Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Korn/Ferry's ProSpective Assessment

Amazing test that is so far the best I have got to see and tested.
It brings your insight to you, the way, you never knew it...truly endoscopic, I say.

It is not a trait test, it is not personality test, it is not leadership style test. It is a tool to discover, someone, called , YOU.
Take this..and get to know who you are?

Great things come for free! One best example is this tool. Link below-

Want to discover your Top 5 Leadership Characteristics and more?


Korn/Ferry's ProSpective Assessment identifies your strengths and weaknesses and can help you get what you want from your career.

This 3 step assessment takes just 10 minutes. You’ll receive a personalized report which contains your Top 5 Leadership Characteristics and highlights your hidden strengths and blind spots.


https://linkedin.kornferry.com/InSight/MyResults/910E31793FF845E2BE742086CBF2E7E7?utm_source=linkedinshare&CV=113

Saturday, January 28, 2012

Some Great Quotes that inspire me


A man does what he must - in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures - and that is the basis of all human morality.

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

A politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen.

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.

Battles are won by slaughter and maneuver. The greater the general, the more he contributes in maneuver, the less he demands in slaughter.

Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities... because it is the quality which guarantees all others.

I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.

I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else.

Winston Churchill
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America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.

Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.

Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. As a peacemaker the lawyer has superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough.

Abraham Lincoln
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I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.


Franklin D. Roosevelt
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Coaches who can outline plays on a black board are a dime a dozen. The ones who win get inside their player and motivate.
Vince Lombardi

Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence.
Vince Lombardi

Dictionary is the only place that success comes before work. Hard work is the price we must pay for success. I think you can accomplish anything if you're willing to pay the price.
Vince Lombardi

If you can accept losing, you can't win.
Vince Lombardi
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Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works.
Steve Jobs



Sunday, January 22, 2012

BlessingWhite-Employee Engagement Report 2011

Employee Engagement Report 2011


Beyond the numbers: A practical approach for inviduals, managers, and executives
From BlessingWhite
A must read. This 77 page report is a must read in employee engagement. It is informative, practical, actionable and visually appealing. I read the report on my iPad and loved how it looked combined with the ease of how I could navigate through the report, and with the flick of two fingers enlarge tables or images.
Nuggets of engagement. Here are 11 nuggets to get you started:
Stable engagement. Despite the the economic recession, engagement levels around the world remained roughly stable 31% are engaged, and 17% are disengaged.
Give or get? Engaged employees plan to stay for what they give while disengaged employees stay for what they get.
Trust me. Trust in executives has more than twice the impact on engagement levels than trust in immediate managers does.
Survey damage. Engagement surveys without visible follow-up action may decrease engagement levels.
Engage Individuals. Work on ownership, clarity, and action.
Engage Managers. Work on coaching, relationships, and dialogue.

Engage Executives. Work on trust, communication and culture.
Full engagement. Occurs at the alignment of maximum job satisfaction and maximum job contribution.
Highly engaged. Citing McKinsey research the report states, “only highly engaged employees enable performance.
Career conundrums. Most employees don’t have clarity around their career aspirations and job satisfaction.
Geography lessons. Read the well-written meaty global analysis and recommendations for: Australia and New Zealand, China, Europe, India, North America, and Southeast Asia.

You can view the complete report on the below link..

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0BwBOW5MTJapWMWIwNjJiZDUtNDRiNS00ZDRkLTkzZTEtNmM4NTgzZjk0NmU5






Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Management is the art of losing control.

Leading a team is more an art than science and when it comes to team and success through team, the mantra is losing control and help evolve leaders all around you. An army general leads a team of colonels and they lead pack of Majors, Captains and Ensigns.

While we try to develop leaders under us, we forget that leaders cannot be developed by keeping tight control. They are developed when given a free hand to learn the ropes of the trades their own way.

Indian  cricket team is suffering it's worst at Australian pitches. Oldies not able to perform, youngsters, still learning by failures! Media got spice to call for debates, talk shows. Ex-cricketers starting pronouncing verdicts on senior players, Chief Selectors and the BCCI. These players in their days never uttered a single word against the team management, forget about the Chief Selector and the BCCI. How do they expect the players of today to ask big questions that can help save Test Cricket in India?
When you are winning , you need a manager and when you ar losing, you need a leader. MSD has this opportunity to make this turnaround. We hope, he would do this.

Our last test player that we built is Virendra Shehwag some 6 years back. We have not seen any other charismatic batsman or a bowler in last 5 year in India.
We built team of pinch hitters and some quick fielders, won the T20 world cup and World cup ODI.
This simply means that we know how to build a right team for a format of the game.
I am pretty sure, we can even build a world class test team if we want to. Test team maybe completely different from the current squad that won us T20 and ODIs.

"The Peter Principle," about to be reissued in a 40th anniversary edition, was a best seller when it was first published. A satiric treatise on workplace incompetence, it touched a nerve with readers because it was so funny. And so true. Much like the film "Office Space," NBC's "The Office," and Scott Adams' "Dilbert" comic strips, this book by Laurence J. Peter (a former teacher) and Raymond Hull (a playwright) captured the twisted logic of workplaces — tapping into how ridiculous they feel to insiders. It gleefully emitted a cloud of jargon monoxide and absurd advice as it reached its famous main conclusion: "In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."


