I am a CEO too……………..So are you!

Everyone is a CEO of the organisation called “myself” .  Do we live like one and how effectively? Is the key question.

Corporate world has put CEO term at high pedestal, with so much of aura, mystique attractiveness, and expectations attributed to this word.  Most of us are not, nor will we, get to wear this title in our lives.  What does it mean- is all advice and research around CEO excellence and effectiveness not of any use to us? 

And now that we don’t wear that title, can our expectations from ourselves be any lower? Not really. 

How about living our lives as CEOs of our respective organizations called “myself”. 

Are we steering our “Self” organizations using similar frameworks and practices that we expect formal CEOs use to run professional organizations?

Consider the following:

1    Effective CEO defines and displays what the organization stands for…..consistently.  Have we defined our personal values, priorities and aligned our behavior is sync with the same?  Are we comfortable making trade-offs in line with stated goals and priorities? Have we defined the our brand preposition or have we left world to interpret us as per their convenience?

2    Effective CEO is clear about the performance measures that matter and is rigorous in their evaluation.  Have we defined balance scorecard equivalent, that covers various dimensions of life- social, health, wealth, etc, both for the short and long term?  Do we keep keen eye on our assets and liabilities and have established objective ways of measuring their strengths continually? Are we honest and strong enough to acknowledge to ourselves the true picture or readily accept convenient explanations?

3    Effective CEO monitors and adapts to the ever-changing demands of ecosystem:  Do we spend time understanding the context and needs of all set of stakeholders (parents, kids, neighbors, colleagues etc.) and have designed way to engage with them?  How sharp are our abilities to sense weak signals and shifts, and how dynamic are we to realign to the changed situation?

Above three are illustrative nudges that will provoke one to define the personal agenda to transform into an effective CEO.

In essence, being a CEO means embracing few non-negotiables, and being prepared to live by them: ie

Accepting Accountability for outcomes (its consequence of one’s choices with no-one to blame),

Engage in Continuous Learning (and reinvention, while tied to Values) and

Respect and Humility (whatever the provocation)

Take charge and experiment living like a CEO of “Myself” for a week and share your feedback with fellow CEOs!

CEO excellence decoded: it’s about six mindsets and supporting practices that matter most!

Authors, Senior Partners at Mckinsey & Company have identified six mindsets that distinguishes Best CEOs from the rest,and supporting practices as adopted by these CEOs in their role, culled out of interactions with impressive list of CEOs across wide spectrum of industries and regions. Among the six mindsets ie Direction setting, Organization Alignment, solving for Team psychology, Board engagement, stakeholder connections and personal effectiveness, I found the one dealing with team and decision making quite thought provoking.  

My takeaways from team management mindset and associated practices are as follows: 

1. DACI often works better than RACI:  No matter how much we use RACI, I often find people arguing between R & A and experiencing difficulty in allocating right actors to each category.  DACI framework creates no such confusion.  (A)approver is the person who approves the decision, (D)river is the one who proposes and also delivers what is approved, (C)ontributors are mainly team members and Informed are all those who are likely to be impacted from the decision and overall project.   

2. Serious Reviews are primarily for those not doing well? Is it? There is not much to discuss as all results look good- really! DO we now the reason behind success? Is the success by design and deliberate effort or outcome of fortunate events? What is the likelihood of continuity of success? What if there is lot more potential as the assumptions behind target setting have gone wrong, and no one is revealing it? 

3. Between Data and Dialogue, make SPEED an essential ingredient: Neither the advocates of data can ever be sure that all data has been collected, validated and analyzed, nor the experienced believers of intuition and gust are satisfied in their ability to articulate why they feel what they feel and convince others- and the situation keeps crying for decision.  And this is where the decision timeline brings necessary closure to the issue.  

4. Solid performers are not second class citizens: Do you prebook all the excellence rating slots for those you want to promote?  Do you classify the excellent piece of work done by solid contributor, quarter after quarter, as nor worthy of praise as it has become norm for him to deliver at that level, given his tenure in this role? Imagine getting that quality from his replacement as pinch test!  Do you dismiss those not matching your career ambition levels lethargic, lacking initiative and drag

5    Drag between decision to let go and its execution serves no one:   Yes, you have shared the expectations, you have provided performance feedbacks, you have proposed coaching and training support, but the outcomes are still not up to the mark.  The inclination to give another chance and avoid delivering the verdict only leads to another drag on team performance, dent on your leadership credibility and one more quarter of anxiety to the person suffering underperformance.  Whenever I have let someone go, my only regret has been that I should have done it earlier! 

