Selling HR

Everybody sells something. Most of us in Human Resources think; it is the work of sales to sell. We often forget that in HR, we are selling the most difficult commodity to sell, "Ourselves". As Head of HR, we got to sell ourselves to the shareholders (representing employee), sell ourselves to employees (representing shareholders & our colleagues in management), sell ourselves to our direct reports to enlist them for the projects and committing to a excruciating deadlines.


A HR head we has multiple hats and in all of them he has to sell, yet most of us run away from this concept and the word. We think selling is a lowly job, well the US presidential candidates sell themselves to the public and if that is not the hottest job of the world, then  which is? For the hottest job of the world, the candidates go to great lengths to sell and sell hard.


HR has to learn the art of selling and who else but our dear friends in Sales can help us learn it. We got to see them and learn from them in their natural surroundings, we should accompany them on sales calls, work with them when they are selling targets to their teams (be cautious when they oversell the same and learn to avoid all the silly  mistakes they make while doing this). In turn barter your HR skills especially the ones about managing people with them, everybody wins at the end of the day.


Once you have learnt this beautiful art, you sell the Sales job to Sales employees, that to me is the Master Stroke. I remember in my last assignment I had to sell a Sales job with decreasing compensation to sales employees (if you joined at INR100 by the 3rd year your salary would be INR50), I greatly enjoyed it. It gave me a challenge which had never been encountered in India and we ran that model of compensation for 4 years in the company before stopping it. In those 4 years, I hired roughly 450 sales employees where by their fixed salary used to get swapped by variable and get reduced by 50% over a period of 3 years. It too guts to join such a job and such a company. I admire their courage and their self confidence to be in such a situation.


The toughest job in HR is to attract and select the perfect candidate for the job and we all know that their is no perfect candidate just like their is no perfect spouse...but we all believe that there is. Often enough it is HR who has to sell to the candidate the company, sell to the manager the candidate and in the end sell the best offer to the candidate to join. Still under the illusion that 'Selling' is not his job. 


Great HR heads are selling all the time; their company to the candidate, their proposals to board, their company and the manager to the exiting employee, themselves to anyone who attends the numerous training programs they run themselves.


Selling is inherent to HR, whether you like it or not........Learn to Sell.


The joke with my friends in Sales is that it is the HR person who sells you your job in a company, so who is to say who is better salesman!!

The only Constant

It has been a while that some quote got me thinking, my brother in law said to me "the only constant is the human behaviour". Well it is an oxymoron statement, when we keep on saying in the corporate that the only constant is change...we never realise that whatever the circumstances...wherever in the world we are...whatever we might be doing or going through...humans react the same way to similar situations.

The human beings behave in the same way to the stimuli thrown their way...if you are sad you cry...if your boss shouted at you...you will be sad...if your boss praised you...you will be happy. Certain things remain in front of us and we never notice. It is perhaps the same with humans. Since we interact and are with each other so much that we never realise who we are, what motivates us and what will be our behaviour. Our brain keeps on labeling people and categorising them: teachers, politicians, doctors, indians, americans, europeans, african etc...we remain humans and we react the same way to same stimuli.

So what is the point...the point being that in corporates we need to pay more attention to humans than to anything else since in the changing circumstances we still know how can we get them to give their best since their behaviour is predictable. The only thing which is predictable in an unpredictbale world. The Manager has to play a far stronger role in understanding his team, their behaviour and whole being rather than the person who has come to work for you. This person comes with connections and these connections do not leave him...since he is physically in office does not mean he is not worried about  his family.... is not thinking about the evening program with his friends etc. If a manager knows people...he knows work...he knows productivity...he knows the key to the workplace. Many organisations and managers are not able to understand this reality and hence keep on grappling with issues which are superfacial and not able to go deep ever.

Even in the best of B schools they do not teach; how to handle humans, they do teach organisation behaviour, psycholgy etc but they never teach how to handle human beings, their emotions, their motivations, their moods and keep them engaged. Most of us learn by experience and is it not sad? Understanding humans is a learnable skill and we should strive to provide the same on the job/ in MBA or other places.

It makes imminent sense to learn to deal with the only constant when everything else is changing fast.
Isn' it?

A World without Steve!

