On the one hand, service is a fast paced job dealing with huge number of parts and ensuring business continuity for customers. They are responsible for maintenance, problem diagnosis and resolution, compliant handling, fire fighting amongst others…  This is what they know and most of them are programmed for problem resolution. On the other, they are required to generate substantial revenues for the organisation requiring a very different mindset and capability. We have seen a huge disconnect while having a conversation with service engineers on revenue generation.

It is only logical for organisations to expect service engineers to generate revenue, but how?

A few thoughts on likely ways to encourage a revenue generation mindset in service engineers:

• As a start point we could replace the word revenue generation to spares generation. As this is in their realm they would most likely relate to it and be open to talk about strategies around it.
• Frequent access to the organisations big picture will result in buy-ins. Appreciating the need to generating revenues from spares and service will ease adaptability and adherence to processes and systems that assist in revenues generation.
• Encourage a solution mindset in service engineers rather than just after sales. This will persuade service engineer to understand customer’s life cycle and identify various touch points which could result in more revenues sources.
• Bring in a strong relevance between service quality and spares generation. Bad service would mean leaving opportunities for revenue generation on the table.
• Focus on developing relationship based selling skills in service engineers and nothing else.

We believe that this is a sensitive matter as after sales business is one of the few constant connections that customers have with a brand, and every interaction shapes their perception of its value. Keeping service engineers focused on customer outcomes and carefully building a structure around revenue generation could be critical. We are currently working with a manufacturing major on building a framework that will ease this transition.

• Strategic intent gives a common purpose, lays emphasis on opportunities to pursue and      inspires    every stakeholder in the organization.
• Strategic intent is usually derived from the company’s vision (or) many a times strategic  intents form the basis for creating a vision for the organisation.
• Strategic Intent directs the organization’s focus, thoughts and actions to the present.
• Strategic intent defines the purpose of your organisations’ existence in the ecosystem. It  defines your actions around growth, operations, innovation and customer.

Strategy execution practices – Organisation goals formalises the key success factors required to execute the intent

• Organisation goals translate the strategic intent into actionable, relevant, measurable goals.
• Organisations goals should be holistic and necessarily span across organisation growth,  operations efficiency, innovation and customer delight.
• Involve all key stakeholders while arriving at organisation goals. Stakeholders buy-in is  critical for business success.

Strategy execution practices – Department goals enable organisation goals

• Key stakeholders across functions and operations must converge and create goals that make  everyone accountable for the execution of the organisation goals.
• Every department / function should involve key stakeholders while arriving at goals and  KRA’s for successful execution.
• Department goals have to be transparent, objective and communicated effectively to all  stakeholders in the ecosystem.
• Each department should necessarily have at least one KRA for every organisation goals. This  way all departments contribute to the overall achievement of the goals.

Follow ups are known to be a “routine” practice at most organizations to ensure things get done. Whether between managers and reportees or among peers, follow ups are considered almost necessary to get things accomplished. Needless to say, the amount of time spent here eats into one’s ability to be “productive”, apart from fueling frustration. This apart, an innate culture of follow ups is bound to hamper the ability to service customers in some form.

So why are follow-ups the norm?

The person has way too many things to do

Very often, we tend to overlook that the stakeholders we want collaborative help from are running behind many things. So, it is imperative that we “communicate” with the stakeholder(s) the importance of the work and how it affects the overall objectives. It is a step forward that we need to take to enable the stakeholders prioritize among the various things that they’re chasing.

Then, there are a set of folks who would term every activity as “urgent” & “priority”. Over time, whatever work comes from these folks are not taken seriously and they land up, many times, like the boy who cried wolf

Mutual trust:

What’s in it for them? Stakeholders who “owe” us work are but merely customers offering an exchange of value. How we “thank”, “reward”, and “recognize” their contribution as well as “repay” them would determine how they react to our needs the next time round.

The person needs help to complete:

Even though a person may be extremely willing to get our work done, (s)he may not really know “what” exactly it is that we require or “how” to go about getting it done.

Again, the impetus lies with us to ensure that we provide them sufficient know how of what exactly it is that we require, how we visualize the output and what essential components we would need as a part of the output.

