Education is an important part of the persona of a person. A person educated at the IITs and IIMs and the likes always command immediate respect. My brother who is from IIM Indore was narrating how people would treat them as near celebrities when they would visit the city wearing their IIM t-shirts. Youngsters would stop them and seek their advice on how to prepare for CAT and which was a better campus that they should target for their education.
The tag of your campus carries onto the organisational work environment and all the companies keep chasing people from the best institutes. Have a look at most of the job ads anywhere and most of them specify preference for the best institutes. I even remember sitting in a conversation when a promotion was being discussed and there were two candidates one a great performer with great potential but from a so-called tier 2 institute and another one from a tier 1 institute but not as a great a performer or potential and most people seemed to favour the person from tier 1 insti.
I had a really difficult time arguing with the client team that the education is supposed to convert to performance on the floor which should entitle people to promotions and not the tag of the education alone, it definitely was quite a difficult conversation. One of the very strong criteria they had for promotion was the qualification a person carried.
In my interactions with a lot of clients I see the same bias and sometimes wonder if companies are falling in a trap and ending up not picking up the best people for the best job.
In my mind, the campus a person is from gives an indication of certain traits or qualities, but does not necessarily convert to finding the best fit person for a job. I would much rather that the companies focus more on the exposure a person has had and hence the competencies that a person may have developed be given higher importance over the education. If companies try and do that, they will increase the talent pool that they are targeting and be able to also find the best people for the vacancies that they have.
Someday I will want to do some reseach to prove that the campus you are from actually provides only 1.329% advantage over the others and I am fairly confident that the results will come exactly the same as mentioned here.
My simple thought hence is, drop the line looking for people from IIT, IIM, XLRI etc only from your ads and increase your pipeline of people, who may not be from these campuses but are the right fit. Take my word, you are spending far bigger time and money for the 1.329% advantage that you have right now.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Thursday, May 01, 2008
Reduce salary fight inflation
I found a suggestion by Dr Manmohan Singh, that reducing salaries by corporates will help fight inflation and help long term growth, very amusing. He just reduced our taxes to give more money in our hands and took credit for it, now he wants to take the money back by some other means. Did this tax reduction cause inflation in the first place?
His government just approved the highest salary increase for all government employees, should he not roll that back, if not reduce salaries, to help fight inflation by the same logic?
But then whats the point of asking these questions, if politicians were driven by simple logic it wouldn't be called politics.
His government just approved the highest salary increase for all government employees, should he not roll that back, if not reduce salaries, to help fight inflation by the same logic?
But then whats the point of asking these questions, if politicians were driven by simple logic it wouldn't be called politics.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Just don't do it....
So many times I meet people who want to do things just because everyone else is doing it, at times without even thinking about the impact on their organisation. Recently I got asked a question saying 'I hear that stock options keep coming in favour or going out of favour with employers, so do you think I should do this for my organisation at this point in time'.
What most of us fail to understand is that no HR program works in isolation. If one is putting in a suggestion scheme in place then just putting the scheme in place and having financial rewards for the best suggestions does not lead to the success of the program. The intent of involving everyone in the success of the organisation also needs to be backed with a lot of communication about what the organisation is doing or trying to do and connect them with the reality of the business so that the suggestions that come are not ONLY towards improving the peripheral issues, like switching off lights and putting signages, but they also help resolve serious business issues faced by the organisation.
A stock program is an ownership program hence along with giving stock one also needs to create an environment of ownership through various behaviours that the owners, managers and peers need to display to get the maximum benefit from the program.
Hence 'Just don't do it...' because its the current fad right now, but seriously evaluate what you want to achieve and also what all you will need to do to make any of the HR programs successful.
Sanjay
What most of us fail to understand is that no HR program works in isolation. If one is putting in a suggestion scheme in place then just putting the scheme in place and having financial rewards for the best suggestions does not lead to the success of the program. The intent of involving everyone in the success of the organisation also needs to be backed with a lot of communication about what the organisation is doing or trying to do and connect them with the reality of the business so that the suggestions that come are not ONLY towards improving the peripheral issues, like switching off lights and putting signages, but they also help resolve serious business issues faced by the organisation.
