What GICs Can Learn From Startups To Compete For Tech Talent

GICs (Global Innovation Centers) often face tough competition from startups regarding attracting and retaining top talent in the tech space. Startups are often perceived as more agile, innovative and exciting, while GICs may be seen as more bureaucratic and risk-averse. However, GICs can leverage several advantages to compete with startups and attract top talent.

First, GICs need to highlight the benefits and perks they offer employees, such as stability, strong company culture and opportunities for career advancement. By emphasizing the unique value they offer employees, GICs can differentiate themselves from startups and attract top talent.

But can they do more? Could they maybe emulate certain aspects of startup culture that most attract the top talent and thus offer a "best-of-both-worlds" workplace? Read on to find out.

Advantages Of GICs Over Startups

One advantage that GICs have is their association with large organizations, which offers stability and security. While startups may be more exciting and offer the potential for rapid growth and big rewards, they also come with higher risk and uncertainty. GICs, on the other hand, can be attractive to employees looking for long-term career growth. Another advantage GICs have is the resources and expertise they have to offer a range of professional development and training opportunities, which can help employees build new skills and advance their careers.

GICs also tend to have more structure and more defined processes and job descriptions, which leads to more consistency in operations, better-managed change and more structured rewards and recognition programs. On a more personal level, I find that GICs often offer better recreational facilities as well as access to counseling and mentoring, meaning that work-life balance may be easier to maintain. Finally, GICs are often a part of very reputable global organizations, which adds prestige to any employee’s résumé.

Now that we’ve listed some of the advantages GICs should emphasize when competing for talent, let’s see how GICs can emulate startups to offer some of the same excitement and agility in the workplace that often attracts top talent to startups.

What Can GICs Learn From Startups?

1. Remove some of the bureaucracy

One central point of criticism toward more prominent legacy companies is the amount of red tape, which slows processes down and can effectively halt innovation and creativity. If you want to compete for top talent as a GIC, try to give more ownership to your department heads, cut down on bureaucratic processes and consider introducing something like Google’s 20% rule, which gives employees time to work on whatever they are passionate about. Much innovation arises from this kind of freedom.

2. Become more fun

What makes startups so much fun is the informal work environment, the pace at which work is done, the spontaneity and the culture that encourages team members to be friends and have fun outside of their work responsibilities. It can be easy to import some of that into your GIC environment: Encourage people to create non-work-related Slack channels to discuss their hobbies and interests, trust people more and control them less, and host fun events like hackathons and fascinating talks by top authors and celebrities.

3. Allow for more exciting roles

Multinational corporations often have very narrowly defined roles that can make more creative spirits feel trapped in a job description that gives them little opportunity for creativity. Consider being more flexible with job descriptions and encouraging employees to weigh in on what they would like their role to be. That way, you will have more engaged employees and better results as they work on things they genuinely care about.

4. Offer more opportunities for growth

A GIC definitely has an advantage over a startup regarding long-term career prospects and succession planning. However, in the short term, the opportunities at a startup are more exciting. In a startup, someone who comes in as a software engineer could rise to CTO within three or four years.

What opportunities for growth could you offer to those who are ready to take on more responsibility? How could you make their mid-term prospects more exciting? This is an important consideration, as the average tenure at any one organization is getting shorter, and the younger talent often advances their career by changing organizations every three to five years. If you only offer long-term opportunities, you might lose out on some of the top talent.

5. Create a startup-like environment in capsules

Could you have an innovation center—a kind of Skunk Works, where the atmosphere is more startup-like, as it often is in R&D departments? Could you create a part of your GIC that allows more flexibility, creativity and playfulness to enter the workplace?

Offer The Best Of Both Worlds

As there is increasing competition for top talent in the tech space, companies looking to recruit the best and brightest must set themselves apart to become attractive. GICs would do well to redefine their employee value proposition (EVP) by focusing on providing a flexible or hybrid working model and offering a range of other benefits to attract top talent.

The best way to do that is to offer candidates the best of both worlds: the excitement, pace, innovation and creative challenge of a startup environment combined with the stability, reputation and long-term opportunities of a GIC.

First published on Forbes.com in June 2023

How Global Companies Can Attract And Retain Talent

The talent competition is tough, especially in the tech space. Talented engineers and designers have many options open to them. What can global giants do to attract the most sought-after talent to their teams? How can they create a hybrid work environment that is hard to resist?

Some of the issues leaders face in hybrid work environments are that employees feel less connected and managers feel that control is slipping. Maintaining a positive culture and keeping morale up is more challenging when things get tricky.