Even assuming that we give the work to a person that has the required “competencies” to get it done, it is still important for us to call out, in as much detail as possible, the context in which (s)he will be required to apply the skills to get the job done. Time spent towards “enabling” one’s work shall certainly have higher returns than on using the time for mere follow ups.

Organizational political dynamics:

Several times, work to be provided to ‘X’ is always assigned a higher priority than that which is to be provided to ‘Y’. This usually occurs due to the formal / informal power of individuals and skews priorities that in turn have a negative effect on organizational objectives.

Ensuring that prioritization is done based on the “organizational impact” of work rather than the individual assigning the work is a key step towards negating this effect.

Ability to say no & ability to prioritize:

While it’s one thing for us to communicate “importance” & “value”, it’s quite another thing how the stakeholders would perceive them. One’s habit of saying “YES” to everything and the inability to prioritize is another key contributor to one biting off more than they could chew.

Bringing in a “culture” of prioritization through objective impact value assessments of every piece of work, would make it easier for one to be able to choose what to work on and in what order.

Team wins and social networks:

Steps to work as a “cross functional & strategic team” rather than “individual or functional team” goes a long way in sensitizing the importance of every function within the organization. The notion of “no one wins until everyone wins” is essential for one to appreciate and contribute to the other’s success.

Promoting social networks & relationships across the breadth of the organization shall foster a culture of “oneness & unity” which in turn shall help the formation of strong alliances. This by itself would result in a strong competitive advantage for the organization, since not only will it get things done without follow ups, it would begin to think and accomplish greatness beyond expectations.

The person just doesn’t care:

Irrespective of the number of times one is told about the importance of what is required and efforts are made to enable performance, if the response still remains lax lustre, do consider the possibility that the person isn’t just “engaged”.

In essence, the key things from observable behaviours that impact a no-follow up culture are;

• Clarity in communication of end objectives
• Alignment
• Evincing buy ins and building a consensus
• A culture of objective prioritization
• A culture of enabling performance
• Rewarding and recognizing contributions
• A thrust on forging collaborations & alliances

Obviously bringing about a “cultural change” isn’t easy! For all the stakeholders to “behave” in a way that is beneficial to the organization along all the 7 parameters stated above requires a well managed “change” and “transformation” process that is contextual and persisted with over a period of time for the organization to see the benefits!

Real time capability building is about precise and contextual application of skills and knowledge to the present wants of the job. Being agile and constantly working on building aligned and precise skills & knowledge across the organisation is the need of the hour considering the ever-changing landscape of business and the specific needs of people.

Present learning methodologies Vs real time

The capabilities that companies need most have evolved, but methods of building those skills have not. Although traditional approaches to learning have made some impact on productivity, the impact has arguably reached a plateau.

For instance, most interventions are like “Learning-by-studying” where you are to understand the principles and theories, which technically is an accumulated knowledge of previous occurrences. Whereas real time methods could be like “Learning-by-using” where you continuously apply knowledge and skills to better outcomes, which is unique to the requirement at hand and constantly changing. For example – In the process of on-boarding a vendor in manufacturing, ability to negotiate is critical.  Negotiating skills as a theory may be needed, but application differs as shown in the picture below:

Thus, in rapidly changing environments, knowing what customers want has to be a repetitive activity. Building agile methods to acquiring skills and building capability real-time will have a positive impact on productivity in organisations.

If we were to develop real-time capability for the organisation /department / Individual it is imperative to understand the circumstances holistically. We will need to understand output clearly to determine the input.

Challenges to capability building  

A recent global survey result published by McKinsey on building organisation capability shows the biggest challenges faced by organisations.

Interpretation of this report seems to suggest that these challenges are interrelated.  If we were to look at real-time capability building, we would need to actuate most of these factors. For example; Objectivity, buy-ins, alignment, accountability, performance and skill development.

Why should we look at real-time capability building?

Changing business scenarios:

The truth we have to face is the ever increasing demand for high quality reliable products & services required to be delivered within a short span of time at acceptable. This landscape is ever changing and so is the capability to cope with these changes. Your present capability may not be relevant tomorrow.

Holistic and aligned to strategy:

Most organisation leaders know that their organisation should be aligned. They know their organizational capabilities in relation to people, processes and systems should all be arranged to support the organisations strategy.

The challenge is that leaders tend to focus on one of these areas, sometimes based on their comfort areas, but what really matters for performance is how they all fit together and in real-time.