A stock program is an ownership program hence along with giving stock one also needs to create an environment of ownership through various behaviours that the owners, managers and peers need to display to get the maximum benefit from the program.
Hence 'Just don't do it...' because its the current fad right now, but seriously evaluate what you want to achieve and also what all you will need to do to make any of the HR programs successful.
Sanjay
Monday, April 07, 2008
Dead Horse Theory
Someone forwarded an interesting mail which did sound a good fit with many corporate policies. So read and have fun.
'When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount and get a different horse.'
However, in government, education and corporates India, more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:
1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Appointing a committee to study the horse.
4. Arranging to visit to other countries to see how other cultures ride dead horses.
5. Lowering the standards so that the dead horse can be included.
6. Reclassifying the dead horse as 'living impaired'.
7. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
8. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.
9. Providing additional funding and / or training to increase dead horse's performance.
10. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse's performance.
11. Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overheads and
therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses.
12. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses. And, of course,
13. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position!
Monday, February 25, 2008
Chair - Man
Recently while working with a client organisation, I noticed something peculiar, peculiar from my perspective but common across many organisations. I noticed that the chairs in the conference rooms were all the same size except one which was at the head of the table, which was much larger. The interesting part was that the chair was left unoccupied for most of the meetings I conducted with the client, except when the owners of the company were in the meeting. This chair was always left vacant, despite the fact that for a few meetings they had to bring in more chairs from outside.
This reminded me of my first job, where once my chair was broken and I pulled in a chair from one of the managers who was on leave. I was pulled up for the action and reminded that a management trainee could not sit on a manager chair. The big difference being the manager chair reclined and the others did not. Well I argued about the fact that there were no other chairs and there was urgent work to be done and how the hell did it matter, the chair was not being used in any case. But then logic did not work, if logic always worked in organisations, Scott Adams wouldn't have made so much money with Dilbert.
This also reminded me of one manager, who got promoted and was entitled to a bigger chair, but did not get as they were not in stock, he created a huge issue out of it. I assume it was a big thing, he had worked very hard for nearly 18 years with a single minded focus of getting a chair which would recline and now when the time was ripe he was deprived of the most important priviledge he had worked towards which would affect his productivity in a significant manner.
I have always wondered about these visible signs of authority and growth and have never managed to come to terms with those. Having worked in a company for 10 years where the business card did not carry any titles, could never understand the need to have titles like Additional Deputy Assistant Manager. Also the company for a long time tried to provide classless benefits, so nothing changed visibly for most people neither the size of the desk, the car, the cellphone etc etc with a change of job and my guess is we did well.
I sometimes wonder how much time the company would have spent trying to create these minor visible differences in hierarchy which take up so much productive time of the organisation in executing the minor twists.
My personal liking is to having simple common uncomplicated rules and processes, driven more by need than by hierarchy. I would much rather not spend 2 meetings worth of time of very senior people in an organisation about what to name a new grade to be inserted. Which one do you think is better Additional Manager, Deputy Assistant Manager or Additional Assistant Manager.
Sanjay
This reminded me of my first job, where once my chair was broken and I pulled in a chair from one of the managers who was on leave. I was pulled up for the action and reminded that a management trainee could not sit on a manager chair. The big difference being the manager chair reclined and the others did not. Well I argued about the fact that there were no other chairs and there was urgent work to be done and how the hell did it matter, the chair was not being used in any case. But then logic did not work, if logic always worked in organisations, Scott Adams wouldn't have made so much money with Dilbert.
This also reminded me of one manager, who got promoted and was entitled to a bigger chair, but did not get as they were not in stock, he created a huge issue out of it. I assume it was a big thing, he had worked very hard for nearly 18 years with a single minded focus of getting a chair which would recline and now when the time was ripe he was deprived of the most important priviledge he had worked towards which would affect his productivity in a significant manner.