In recent years, global innovation centers (GICs) have become an increasingly important part of multinational corporations (MNCs)—such as IBM, Cisco, Deloitte and Glaxo Smith Kline, to name a few—as companies seek to remain competitive in a fast-paced and digital world. Since these large business units are often located in a different country from the HQ and have a particular set of tasks, they need to offer a different employee value proposition (EVP) to attract the specialized talent they need.

Before the pandemic, many companies relied on providing attractive work environments and accessible services to lure in top talent. Today, in a world where many people want to work from home, these perks are less effective. Many GICs are responding to this shift by offering more flexible, hybrid and remote work options, which can be a crucial part of their EVP.

Let's explore how you can learn from GICs' practices and leverage your hybrid work environment.

Get The Basics In Place

First, get your hybrid work environment right. How much face-to-face interaction do you need and want? What type of interactions does your culture require? Looking at your employee profile, how much flexibility is needed and desired? What kind of infrastructure do you have in place? What do you need to create the best hybrid work environment for your employees?

The second step is fully leveraging technology. Make sure you have clear guidelines on which software is used for what. Big companies use up to 50 different social and collaborative software platforms, which can get confusing. Try to reduce the number of platforms you use and clearly define what they are used for, e.g., email for more in-depth content, Slack for quick questions and coordinating meetings, etc.

Give your teams access to exciting technology to get their creative juices flowing and enable them to work most efficiently.

Thirdly, communication is now more critical than ever. Put some effort into achieving maximum clarity in your communication. Text updates are usually not enough; most people won’t read them, so think of efficient ways to do live updates at regular intervals. Make sure everyone has access to all the information they need.

Also, when speaking on Zoom, ask people to keep their cameras on whenever possible so that there is more of a connection. Leaders should set an example that others will follow.

Leverage Your Hybrid Work Model

When you’re offline:

When you’re at the office, make the most of personal interaction time, especially as a leader. Use this time to interact with your people face-to-face and build rapport. Nothing can replace meetings in real life for relationship-building. It’s also a great way to gauge morale, hear people’s ideas and create open and transparent communication opportunities.

So organize some nice "away days" or retreats to take your people on, and make sure they spend time together in person regularly. You need that real human interaction to keep morale up and your culture alive and thriving.

Offer some engaging personal and professional development opportunities. Let key people travel to conferences and events where they can engage with other industry leaders, offer in-person workshops on days when people are at the office and have some fun with team- and culture-building activities.

When you’re online:

Since most people are working remotely now—at least part of the time—you can create new cross-border collaborations. Get people from different teams together, and let them exchange their experiences, challenges and successes. Encourage cross-functional collaboration to accelerate innovation.

You no longer need to have separating lines between countries and departments; working online opens up a whole host of opportunities, and most MNCs should exploit these more fully. Allow yourself to be daring and creative to come up with new ways of working together.

Another thing that becomes easier online is mentoring across levels. Embrace both classical mentoring, where more experienced professionals mentor the younger generation, as well as reverse mentoring, where the more youthful generation mentors the more experienced colleagues on some of the latest trends in tech, etc.

Finally, give your team members access to coaches and counselors, provide mediators to help resolve conflicts and offer your leaders memberships to critical networking and mastermind groups for your industry. Opportunities for advancement and development are a big part of the EVP for most employees.

In Brief

In addition to offering flexible working models, GICs also provide a range of other benefits and perks to attract top talent, like opportunities for professional development, access to cutting-edge technologies and tools, and the chance to work on innovative and high-impact projects. Consider what other elements your global company can borrow from these centers to appeal to employees.

First published on Forbes.com in June 2023

Four Steps To Evolve From A Regional To A Global Center Leader

From support centers to centers of excellence and innovation, global centers (a subsidiary of a multinational corporation based in the United States or Europe in a lower-cost country such as India, the Philippines or Romania) have evolved and proven their resilience during the pandemic. How about their leaders, though? Have they evolved as far and as successfully? Let’s have a look at the expectations that MNCs have of their global center leaders and how well these expectations are met.

Global centers started out as development and support centers for MNCs. Straightforward jobs were outsourced to lower-cost regions while creativity and innovation remained at headquarters. As global centers grew, more and more of them evolved into centers of excellence with a focus on research and development, product development and design. Banking, financial services and insurance companies and professional services firms started expanding the scope to cover research, underwriting and consulting.

