transparency.

Confidence of individuals in their roles is, key to a great and high performance team. Confidence comes from knowledge and knowledge is a function of abilities and experience.

Honesty and transparency in assessing your abilities (and your shortcomings) is, key to individual and a team’s success. Self-awareness is another term widely used for this factor. The proportion between your factual abilities and what you projection of yourself is a key quotient to watch for. We all come across various individuals with very diverse quotients! ; at work, in families and other social arenas.

Keep this quotient in mind for yourself and for every member of your team-always.

People who know me would be familiar with a quote I use extensively “capitalize on strengths and make weaknesses irrelevant” I believe this is the key for all business and personal relationships. Application of this principle is universal.

What’s also important is that, as a team, we are aware of each other’s weaknesses and absolutely sure/confident of strengths. Very often I sit in conference rooms with groups at all levels, where the total experience of the group exceeds 10-20-30 and sometimes more than 50 years of experience!

Teams/Groups almost at all times fail to recognize the true potential of their collective expertise. Conversations like these are key, in igniting collaborative teamwork. Ignition though will help only for a few steps, what is important is follow through and constant ‘fuel’ supply. Understanding individuals will take you, a long way to refuel the team where required.

Have fun!

Creativity and spirit of team is to be further fostered by regular (though not excessive!) doses of fun exercises. Fun has a very diverse meaning across individuals, groups, countries and geographies. The constant endeavor would be to find the correct balance and embrace diversity. Some activities are key to team building and some are required to reboot your team’s computer. In the end we all are humans, and as long as we are aware and hooked on to our purposes- a few long evenings won’t hurt!

Happy Team Building :)

Good Old Sound of Dial Up

This was a test in 2011...

Looking back at 2009....

2009 was a mixed year.

So we did survive; probably, the first of worst slowdown years. The road to recovery has begun for us and all. The bitter fact remains that it took enormous time for a lot of people and nations to come out of denial stage. 2009 also showed us that our lives are globally more woven than we think. A fisherman in Canada, farmer in Africa, sales executive in Hongkong are all interconnected.

A simple flashback.

'Yes we can' slogan erupted and then slowly mellowed down.
Cricket was symbolically attacked in a terrorism hub.
The G8 became G20...reminds of a crowded dinner table and decision of who would be the best man.
More lives lost to Swine flu and the battle continues.
MJ left and the world watched in shock.
Social Media Networking era has begun and looks almost on peak. (caution..)
We witnessed the longest solar eclipse.
Copenhagen targets to limit global warming to 2 degrees after a long and painful drama.
And to close the Tiger ended up in the Woods.

The undying human spirit has again proven, that no matter how dark the clouds are; all we need to do is to stick to 'purpose' of our lives and sunshine will be back.

The Law of Farm may be old, but still applies. I wish we all apply the lessons learnt.

Happy New Year 2010.

What ticks an employee to stick to an organization?

Hope you all had a great weekend.

Someone posted a question (over the weekend!) "What is that ticks an employee to stick to an organization?" Can you say one thing that is must to have in workplace and that’s what makes an employee to adhere to the company and that’s the key retention factor.

The following was my early monday morning answer :)


The first factor. Every employee holds different Values which he or she expects from an organization. These values are very intrinsic and often remain unknown even to that particular individual. These non negotiable values range from Job Satisfaction (More to deal with the "I contribute factor"), Security of monthly income, Learning and Developing, Respect, Reward, Recognition, Growth in the chain etc.

The second factor is to realization of employee skills (Preferred Skills) by an organization and by the individual himself. So lets say I am an operations manager and I love been with people motivating them to achieve the targets while keeping a close eye on metrics management and improvements. People and Performance management is my core or preferred skill.
Now at this point of time I am realigned to a different role with a better pay and designation and the job involves looking a reports and graphs and cite business improvements which is an acquired skill but not my preferred skill...I will be in that Job for a period of time with a desire to learn or for the comfort of work hours etc....however soon with develop with a vaccum to align myself to my preferred skill and this is where the breakdown happens and may be the first symptom of an employee attrition.