Customer wants:

Although organisation capability must aid strategy accomplishment, it has another important prerequisite, that of being customer centric and satisfy customer needs.  The needs of our customers are constantly changing and so should the capability of the organisation to satisfy them.

Frequent enabling:

Dynamic business scenario and changing customer needs warrants more frequent reviews and capability enablement. Organisations strategies go through constant changes so should the effort to align and enable the capabilities quickly and in real-time.

Engagement:

Frequent interaction and real time capability building activity will bring in objectivity and relevance to everyone’s work. Engaged employees foster collaborative working.

The Sunday night thriller saw the Indian cricket team emerge victorious in a match that went right down to the wire! With the Kiwis requiring 15 runs of the last over, a very doable feat in the game of today, the man entrusted with the last over stuck, with precision, to a key thing called ‘optimal execution’.

Here’re four things that I learnt from Jasprit Bumrah about optimal execution that correlates well with our professional lives, when he revealed what went on in his mind in that exciting last over;

Staying calm – Managing risks:

 “I tried to stay calm. If you try to complicate, then [a] lot of things happen. [I] stayed calm, and [the] job was to execute. It’s important to ‘shut out’ external pressure. I was just focusing on ball-by-ball and kept [the] expectations of people away.” – Bumrah

 Bumrah’s ability to identify ‘pressures’ a.k.a ‘risks” that were specific to him which would impede ‘his’ performance and to be able manage them well during that over is certainly a key learning on risk management for me!

Very often, we remain oblivious to the various things that impede our performance at work; risks we may encounter. It is only likely that we get stressed when a risk materializes because we aren’t prepared for it. Our ability to remain calm certainly has a lot to do with identifying what is going to stress us out!

Risks are not only the management’s problem, it is ours too. Our ability to identify goal centric risks in our own spheres of work, preparing for them and managing them well is certainly a key determinant of our success.

A ball-by-ball focus – The discipline:

 Another thing that struck me in what Bumrah revealed was his attempt to remain steadfastly focused on every ball that he bowled.

 And, business execution is merely that isn’t it? Going about implementing our plan, every single day & moment of our working; staying disciplined and persistent certainly contributes a great deal to our success.

Localized strategy – Contextual application of skills & remaining agile:

 “I tried to look at the batsman till the end, but decided what delivery to bowl just before the release. It was difficult to bowl because batting got easier thanks to the due”, Bumrah said.

 I am quite sure that the Indian team, its coaches and managers would have discussed at length the various things that they needed to do for every NZ batsman who came down to bat. I find this akin to organizational level planning and strategizing.

However, the key was how Bumrah ‘adapted’ his bowling to suit the conditions that prevailed.  This too, I believe, is an intrinsic component of success. Our ability to consider the conditions around us (markets and internal) and to apply our skills to the ‘specific context’ as warranted, however, remaining within the overall paradigm of the organizational strategic boundaries is certainly a critical success factor.

Execution is everybody’s business:

Every organization is merely a sum of the achievements of its employees. It wasn’t enough that Virat and Rohit scored amazing tons and posted a huge score. It wasn’t enough that Yuzvendra Chahal produced a great spell as well. It was required for Bumrah to finish off in the manner that he did, for India to win. So, well, execution is for sure everybody’s business.

So, congratulations to the Indian team! And, a special thank you to Bumrah for sharing what went on in your mind during that over. It certainly taught me a few things about optimal execution!

Whenever I’ve attempted to air anything that is a seemingly contrary point of view on employee engagement, I usually get shut out of the conversation almost instantaneously! How dare I even consider the possibility? How illiterate can I get?

But wait, I haven’t finished! While I do have serious doubts about the ability of all “happy” employees to reign in success, I have no doubt in my mind that all successes result from “engaged & happy” employees. And no, the difference is not merely in the semantics & it has nothing to do with the individual.

Unless “happy” employees are actually translating their “happiness” into performance, what economic sense does it make for organizations to invest in these practices? Although “engagement” multiplies the earnestness of an individual to contribute, are organizations really completing the loop and making the most of this solemnity?

