What is state of your mental Health? A self-check toolkit.

 While we go for regular physical health check-ups, even if otherwise ok, we seldom do mental health checkup! Authors cum practitioners  like Alain De Botton, Dan Arley, Adam Grant, Jordan B Petterson and Browen Berne, do share some insights which can often be collated as barometer for self-checking the state of ones’ mental health. I wander what would a self-check mental health barometer looks like!  

Shy of asking Chatgpt or google, here is my list:

1 Are you able to consciously edit various thoughts emerging in your mind, to select the empowering ones and discard the debilitating ones?  It does not entertain thoughts that reminds us of our unworthiness or fuel the feelings of regret, remorse, resent or conceit.               

2 Are you able to retain the general trust in goodness of humanity and reconcile with selfish acts at the individual level?

3 Can you resist the temptation of comparisons to others, either to feel good or bad?

4  Recognize the unreasonableness of cheerfulness as the only desirable end-state state, and any other as sub-optimal?  “Worldy” people are likely to be less happy than they seem. 

Albrecht Durer (1493)

5 Realise that every explanation that looks plausible may not be real, and that randomness could as well be the real reason?  Not every unsuccessful man is so, because of laziness or stupidity.

6 Able to compartmentalize thoughts and emotions and maintain sense of proportionality of response to the situation.

7 Able to recognize fear as state of being and mange it through recognition and additional dose of curiosity. 

8 In quest of seeking more, not to undermine what is already there.  Recognize that Every situation has the possibility of being worst! Can you express gratitude to crashed pillow that ensures good night sleep.   

9  Once in a while you remind oneself of transience nature of being, and its insignificant presence at cosmic level.

10  Are you comfortable with laying boundaries in relationships and can utter warm sounding but definitiveno, without affecting prevailing level of affection 

11 Appreciate the role of genes, parenting, and early childhood experiences in shaping us, but not hold to these convenient factors to defend your learnt helplessness or laziness.

How much you score and what is the ranking criteria- I cant say- but may be there is some realization where to focus to strengthen our mind!

AI: Powerful Strategic Lever- Define its purpose, plan and deploy it RIGHT

Book is general purpose read on how AI is being used by variety of organization, and understandably these are at different levels of maturity in their leverage of AI for business benefits.

Authors rightly argued three major strategic objectives in using AI: Creating new offerings, Transforming Operations and Influencing Consumer Behavior. Calling out influencing behavior capabilities as distinct objective makes it easy to measure the effectiveness of AI intervention, while the second order benefit may reflect in revenue gains, brand loyalty or reduced cost of serving customers.

AI domain itself comprises multiple type of technologies, classified under Statistical Machine learning, Logic based systems and semantics- based AI, making choice of right technology or combination of two technologies to develop solution becomes critical decision point in AI journey. Different technologies have different uses, and fully evolved AI-fueled organizations may have different combination of AI technologies being applied to address different use-cases.

Authors rightly argues that the effective use of AI need not be full replacement of human effort say by automating the insurance claims for car accidents or designing driverless automobile, but equally by solutions that augment human effort, by providing suggestions and timely assistance. The stories of Morgan Stanley Next BEST Action System and Guardian driver assistance System by Toyota illustrate this strategy quite powerfully.

Business value comes from AI in production and that also when embedded in workflows. Pilots, prototypes and proof of concepts are good for learning but deployment demand much more- planning, data and system integration approach, capacity creation, disruption management and resource commitment.

Interestingly successful cases referred in the book, have CXO level sponsors who had good hands on personal experience in the technology and deep appreciation of need for patience and sustained effort on road to AI-fueled transformation.

People readiness approach towards AI presents challenges, especially coming out of lack of sufficient clarity on the impact on current roles on account of AI infusion, including future in-house capability and capacity requirements. Unprepared communication around AI programs are likely concerns around employment continuity for the existing staff. At the same time, efforts required to upskill and redeploy staff in AI-fueled set-up demand early start.

If you are serious about AI, you need to be serious about Data. Most companies have major data management projects underway along or prior to taking AI program, The more proprietary data you can leverage and multiple data sets you can uniquely combine, more differentiated AI outcomes and potential value creation opportunities shall emerge.

Authors have listed use cases of AI across various industries in a very concise bird view manner – covering both the established and emerging use-cases. Given the interest in this subject, there is too much material available across channels on AI- be it published books, free articles, websites and you-tube videos. Where this book scores is providing the holistic view and supporting with real use cases and some experiential insights.

It is good read for early learners in this area, to be followed us with deeper study (elsewhere) in any particular aspect that one finds interesting and relevant.

Megatrends : known threats but include hidden opportunities too…..

Nourel Roubini has pointed out to ten trends that have the potential to hugely redefine our future- and more so in a negative way. Author sees the inevitable coming of stagflation, which is going to be severe and prolonged because of economic decisions taken historically that promote debt and lead to boom-bust cycles, and recent government and central banks' fiscal and monetary responses to meet COVID challenges.

