The hard side of addressing the soft issues

The hard task of addressing the soft issues

Everybody in the board loved Chandrasekhar. He carried himself with grace and was deeply human in the way he came across to people. He seemed unhurried despite his busy schedule and was always approachable. The CEO Ravichandran had assembled a team of great of experts who were quick to address technical challenges and redress customer complaints with remarkable ease. However, the workplace was very machine like and lacked any energy or enthusiasm. Where could he be going wrong? He valued the difficulty of keeping people motivated and was anxious not to allow the enthusiasm of the youthfully capable team to come down for any reason.

Chandrasehkar listened for a while.

He asked the CEO if he could be permitted to walk about all alone, unescorted by the senior managers, across the shop floor and the offices of the middle management? The CEO saw no reason to object and let it happen.

Chandrasekhar went about in his natural style shaking hands, meeting a cross section of the people enquiring them about their welfare and work. He apologized for dropping unannounced and took permission from people if it was all right for him to talk while they worked. In some cases, he waited until the operators and staff finished their work and got free to talk to them. He graciously accepted the insipid tea and soft biscuits that were offered to him and demonstrated enjoying it with great relish. After touring the workplace for almost three hours, he returned to the CEO’s room for lunch.

The CEO expected Chndrasekhar to say something about the mission he had undertaken in the morning but the discussion seemed to include everything but the topic that was far too dear to the CEO. That after noon Chandrasehkar asked for the services of the CEO’s secretary and dictated a brief note on his findings.

What junior employees wanted their senior to do:

1. State expectations clearly: Bosses are often vague about what they want and often fore away instructions to juniors without telling them the significance of the task they are being asked to undertake.
2. Be reasonable; do not expect miracles: Target are set so high that the seniors manage to raise the blood pressure and anxiety levels rather than the enthusiasm to exceed expectations.
3. Give us decisions with the same speed you want to get results: Avoid creating interruptions to work by delaying decisions making them wait in suspense.
4. Find the time to ask me how I am doing instead of pouncing on me in the last minute: Managers vanish from the scene indefinitely into meetings only to appear at the last minute and create excessive rework for them.
5. Do not set me up to fail or knowingly let me down: Sometimes they wonder if the boss is really their friend and would like to see them succeed.
6. Be honest: If yo do not trust me, say so: some of them believe their bosses merely suffer and tolerate them.
7. Don’t lie; we are intelligent enough to make out: This is self explanatory and erodes trust completely.
8. Shoot the messenger: “We are afraid to ‘bell the cat’ because we know we will be shouted at for brining, not creating, the bad news.”
9. Micromanaging: Sometimes, the boss better leave us to ourselves and not be hanging around waiting anxiously for us to complete the work.

What the senior managers expected the junior employees to do:

1. Inability to say “No”: Say ‘No’ if you mean NO. Don’t say ‘yes but’
2. Anxiety to please at all costs: Why do they say yes to everybody creating a lot of confusion?
3. Over commit and under deliver: Why be shy to admit what yo cannot instead of building an expectation and disappoint at a later stage.
4. Admit ignorance upfront: No doubts are raised when the instruction is given; all problems come up only when they sit down to execute; why not do some anticipatory thinking?
5. Withhold resources: Knowing full well they need resources, no one releases surplus and idling resources. People enjoy merely holding onto them.
6. I don’t know: Please do not pass your half baked opinion freely n every subject.
7. Allow problems to fester until it blows up: Let the boss find out culture has to go. Please should if there is ‘fire’
8. Safely stay in the middle: don’t be a middle of the roader and forever feel shy about taking sides.
9. Over communicate please, rather than holding back: If you do, err on the side of speaking more than not speaking at all.

When Ravichandran read it, he said, “This is fine; how do I implement it ?”

“Whenever bosses and juniors exhibit the right behavior, give them a chocolate. Count the number of wrappers at the end of each month to know how many of the positive behaviors they exhibited.

Measurements help change behavior.

Positive appreciation helps change happen faster.

It is easier to manage technology; the soft side of business is harder to walk on !”

Shekarsan

What is our intellectual horse power?

What is our intellectual horse power?