Recently, since Covid-19 forced a lot of businesses to start or accelerate their digital transformation, some global centers have started playing a role in facilitating these changes globally. These pioneering centers have acquired talent in emerging technologies such as data analytics, artificial intelligence, the cloud, blockchain and cybersecurity. This rings in a new age of value addition in global centers and makes global centers more attractive to so-called unicorns and other rapid-growth businesses. Gojek, Uber and Grab are examples of unicorns that have Global Centers in India.

In my coaching practice, I have identified four steps to help regional leaders transform into a global center leader:

1. Think locally but, more importantly, globally

Global centers are part of MNCs and as such must have a global perspective combined with local knowledge, not just of their own country but also the other countries where the respective MNC has a strong presence. A global center leader needs to think strategically when making decisions on which offices to allocate projects to, which locations to grow, etc. The issue at the moment is that global center leaders often feel they are competing with other locations.

It is time to think on a more global scale about what is best for the organization as a whole. Leaders need to prove they are thinking strategically and holistically. They need to show their understanding of the overall organizational health of the company and where/how they can contribute to improving that. They need to leave behind the mindset of pushing their own people and their location forward to instead look objectively at where the best opportunities lie for the organization as a whole. This requires them to network with their colleagues in other locations and to initiate collaboration wherever it might be beneficial.

2. Contribute at a strategic level

What does this look like on a practical level? It means going beyond delivering projects on time, at lower cost, faster and with higher quality—that is the baseline for global centers these days. Global center leaders are expected to go beyond the old "tell me what to do and I’ll do it better than any other center/team/person."

Nowadays the expectation is that global centers contribute to the future direction of the company, that they earn their seat at the table by going beyond problem-solving, that they take a more proactive role. Even MNCs want to create more agile work environments these days. Digital transformation is a fast-paced field where constant innovation is happening and there are countless opportunities for pioneering Global Centers to forge new paths. Guided by questions like “Where will the next five-year growth come from?” leaders can take the opportunity to anticipate, think ahead and contribute to shaping the future of the company.

3. Move from cost arbitrage to business growth

In order to execute that move successfully and develop a more entrepreneurial mindset, leaders need to strive to deeply understand their customers’ needs and pain points. Who is your ideal customer? What are they struggling with? What obstacles are they encountering when they want to engage with your product or service?

Leaders can start their exploration in their local market, participate more, join the relevant conversations, meet their customers and competitors. Then, expand into the international market.

Another opportunity is to keep abreast with the business, i.e., stay connected across sales, services, product management and engineering—locally and globally. Global center leaders need to move not only with the times but ahead of the times to stay relevant. What is the next emerging trend? How can you be one of the pioneers of it?

4. Expand your sphere of influence

Traditionally, global centers have promoted generalists. They have shied away from too much specialization so that employees could easily be deployed on a variety of projects. Once leaders get to a certain level, this is no longer sufficient. They need to supplement their generalist skills with some deep expertise, especially in strategic areas.

Being an industry insider and having a good overview of global trends and developments in your niche are vital for the role. What regional and global trends are there in your industry? Where is the innovation happening?

Combined with essential soft skills like networking and executive presence, this ensures they have the ear of the right people, allowing them to consult internally on various strategic matters and to get involved at the executive level. This, in turn, helps them build their reputation and thus their global influence, creating impact beyond their immediate function—a vital step toward professional growth opportunities.

Global center leaders are sitting on a potential gold mine, especially as the pandemic has not only changed the global workplace landscape but has also proven the resilience of global centers. If leaders understand how to leverage their advantage and onboard the right talent to evolve to the next level, they can grow their global centers exponentially.

This article was first published on Forbes.

Preserve Your Core

We dreamt of space travel, hover boards, flying cars, and many other revolutionary changes. Little did we know that our lives were going to change in phenomenal ways in the coming decades, but not as we had imagined. Technology has seamlessly integrated itself in our lives in such subtle ways that we do not notice its existence.

Analytics and the Changing HR Game

There are numerous definitive ways in which Big Data and analytics can change the HR game, enabling an efficient and agile shift in human resource development and management. What are some of the areas that analytics will play a huge part, and how will this shape the future of the corporate world?

There is a set of problem questions that ubiquitously plagues every HR or Business Head. Some of these are along the lines of:

• What will my turnover be next year?

• What factors drive employee turnover?

• What are my biggest workforce risks?

Predictive analytics to provide such answers would hugely simplify processes for the HR department. Decisions, predictions and expectations become more objective and realistic, and therefore the path forward is significantly more concrete than it would be with the traditional guesswork approach.

The good news? There is an abundance of data available, 90 per cent of which was collected in the last two years alone.