Heard two interesting real life experiences;

• A multi national organization (services) with several thousand employees across the world, scored really (really) high on “employee happiness”. Most people there were “extremely happy” to work for the organization and attrition was low. However, the organization struggled with their CSAT rating for the services they offered.
• Imagine you land up in a very well known electronics retail outlet (a big chain in India) with only few other customers in the store already. The store is well staffed. Yet, even after going around the store for several tens of minutes, visibly perplexed to find something you want to buy, there’s no one who walks up to you to help.Finally you garner the attention of someone who then passionately “tells” you what you “should” buy & doesn’t really lend a ear to what you’re saying about why you want what you want.However, you do manage to convince them to sell you what you want, and finally even end up asking them about how their life in the store is. You manage to find this information from several others in the store as well, as well as in a few other outlets. You figure that most employees are quite happy with the perks and environment that the chain offers them and find it ‘exciting’ to work there! Where would that experience leave you?

Well, in both scenarios, the organizations did a phenomenal job in keeping their employees happy, but somehow “forgot” to complete the loop or tell them what’s expected from them. Perhaps the employees really did not know “how” they could make an impact on success, although I’m sure they were more than willing to do what’s necessary.

An article by Mario Chiock titled “What is Technical Debt” published on the 7^th of November, 2016 carried this picture, which later my colleague, Shweta, shared with me. She went on to mention how relevant this picture was to our everyday lives and how we get tied in so much into the way things are, that we become oblivious to the better ways of doing them!

How true & how wonderfully depicted!

I realized how comfortable we get with the status quo that we “choose” not to look for the better ways. We “choose” to remain busy putting in countless hours of work that we just don’t have the time to “invest” in ourselves to become better. And the more we wish to achieve, the harder we work. But seldom take the time to look at how we can do more with less.

So I asked myself this. When was the last time I paused to check how I could become more “productive”? Well, I really couldn’t quite recall if I ever had that conversation in my head! Do I think it’s important? Oh hell yes. But do I do something about it actually? Well, maybe not right now. I have tons of things to finish……

Isn’t this what strategy execution is all about? We have great ideas & plans for our organizations, our own work and life. But getting the plans implemented on the ground requires us to put in the effort and time to think about the best way for getting it done. Even if it means, adopting a radically different approach. Harder does not necessarily result in better!

And then there are distractions, pulling us back into “our” comfort zones! The hoards of “urgent” things that we need to get done when we walk into the office, the tons of chores we need to complete on the weekends, and so on & so forth. Remaining steadfastly focused on the “important things” and having them as high priority, although they require perceptibly more time, given the “urgent stuff” we need to finish is imperative. The cost benefit is quite simple really. The time on the important things now will ensure that the urgent things get taken care of in lesser time in the future – the path to the better. Much like taking the time to switch to a wheel in the image above!

So, thank you Shweta for sharing this & for reinforcing the need for the third of my six commandments that reads “Challenge the status QUO.  Question everything, but assumptions & not ideas”!

If organizational performance is but merely its ability to translate market potential into financial success, then it is imperative that “people capability” is a crucial success factor for any organization.

While numerous studies, research, thought & action have gone into developing fairly advanced models & frameworks for competence management, on the ground facts reveal that the largest impediment to organizational success is strategy implementation (for which competence is a vital contributor). So, if competence was indeed being managed well, why doesn’t it reflect in organizational performance?

Global studies reveal that over 50% of managers worldwide attribute lack of capability of their teams to sub optimal performance. Furthermore, our own study reveals that the average capability, as seen by the leadership, vis-a-vis the requirement to implement organizational strategies stands at 67% with the best figure pegged at 72%!

Now, isn’t this shocking! Well, it was for us. So we dug deeper. We wanted to find out what caused this lack of capability & here’s what we found!

While there was no dearth of knowledge (education) or skills (experience) in an organization, the biggest impediment came from the ability to apply the available knowledge & skills in the context that was required by the strategy / for the job at hand.

So, while education & experience could be at best indicators of potential, capability is actually the ability of an individual to adapt & apply the understanding in the present organizational context. It is the consistency & adaptability of one to continuously transform understanding into application and vice versa.

So, apart from the individual’s attitude (which is beyond the control of the organization other than plausibly providing the appropriate work environment), is there a lever that can be perused to coax better application of knowledge?

The answer is yes! If we cull capability requirements from smaller activity chunks, the context in which a particular skill or understanding is to be applied can be called out, thus reducing bias which otherwise hampers contextual application.