“Do we hire people in this company to think at all?” asked Raghu Parthasarathy who had assumed charge as the Chief Knowledge Officer. Raghu had returned to India after spending over 20 years in the US. He holds several patents and helps companies develop the capacity of the people to innovate and enhance the intellectual capital base.

He was making his observations known to the CEO and the board on why he is compelled to ask that question. He revealed some interesting statistics:

Against the 2.5% of the turnover the company was spending in R&D, it was ‘importing’ knowledge and outsourcing thinking that costed the company nearly 30% of the revenue! In other words for every one rupee spent on commercializing new ideas, the company was spending 12 times that borrowing it from elsewhere. Therefore the company’s ability to think, that he termed ‘intellectual horsepower’ was at mere 8.33% If the company was content to encourage so little thinking and do much shopping for ideas from external sources, why at all hire top flight engineers and MBA’s from Ivy schools at exorbitant starting salaries?

He reeled off examples:

The human resource department does very little thinking or even doing. They outsource everything from climate surveys, Employee satisfaction surveys, recruitment and selection of senior and junior personnel, annual compensation benchmarking, skill assessment for all new positions and even 60% of the training. The cumulative financial load of all these outsourced activities was equivalent to one month’s wage bill for the entire company, 20 crores! The HR department had become a buying agent of HR services. This does not include payroll processing and the HRIS platform under automation.

Marketing itself does very little thinking related to their function. Everything from creative advertising, to consumer research, brand equity assessment needed to be audited, analyzed and reported for market share gain and loss; all these were offloaded on to third party suppliers. All that Marketing did was to arrange them make presentations to the CEO and settle their bills. They gave away almost 30 crores of business in the previous year and felt the spending should go up higher! When will they learn to do these works in house?

The Director of Communication had appointed specialized agencies to bring out the company brochure, design the balance sheet, edit and print he monthly newsletter, convene all promotional events including press meets and the maintenance of the company’s Intranet. That cost another 24 crores; down the drain.

Information processing department outsourced all their data entry work and the related analytics to a specialize agency that is supposedly statistically more literate then us. No single agency within the company was capable of generating any special reports or analysis of our own.

Raghu parthasarathy highlighted the need for the company to institute a policy that will make the ‘import of thinking ‘abilities far more stringent. He went on to categorize knowledge work into five:

1. Internally developed proprietary know how: Ready made, tried and tested proven application
2. In house research and analysis: Confidential and tightly managed development program
3. Fully outsourced projects: Routine and cost effective to get done from the outside
4. Off the shelf bought out solution: Import ideas if they are it can be developed faster and better buy
5. Custom designed package development: What is needed to develop it in house?

The first and second should be actively encouraged.

The third and the fourth seriously debated.

The last one actively discouraged; it should either belong to the first two or the next two.

Else it will become prohibitively expensive to maintain and upgrade. .

Unless the estimated 80 crores on outsourced knowledge work is actively tracked and brought down, not only would the company be at a disadvantage, it will also affect the morale of the people who have to look up to outsiders for creative solutions. will that not be counter productive in the longer term?

Shekarsan

To trust or not to trust my deputies

To trust or not to trust my deputies

Coming from Singapore to take over the Indian operations, for Peter Chen gaining trust with people should be the least of the issues. Yet what he took most for granted turned out to be the most challenging for him. He had completed a few rounds of meeting all his deputies and was reasonably pleased with each of them, the spirit of professionalism they demonstrated and the self assured way they carried themselves about the office. It should be a professionally challenging and intellectually stimulating to grow a market that offered so much diversity at such a scale he could never have imagined Singapore to offer. However that was not to be.

Peter’s family could not relocate to India. So the board allowed Peter to be in India Monday through Friday and return to Singapore for weekends. One such weekend, he was surprised to run into one of his deputies in Singapore. He let it pass thinking that people are entitled to their privacy and made no effort to make any connection with her. A few weeks later he received a confidential call from one of his Board members asking Peter if he was aware of the concerned employee being away from the country, as was required by the company policy? She, Meenakshi Khatri had obviously not done so.

Peter approached one of his long time India based Director, Gopalan, and expressed his displeasure at employees not following company rules and setting a poor example of themselves to the rest of the staff. Gopalan thought for a while and suggested that he cannot go by hearsay. Peter must possess an irrevocable evidence; when confronted the employee concerned must have no choice but to realize and own up the default. If they are given an opportunity to explain, it will drag the organization into a loop that they cannot afford to create.