There are numerous definitive ways in which Big Data and analytics can change the HR game, enabling an efficient and agile shift in human resource development and management. What are some of the areas that analytics will play a huge part, and how will this shape the future of the corporate world?

Managing Talent Agility

• The HR departments of the future will largely focus on talent agility. There is increasingly a shift being seen from attempting to foster change and recruit new people, to actually ensure that the talent deployed is agile and can seamlessly move with the times.

• Predictive data will give the HR department hints on which direction the trends are moving in. This will help build a people pool with the latest business developments in mind.

• Aligning and realigning at regular periods of time will prove easier with data available on people and their skills. As agility becomes the new norm, talent will have to be matched to work and vice versa.

Talent Advisory

• With talent agility, the HR department will also become career advisors. In a world where agility leads everyone to change careers at regular intervals, the unit with the most data at their disposal, will be the most effective source of career advice.

• The HR department will also be in charge of workshops, training sessions and onboarding initiatives that will align employees with their new job roles in a rapid, yet efficacious manner.

• In assigning new job roles, or simply giving input for employees’ future options, the extensive performance data will prove very useful. Analytics can help search through years of data across the organisation, match competencies, look for keywords, and find talent potential where mere human observation cannot.

Freelance Talent Management

• With the dawn of HR analytics, the future workforce with be mobile, possibly remote, and will be employed in multiple jobs.

• Talent acquisition will also expand. Rapid talent mobility will lead to freelance marketplaces, rather than job boards. These will deploy employees on a project basis, incentivising, evaluating and finally redeploying, all at a swift rate.

Persona Hiring

• Lengthy job descriptions will no longer serve any purpose. Roles will be created according to need, served and then dissolve in a rapid fashion.

• The hiring process will evolve to consider actual past performance of existing employees, sourced from various databases. This will in turn create a persona for a potential employee which will play a crucial role in the interview process.

Ultimately Big Data will lead to a culture of fishing where the fish are. Social media and big data analytics will play a huge role in matchmaking and finding the right talent. Hunting for new talent will go the route of digital marketing, where skills will be marketed in much the same way that products are now.

The HR department trajectory will go full circle. To keep up with a fast-paced, analytics-based culture, Human Resources as a field, will have to build strategic thinking as a core competency. In many cases, the inhouse HR will be downsized, and a large chunk of HR responsibilities will be handled by specialised agencies.

While the process is fascinating and will ensure that numerous loopholes in current HR methodologies are addressed, a regular culture of impact assessment is just as important. There is, after all, an ROI on everything, right from talent acquisition initiatives to employer branding and employee engagement – all of which come under the scope of HR responsibilities. The key to successful HR analytics is, thus, analytics of HR analytics.

The dawn of a new HR age means that humans will become more human, and machines will become more mechanical, efficient and predictable. The need for effective and competent leadership will grow and ultimately people will be more real with one other, because this is what will count – honesty and transparency, and claims that line up with results from extensive data analysis.

Break Away from Silo Thinking

Have you heard about the 'Functional Silo Syndrome'? In a team of five members, when one individual shoulders all the responsibility voluntarily and refuses to seek help or divulge project details. Or on the floor when everyone is engaged in a ‘team building activity’, but this one team member will be sitting in his/her cubicle furiously typing away an email and complaining about all the ‘noise’ occurring in the name of bonding. 

Myth

If you are independent, you are more susceptible to becoming a loner. 

Reality

 Alienation (by any means) will cause you stress and adversely affect your health. 

Business Dictionary defines ‘Silo thinking’ as a mindset present when certain departments or sectors do not wish to share information with others in the same company. Carelessly tossed around for the past three decades, this situation does not originate at the bottom of the corporate ladder. Rather, it is said to trickle down from the top. 

It is said that “leadership is not a position or a title. It is action and example”.  Organisations have been trying to implement various means to eliminate silos at the workplace. How can you as a manager help in changing the silo mentality? 

Work towards unifying the team

Address the issues that are central to the organisation. Encourage employees to align themselves with the same vision. As their leader, steer the wheel with conviction and lead by example. Support cross-departmental collaboration for various projects and activities. The goals of all employees must be aligned in the direction of general progress of the organisation and not just be limited to the fulfilment of their individual departmental objectives.

Why Do Employees Quit Organizations When They Are Doing Well?

It makes complete sense from an individual’s perspective to quit a job when one is ahead and doing well. However, no one works in isolation – there are always repercussions of an individual’s performance that go far beyond the self. There is a good chance that the next level is also doing well, is empowered and the general chain of hierarchy is undergoing the opposite of a domino effect – each domino is enabling the next one to stand up and stand strong.

