My Biggest Concerns Every Appraisal Season

 “Managers are uncomfortable when they are put in the position of ‘playing God,’” said Douglas McGregor who articulated his famous concepts of Theory X and Theory Y. In management circles, appraisal is a highly interesting and provocative topic.

Every year I have seen HR function investing time & money training assessor and assesses to ensure the appraisal process has three components Self Appraisal by Assesses, Quantifiable Performance Metrics and a Forced Ranking system (A B C) My biggest concern this appraisal season is the effectiveness of the appraisal process to ensure the utility of the three components. Lacking which creates lack of trust despite of all the investments. Assessors see this as another task hanging over them with timelines pressure for completion and they worry about attrition going up post appraisal. Assessors worry how they will force fit their people as per their quota. Once this is done, they worry about explaining same to the assesses. Those managers who are not regular with their employee feedback face this challenge more. On his part-Assesses see this as a mundane administrative process which many don’t trust much but they take it quite seriously knowing it’s linkage to their pay hikes and growth. Many assesses think the exercise is just a formality as they know their fate has already been decided.

If done properly Annual Appraisal Process is the bridge between an Employee's Career Planning and challenges of an Organization. In fact-Promotions, Job Rotations, Bonus, Salary Hikes, Training & Developments all are linked to the appraisal.

I have seen few organizations & people abusing the tools, methods and metrics all the time e.g Self Appraisal sometimes become annoying part of the process .It does not match with the ratings and feedback. It’s tricky as how can you be honest without coming off as arrogant, or shooting yourself in the foot? Many routine tasks become a Improvement Project when you have same as a target metrics which is more like an eye wash My concern is that we should not hung up trying to find quantitative metrics to support every judgment in a performance appraisal. Remember what Albert Einstein said Everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts.

Is Strategic Planning for you becoming more of annual get together ?

A few days back ,an old colleague of mine was sharing about coming from his organization's strategic planning event.He was feeling more lost after the event .I wondered if organizations have forgotten the purpose of same and it has become more of a annual get together.

Running Operations without Strategic Planning is like steering a boat without a rudder.Everyone who is leading an organization will agree to this but very few leverage the strategic planning exercise as much as they should.

In my conversation with them most of the leaders agree to the need but they as well admit that they have not leveraged their last strategic planning exercise as much as they should .With my own experience ,I can tell you that the most difficult thing to admit is leadership failure.Most of the times it's too late to fix the cause A effective Strategic Planning can help you fix that cause well in time .

When I started my corporate career ,Strategic Planning used to be done on a time horizon of at least 3 to 5 years.But let me admit that with changing times ,I have seen many times the need to revisit this on  a annual basis.The competition many times now even does not come within the industry.Who could have think phones or rather cellphones eating up market of cameras.

I thought of sharing with you the seven symptoms -Dirty Seven as I call them which can give you enough hint that it's time to go back to drawing board with your Strategic Planning Process before it's too late -

1    You are not getting the results  

2    When you feel you see different teams operating in SILOS

3    When you feel you are loosing out your customers or listening to customer complains as usual

4    Work is no longer fun,exciting or inspiring 

5    Leaders feel confused or stressed most of the times

6    Merger or Acquisition or a New team in place

7    When you are complaining about your own organization's culture

 It helps to have a "facilitator" who is "neutral" , knowledgeable about the process and preferably an outsider.Do invite us for your next strategic planning meet.I bet you will get more out of the event.

Read more about our  Transformation Coach Workshop which is the missing link between your present and the future you want to create along with your team. 

Is your company building a future

All Stakeholders - customers, employees, shareholders & even society as a whole want to work for a company which is futuristic in his approach. Excellence or world class’s definition will keep changing & evolving with time. Fortune companies list & various researches conducted have proven equally time and again that there are no “permanently” excellent companies or industry or a sector. If we look at success factors behind successful companies you can find a few common thread among them.

When I talk to my clients and they often talk about cut throat competition, I tell them competition has a place in your strategy & is important but not the only deciding factor always. Lack of a proper strategy may result into this situation.While consulting them on growth and making competition irrelevant, I always advice those to look at uncontested market spaces a term now very popular in a board-room. This approach helps everyone as it address growth not only for your organization but for overall market instead of fighting around often declining demand. Benchmarking is good exercise but fails as an approach here as you are still trying to be something which already exists.