6    It is quality of cement not strength of individual bricks that decide how strong the wall is:  Leaders cements the team through clearly defining behavior charter, meeting norms, information sharing expectations, integrity and accountability standards and disagreement resolution process.  CEO must be perceived as playing fair to all members, while accommodating for individual needs and aspirations in a transparent manner.  No less important is the task allocation process, to ensure that tasks that deserves team efforts get teams and those that are delivered best through individual accountability are not thrust on the team.

7. Finally, who is welcome in the team:  Someone who adds another dimension of competence to the team portfolio, has history of contributing in Team effectively through his conduct and has Character others can admire! 

Among the other mindsets, few practices that are worth reflecting and reiterating include: 

8. Resource allocation practice:  It is expected that CEOs would continually review and redistribute the resourcesallocated across businesses and units in response to changing context and opportunities – Best CEOs tend to do this three times more often!  These CEOs have developed practice to sharply identify what to nurture and what to pruneamong opportunities that are not unfolding as per plan, and take necessary actions.  

9. Pick only one thing to change in culture:  Best CEOs identify one element of the work environment that makesbiggest difference in delivering desired outcomes and needs to be changed.  They use all levers including communications across forums, stories, personal conduct, measures, to bring change in that element.  Key here is to identify the one element that needs to focus on (closely aligned with strategy), among many options, including temptation to change multiple elements at the same time.  It is clear recognition of the effort required to make meaningful change and hence the need to concentrate energy. 

10. Boards have their own reason to exist Best CEOs facilitate boards to do their duty, while leveraging them strategically to drive his/her own agenda as well.  There are fairly known ways of engaging with board members, including exposing your management team to board and other practices that are well documented elsewhere - may be Best CEOs are able to practice them more astutely. 

11. Making stakeholders interactions meaningful to all: CEO messages need to clearly explain his intent and decisions by relating to five segments ie self, colleagues, company, customer and society.  And while doing so, it is important that underlying narrative stays the same, else any perceived inconsistency in messaging would create trust-deficit.

 

12. Manage your Personal effectiveness- Given the time and energy demands of the position, focus on doing what only you can do or should do? It is also good to prioritize within time allocated to each segment – say 30% to external parties than prioritizing across whole stakeholder segment.

While books such as above are often questioned for their originality of ideas and newness, their real value lies in culling out differentiating practices from large swathe of options, supported by reference to CEOs who stand behind these suggestions.

 To that extent, it helps do self-assessment against what the Best CEOs are doing and if the reflection ends up provoking reader to experiment with one more practice, the time spent on book is worth it!

What did my stint in HR teach me about transformation?

To integrate the hard and the soft stuff in Transformation Design itself !

Period between roles is often the best time to reflect on the lessons learnt during the stint and to update the favorite frameworks and approaches one uses to concretize the benefits.  As a transformation professional while working with HR professionals, I learnt the need for adopting an integrated approach to transformation design that beautifully marries the hard and the soft stuff, with promise to produce better outcomes.  Let me elaborate:

Conventional approach to transformation involves designing interventions around PTP ieProcesses, Technology and People, bound by the overall objective, be it growth, profitability, competitiveness or any combinations thereof.  Guiding assumption is that If one designs theprocess right, ensures right level of technology enablement and trains the people involved, the transformation will happen.  And if this recipe doesn’t work, the focus shifts to addressing culture factors and seeking leadership sponsorship.  Consequently a change management professional is added to the team to take care these needs and address the low adoption challenges. I have myself used the above approach to varied level of effectiveness.

Although, increasingly there is a realization that process and technology design dimensions are so intertwined, given the systems having inbuilt processes, the two have to be designed together instead of sequentially addressing each of them. 

During my stint in HR, I closely witnessed the significance of a robust competency framework in forecasting future performance and its utility in talent acquisition and development areas. Most of the performance gaps are often explained in terms of competency proficiency deficit and accordingly follow-up remedial measures are designed.   Further, the HR community would always bring employees perspective by asking what is in it for the employee or the manager to support the change? 

My optimism linked to the effectiveness of revised processes would also get countered by the argument that it may not work here.  There are evidently several instances where despite having processes and technology enablers in place, the activities performed did not meet the expected quality and overall outcomes.  If it is a practice that only the selected profiles are uploaded and not those applied against the position, process and technology are not at fault, for instance. 

This made me think: How about replacing the three dimensions of transformation design from PTP with PCI? 