The last 25 years from 1984 to 2011 have seen fundamental changes in the way the world operates. Steve made a dent in the universe and left. A boy of a single mother, a lad who left university education because it was a drain on his foster parents resources and a dreamer left this world. He showed us many traits of a human being who truly wants to make a difference. He left a legacy which will be remembered for a long time to come.

I have never seen/met him, I only heard him and was fortunate to see him live on internet while he unveiled iphone4. No other death, including the ones of near and dear ones has left a hole in the way his has. He truly showed that it is the mad ones who lead the sane ones and always will. I have seen many comparisons of his leadership style to others, to me he is more than a leader he was an inspirer. He was a poet and a plumber rolled into one.

In his brief journey on this earth he played his part well and with integrity. He will continue to inspire me and egg me on to do my bit in building a better world. I will try to make a nick in the universe, Steve!

Understanding Millennials

I was invited to share perspectives on the mentioned subject at the 7^th Young Managers conference of National Human Resources Development Network (NHRDN) held almost a fortnight ago in Delhi. I was deeply honoured to have been invited and sharing the table with eminent personalities from the industry. I was accompanied by Sonali RoyChowdhary, Ashish Rajpal and the discussion was moderated by NN Akhouri.

The topic of discussion was Understanding Millennials , it could not have been trickier as 70% of the audience was Millennials.  It was a post lunch session and as a panel we had limited choices to keep the audience awake; we decided to change the format of engagement, we involved the audience from word go and asked their perspectives on the topic before sharing ours. This did the trick and we got a lot of questions and comments early on, and kept the audience awake.

From my perspective I diced the pie into 3 parts:

·         Societal

·         Organisational

·         Personal

Societal: Most of them come from nuclear families and both parents working.  Millenials are constantly being bombarded with new gadgets, new applications and more choices. They have the pressure to choose from these constantly. They have their friends across the world and can keep in touch with them instantaneously. If they want to know something then there is Google, their dependencies on other human beings is low. They have a constant need to be “Me”. The first person to be satisfied has to be “Me” in all transactions unlike the earlier years where parents’ came up first. Sacrifices were common and contributions to home were expected…all this is a past phenomenon.  Corporate have to leverage this by thinking of “WIIFME” equations in all that we do…whether for policies or for customers.

Organizational: In their working time most of the Millennials are surrounded by various kinds of digital instruments which keep them up to date on what is happening around them and they all like to respond to these demands on an ongoing basis. Most of them own an IPod, Smartphone, Laptop and now increasingly I pads. Hence the organisation, which is going to attract the best of them, needs to provide for such Distractions!! (Gen X thinking) and in fact perhaps help them in coping up with all of this. There is a need to listen to IPod while working on your laptop; we used to call this distraction. Gen X has to learn to keep up with all the gadgets and the shorter spans of attention from Millennials. Corporate has to learn to be able to engage the employee in spite of all this and consistently communicate with them in spite of all the devices. Many modern day IT companies have been able to this successfully while others are on their own learning path.

Personal: in our minds (or is this a marketing guys conspiracy?)  we keep on segregating people and employees into categories. Truth of the matter is that we are all human beings and most of the things which appeal to us are same. We value relationships, we value someone giving us time & paying attention to us, we value our opinions and someone agreeing to them, we value respect and we value someone explaining to us the reasons and the “whys”.  As managers we need to understand the above and keep these small things in our mind while dealing with Gen Y.

Some simple equations to deal with Millennials:

·         Give them space meaning give them work and direction, do not supervise

·         Treat them as equals shun the hierarchy

·         Give them respect for what they know (trust me they know a lot about a lot of things, we as Gen X have no clue about)

·         Expect them to be diligent and sincere not necessarily ones who spend 14 hours at work

·         When you hire someone, you hire the WHOLE being with his/her mind, heart and soul, provide opportunities to nourish all aspects in the organisation

·         Trust them

In the end I would like to sum up by saying that we are all humans, whichever generations we might belong to and if we treat each other like humans, we can go much further and faster than we are. We can grow to be more kind, respectful and yet abundant to create meaningful work and world.