Megathreats emerging from demographic, geopolitical, environmental, and technological fields, with the potential to realize simultaneously, will further exacerbate the situation by imposing supply and demand side shocks to the economy

Some of these threats are well known, and to that extent, the book doesn’t add much to the literature related to these areas. For example, issues coming out of strained China relations, increasing protectionism and changing trade patterns, the growing burden of an aging population and shrinking workforce, the multi-dimensional impact of climate changes, advancement in AI and its impact on employment, weaponization of Dollar and its implications on currency markets, and dangers of crypto-currency going mainstream. These are complex topics that are being intensely debated and researched elsewhere and to that extent, it is not fair to expect the author to be hugely insightful and original in analyzing these trends.

While the book lists what all is and can go wrong, it provides very little guidance or ideas on how to arrest the situation. Author's recommendations for averting these mega-threats are bordering more on hope than a structured plan or a specific set of interventions. His viewpoint that 5 to 6% growth in advanced economies, will help to come out of economic mess hinges on assumption that prosperity generally helps tide tough situations better, and also reduces conflicts. How to make economies that are traditionally growing at 2-3% double their growth rates? And doing it in a way that doesn’t worsen the debt trap, create bubbles, sustain employment, increase inequality etc etc.

Further prosperity distributive mechanisms need to be equally strong, given the toxic effect of inequality on peace in the society, and providing universal basic income type of interventions may not be enough.

Expecting technological innovations to come to the rescue by significantly improving productivity and making growth green, climate-friendly, and sustainable is stating the obvious. Accelerating the speed of innovation and mainstreaming its use in a fragmented world with commercially diverse interests and diverse strategic priorities, is another challenge- so much evident during the recent CoVID Vaccine development and distribution game being played at the global level.

The author has analyzed the global macro-trends with a predominantly American perspective, with some references to Europe and China. Clearly, the implications of these trends may not be equally severe or threatening for all countries across the globe.

Seeing from India's perspective, the decoupling of US- China, demographic shift, changing role of global currency (USD), and shifts in global supply chains. the growing movement towards green technologies and rise of AI may actually be MEGA-BOOSTERS, creating immense opportunities and driving next phase of growth.

As rightly suggested by Roubini, we should recognize the need for revisiting one’s traditional investment portfolio (60:40 Equity-Debt) to potentially include short-term bonds, Gold, and Real-estate, as these are likely to help protect capital in uncertain and inflationary scenarios better.

In short, while the book does reasonable justice to listing the dark sides of major global trends, it severely falls short of any new and fresh advice on how to handle these threats and lessen their likelihood to materialize and improve society’s resilience to manage the overall impact. 

Are you more like Mr Evolving or Mr Comfort in your focus and actions?

My worry is that he has started spending too much time discussing those who got lucky? 

A Comment by Manager about his team member during talent review meeting made me think!

Everyday we indulge in multiple interactions with colleagues at workplace for work and ancillary purposes.  In our engagement set, includes those who are above and those below us in organizational hierarchy- ie seniors and junior folks.

Similarly, we may classify these folks as more or less competent than us, and this classification is purely personal, based on individual assessment of others competence in comparison to self! 

These two parameters combined puts all the fellowmen we interact with, into four categories.  How and how-much one interacts with people in each category, helps one get labeled as from Mr Evolving or My Comfort camp.

Mr Evolving has his set of friends like Mr Positive, Mr. Enthusiast, Mr. Trusting, Mr. Learning, Mr Curious and Mr. Experimenter, who together share certain set of characteristics when deciding how much time is to be spent with colleagues placed in each quadrant and 

what set of assumptions would drive those interactions.

What is the most differentiating feature is this  camps focus on encouraging and respecting competence across levels with intent to learn and also mostly under-playing the role of luck in driving outcomes. They do not spend effort or energy on arguing too much on so-called system aberrations or difficult to fathom deviations.  

 

 

 

Contrast this to Mr Comfort, who has friends like Mr Sceptic, Mr Justifying, Mr. Precedence,  Mr. Avoidant, would spend most of their time in lower quadrant seeking assurance of their competence level from those below and also presenting oneself as the under-valued, victim of the system, making selective convenient reference to those above in hierarchy.

 

  

Indeed, leaders of both the camps are effective communicators, use good set of examples in support of their PoV and display immense ability to sway loyalty and grow their followers base.  

Unless, seen in the form of pattern, each of the arguments presented by these leaders appeal as persuasive, realistic and worthy of merit. 

Like most of us who say hello to all colleagues, we may also be spending some time with members from both the camp and do attempt to understand their perspective.

But do we really know, which camp is our resting place? For it matters in the long run. And unless consciously resisted, the shift to Mr Comfort camp may happen without much notice.

Is our understanding of position same as that our colleagues associate with us? When was the last we validated this?

Here is a self-revealing exercise:  

1. How is the total time split across four quadrants?

2. How often is luck or system referred to as reason to justify outcomes (positive or negative)?

3. How often have I advocated competence enhancement as step to growth? 

4. How many conversations have been about gaining new experiences with associated discomfort? 

5. Is there NEED to rebalance time allocation and attention shift from Luck to Competence?    

Be in the camp of your choosing and not luck…it matters !

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,