Role based capability building: If we draw out a process chart to achieve the goal at hand, we can then identify specific capability requirements for each of the activities that get called out.  Addressing specific capability gaps would then help enhance execution and ultimately performance.

For example, let’s look at a typical vendor development process:

Let’s say negotiations skills is an imperative requirement for the process above. Although the underlying skills of negotiation would remain for all organizations with similar processes as above, the context of vendor relationship (price v/s value) that is unique to each organization, would essentially determine the context in which the negotiation skills are to be applied.

In other words, negotiating with vendors for quality and timeliness requires different adaptability of negotiating skills than negotiating with vendors for price, even though the underlying skills requirements are the same. To perform the activity at hand, hiring the right person with the right skills or training existing people with specific inputs is sure to get better results.

For us to be able to coax our organization to better execute our strategies, isn’t it imperative for us to translate our plans into objective goals for each strategy implementing entity at our firm? Isn’t is important for us to ensure that all the entities in our organization are aligned to our plans? Aren’t these threshold requirements?

Our study of over two dozen organizational leaders across industries & organizational sizes revealed quite another thing!

The clarity in what an organization wished to achieve was found to be a mere 70%

Since optimal execution of business strategy begins with a clear & uniform understanding of what needs to be achieved as an organization, we dug deeper to figure out the causes of this low score, and here’s what we found!

1) Although leaders were quite clear about what to pursue as an organization & what direction to take, this wasn’t necessarily communicated effectively to all layers within the organization. In certain cases, there was an absence of objective goals. In certain others, goals were centered around sales & revenues which essentially meant that the necessary thrust for customer focus, operational efficiency, quality, evolution and other success factors required for sustenance & performance were missing!

2) Yet another crucial factor that determined clarity was the number of goals that an organization pursued. While no goals or for that matter sales only goals obviously meant ineffective management having too many goals was also a problem. Having too many goals blurred priorities thereby reducing clarity on what actually mattered the most to the organization. A global study based on the law of diminishing returns suggests the following

3) The third crucial factor owing to a low clarity in the what, was an inherent disconnect between strategies & the customer! Oxymoronic? Well, its true! Although customers are an indispensible partner for success, not enough attention was being paid to understanding their precise needs. (In case you missed the article, please click here).

4) The fourth crucial factor were the goals themselves! On the one hand, certain organizations provided more impetus to an extrapolation of past achievements while setting goals, thereby not factoring organizational & market potential. On the other hand, organizations laid a lot of thrust on aspirations while setting goals, in which case the market realities were not factored. In effect the desirable balance between market realities, past performance & aspirations remained unachieved.

5) Last, but not the least was a missing alignment from the organizational stakeholders who were actually responsible for implementing the strategies on the ground. We found that the average alignment achieved by organizations was 72%!

The gap stemmed from factors like,

 a) No buy in

b) Only one or few entities could see how they impacted the organizational goals. The remaining organizational entities really did not see the connect between their contributions and the organizational goals.

 c) The measures for any given goal seemed to remain the same across various levels, thus blurring accountabilities & alignment. The following pyramid showcases the typical distribution of focus areas for success.

This really set me thinking how the poll predictions went so horribly wrong!

I don’t doubt for one moment the mathematical models or the competencies of the data analysts. In fact, I do believe that poll analysts would have some amazing models built from years of election research and experience that would most likely predict, to a great deal of accuracy, what the election would turn out to be.

As a person who is obsessed with data, this story reminds me of a fundamental principle of data analysis or for that matter life; that of removing biases! I wonder what the predictions would have looked like if the sampling for the poll surveys had been done with lesser biases. In fact, one of the local English channels covering the US elections reported a few people arguably from the Clinton campaign coming out of the White House exclaiming “where are these people who are voting coming from?”

Isn’t it as simple as the equation,

Even great models fitted to samples with bias = Biased predictions = Biased decisions

Now, to think about it, I realized biases are everywhere and define the way we manage our personal and professional lives. As simple as it is and I’m sure this is no eye opener for anyone, but the question is, how open are we to question our own assumptions and how often do we actually see ourselves doing it?

One of my three commandments I follow in my professional life reads: “Challenge the Status Quo. Question everything, but assumptions & not ideas.” For me, the need for this commandment just gets reinforced and I pledge to myself to follow this more vigorously.