When one person who is doing well, quits the organization, it negatively affects their team, their juniors, and the company as a whole. Not only do recruiting and on boarding costs come into play, it is also their absence that is felt, because they were an integral link in the chain.

Why is it, that despite being in a great place professionally, employees choose to leave their organizations in search of greener pastures?

Employing EQ to Emerge Through a Crisis

Any crisis brings with it an atmosphere of hostility and ambiguity. Whether it is an internal or external crisis, it threatens the stability of the organization. Although, crisis protocols and programs are usually in place, the uncertainty attached to a crisis can create unrest significant enough to shake the very foundation of corporations. During this critical period, it is necessary to have a high emotional quotient (EQ) to deal with the volatile situation in an appropriate manner and to bounce back from it without any damage.

As you work towards finding rational solutions, it is essential to understand the emotional aspect of the crisis as well. When an organization is facing a situation like this, the employees look closely at the leaders for reactions and guidance. Considering the fact that their reactions will largely be modelled after yours, leaders have to demonstrate a high emotional quotient and encourage employees to do so as well. 

Empower the HR department

As the department closest and most equipped in the organization to connect with the employees, HR personnel must step up and leverage their people skills by engaging in constant communication with the employees. To evoke the EQ of the employees, this team can organize town halls, seminars, or workshops to facilitate conversations and bring about unity in the organization. 

This is the time when a company’s  policies designed to create a work-life balance become extremely important. The crisis may lead to additional work, stress or general anxiousness amongst employees. Encourage them to use their time off, provide flexibility, and promote better physical and mental health during this time. 

Experience, Experiment, Explore: Three-Step Business Owner's Guide

Remember the time you decided to venture out on your own? The days of struggle, the relentless researching, never ending enquiries, possible networking opportunities, word-of-mouth promotions, and a one-man army that was ready to take on the world. A while later when you succeeded in your area of expertise, you considered diversifying. But this decision had to be made after a thorough risk analysis.

Taking risks is a part of business. But if you kept saying yes to every risk, without weighing the pros and cons, you could have also lost your business. When it comes to maintaining the margins in the balance sheets, it can be extremely tempting to oblige to any project that comes along. But if it’s not a cultural fit and does not agree with your business ethics, it can do more harm than good.

While there are no official rules as such for the business to flourish, I personally recommend these tried and tested golden guidelines.

Experience: A much-needed reality check to keep you rooted

While business school taught you a lot, it could never replace first-hand, on-ground, hands-on experience. That eventually came from having observed the industry and its evolving trends. But what if it could have been an easier journey?

Earlier, the industry was volatile and uncertain. Now, it is ruthlessly competitive. A mentor can not only help you plan for the short-term deliverables but also aid you in strategising long-term goals. A wider perspective towards your career will help you plan better. In times of confusion, a veteran can groom you to make quality decisions even when there’s a crisis to be handled. Giving you that much needed push when you are low, but also critically evaluating and providing feedback, when you end up getting used to looking through tinted glasses.

Breaking Down Silos at Work

All businesses have hierarchies to facilitate the division of work. A decentralized system is efficient as it comprises departments with the required expertise in respective fields. However, the same system that vouches for smooth functioning can also create issues in the giant machinery of an organization.

Often, ‘silo mentality’ creeps in at several levels and establishes itself as an integral part of multi-departmental functionality. It is estimated that about 70 percent of executives see silo mentality a major obstacle in achieving goals. But what exactly is it and how does it impede progress?

We have seen tall structures used to store grains. These installations remain isolated with no windows or access to the materials kept inside. This serves as a perfect analogy to the way things operate between teams with a silo mentality.

The Know-How of Filtering the Right Talent

There are several criteria that go into hiring the right talent. Written tests, interviews, and psychometric analysis, all together promise to tell recruiters enough to make a long-term decision about a potential candidate. From a vast talent pool, all carrying with them the requisite qualifications, it becomes a tedious task to filter the right talent.

With multiple people who have decision-making powers in the process, different sensibilities compound the difficulty of making this subjective choice. There are, however, a few things to keep in mind about the hiring process and the modifications it needs. 