Gopalan knew of an ex Army officer who was reputed for carrying out confidentially checks on the conduct of a sample of the employees and table it to Peter for him to take action. When Peter called up Col Preetam Singh, the head of the surveillance agency, Preetam expressed happiness to undertake provided the company had an explicitly state policy note being put out to all employees on the need for them to observe the code of conduct and obtain their signature on it. As a first step, Peter should give the employees an opportunity to voluntarily disclose any anomalies either they are aware of or are currently engaged in. By getting them to disclose, Peter was fortifying his stand. Peter would be better off forming a sub committee of the board of Directors looking such cases of voluntary disclosure and making a recommendation for the board to approve of. By doing so, Peter would be above board and not get pulled into the political repercussions such decisions are bound to have.

Peter faithfully went by the advice of Col Preetam Singh. Two weeks later, he received a dossier, passed on to him by the subcommittee with their recommendation on the disclosures made by his closest deputies.

Sunil Shah, Manager-Transport and Logistics admitted taking a fee for allotting loads on a priority basis so that the transporters did not have to idle their trucks outside the factory gate. A faster turnaround time for trucks need a premium to be paid to him and his staff. In turn they would ensure that the transporter’s bills were passed with minimum of delays.

Bikash Kalra, Manager distribution accepted that he charged a premium whenever the products were shipped to dealers prior to a price increase. The differential between the new price charged to consumers and the old price at which the goods were shipped would be passed back for a consideration to Bikash.

Deepak Battacharya: The ad agency and printers were mandated to pad up the fees charged on their services in order to accommodate the princely life style maintained by Deepak.

Sunil Srivatsava’s popularity with the dealers stemmed from his arbitrary division of territories and induction of new dealerships for a consideration of course. He was always kept in good humor both ways; existing dealers rewarded him for not further fragmenting their territory while the new ones were fed the hope that their allotment was imminent any time.

Kishore Rajavanshi, made a cut on every real estate deal and government liaison, while Om Prakash Gupta, Head of Procurement and import licensing collected a fee for faster goods inwards and acceptance past the income QA. Raj Sekhar, the Head of HR ran his own private agency for testing candidates and intake of temporary and full time manpower. Meenakshi Khatri handled outbound tours for her ‘friends’,which explained her being spotted in Singapore.

Peter shook his head in disbelief not so much at the recommendations made by the subcommittee on how to deal with them. It was more to do with how naive he was in assuming his deputies to be above board and the image of themselves they revealed to him thorough such a disclosure.

Preetam computed the loss to the company to be of the order of 85 crores apart from the lost productivity, internal politics and a bad reputation for being a value compromising institution. Erosion of share holder value stared Peter in the face. Should he keep them or let go?

Shekarsan

How to blend diverse management cultures

Kaz Petrosky was the head of sales. His ancestors came from the Urals in Russia but he is a naturalized US Citizen. He was on deputation to India and ran his sales team like the US Army. His team was disciplined and very sales focused. When they are given a target, they have to go after it like war had ben declared. It did not matter what it cost or who came in the way. You just went ahead until the victory was all yours. They were ethical in what they did but were mercenary like. They believed that rules were meant to be broken and relations bent at will to get the job done. They were all very focused, sure of their financial figures and up to date in the facts that mattered. Speed and surprise were the name of the game and the sold like it was an extreme adventure sport. They worked alike a great team, consulted each other, partied together and went about their work and life in a no nonsense and business like. Kaz was very proud of his team; he rewarded them well when they delivered the results. As long as they met their goals, Kaz was completely hands of and gave them full freedom.

Louis Camino, headed manufacturing. He was a quint essential European of Spanish origin. Very soft spoken and always well dress in his three piece suit, he was meticulous about meeting, reports, schedules and protocols. Every activity was planned well in advance and life happened like clock work, all on time per scheduled time. He was focused and time conscious; met people only by appointment and went about his work in an unhurried and purposeful way. He too hated surprises and relied upon methodical working, detailed documentation and maintained a factual historical record of everything as if someday he may be required to reexamine the history of how he functioned. The team in manufacturing adopted his work style.