Organizations which invest in understanding the real values and preferred skills of their employees and align a balance are successful in keeping their people.

The success is directly proportional to the degree of this balance.

Thought for the approaching weekend..

So much has been written about Leadership ...but as the Passionate Corporate Coach Marina Kapur says "What we know is just a micro part of Mega pool of Knowledge about Leadership and Overall Management" to which I totally agree.
Our Lives are all about re-discovering and reinventing ourselves. So this weekend..get to the bottom of who you are & what your non negotiable values are? Align them with your preferred skills while acknowledging your areas of opportunities. Leadership is not a one time exercise but its a way of life. While we all (including me) get consumed by our daily routines and tasks; we need to constantly revisit our purpose, where we want to be 3-5 years from now and how we want to be remembered.

Recently a question was posted to me "Can a serious leader ever be a good subordinate ? Or can a subordinate follower ever be a good leader ?"

Well my reply was as follows:

Leadership and Excellence are attributes, that you are either born with or acquire through commitment to constantly learn. You can be a leader irrespective of your designation or position. People in lowest scheme of our society display leadership through different means...our sweeper at the society displays leadership by sweeping so well that every passerby says "someone has done an excellent work"

Leadership is not about competition, its about synergy.

A serious leader can be a good subordinate (not a yes man) and subordinate follower can be a good leader...both can lead within their circles of influence and collaboratively support an organization which will have clearly chalked values.

Keep thinking and let me know what you think...See you soon.

Time to change ...Are we?

So we watch TV everyday or read daily newspapers featuring the melt down or recession, trillions which are being promised to save economy and millions which are spent to arrange for a platform to arrive at that decision. We witness historic speeches where our global leaders solicit change and I firmly believe that its time to change and challenge.
The summit that we had recently should have been facilitated through a virtual conference saving the millions which would have evaporated just for leaders to arrive at that summit.
If we say that change is the way forward why don't we change the way we conduct our global meetings...the delegations on peace and the conferences on global warming, the list is endless which would save a lot of money and will be a change from the way we operated a year ago. I do not undermine the human warmth of meeting people, its just that, these times call for it. There is no harm in trying and if it doesnt get us what we want, we can change again and in the worst case scenario we can get back to royal or ceremonial meetings.

The concise message to all leaders (and we all are those leaders) is that its perfect time to practice leadership in everything we do. Be it saving petrol or electricity or for that matter wasting tooth paste. The sooner we realize and cultivate this habit sooner we will be out of this mess.

Quote of the Day...

"What's Difficult to Measure is Very often Wrongly Measured...Customer Satisfaction is One of those things."
Tahir Khan.

Approx 41% of call center's use survey by telephone and rest rely on emails and other channels. Sources reveal that phone surveys are costlier than email surveys. Well it is very important to measure customer satisfaction realistically and it may be costly, however not measuring and leveraging that data would cost even more.

Another common point of failure is inability of analytics to separate customer satisfaction evaluations from any/all quality monitoring done in a call center.

With independent surveys, you will gather information from the customers themselves without having to "interpret" whether or not the customers were satisfied with the service.
While Call monitoring(remote) will give you a realistic picture of compliance and process adherence, it can be utilized as an accesory in evaluation of customer satisfaction (Commonly referred to "surrogate" in the call center world). The risk in capitalizing this data is that, it is very much dependant on the skill and outlook of the monitoring evaluator hence should always be of secondary value in measuring customer satifaction.

One probable disadvantage of phone surveys is that Most customers will not take the initiative to complain to the agent while talking to the surveyer. Instead, they will tell their friends and co-workers how good or bad their experience was. By offering them an independent email survey to comment on their experience, customers have the opportunity to voice their opinions and you can (operationally)assure them that any problems/trends and behaviours encountered are addressed immediately. This will work well to maintain their loyalty and avoid losing your customers to competitors.

The best way forward in these and all times would be to blend both channels randomly to arrive at a more practical measure.