Leading Internal teams with Trust, Transparency and Flexibility

Trust, Transparency and Flexibility has worked great with our external customers, to me if this is something that the external customers buy from us then there is no reason to believe that it will not work for my internal customers. In the note below I have tried to draw a congruence of this philosophy to my internal management style.

I will try and explain each one of the three but before I start let me lay two golden rules - management or no management "Respect the Individuals". If you cannot respect an individual be it in your personal or professional life you have lost it as a leader before the start of the game.

Let me now start with Trust, this is the first and the foremost thing in building a winning relationship. Many times I hear people saying that a person has just joined hence he needs to prove his credibility in due time to have the trust of the manager and the organization. To me this is weird. The reason that he is onboard after qualifying the multiple rounds of interview itself is enough proof for him to be trusted. Unless he does something that breaks his credibility there is no reason not to trust him. People live in a fear and a non-trust environment for many months that actually deters their performance and lessens the appetite to risk taking. Also with trust comes delegation. Delegation does not mean to take decisions yourself and then have your team agree to it which I see many people doing; to me it means to give the power to the right people to even make some wrong decisions while helping them learn from the mistakes. Believe in your coaching and the people’s capability, you will have to trust your team with deep waters and leave them to swim.

Hence rule 1 - Trust your team day one unless proved otherwise.

Transparency - To me transparency means to be able to admit and share the good and the bad with your team. I personally believe that basic nature of all human are alike, if failure hurts me I am sure it hurts other as well and the pat on the back make all of us feel good. Having transparency creates an environment where people can admit failures and not be afraid of trying something new. Also this helps in identifying the issues early and reacting proactively. Be open to admit your mistakes in front of the team, this will surely help them open up. There is nothing wrong in not knowing, what is wrong is not knowing and not asking. Create an environment where people can stand up and ask basic questions. It is difficult to admit that we do not know basics or to overcome the fear of what others will think, but if you have accomplished that in your team you are a winner and you have a winning team behind you because the answers to the most complex problems in the world lie in simple basic questions.

Rule 2 - Create an environment that helps people admit the mistakes and encourages them to ask questions without any fear.

Flexibility - As I have already mentioned in one of my blog below, flexibility should be viewed as an organization’s or a managers open mindset to listen and adapt to changing environment by enabling framework to re-define the processes. It is very important to be receptive to change and new ideas. The change is inevitable the question is - can you impact the change in a positive way. I do believe there is no one correct way of doing things, someone could any day discover a better way of doing things than what you did in the past, trust the team with the flexibility of trying new ideas. Balance flexibility to have a positive effect to create a learning environment.

Rule 3 - Be flexible to accommodate innovation but not at the cost of making the exception a rule.

Before I end I must state the second golden rule that I defined in the first paragraph. The second golden rule is "Listen Listen Listen". Unless you listen to your team and the people around you it will be difficult to make the positive impact. Many times you may not have an answer to the questions but a patient listening works wonder!!

Happy Leading.

Flexibility & Process Adherence

One of the major issues I see with the organizations today is the misuse of one of its biggest strength "Flexibility". Flexibility to me does not grant an authority to individual or teams to grow above the defined rules or processes. It should be viewed as an organization’s open mindset to listen and adapt to changing environment by enabling framework to re-define the processes. I today see people living by exception or may I call it that the exceptions are becoming a rule. At the pace we are growing this is not sustainable and at some point very soon will become unmanageable.

I might be wrong but I believe that once a process or a rule is defined that should be followed. A friend of mine told me once when I was visiting US that there is nothing right or wrong it is only legal and illegal as law states. I often hear people say that following a process or a rule is a deterrent to creativity which I personally do not agree with. I surely agree that certain rules or boundaries might create constraints that may not be able to accommodate your imagination but then rather than breaking the boundaries why not work to recreate or redefine them.

If any single process is not working this does not go to say no process works, think of the way the traffic would look like if all were trying to be creative on roads it would be a disaster but then we have build racing tracks (redefine boundaries) to accommodate for the more imaginative folks. To me there is no binary answer to the question “Do Rules deter Creativity". There will be situations and roles which do not have scope for creativity typically in operations hence the need to be strict with the process might be higher in certain situations.