Hitoshi Kobuse, is a quintessential Japanese. As the Head for customer Service,work is religion for him. Accordingly he cultivated a team oriented work culture where everybody was equal. He believed in keeping his team fully knowledgeable on all the products technically that required every one of them to attend training programs regularly, make intensive research and present proposals for simplifying work and generate savings. He rewarded people’s effort to publicly announce and track the incidence levels of problems and recognized their efforts at problem solving. He made hero’s out of anyone that recovered a lost or annoyed customer. He never behaved like a boss, he was a coach.

Ravindranath is a profit conscious and bottom line oriented Purchase manager. He was relentless in negotiating opportunities for waste avoidance and cost reduction. There was a popular joke in the office where a beggar took pity and donated his days collections of coins after meeting Ravindranath! He had cultivated a solid reputation for demanding justification for every paisa invested. His motto was: if you do not survive the short term, there is no long term. So, focus on managing profits at any cost; even if it meant overcommitment because people have short memories anyway.

The CEO was perplexed by the sheer contrast in the styles of the four key managers at work and wondered if he can get them to subscribe to a common work culture. We must value diversity, no doubt; but wonder what is may be costing the company?

Shekarsan

Who will stop the buck

Karthikeyan topped the Business School upon graduation this July. He joined the world of business directly from campus with no prior experience. Many of his batch-mates had been assigned to functional departments like production, procurement, finance, marketing and so on. He was singled out to work directly with the CEO as an Executive assistant. Karthikeyan had heard that an assignment with the CEO’s office meant being used up in all ways possible with nothing concrete to show by way of his own achievement; his career growth could be at risk. Karthikeyan aired his concern to the CEO in private at an informal dinner convened for the fresh batch of incoming MBA’s by the CEO at his home.

Much to his surprise, the CEO welcomed Karthikeyan’s candid confession of anxiety and his keenness to prove himself. Expressing great confidence in Karthikeyan’s judgement, the CEO sought his help in establishing top management accountability. Karthikeyan could not believe that the CEO, of all the people, could have difficulty enforcing accountability with the top management. Equally surprising was that the top management, who should themselves be anything but accountable, being otherwise.

Problem: The company had been consistently missing to meet the monthly profit projections to the board. The shortfall had been at 50% of estimates for the last six months. If every department was doing what they had committed to do, as they claimed to, why should there be any gap? Since no one came forward to clarify, the buck eventually stopped at the desk of the CEO. Can karthikeyan investigate and report to the CEO in complete confidence?

Karthikeyan’s confidential note to the CEO:

After due study, Karthikeyan proposed an objective examination of the following six factors that could possibly contribute directly to the shortfall in profits:

Budgeting: The severity of assumptions made in the plans varied with the actuals by a large margin. Likewise the unplanned investments and expense overruns had no way of being flagged off in advance and approved before incurring them. Even though the policies provided for it to be ventilated in advance as a risk, such a practice is non existent. The CEO may like to call for monthly alerts before according approval for spend. How does he propose dealing with the defaulters?

Investments: Several projects seem to have been started but only a third of them had got off the ground. Some were false starts, while many others were either closed prematurely or left hanging midway because of unresolved disputes. Some projects were declared successful although they were still to secure the completion certificate from the clients. Does the CEO get reports on these?

Revenue capture: Poor quality of order intake, unrealistic delivery commitments and acceptance of penalties for non delivery were not made public as potential risks. In addition, delayed and error prone invoicing did not make any provisions for delays in recovery due to the rework and excessive follow up effort required to mobilize collections. Would the CEO like to call for comments?

Cost management: While the budgets where signed off for a specified number of discretely identified heads of expenditure, new heads of expenses had been included without any reason for them to be created in first. Besides a number of surprise entires of out-of-budget items, there was also considerable delays in the booking of expenses. Did the company have norms on revenue recognition and closure of accounts on time?

MIS: While the HRIS was maintained at 99.5% level of up-to-dateness and accuracy, for all the heads of business information it was at a mere 65%. The Information Management policy is silent on the standard of quality of information reported and accepted. The confidence level of decisions arising out of poor quality and out dated data is a deeper question for the top management team to examine..