Conduct Effective Interviews

Professional interviews often become a series of questions and answers that are extremely generic in nature. The more generic the questions, the more cliché answers. The pattern this creates is that interviewers are not interested in the person as an individual, but rather ask a set of questions that they already have preconceived notions about and expect set answers for. The interviewee, on the other hand, prepares only to impress, providing canned answers to the questions, thereby giving absolutely no insight to the interviewer about their potential place in the organization. There must be increased focus on allowing the person to be at ease and challenging them to think before they give answers. What gets ignored often is that candidates are individuals and their personalities will either add value to or negatively affect the organization. Understand the candidate better, let them understand you, and visualize the kind of fit they would be for the company, both qualifications wise and culturally. 

Be Transparent about Challenges

At the outset, your potential candidate knows only what the organization allows to be perceived on the outside. This is normal. However, for someone you actually intend to hire, stay transparent about all the organizational challenges, the limitations of the role, and the areas for improvement in the company, especially for a role that might require change-making and innovation in existing processes. Be sure to discuss the culture of the workplace as well, and let the candidate determine whether they would be comfortable working in said environment. Show them around the office, right down to where they might sit and who they will have to deal with on an every-day basis. Take them through the amenities and facilities, and maybe even let them sit in on a meeting if possible. This will give them a good idea of the kind of discussions, briefs and interpersonal interactions that happen on a daily basis. There is currently too much emphasis on hiring the right talent, rather than allowing the talent to make the right decisions.

Stay Clear to Steer Clear of Ambiguity

Candidates need clarity on what is expected of them, and recruiters need clarity on whether the potential candidate is desirable and has the competence to fulfill these expectations. Outline the candidates KPIs with utmost lucidity, and ask them what they think of these indicators – whether they feel confident about living up to them, and whether they find them reasonable. In the case of new managers, they must always be allowed to meet and interact with their future team. This will enable them to better understand the challenges that lie ahead. Managers also need to know about the kind of support system that is being provided to them in the form of their team, while also being empowered to drive change and optimise the team after joining.

There is no dearth of talent and qualifications, but recruiting new employees needs to go a step beyond that to actually predict on the basis of insightful interviews, whether an employee is an appropriate fit or not.

This article first appeared on Entrepreneur India.

Understanding Why Multinational Firms Need Global Coaches

Making a case for why global organizations need to train their leaders under the guidance of multifunctional coaches and mentors.

As we are at the beginning of a new decade, there are speculations about if we have reached ‘peak globalization.’ If so, what does it mean for a leader, who heads a global company and is leading it into new markets? It may mean managing teams that are diverse in terms of nationality and geography or handling cross border and virtual teams. But it most certainly will mean that a challenging and daunting time is ahead. More importantly, it also means it’s time to adapt. Global organizations need to work across organizational boundaries and cross not only cultural barriers but also navigate the political and economic laws that rule the land. Add technological advancements in the mix, and you get how complicated the picture is. In such a scenario, how does a leader begin to manage and support the most critical asset an organization has: the people? Let’s find out. 

Cultural Challenges

With company branches spread across the globe, having offices in different corners of the world will inevitably bring in cultural differences. In a leadership position that requires leaders to travel overseas, experience different environments, and interact with people from other parts of the world, how do they bridge the communication and the cultural gap? Communication doesn’t just mean language, although that barrier remains. Employers and leaders must realize that culture drives how people perceive, think, and eventually act. Effective communication begins when there are awareness and acceptance that these differences exist and must be accepted. In such a case, leadership coaching can help build the conscious practice that is required to build a mindset that enables one to see different perspectives and helps in building a uniform corporate workplace culture.

Decision-Making

Business leaders make significant decisions every day. Yet, the most challenging part of leading a multinational organization is to be able to see the big picture when all the functions from various offices require equal attention. How do you ensure that leaders stay clear of analysis paralysis? Similarly, how do you ensure that the decisions which impact the company as a whole are effective and drive it forward while keeping everyone in tow? Decision-making doesn’t come naturally to people, and it’s a process that develops and strengthens over time. Executive coaching to help leaders merge the business dynamics with organizational principles and human understanding is critical here.

Building a Resilient Mindset

Resilience is nothing but the ability to recover from setbacks quickly. However, dealing with failures is not an easy task, especially with central responsibilities and if the failure impacts several stakeholders. Being in a leadership position comes with a fair share of pressure, and roadblocks are not uncommon. At times, issues in personal life start affecting the professional side as well. In such a scenario, leaders can benefit from leadership coaching to learn how to better deal with tough circumstances at work and to better manage themselves and their team in times of distress. The most valuable aspect of such a system is that over time, leaders absorb specific lessons from the coach, which they can, in turn, pass on to their team members in need.