While you read, you may have started thinking many examples where organizations have crafted their own place. I have personally applied frameworks & used tools which have been very helpful. One of the enablers for a successful strategy is that it is understood by everyone in the organization. Not only they understand strategy, they also know what role they have to play in there. While we are working towards maximizing opportunity we should be as well careful to minimize risk. It’s a calculated risk where you have to built trust & get commitment from whole organization.      

The challenge which every practitioner faces while applying this is how to size this market as you don’t have any past data .When a business create a new market ,it need not be just a geographical expansion of business. It can be as well as a result of new products, new services or new customer segments. It’s like building new roads to go to a new place where no roads exist today.

I develop these insights while I was observing the companies I worked for in last two decades .These companies became number one or two in the world in their own industry segments or markets. They were known as inventor and were market leaders. As they become from innovators to mass producers value converted into volume and margins declined. As your product becomes a commodity, you have to lower the price point hoping to increase the market share & revenues, but you may not sustain them even if you want to forget about profitability I have also seen companies sometimes look at merger and acquisitions route to show growth in their accounting books & to create a buzz in stock market and sometimes with customers but  I have also seen them writing off the value which they once claimed. The question remains whom are you trying to fool and for how long? Great organizations who build future know that business have a life beyond their CEO’s tenure with them or his entire work life or their own life. So go ahead and build a future where you can set your own rules and competition does not matter.     

How to get it right - "sales pitch " for your organisation

It was my first day as an entrepreneur and I was meeting my first "would be" business partner .I was as excited as one could be in that situation.I could sense that behind my excitement, I had my anxiety hidden as well.

Selling is as much as an art as much as it is science.One need to be very clear about the message you want to share with your business partners.We call that message as the Sales Message for your services & product.The whole value as seen from customer is in this message only.

I am neither a sales expert nor I have done much of sales training but observing organisations with varied sales messages have always fascinated me.Sales messages are an entry to your prospective clients,customers, business partner's heart and head and influence to a great extent on his buying decision.The sharing of sales message which can take different forms -It can be a elevator pitch,a email,a cold call, or your website,a sales brochure or a sales presentation to a prospective client at his office.

We all love stories and have been hearing same since our child hood. Every good story has a hero, a desire or a goal and there are some supporting characters.Some organisations who have a lousy sales message, their organisation is the hero, the goal is making a sale and the customer is a supporting character who sometime helps & sometimes hinders the sale. But in a good & effective sales message, the customer is the real hero, the goal is what the customer wants to accomplish or achieve and your firm actually acts as a supporting character who helps that customer achieve his goal.

Think of this as a customer...Will you be interested in knowing the turnover or profitability of the organisation from whom you are buying your product or services ? Organisations sometime don't have a good sales message.I believe the reason lies in ignorance or failed to understand the importance of same

Customer cares about himself and his needs & not about your organisation,so it's important to understand where you have to focus.

Following points are going to create a good Sales Pitch :

• It will always be more concrete than abstract
• It will also need to appeal to your emotional side.I am not saying that intellectual appeal should not be there.What I am actually saying is that emotions are much stronger than the intellect even today.Persuasion happens more through emotions then intellect.In the ever evolving human species ,emotions have a longer history than intellect
• Jargon should be as minimal as possible
• Edit out the buzz words
• Differentiate yourself from your competitors  

While you write the Sales Message,make sure you put yourself into your customer's shoes ...It's not important to WIN every deal you come across.What's important that you should know the reasons from your customer's perspective - Why they did not choose you ? This will make you stronger,more competitive & more compelling  in the other deals which you will participate in future.

Only a Sales Job can teach you to handle rejection .What is important is that you are in the game and you are playing the game .You will excel the game only by playing it .Yeah I do understand that we all want to play to WIN but playing is more important than winning.Keep playing only to increase your chances of winning..All the Best !!

Get more from your processes

Processes are vehicles for safe, reliable and good quality products & services. Processes are strategic tools that reduce costs by minimizing waste and errors and increasing productivity apart from a good customer experience every time. Processes help companies to access new markets without compromising , level the playing field for newer businesses & products and facilitate free and fair expansion

If we need to start evaluating processes in an organisation , we will follow these 10 steps 

Step-1

Know who are your customers and what do they need . This may seem like a rather easy question to answer, but consider it carefully. Identifying and understanding the company's ultimate goal is crucial in setting its policies and processes.Sometimes your competitive edge can come out from this answer itself. 