I have always wondered about these visible signs of authority and growth and have never managed to come to terms with those. Having worked in a company for 10 years where the business card did not carry any titles, could never understand the need to have titles like Additional Deputy Assistant Manager. Also the company for a long time tried to provide classless benefits, so nothing changed visibly for most people neither the size of the desk, the car, the cellphone etc etc with a change of job and my guess is we did well.
I sometimes wonder how much time the company would have spent trying to create these minor visible differences in hierarchy which take up so much productive time of the organisation in executing the minor twists.
My personal liking is to having simple common uncomplicated rules and processes, driven more by need than by hierarchy. I would much rather not spend 2 meetings worth of time of very senior people in an organisation about what to name a new grade to be inserted. Which one do you think is better Additional Manager, Deputy Assistant Manager or Additional Assistant Manager.
Sanjay
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Subway - No way
I used to be a big Subway fan, to the extent that all my eat outs used to end up at Subway. My wife would object saying it was not hygienic to eat stuff which was cut and kept open. I used to give her a big lecture on Subway as an international brand which was very quality conscious and so on.
One day my wife got and opportunity to counter all my quality conscious Subway gyan. We walked into a Subway outlet in Gurgaon and I was getting ready to order, when my gaze moved to one of the containers on the counter which had a dead lizard in it. I was shocked and so was my daughter. I quickly clicked a snap of the thing and called out to the counter boy. The boy looked sheepishly at me, picked up the lizard and threw it in the dustbin and had the courage to ask me ' your order sir'.
I was amazed at the lack of quality consciousness of this chap, and that got me thinking about how shallow the claims of these so called big brands about quality consciousness is. I am sure this incident did not get escalated any further, nobody got to know at Subway of this fact and the next time around the same thing may happen and it will get brushed under the carpet just like this one incident.
You and I will probably assume that the brands do mean quality, but many incidents in the recent past have shown that the big international brands do not guarantee quality, be it worms in chocolates, pesticides in cola and so on.
For the time being, I have stopped eating Subway, not that it impacts their business, but just cannot come around to it. I wish my trust was not betrayed in such a manner, and more importantly I wish my wife did not get this opportunity to pull my leg every time we went out to eat.
One day my wife got and opportunity to counter all my quality conscious Subway gyan. We walked into a Subway outlet in Gurgaon and I was getting ready to order, when my gaze moved to one of the containers on the counter which had a dead lizard in it. I was shocked and so was my daughter. I quickly clicked a snap of the thing and called out to the counter boy. The boy looked sheepishly at me, picked up the lizard and threw it in the dustbin and had the courage to ask me ' your order sir'.
I was amazed at the lack of quality consciousness of this chap, and that got me thinking about how shallow the claims of these so called big brands about quality consciousness is. I am sure this incident did not get escalated any further, nobody got to know at Subway of this fact and the next time around the same thing may happen and it will get brushed under the carpet just like this one incident.
You and I will probably assume that the brands do mean quality, but many incidents in the recent past have shown that the big international brands do not guarantee quality, be it worms in chocolates, pesticides in cola and so on.
For the time being, I have stopped eating Subway, not that it impacts their business, but just cannot come around to it. I wish my trust was not betrayed in such a manner, and more importantly I wish my wife did not get this opportunity to pull my leg every time we went out to eat.
Friday, November 16, 2007
Management Knowledge sharing initiative
My dear friend Avneet Jolly, who contibuted matter for my most popular blog item 'An Indian in Texas', has embarked on a very interesting venture to help consolidation of management knowledge and sharing it for people who need it. Details about his outfit are given below.
Also there is a contest for contribution of good ideas and knowledge for people who may want to partcipate in it.
A good initiative and another one has been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug. All the best Avneet for this good effort.
Sanjay
-------------------------------------------------------------
Also there is a contest for contribution of good ideas and knowledge for people who may want to partcipate in it.
A good initiative and another one has been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug. All the best Avneet for this good effort.
Sanjay
-------------------------------------------------------------
Insightory Inc.