Practices reflect an unique marriage of laid out processes, technology enablement and the actual way activities are performed by the doers.  Practices are observable and closest to outcome.  So define the normative revised practices and then move backwards to get right processes, policies, technology architecture, information integration etc to support the same.  If the focus is on customer centricity, what are the new practices that need to be introduced while dealing with customers and meet their requirements. What are the best practices, that we need to imbibe from the competitors or cross-industry leaders? To get those practices rolling, what process changes and technology infusion needs to be in place?  Defining practices brings concreteness to the leadership sponsorship sought, by insisting their personal conduct reflects agreed set of new practices.

Competencies: Seeing the impact of transformation through the competency angle makes the whole exercise inclusive and comprehensive.  Evert transformation exercise may include revision of competency (functional, technical and behavioral) mix in terms of type and proficiency levels of competencies required. Examining the revised portfolio of competencies required within the team to meet transformation objectives (deliver in practices) allows for making calls on competencies that need to be sourced from outside, invested in development internally, need not be further invested in, etc.  It also allows for including in the consideration set, the competencies available with consultants, outsourced partners, machines (AI/ML/RPO) besides employees, to meet the requirements at collective level. 

Incentives:  “Never underestimate the power of incentives to influence behaviors” is the statement that every economist swears by and is fully agreed to by the HR community.  Well defined incentives (payoffs in terms of rewards or penalty avoidance) are the best way to align organizational and individual goals.  Transformation exercise influences the existing set of incentives by having disproportionate impact on different stakeholders, making a case for revising the incentive framework.  What are the metrics that are measured and rewarded, individually or as a team, at what target level, how much and, in what form- all these elements need to be revisited? If the practices require greater teamwork, continuing with individual level incentives may be counter -effective. Are there (dis)incentives required to establish new practices? Will the additional incentives be perpetual or come with a sunset clause? How closely are the incentives linked to value realization from transformation exercise and to what extent is the value created directly attributable to the individual and team contributions.

While Practices, Competencies, and Incentives do figure out somewhere embedded in the conventional transformation design they do not get the deserved focus.  In the conventional approach, we design the hard stuff and sprinkle it with the soft stuff interventions.  

By using PCI framework soft and hard stuff are collectively considered while designing interventions, thereby leading to greater probability of success.  

Of-course, even in PCI framework, one would have to carry out the required process redesign, technology enablement and people realignment, except may be in a more outcome focused and an adoption centric manner.

Try using PCI framework next time and do share your feedback,  

Living Finite Lifespan WELL is about Prioritisation and not Productivity……

It is quite a revelation to relook life span in weeks and the realization that weeks are moving fast, while we continue to prepare for life when all will be done, be in control and at peace, allowing us to live our Life. 

Let us look at Oliver Burkeman take on living the alternate way, through set of insights:

1. The more efficient one becomes, the longer to-do list becomes- same is true for emails as well
2. Distractions are welcome as relief from something we need to do but not like to spend time doing! Don’t blame the social media which is designed to get your attention to provoke distraction.  
3. Forced busyness to get everything done avoids the pain in deliberately choosing where to spend our finite time as humans, and confront loss of choosing what not to do (FOMO syndrome)
4. Self-deception lies in the belief that future version of ours will be more certain, problem-free and in control of time, and one will live well then!
5. Realizing cosmic insignificance of single life liberates one from over attachment to adding meaning to every moment of living and makes it easy to be accept modest contribution and be less hard on self

Some suggestions, worth experimenting with 

6. Put hard upper limit on the tasks one will work on at one time and any addition to the list requires completion or removal of item in ongoing tasks list.
7. Consciously choose where less than excellence is acceptable ie strategic underachievement is ok
8. Consolidate areas wherein one will contribute ie take one cause that you would align with, instead of shuttling between various genuine causes, all being worthy of support
9. Do not postpone generosity, be it praising a colleague, offering help to someone in need, on the pretext that one would do better or more effectively later on- later may never come! 
10. Use the principle of taking out saving first from income and using rest to support whatever expenditure possible, to time as well ie staring with spending time for most essential first and then second essential onwards till the fixed time gets all used up.   

The book rallies around the need to revisit our relationship with time and to let go the quest for being in control and being top of everything.   The essence of time management lies in better, ruthless and guilt-free priority management and accepting that some stuff will never get done.

While the central message of the book is not new nor radical, it is the cogency of the arguments and references to research work, thinkers and relatable analogies to daily experience that make it an interesting read and hopefully influence readers’ mindset as well.