Most heads of organizations, founders and owners express that grooming engineers or professionals to be leaders is their greatest concern. Heads of organizations realize that they need to be able to groom these technically oriented engineers to become good managers and capable leaders, if they really want to grow and scale the business.
Most of the technical staff have an engineering or professional background and are very happy solving technical problems, and getting immersed in their own processes and functions. Interaction with teams across companies has revealed that 95% of them harbour aspirations to be highly skilled engineers or professionals. Although almost all of them work in teams, or at least appear to function as teams, they are pretty individualistic in their approach and thinking. Perhaps this is natural amongst Indians who feel comfortable melting with the crowd rather than standing apart, at least outwardly, even if they mentally harbour intentions to take out anyone who even has a semblance of leadership traits and could perhaps be a future threat. It is no surprise that team performance especially in the Indian context is really not exceptional. Team outcomes are rarely greater than the summation of individual contributions. Given the upbringing of a typical middle class professional workforce, social risk taking is not really something they aspire to, and leadership with a high risk of failure would not be a path they aspire for. Most like to feel accepted and comfortable in their own social circles. Building technical and professional skills melds with their wanting to be part of the crowd. Their own peer groups provide them with the knowledge of opportunities and skills in the industry. They hence easily learn how to re skill themselves technically, stay abreast of technological change and even the art of political machination. Very few of them have the ability to visualize what it takes to be in top management. Some of them might get themselves an MBA, and become managers, but fewer still are leaders in the making. Most rather prefer to remain on the technical side of the business.
From an organizational perspective, it is imperative that technically skilled people who know the technology and product scale up to lead the company. It takes time and effort to groom and build a second line of leadership that will really bring scalability to a company’s growth. Leadership can be learnt and comes from exposure and practice. The organization can create the environment where technical professionals ease into managerial roles, and later into leadership roles. This is where talent in middle management becomes crucial. Talent here can be cultivated by training staff to manage work, manage people, set goals, schedules, review, follow up, evaluate performance of self and others. Getting them to practice these skills, is the key to embedding it. The most difficult part is to imbibe a culture of performance among teams. As they become good managers, they learn how to recognize individual talent and skills among team members, and how best to utilize those unique skills to achieve above average performance. They learn to accept the eccentricities of people around them, evaluate them, coach them, and help them in performing better. As this is done, a culture of leadership starts getting embedded in the organization. Employees learn that leadership is not bad; it does not mean stepping over others; it does not mean bossing over others; there is nothing wrong in following a leader. Since most teams are close knit groups of friends, it is useful to get team members to be open and accepting, whenever a friend amongst them is elevated as leader. This is a role where HR and top management can strongly play. They really need to influence and advocate such a culture and get the employees to adopt such a culture. This elevation to a leader also needs to be done carefully. The newbie leader should not be set up for failure. The environment needs to be managed carefully and small steps need to be taken. Companies could allow experiments in contained environments of real life projects, where the newbie leader can be given the reigns, and helped through. There are companies that regularly conduct training in the form of offsite exercises, where they send out teams to work on social issues and causes. There is work to be done, and certain objectives to be achieved. They allow staff to take on the mantle of leadership and execute. But to be sustainable, this has to happen within the organization in the course of regular work. Future leaders need to learn how to be performance oriented, when to be authoritative, when to be considerate, when to teach their team members. They need to exhibit high levels of integrity and get the team to trust them. Integrity is assessed by team members in a number of ways. People knowingly and unknowingly can pick up even the most subtle signals that demonstrate the lack of integrity, and this could prove fatal and undermine the leader and the team. Team members are driven by faith and belief rather than anything else. We all work in corporate environments to make a living and improve our material life. We sometimes act like mercenaries – we give and expect commensurate rewards. But a real leader emerges only when an individual can overcome his petty selfishness and biases and work for larger goals. The more selfless the goal, the higher the ideal, the more all encompassing it becomes. People around no longer feel threatened and behave defensively. Organizations need to enable this by providing the environment/systems and sensitize staff to better ways of working than just being crabs that pull down one another. Once this culture and change is managed, half the battle is won and we might start to develop better managers and more importantly, leaders who can take us to the next level.
Management is not just about strategy and systems. It is all about doing & managing people as well. Managers make grand plans, but fail to get teams to work effectively to produce greater output. Often, there is a tendency to do everything themselves – individually. This is understandable, given today’s situation – resources lack competency, freshers have no clue what they are supposed to do, high churn among trained resources, etc. But despite this, if work is largely individual and team based, it means employees are technicians, not managers. The output will never be greater than the sum of the parts i.e. no scalability. When managers and leaders hire people, they expect them to perform. When the employee does not perform, rarely are the causes examined. A rather quick conclusion is made that the employee should be replaced. But good management is all about managing people, and here are some pointers on what could be done to improve performance of subordinates.