“Promotion” in our industrial society, generally means “You’re really good and experienced at your job? Now stop doing it and start managing a bunch of people”.


“Everybody codes here, except for the accountant and the CEO. The latter used to code, but he was so bad at it, we made him in charge of everything else”.


Hope BCCI gets some lessons out of Peter's Principle.



Sunday, January 8, 2012

The Serious Catch22: Companies are helpless..employee hopeless

What happens if role of 25% employees in the organisation does not change and their salary grows @10 to 15% each year.
If salary grew @10%, company would pay 150% salary cost after 4 years.
If salary grew @15%, company would pay 175% salary cost after 4 years.
If some of these salaries at higher band grew by 20%, the cost of salary would be more that 200% after 4 years. Does your company make ~50% profit YOY?
Take a situation, Recruiter hired at 3 lacs PA gets 6 lacs after 4 years, while she still does the same job she did years back and sometimes, does less than what she did when she was new. Do you think I need a recruiter with 6 lacs if I still expect her to source resumes, schedule interviews and send me daily tracker. Compared to 6 lacs cost, a third party recruiter or contract recruiter would cost me ~2 lacs for the same job.

A training coordinator who costs me 5 lacs will cost me 10 lacs after 4 years and if he keeps doing the same job, I lose 50% each year on cost efficiency of my department.

I remember, one of my bosses in an MNC told me a situation , where her HR Generalist and other back end HR people asked her, 'how can I grow in my position' and my boss, answered her, "you will grow if you get out of your current role". That is a very logical and fair answer. Now, having answered that, If that person does not come out of her role for 4 years,you certainly lose out 50% and more on cost efficiency of my department. While this situation is unavoidable, many a times for department heads, is there anyone thinking of what is the right value of the services delivered and how to keep her team lean? If at any point in time, a Manager realises that her team is becoming cost heavy and flatter on services, what shall, she do? Having a cost heavy team does not make sense to me. I have seen HR Managers holding the same role and title for 11 years or more in the same company. Think of my formula of salary raise, this HR Manager would have gone past 3 times his starting salary and for what? Same role? same title? Same Deliverables? Huh! How can you keep seeing this happening? Do you think your justification that now the same team member serves more people because company hired more people is a baffling excuse. I see most of HR roles not even enlarge horizontally, leave aside vertical expansion or enrichment. No HR head normally keeps teams leaner, meaner and meaningful beacuse they know HR is a cost centre and business has to bear this inevitable cost.
This frustrates the employee and makes him helpless as he becomes expensive for market and flatter on his learning & execution capability and scope of work and responsibilities. This is a career blocker!
Should companies not ask such employees, how do they plan to make a better career choice? and if they do not do it by themselves, should companies not ask headhunters to outplaceplace these cost heavy and services flat people?

I believe, this is a catch22 situation and more you prolong your decision, deeper you go the trouble spot.

Trust me , this reminds me of the Wall Street Journal article I read sometime back, where it talked about companies who have stopped doing performance appraisal and have started making more 1-1 meetings and feedback with managers. They hire compensation consultants every year and set the compensation for each position.
Do you think if other companies start hiring Compensation and benefits consultants each year and agree with their recommendation, lots of static positions will be ruled out and as a result companies will do justice with cost and services and also with employees who become top heavy and feel helpless and get a sense of eroded self-value and esteem?

Choice is yours.

Saturday, January 7, 2012

Sodexo-Employee Humiliation Tool

Jan 1, 2012 and Sodexo or meal vouchers are not accepted by major retailers. They announced well in advance though message printed on their point of sales counters. Food Bazaar even used speaker systems and kept announcing through Dec 2011 in their stores. BIG CHANGE and BIG savior.
I almost always had a bad experience using such vouchers..

Reason-1. Did not know whether it works in this store or not. Had to ask the cashier. If they did not accept, the cashier would not even look at me and say, NO, and expects me to go out...as we have seen beggars being treated, when they come with their begging bowl..
Reason-2 As soon as I pulled out my bundle of meal vouchers to pay, the biller would give me a tired look as he will have to count the tickets, which may be combination of Rs. 10, 20, 35 or 50. It kills his time, asks him to check for expiry dates, enter in his system ticket numbers, and face agitated people in the queue behind me, who will keep asking him to hurry up
Reason-3. As soon as I pull out vouchers to pay, my fellow payers at counter would give me a humiliating look as if I am at a below poverty line (BPL) , Public Distribution System (PDS) store and survive on subsidy. Some even give me a dirty look and leave the queue thinking I will take a lot of time as I am using CHILLER to pay the bills.
There may be more reasons and you can send your comments on.

I have always considered this voucher as a humiliation tool and am not sure, why HR would call it a motivating, tax saving tool.

2012 will bring many more such big/small time changes.
Pay little tax, save on humiliation. Live with pride.

Time to stop Employee Farming!

  #Twitter  handle in Nov 2022 tweeted: "bye literally everyone"! Elon's tweet confirmed that this action was needed as  #twit...