Culture: Noting the gaps and anomalies between what was happening and what was meant to happen, Karthikeyan was pained by the functioning styles of the each of the individuals. They varied so widely that several questions had not been answered to his satisfaction by many of the seniors. Karthikeyan confessed at mistakenly assuming his seniors to be sympathetic to his lack of industry experience and expecting them to guide him resolve the problem. Instead they not only were unsympathetic towards his challenges at work but were equally dismissive of the importance of his assignment to the company’s future, merely testing his wits in the process.

How could an organization remain young in thinking and become adept at learning if the top management acted so difficult. If people were made to struggle to get to the facts and teased for asking elementary but significant questions, how will the CEO earn the trust of the board and the shareholders.

Young MBA’s will soon lose their enthusiasm and play safe, quite like their bosses?

Who then will have the enthusiasm to question and stop the buck?

Shekarsan

Top management on the ‘bench’

Vinod Nagpal had been invited to serve on the board as an independent director of a large corporation. After the incidence of Satyam, where several highly qualified professionals needlessly sacrificed their good will and reputation, he decided not risk it. After considerable pressure and persuasion from one of his friends from the board of another financial institutions, he allowed his name to be referred to the current company. The first few meetings passed off peacefully to make him wonder if such a position of directorship was even essential. Nevertheless, he decided to serve his term and exit peacefully.

Almost by accident, he was approached by one of his friends for help. This friend in particular wanted Vinod’s help in stopping the transfer of his middle aged son in law employed with the company whose board he was a member of. Reluctantly, Vinod spoke to the Chairman and sure enough he was promised it would be looked into.

A few days later, the HR Head sought a personal meeting with Vinod. As they began talking, Vinod discovered a unique challenge the HR head was facing. Almost the top 200 senior people in the company rarely ever went through any performance appraisal. They merely lingered on year after year without any pressure on them to deliver any results. most of them were in their mid forties and the retirement age was 58. So they had a 10 to 15 years ahead of them before retirement that had to be spent meaningfully.

At this age, they felt they were beyond training and rarely needed any need to stay professionally in shape. They were all socially well connected that moving them out of their current roles was too disturbing a thought to consider. Insecurity from exposure of non performance and complacency with whatever they were habituated to delivering was the accepted norm. In this context, appraisal of performance was either a total farce or an unnecessary ritual. Vinod recognized that the move to block the transfer of his friends’ son in law qualified itself along similar lines of reasoning.

Vinod was visibly disturbed. He would not like to be a party to such an unprofessional practice. Asking the HR head to drop the request would have been the easiest to do. His conscience was ill at ease. He felt compelled to get the organization to face up to the need to address the real issue of declining levels of performance, contributed largely by an inactive top management layer. If there is one irrepressible problem with Vinod, it is this: he cannot sit still. He tends to look around and has this uncanny gift for picking up something that sticks out oddly enough that no one would dare to question. The more elusive the subject, the more determined Vinod would get to dig deeper. Since the performance of the company has been a persistent worry lately, he persisted in getting to know more. The HR head, unaware of the implications ahead, was only too eager to supply the information needed.

He discovered that there was a sophisticated equivalent of the ‘bench’ that is often created as a temporary berthing space for people at junior levels. Bench is where they wait for assignments between short term projects. While they have no assignments to work on, they may attend to anything that catches their fancy. They will however continue to receive all their entitlements; if is not their fault if there is no work found for them by their employer.

The practice of ‘bench’ for senior management, he noticed, carries a fancier description. For example, Seventeen people were on leave preparatory to transfer. Twenty one were awaiting order for deputation elsewhere. Four awaited a promotion, although these positions were to be approved by the board. Seven cases were termed OSD, Officer on special Duty. Fourteen were on ‘sabbatical’ and eleven were sent on an indefinite study mission abroad. One served as an alternate to Ombudsman while three more headed some sub committees and enquiry commissions. A three member team scrutinized the affairs of the Charity fund they managed. Vinod shook his head in disbelief. They totaled up to Eighty one positions!

If anyone wanted evidence for choking the future of bright young minds, this was enough! ‘Bottleneck at the top’ suppressed the opportunities for the youthfully intelligent workforce; no wonder they were disengaged and were attritting at the first opportunity. Experience measured in years was being mistaken for expertise.