When managers buy a machine which does not meet expectation, they realize a mistake has been made, and all tricks in the book are tried to salvage the machine. They call support teams from various sources, try retrofitting, buy extra accessories etc. But in case of a human resource, the moment the person does not live up to expectation, the first thought is to replace the person. Just as all kinds of fixes are tried to get the machine up and running, there is a need to examine the causes of failure and figure out how to better enable employees to succeed before replacing them. Most leaders use a few best practices and levers that could be put to good use. The result that an employee produces depends on various factors like capability, training, motivation, environmental factors and finally performance.
Capability
Hiring decisions are based on evaluation of capability. If mistakes are made here, then there is a serious problem down the line in managers not being clear on the capabilities required for the job. This needs to be fixed at the outset, by clarifying the job description, the success profile, skill sets required, type of person required etc. With clarity and training, managers can reorient their interviews to reduce chances of error.
Training
When employees are trained, the training provided has to be relevant to the job, and it should enable the employee to perform the job independently. It has to teach them how to do the job. But rarely is a check done. This can be evaluated by having review sessions to determine how well the employee has learnt the job. It also provides an opportunity to fine tune the training program.
Motivation
For most employees, work conditions, pay, etc seem like motivators, but over time they become merely hygiene factors. They do need to be taken care of. But even when done, it doesn’t mean employees will be satisfied. Achievement, recognition, work content and responsibility are factors that will lead to higher satisfaction and drive employees to perform better and become self driven. Hence apart from monetary rewards and recognition, praising positive behaviour and criticising negative behaviour is important, and an often neglected tool.
The big mistake most managers make is that they sideline or neglect good behaviour and reinforce negative behaviour. Managers may unknowingly send subordinates many unwanted signals. What the boss says for 2 minutes, the subordinate thinks the whole day. The subordinate may think that he has been innovative and creative and could have spent the entire day working on an idea he thought his boss would appreciate. But when he brings it to the boss at the end of the day, and the work is brushed aside, he may feel de-motivated. If he has not understood the requirement, it is not his problem, but rather a problem with the manager in not having made this clear. In the event that he did a decent job, it becomes obvious that positive behaviour is not being recognized and reinforced. Organizations rent behaviour of employees, not their bodies or minds. Only when employees behave in a desired manner, will useful output be produced. Hence, bosses and managers need to be careful. But for a boss, it is not easy. At the end of a tired day, even after repeating the same stuff to umpteen employees and customers, he still has to do it again, and let the subordinate know that he is doing something important. Correct behaviour has to be consciously reinforced and negative behaviour punished. It is just like a sales man meeting his last customer at the end of the day – he cannot tell the customer he is tired since he has said the same thing to others the whole day. He has to treat this customer as though he is the most important person he is meeting today.
We find great examples of reinforcing negative behaviour played out in families between parents and children too. When a parent shouts to try and correct wrong behaviour, many kids start to cry, the parent then feels sorry for them and say “its okay”. It means reinforcing the wrong behaviour. It becomes a habit that gets internalized, and later the steps get skipped, and wrong behaviour becomes the norm. The same situation gets played out in the corporate environment. Negative behaviour is not punished because everyone prefers to avoid an uncomfortable atmosphere at the workplace. But somewhere in this drama, managers are shirking from responsibility, and encouraging subordinates to continue with wrong behaviour. As managers and leaders, it is our responsibility to correct them. Hence punishing wrong behaviour is as important as recognizing correct behaviour.
Environmental Factors
There could be a number of factors that prevent employees from doing their job. Identifying these factors requires careful analysis and discussion with the employee. It could be lack of processes, insufficient tools to empower the employee, complex people politics etc. Whatever the reasons, with analysis, it is not too difficult to get to the bottom of the cause.
Review & communicate
Then there is the issue of performance of the employee. Check for capability – does the employee know clearly what to do? Are there factors or difficulties that prevent them from doing their job? How can we remove those factors? Are there rewards for non performance, are there punishments for performing?
Do subordinates know what is supposed to be done? If they do not know what their managers want, they cannot give it. Do they know that their performance is not meeting the standard? Do they have immediate feedback about this? If these communication loops are not closed, there is no way things will work out. When we communicate to others, how do we know the other has understood it? Most leaders use a great technique. They just rephrase at the end to clarify. To make sure the instructions are communicated, it is good to get the employee to repeat what we want them to say and make sure the gap does not exist. Apart from them knowing what is supposed to be done, they also need to know how to do it. Close this gap as well. Performance management is not an event. It is a continuous process.
Paying attention to these factors, and consciously practicing them in the course of managing employees helps to deliver better performance.
Companies need to evaluate their go to market plans every year. Whether it is SMEs or Family businesses wanting to reach new markets, expand reach and grow revenues, or large companies trying to align according to changes in products and markets, everyone needs to re evaluate their go to market plan at least once a year. This basically involves choosing the target markets or even exploring new markets, aligning with customers, and developing the plan on reaching out to customers.