Step 2

Examine all elements of the final product or service. This includes the quality & effectiveness of your work. 

Step 3

Identify Critical variables & Identify which steps of the process are more crucial than others.Identify which steps may be streamlined or even eliminated

Step 4

Test and determine how well the process adapts to variations. Nothing in life is perfect, and there will always be unknown factors out there waiting to throw you off track. A process that can adapt to and accommodate these unforeseen variations is more likely to be successful than one with more rigid guidelines that do not allow for change.

Step 5

Survey the people involved in the process.Administer anonymous questionnaires for a first-hand perspective on how the process work

Step 6

Observe individuals and how their roles affect the process. Speak with employees

Step 7

Prioritize improvements in line with the sponsors needs

Step 8 

Celebrate success with positive results on your return on investment  

We have years of experience in transforming Processes.We will love to partner with your to co-create a road-map for Process Transformation.We understand that  Business Outcomes are all about creating shared value through the required Customer Experience which needs capable people and good processes and procedures.

Read more about how we can Partner for Process Transformation  

Organisation's Culture & Change Process

One of the differentiations between learning organization and traditional organizations is in their capacity to absorb change. Embracing Change is a hall-mark of a successful organization. Most of the CEOs/CXOs despite of their position in the organization still struggle around bringing in required amount & pace of change they want to bring in. Managing Change has been tricky always.

If Change is embedded with Business logic, stake holder's emotions & organizations real values, the equations become very effective. Not only this, the change process gets accelerated & impacts gets multiplied as well.

So what are those factors impacts change, the first thing which comes to our mind is Culture. Each organization will have a culture in place. It takes years to create & change culture.

Culture is nothing but a collective combination of attitude, behaviors and beliefs being displayed .As with individuals, organizations as well take couple of years to form these attitude, behaviors and beliefs. The unlearning process takes sometime before organization can start displaying new attitudes, behaviors and beliefs. It’s very important to build this into yours plans for the change to sustain. Ignoring same may result into a situation where change was visible till it was reinforced but was not sustained beyond that.

This is a paradox...leadership team and employees consciously build a culture and now we want to unlearn same and learn new rules impacting our new attitude, behaviors and beliefs but this is the reality. This happens with any conditioning...Organizations are also conditioned like individuals.

There are three cultural traps which resist change .Organizational leaders need to watch themselves not falling for these.

1. Don't try to solve today's problem with yesterday's learning & solutions always - It may not be possible sometimes. So unlearning, learning and application should be part of the culture as the same is unavoidable for growth. Growth is a change to your present as well. Can you get growth without embracing change?
2. Good may not be good forever - In another situation when organization is doing good, leadership team may sometime dislike to even think that they need to change. Inertia of present may go longer then it is desirable.
3. Not planning for change, may result in blocking new opportunity - Many times we resist change  because of the Fear of change or/and Ignorance about the possible opportunities which change will bring in. Everything which is conceived by our mind is not right as mind always operate from past experience .This is a strength but can be weakness sometimes for the organization 

Successful practices of past may become weaknesses of today. Many times problem is with the leadership style which as well may be a product of a successful past. Generally speaking, the older the organization, the tougher is the change. You may have seen yourself that many businesses in past have been closed because they were not able to keep pace with change .This comes at the cost of people's jobs apart from the economic loss.

So if your organization is changing for good, feel comfortable as you are on the right track.

  

Customer Satisfaction to Customer Delight

Airline Industry is a competitive industry where customer experience plays a big role to attract domestic travelers as well as globetrotters.We all have traveled different airlines where we all have gone through different experiences.
I remember one of my air travel where flight attendant in Lufthansa,who was standing near by deliberately choose not to have an eye contact or even serve water after repeated requests as she knew I am asking for something...I have seen the same behavior in many restaurants where I have gone...The waiters are standing idle with no work but busy in their own world and same situation ...not trying to maintain an eye contact...
The interesting part was that I pressed the switch/button to request for same at least 5 times and requested to 2-3 air-hostess and while passing by they used to switch off the light ,I don't know Why?The silliest thing air-hostess did was when finally she came to serve water along with the meals was to act that she had "forgotten" to serve the water and she is really concerned and said "sorry" but based on my experience,I fly frequently on Lufthansa and seen this happening many times