Defining an Ideal Coach

While training for leadership is considered an essential part of developing the leaders of a global organization, basic coaching is not enough. Leadership coaches who have vast professional experience, with clients coming from diverse nationalities, demographics, and from across industries and functions, can help in tackling various challenges at work. A varied portfolio brings credibility not only in terms of what they have worked on so far, but what they can do to develop the leader. The right coach enables leaders to develop higher emotional intelligence and build compassion and empathy. After all, leaders impact people and their lives, not just improve the bottom line and share prices. An ideal coach would be someone whose experience aligns with the specific needs of the leader and can help them develop their potential. 

Multinational organizations carry higher levels of responsibility and accountability as they impact a wider variety of stakeholders. Naturally, the leaders of such businesses must be well-equipped to counter challenges thrown their way, whether the organizational changes or external disruptions, like slowing economies. They need experienced global coaches and mentors that have led by example to help them navigate the future.  

This article first appeared on People Matters India.

Team Cohesion with Differences

Teams are an amalgamation of various types of people. Everyone has a different outlook, yes, but how can we bring all these schools of thought together and channel the differences in a positive manner?

Here’s Why Companies Need to Focus on the Needs of Their Employees

It is the age where human resources and technology have joined hands and talent management, from recruitment to retention is fast-paced, efficient and technologically heavy. In fact, it is not just senior leaders and human resource professionals who look out for technologically based options for talent acquisition and management, but the talent itself thrives on the digital culture. The question that now arises is how have Millennials changed the game and how do we adapt to this change to find and keep the right talent? These questions plague every organization and the answer to this problem is a people-first approach.

Experiences over qualifications

The time for a strictly job-based approach has passed, wherein an employee used to come into work, carry out a pre-assigned set of duties and then leaves the job after completing set tasks. Millennials have travelled the world, whether it is to study, or simply to explore new places and people. Global cultural experiences are more valued than grades and scores. Worldly wisdom is respected over the traditional textbook approach. Today’s average employee seeks constant career growth, intellectual development and the opportunity for new challenges. Employees become dissatisfied, restless, and look for other job opportunities when these needs are not met.

Managing Your People During a Merger Today

A KPMG study shows, 83% of the mergers fail. Some organisations embrace mergers almost effortlessly, and then others fail because of softer, but key aspects like ineffective methods of people and culture management. A merger between two organizations can be a rocky path to tread, but if handled well, it can lead to a wonderful road down the line. It is observed often that employees report lower overall satisfaction and engagement with management, post a merger and acquisition.

This is usually due to various factors such as a mismatch in culture, lack of common vision, poor communication, poor governance and weak leadership.

The answers to avoiding these problems are right in front of us, but we just dismiss such solutions as trivial and get deeper into money matters and official training.

In the Company of Authors

When it’s Friday evening, and the week is done, a few employees of furniture-retailer Urban Ladder step into the weekend, a book in hand.

They meet at the cafeteria of the company’s Bengaluru office to pick a book and discuss it threadbare. Recently, they discussed All the Lives We Never Lived by Anuradha Roy.

A book is chosen on the basis of voting. Sometimes, the book discussion is followed by a get-together outside the office. Recently, members of Urban Ladder Book Club went together to watch Fantastic Beasts 2. All of them are Harry Potter lovers — that explains the choice of the film. Probably, everything, even films, has to have something to do with books.

Enhance the X-Factor of Your Workplace

Merely celebrating ‘Employee Day or Family Day’ doesn’t make the cut anymore. Organisations, especially start-ups need to think and do something out of the box to keep their workforce motivated. There is a need to interact, engage, and build a robust employer brand. 

Does it involve a grand gesture? Maybe, maybe not. But relooking and analysing how your workforce functions can give you the answers. Here are a few tips that start-ups can use to bring out the company’s X-factor.

Ask meaningful questions

Have you ever questioned yourself, “What makes my workforce happy?” Diving straight into the emotions of your employees can trigger an idea. Take an approach that is more introspective and solution oriented. Bring in the empathy factor and put yourself in your employees’ shoes for a day. Take a while to figure what’s lacking or how you can simply improve their daily work experience. By asking yourself and others these questions that are casual, yet thought-provoking, one can gain an understanding and get a pulse of what is happening in other's lives. 

Dealing with Politics at Work

About a year ago, in an organisation comprising 100 employees, a high-performing employee who had spent seven years in the company was wrongly fired. The IT team detected a security breach in the system that traced back to his computer. Only after an investigation was it determined that he was framed, and the breach was a ‘planned conspiracy’ in the greed for promotion.

Be it a start-up, SME or an MNC, politics has become an inseparable part of organisational structures. Here's how to deal with the mind games.