Company
(http://insightory.com)Insightory is a platform for management professionals, academicians and graduate business students to share their knowledge and insights with the corporate world, solve management issues collaboratively, and network with peers who have similar professional interests.
Our goal is to do for management knowledge what Wikipedia has done for general knowledge i.e. put it out on the "open" web, so that those who have expertise can add to it, and those who need the expertise can tap into it. In doing so, we will create powerful networks, with rich opportunities for "providers" as well as "seekers" of management knowledge.
We believe in five "core" tenets:
- Companies need a constant supply of "management knowledge" (best practices, trends, how-to's, insights, etc.)
- Having access to multiple viewpoints is better than having access to a few.
- Management knowledge is not the essential domain of a few; it is distributed among tens of thousands of smart, experienced people all over the world.
- Currently, there isn't any effective way for companies to tap into the experience and expertise of those who aren't employees or contractors / consultants.
- The most efficient mechanism for building and distributing knowledge is an open, internet-based system.
This is our alpha website. A beta version will be launched in December 2007. We are currently holding a Contest for the best management-related documents. Anyone in the management community is welcome to participate. See details, rules and award information here.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Will you hire this person !!
A friend shared this application he received for a job. One can learn a lot about writing a CV from the same. Read it and learn.
If you think you will want to hire him, do tell me, I will get him to write to you. The letter has been reproduced with only a few changes to block the identity of the person. I am highlighting areas of real inspiration and learning for me. Hope you will find new learnings too.
Sanjay
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear sir
its rarely to recieve like this mail so be ready to iether delete it or reply imediately. and also its my first time to send it and iam redy for both the options.
iam one of the most intelegent men at the current time & iam the best in every thing i do, through the world.
i believe that iam not less than Isaac Newton but an apple havnt yet fall on my hed. instead of waiting for the apple i decide to search for it.
i feel that the best company to work for is yours, although i dont have the extensive knowledge but with one chapter i can make things that peoples who studied hundreds of books cant.
this simple english language and a medium knoledgge of
windows xp
solaris10
oracle10g
is all i have but iam sure that i can make the difference.
please dont miss this oportunity.
give me a specific problem and a short course on what i need to solve the problem and see what will i do.
i dont need any money, and if i fail i will refund every peny u spend for the course.
i know you have problems, and this is the chance to solve it, again dont miss it.
iam xx(age) years old, from abc (city) the time i live in yyy (country)s tuding oracle iam looking forward to hearing form you.
If you think you will want to hire him, do tell me, I will get him to write to you. The letter has been reproduced with only a few changes to block the identity of the person. I am highlighting areas of real inspiration and learning for me. Hope you will find new learnings too.
Sanjay
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear sir
its rarely to recieve like this mail so be ready to iether delete it or reply imediately. and also its my first time to send it and iam redy for both the options.
iam one of the most intelegent men at the current time & iam the best in every thing i do, through the world.
i believe that iam not less than Isaac Newton but an apple havnt yet fall on my hed. instead of waiting for the apple i decide to search for it.
i feel that the best company to work for is yours, although i dont have the extensive knowledge but with one chapter i can make things that peoples who studied hundreds of books cant.
this simple english language and a medium knoledgge of
windows xp
solaris10
oracle10g
is all i have but iam sure that i can make the difference.
please dont miss this oportunity.
give me a specific problem and a short course on what i need to solve the problem and see what will i do.
i dont need any money, and if i fail i will refund every peny u spend for the course.
i know you have problems, and this is the chance to solve it, again dont miss it.
iam xx(age) years old, from abc (city) the time i live in yyy (country)s tuding oracle iam looking forward to hearing form you.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Recruiting
There are so many times I get a call where recruiters call to say they have an exciting job opportunity for me. My instant reaction all these years have been to say sorry I am not interested. The immediate reaction is 'WHY'. Most of the times it is impossible for people to understand that there could be people in this world who may not want to switch jobs.
The other thing that is amazing is the oversell. "I have this exciting opportunity for you in this MNC organisation, can you please give me your profile for my reference". When you do not know my profile how the hell do you know whether the job opportunity is exciting for me or not.