Choosing target markets
Companies need to start off by listing all the possible markets that have potential. Most marketing strategies talk a lot about promotion, product features, benefits, pricing and stuff like digital, social and analytics. Rarely do they try and understand the domain and the core offering of their company to dig deep and explore all the other possibilities in terms of applications of their product or service. A thorough analysis of the value of the product to the various markets should be the place to start from. Prepare a criteria set by which these markets can be evaluated and selected. It could be market size, growth rate, strategic fit, competitiveness, ability to be a leader in the market, how difficult is it to penetrate, profitability etc. Evaluate whether to go into blue ocean markets or closer extension markets. New markets are typically long term, high risk, high learning. Market extensions give short term results, and are less of a risk. The evaluation should not be an armchair exercise. Often such plans get done in the conference rooms. The company’s own sales teams are not consulted, leave alone channel partners and customers. Sales reps and channel partners are easiest to contact for ground feedback. Touch base with your own customers to validate. Sometimes it makes sense to also touch base with non customers in new markets to gain insights.
The next step would be to prioritize markets for penetration. Which are the beach head markets, medium term play and long term markets. How certain are the opportunities here, will there be quick wins for sales, or is it too far away across the horizon? What are the channel building requirements? Is the marketing team ready with appropriate messaging? Or does this have to be a totally new positioning and done from scratch? Finally, we must make sure that there is a strategic fit with the business goals of the company.
Understanding the customer
At most companies, we find that efforts have not really been made to understand the customer. Growing revenues does not really mean that everything about the customer’s needs are known. At a design services firm, the team has been providing products and solutions for more than two decades, but do not yet know which of their customers prefer products, which ones want total outsourced solutions, who needs training etc. Despite the fact that this is a complex high touch solution with high customization, the approach is very transactional. There has been no effort to align with the goals and work plans of the customer. They have not yet invested time and effort in mapping and aligning themselves with strategic accounts. The marketing team has not yet figured out the type of experience that the customer wants. They have not had frank discussions with customers on strengths and weaknesses, expectations. The angle has to be how to make the customer succeed. At another company which supplies products to the hospitality sector, all sales are done by high cost sales reps. They really had not gone into depth on the types of customers they serve, and segmented them. Project sales, sales from capex, replacement sales could be through different channels for geographically distributed customers. 5 star customers might prefer high touch experience – meet reps with a knowledge of global brands and positioning among leading hotel chains, while value oriented buyers may prefer to buy through low cost distribution channels and do not look forward to such ethereal discussions. Knowing these customer preferences goes a long way in designing an appropriate strategy.
At larger companies understanding the customer can be taken to a very different level. Marketing needs to realize that customer decision making is not usually rational and there is politics involved. Hence they need to be able to identify the politics within the organization and the people involved and hypothesize on causes of wins and losses, determine sales turning points, and analyze them, so that the company can be better prepared in future. Getting customer advice and recommendations regardless of a win or a loss is also very useful. These are true customer insights which can be used to device strategy as well as do a true marketing tools audit that will identify gaps in marketing assets at every level of the sales cycle.
Looking for new Markets
Market creating is creating blue ocean spaces, not competing in the same red ocean. It does not mean creating a niche market, by differentiation or through low cost strategy. Nor is it entirely about technology innovation like the segway – which incidentally was a great innovation, but failed to find sufficient buyers, since buyers doubted that it could be ridden everywhere – like large indoor spaces, campuses, outdoors etc. Whereas if technology address a need, adds value, makes things simpler, more productive, then people simply fall in love with it. One example is sales force. It simplified CRM and made it adaptable. Similarly, whatsapp, an OTA that is threatening to bypass carriers, is allowing people to communicate with text, videos, calls and keeping things simple. It has created a whole new market of users and groups.
We can also create new markets by speaking to non customers rather than existing customers. Sony for example, really studied users of ebooks and launched an ebook reader that was much better in every way compared to competition. But Amazon also understood non-users of ebooks and figured that content is what attracts them; they launched kindle and it came with access to a number of titles. This opened up a whole new market. This is new market creation.
Design a channel strategy
After segmenting, targeting, understanding customers, positioning ourselves, exploring new markets to enter, comes the task of reaching out to these markets. Channels are routes to reach customers, Customers can be reached directly through a sales force or indirectly through distributors, volume resellers, value added resellers, service and support partners, solution partners, partner retailers etc. They can also be reached through direct to customer channels like website, e-marketplace, extranets, Tele channels etc. Choosing channels has not only market reach and cost implications, but can affect success. Direct sales channels are high touch and are high cost, but can deal with complexity, and enable a high degree of control. As we move down the spectrum towards, VARs, distributors, tele-channels, website, the reach increases, cost decreases, but we tend to lose control and need to keep the offering simple.
Often channels are chosen randomly. With the companies I have worked with, direct sales has been their first and only choice. Little time has been spent in evaluating a variety of other options available. It is useful if this is done methodically rather than just hitting upon an idea. It is an exciting exercise that the marketing department needs to perform every year in close association with sales, channels, knowledge of customers and competition. Processes, policies, metrics also need to be thought of and put in place to make results count and build scalability.