Admit to the problem

About a week ago I came across an interesting article that spoke about the relationship between an empath and a narcissist. The former believes in peace-making while the latter has become habituated to winning. You need an intervention when you realise that the team is falling apart or even worse, when you get a sense of groupism at the workplace.

It’s time to wise up and dismantle your opposition’s plans. Take a step back. Think of all the times your gut has told you that something was amiss, and you overlooked it assuming it is a minor hiccup.

Testing EQ Before Hiring Talent

‘In the next few years, the Indian staffing market is said to evolve into world’s largest’. If this is true, why do we often hear recruiters complaining of being unable to find the ‘right fit’? Because no professional degree or academic qualification will prepare you to handle a real-time crisis. When pushed off a cliff (read as made to handle a prime client in the first month of joining) or placed amidst a tricky situation, we are left with no theory to implement and prove.

Workplace Revolution 2020 According to a recent World Economic Forum report, EQ aka ‘Emotional Quotient’ has been predicted as one of the top ten skills for employees by 2020. Not the kind of EQ that can be gauged through a Myers-Briggs psychometric test, but the experiential-based learning that will keep them afloat when the going gets tough.

As an employer, we often lay a lot of emphasis on soft skills. Why? Because a people’s person will be attuned with empathy and more prone toward making emotionally sound decisions as a future emerging leader. In fact, nurturing our emotional intelligence becomes even more crucial for managers as today’s world of uncertainty and changing work dynamics require individuals who can be rational even during the most difficult times.

When Learning is a Priority, There's Always Time

Being a Consistent Learner Helps Ace Mentorship Skills

The hierarchical ladder may end, but the learning never stops

A crucial part of human development is working to improve oneself throughout life. A long-term process that needs to be sustained over time, self-development gradually builds confidence to tackle new tasks, set higher benchmarks, learn new skills and ultimately touch new heights. When moving up the hierarchical ladder, many executives become absorbed in their set roles, and in problem-solving and damage control tasks. In such a context one often forgets that every task, role and designation – right from an intern’s to a leader’s – needs continuous sharpening.

From making major organization-level decisions and acting as the single point of communication between the board of directors and corporate operations, to managing overall operations and essentially being the brand ambassador of the company – leaders have various complex tasks at hand on a daily basis. This is when learning takes a back seat. The key here is to incorporate learning into the daily or weekly routine. The options are numerous. One could listen to audio books while driving to and from work, catch up on some reading during lunch, incorporate a short training video into the schedule every day, or even arrange a small discussion with the team to present a new idea or concept each week or month. There are many top executives who take out a few hours on the weekend to catch up with other senior leaders from the industry and have an insightful discussion on trends and new developments. Often trying to learn individually can become challenging especially when it involves putting aside time. With a group of people, all encouraging, uplifting and teaching each other, there is higher motivation to ensure that learning takes place.

For a leader to be successful and ace mentorship skills, a culture of learning needs to be instilled within the organization as well as in the personal life. One should constantly be aware of the signs of complacency. The driving forces to avoid stagnant leadership are to set new benchmarks every step of the way. Every time an executive begins to feel that work is going into auto-pilot, she or he should expand the role, learn a new skill, or even mentor another apprentice. One important aspect to consider here is that each person learns differently from another. Some read, some listen, and some absorb from others, while some learn in short spurts and others prefer long-term learning programmes. When stuck in a rut, it is best for leaders to opt for a concept of subject they are most interested in. There may be certain skills or concepts that one needs to learn simply to set a base and create awareness. However, these may not trigger enough interest to help a person out of the void of complacency. On the other hand, a topic of absolute interest and passion to the person will draw them out of the rut and enable them to start on the learning path, so they can eventually learn anything from what they are passionate about to what they only have to learn as part of the industry.

Whether it is picking up new languages, keeping up to date with the newest of softwares and tools, or undergoing periodic leadership training and executive coaching, there is a plethora of learning options for those at the top.

The importance of learning is not restricted to those starting their careers. It is a process that every individual must embrace. Perhaps understandably, as long as there is a higher role or designation to reach, professionals are motivated to continue learning. However, on reaching the top, a common misconception is that the learning is complete and no longer necessary. Leading a team is as much of a skill as carrying out operational functions or administrative functions, and just like these processes, leadership needs consistent sharpening and honing. Education is ultimately the means to human development, and the culture of continuous learning when embraced by leaders will have a wonderfully impactful trickle-down effect on the rest of the organization.

This article first appeared on Entrepreneur India.