Also now at times, I feel the desperation of the recruiters from the way they have started approaching their job. "We have a job for you". "Not interested". " Okay can you give us a reference". This is exactly how the tele-callers selling you those credit cards or loans approach the interaction.
Executive Search, in my mind, is not about making those cold calls and hoping that one of the conversations will lead to a right reference. Its a game of relationships and reach, which will then help you narrow the search down to the right kind of person for the job one is searching for.
My simple thought for all you recruiters making the cold call to anyone is, first try and build a relationship and understand the person properly, if not this time, it will come in handy for future. Remember this game will be about relationships and reach.
Sanjay
The other thing that is amazing is the oversell. "I have this exciting opportunity for you in this MNC organisation, can you please give me your profile for my reference". When you do not know my profile how the hell do you know whether the job opportunity is exciting for me or not.
Also now at times, I feel the desperation of the recruiters from the way they have started approaching their job. "We have a job for you". "Not interested". " Okay can you give us a reference". This is exactly how the tele-callers selling you those credit cards or loans approach the interaction.
Executive Search, in my mind, is not about making those cold calls and hoping that one of the conversations will lead to a right reference. Its a game of relationships and reach, which will then help you narrow the search down to the right kind of person for the job one is searching for.
My simple thought for all you recruiters making the cold call to anyone is, first try and build a relationship and understand the person properly, if not this time, it will come in handy for future. Remember this game will be about relationships and reach.
Sanjay
Thursday, August 02, 2007
Abhi na jao chor ke (Please don't go) !
I have started to believe that an employee has maximum valuation from his/her employer on the day they announce they will quit. Suddenly the whole organisation gets down to trying to convince the person about how the organisation believes in the person and has great things lined up for their careers. Also in many cases offer to increase their salaries manyfold and promote, transfer, or do whatever will get the person to stay back.
The same employee may have been refused a more than 10% increase a few months back, in the garb or market pay competitiveness, budget, internal parity and so on and so forth. Also the company would have refused promotion / transfer on various other pretexts.
Recently someone narrated a story about how a very smart employee did outsmart his employer and beat them at their own game. The person put in his papers and the company offered him a 40% increase and asked him to stay back. The person agreed, took the increase letter, went and negotiated with the hiring company and got a significant increase over the increased amount. The new hiring company obviously thinking very highly of this person's credibility since the current organisation was willing to bend backwards to retain the employee.
Today I understand that in that organisation everyone thinks that if they can bring an offer back and negotiate with their current employer they would be able to get the increase they did not get during increment time. I don't blame them.
Employers need to start thinking more long term given the demand situation for talent and understand that offering significant increases to employees who put in their papers is a very risky tactic, which has far higher negatives than positives and will hurt the organisation in the long term and send wrong signals to all other employees.
My simple thought is that knee jerk reactions will always create more complications. Try and retain people through more long term measures, let a few people go, after all the others need a chance to grow in the organisation as well.
The same employee may have been refused a more than 10% increase a few months back, in the garb or market pay competitiveness, budget, internal parity and so on and so forth. Also the company would have refused promotion / transfer on various other pretexts.
Recently someone narrated a story about how a very smart employee did outsmart his employer and beat them at their own game. The person put in his papers and the company offered him a 40% increase and asked him to stay back. The person agreed, took the increase letter, went and negotiated with the hiring company and got a significant increase over the increased amount. The new hiring company obviously thinking very highly of this person's credibility since the current organisation was willing to bend backwards to retain the employee.
Today I understand that in that organisation everyone thinks that if they can bring an offer back and negotiate with their current employer they would be able to get the increase they did not get during increment time. I don't blame them.
Employers need to start thinking more long term given the demand situation for talent and understand that offering significant increases to employees who put in their papers is a very risky tactic, which has far higher negatives than positives and will hurt the organisation in the long term and send wrong signals to all other employees.
My simple thought is that knee jerk reactions will always create more complications. Try and retain people through more long term measures, let a few people go, after all the others need a chance to grow in the organisation as well.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)