I believe that rules and processes are a must have and should be followed. The only other thing we need is a framework around accessing the productivity/usefulness of the process at regular intervals and a framework to enable redefinition at agreed intervals.

We all know that change needs time to settle in hence need to be very cautions on the frequency of change. Let us not make exception in the name of "Flexibility" and live by exception as a rule.

The Next Gen - Gen Y

One thing which I think has always created a debate on the Gen gaps is our inability to respect the individual and our insecurity to change. I have no doubts that Gen Y will bring in significant changes to what we do and more so how we do. This will be independent of if we want it or not, this change is inevitable. The challenge is how to be part of the change wave and impact it in the right way with the perceived knowledge we have.

I would like to share a small incident that happened yesterday night, my dad has been telling a story about a young man and how he was chased by a lion in a forest and how he managed to get on top of a tree and the lion finally found and ate him. He must have narrated this story to many children from my generation until now. Yesterday when he was narrating this story to my 3 year old son the question came up from the young lad..but grandpa I have seen in Discovery Channel that Lion cannot climb the tree only monkeys can so how did the lion catch the man on the tree!! My dad laughed that off but then it was a valid question…though small incident but captures the curiosity and knowledge that the TV brings in to kids today. We can laugh but the fact is that the old story now needs a CHANGE.

What you perceived as risk may not be a risk anymore and when Gen Y does not carry that in their risk register you tend to label them as not being careful. The positive start of the change will be by being receptive to ideas and respecting the thoughts of the Gen Y.

The question not only is Do We Get Gen “Why” but “Do we want to get Gen Y”

Is Quality a Burden?

Many times I hear people in the organization say that quality initiatives are a burden; strangely enough I heard a comment that quality is overdone in our company. The question I thought was could quality be overdone ever? This brings me to the basic question of what is quality. To me quality is value for money for the end user.

But we have to agree that something is missing in our quality initiatives. Quality delivery needs strong process backing be it ITIL/ISO or BS7799. Another way of putting the same is the fact that the quality cannot be implemented but can be brought by ensuring the right processes within the delivery organisation. Quality is an output. I feel the need is to focus on process implementation and adherence. Why do people feel that processes are burden or overdone.

1. The underlying objectives of the process are not clearly communicated.
2. The buy in from the people who should follow the process is not there.
3. Processes are not designed to suit the delivery organizations.
4. No clear benefits of process adherence are listed.
5. No rewards and recognition are linked to process oriented delivery.
6. Process implementation starts with a big bang but the continued motivation is lacking.
7. Our approach to process implementation may need improvement.
8. Change comes at a cost; we might not want to take the risk.

We need to understand that all the delivery people in our teams are too busy with the day-to-day operational activities and if we ask them time for these initiatives they would not be too happy about the same but if can sell that the process would help them reduce their work load or help in smoother delivery they could be interested.

May be we are dumping the processes on our Delivery teams i.e. selling without the need. As a common man I might buy your product without my need knowing what a great salesman you are but this in no way ensures that I would use the same. Hence before selling let us create a need and have people ask for the same.

At the same time we need to understand that our sales organisation needs to have these certifications and quality standards and that is the reason why the management wants to have it. This indicates that sales organisation realizes the needs and thus has a focus to fulfill their needs; the same need identification has to be done for the Delivery or support organizations.

Here is how I feel we should go about the same:

1. It is difficult to create a need with all the individual support people so we should start with us first and then be responsible for selling the same at lower levels.
2. Before talking about processes we should understand the problems being faced in operations.
3. Match the problems being faced with the process solution.
4. Sell the solutions to the problem and hence the process
5. Ask for team’s full participation, they should not nominate any other people and themselves not be active participants.
6. If the teams say they do not have the time to participate hence want to nominate others believe me he/she is not convinced with your idea. Take more time to sell the need.
7. If time is a constraint tell him you would match his pace but persist with working only with him.
8. Mark the Key performance indicators for the process being worked upon.
9. Measure the results and reward the team not only for excellent delivery but also for process centric delivery.
10. Have the Delivery manager share his success with other Teams.

The bottom line is let's not do selling without need creation or else we won't have satisfied customers internally and externally. The process should not be “must have” but “must use”.