Vinod looked up at the HR Head and wondered what he should do with this insight he had just now picked up.

He asked the HR Head to make a note at his request to the CEO asking for the need for all these positions to be examined, justified and put up to the board for approval. These eighty one positions added no value but cost the company Rupees forty Crores that would go to the profit line every year. Not a bad start for his first experience as an independent director on the board he felt!

Shekarsan

Overstaffed and underutilized

Ramarao Patil is feared and respected most for his very deliberate approach to cracking any business problem. Unlike many of his other Vice Presidents in the company, he is neither flamboyant nor speaks an extra word. He is cautious about what he has to say. When he speaks, there is a note of finality that, eliminates a request for anything to be to be repeated twice or ignored.

The business was growing no doubt, but not exactly booming enough to merit a celebration. The issue in question was: the HR manager had put up a budget for 15% increase in wage bill towards promotion and increment. Many of his peers also wanted the HR manager to push it through so that they can ‘please’ their subordinates. There was a popular perception that people stayed back for money; if increments are substantially higher than earlier times, it will contain the levels of attrition as well.

Ramarao was simply shocked to learn about the proposal to increase the wage bill by 15%. The business had not grown so substantially to merit such a raise, he reasoned to himself. He unilaterally endorsed the principle of recognizing and rewarding the deserving people; but such people were a minority and did not account for more than a mere 10%. The balance 90% of the workforce, regardless of the levels of inflation or market pressure, definitely did not make a strong case for a 15% raise. Anyway, he decided to keep his reservations to himself. He expected a better sense of judgement to prevail upon the minds of the HR head, the CEO and the Board of directors. Should an occasion arise, he decided to table some facts that should help them reconsider the budget.

Just as predicted, the HR head convened a special meeting, chaired by the CEO and the CFO seeking an approval for the request for the increment budget to be approved. Everybody around the table stayed silent, hoping that the meeting will pass off peacefully without any protest so that they can return to their departments and pass on the cheerful news. Predictably, Ramarao broke the silence and challenged the HR head to justify his request.

“ The mood around the table suggests that I too join everyone round the table and let the proposal go ahead. I wish I could. I am not a HR professional. Yet, I am troubled by a few aspects that this committee should consider before according it the final approval.” Turning his attention to the HR head, “Sir, can you help me understand a few realities we have”?

1. The salary bill for the company rides at 70% of the revenue, while for Infosys it is only 48%. These are the published figures from their balance sheet. It is therefore a fact that we are paying 22% more wages than the Industry leader. To raise the wage by another 15% on top of that would mean growing the gap with the industry leader to 25.3%. Should our endeavor be to reduce the gap or widen it?
2. We have 400 managers and supervisors managing 2000 employees. That means we have one manger for every 5 workmen; the corresponding number for competition is 15. If we were to apply the ratio of one of supervisor for every 15 employees, we should have only 135 managers on our rolls; we have 265 managers in excess. What does it mean? Our supervisors are only 33% as productive as their counterparts in the best companies. Alternatively, the quality of our workforce is so poor that it needs three times more supervision. I am not asking for retrenchment; I want our team to address the pressing need for us to increase not the number of supervisors but the managerial productivity of the supervisory personnel.
3. The 400 supervisors and mangers are stacked one upon the other in 11 layers of titles and subtitles. The competition has only 5 layers from the Chairman downwards to the level of trainees. Do these inflated titles and twice many layers give people the empowerment necessary to generate four times the productivity levels of our industry leader? We earn a mere US$ 3000 as profit per employee against their US$ 12,000 annually.
4. Finally, we must dispense with this illusion that seniority should reflect the quantum increase in salary levels. Is each level made out to be distinctive enough to differentiate itself by competency levels and justify the wage bracket it is assigned?

I wish I could support everybody but I cannot. If all the profits earned are paid away as wages to employees, I am sure the CEO and the CFO will have to find additional ways of funding for depreciation, dividends to shareholders, money for launching new products, opening up markets and undertaking research & development. Kindly rethink this proposal from the standpoint of shareholders; after all, as senior managers, we also need to earn a dividend on the stock options we hold. Is a wage increase is really affordable and necessary? Please reconsider. Thank you.”

Shekarsan