Data Vs. Feelings - An organisational Battle

It is said that you should let your biases be known upfront, and here is mine – feelings win all the time. Here is my point: even data creates feeling. The way we perceive data; it creates joy, defeat, awe, suspicion and I can go on…

Yet it is data which wins in any modern organistaion most of the time. I am sure that there is a logic (and data) for this, it might be that it is easier to make a point and other people understand data rationally, objectively. It is not far long ago that English ruled almost half the world and did it for a long 200 – 300 years without computers, data flying across continents in milliseconds. Ships traveled across the seas (in much longer time although). Are we going to measure the progress of humankind by the amount of data we have created or will keep on creating?

Even the most cold hearted person on this earth feels the cold in his heart. All the modern organisation theories want us to look at data. We want to convert feelings into data, convert the non-tangibles into tangibles. Imagine a story based on data, it is like Martin Luther King saying, “Of the 1 million and 4 thousand dreams I have had since my childhood the one which I dreamed on 13^th May 1950………”, you get the drift. Will you be motivated by this?

Are you going to argue about the date and the time this dream was dreamed and how/under what circumstances this dream created the vision he wants to implement, how fast and how early the success could be?”

Feelings stir us and prompt us to action, data is damp and squid, it triggers a thought but does not make get us into action.

Action is created by feelings and feelings which can stir us.  

Purpose and Engagement in an Organisation

I have been tinkering with this thought for the past few days. In my opinion organizational success is created through the pureness of its purpose. The thought of many people rallying for a cause is bigger than the idea of profits for a few sharerholders.  What causes people to give their best for an organisation is not few rupees but the notion of working for a cause (it may be their own cause).  That is the reason why progressive organisations allocate time to employees to follow their own causes and passion (in turn creating new opportunities for the employer).

I am sure that this is not an original or new thought but here is an equation which we can mull over:

Purpose of an organisation ~ Engagement of employees

The higher the purpose, the higher the engagement, lower the purpose, higher the disenegagement. Purpose cannot be for a few employees in the top management, it has to be transmitted and adopted at a faster rate than the loss in its transmission. This can be very challenging in a large or a growing organisation.

Purpose can be easily lost in the day to day transactions of an organisation, it can be lost in the very transactions which are needed to bring it alive. It can easily be lost in the turf wars of implementation. It is lost on the new employees who are walking in consistently in a growing organisation or are being hired to replace the ones going out.

The organisation has to find reasons to reiterate, weave stories and communicate it back to the employees at frequent intervals, where the vehicles chosen to communicate are different while the message remain same. The purpose has to define the activities of an organisation, whenever an employee asks a question to himself, ‘ Why am I here’, “What am I doing”, it is the purpose which should bring her back and keep her focused on the job. Once that question gets answered the employee is back on the job with her mind and the heart.

If the purpose is important and the employee has to consistently be reminded of it, who should be doing this job, do we need a Chief Storyteller in an organisation or is the CEO one?

Storytellers & Organisation Behaviour Specialist

I think storytellers and scriptwriters are better judges of human behavior than OB specialists. Psychologists keep on examining the reasons why people behave in a certain fashion in organizations and what motivates them. I say, do not look beyond the base emotions of anger, greed, jealousy, hate, love, loyalty, revenge and fear.

I am sure we can add some more feelings to the list but a good manager and a great HR professional keeps looking for these emotions to find out what will work in his/her organization in particular circumstances.

Sometimes it is difficult to put data on the table for these feelings but ask the data oriented guys (vis-a-vis touchy feely guys) as to what are we trying to do with data except for satiate the feeling of “I Know” and a sense of fulfillment by making a point.

I wonder if the data oriented guys overlook their feeling(s) while listening. In a meeting when they are looking at their ‘blackberries’, I think they are ‘bored’. They look only for those points which will interest them and many of them are yawning, they feel ‘tired’ and ‘exhausted’.

The world is full of feelings and so is corporate, the sooner we recognize and put them in the right place in the corporate the better it will be for employees and shareholders; who I think feel “cheated” when they do not get the returns they are looking for.

If  Mckinsey’s Rajat Gupta’s tale was to be examined, I think ‘Greed’ will score above everything else including success and fame. I am sure you are familiar with many more such tales, including the day to day one’s happening in your company and the in the corporate world.

Like I say, “People are People”, let us treat them like that and we would have taken care of profits and fairness.

Blackberry Fall

Life is a straight road
Thought I
And the only thing keeping you alive is the black stubs

Typing in
In a world of my own
Did not see the steps
Down came the Humpty
With blackberry in his hand

Get up and shake those thoughts
Oh no! What happened to my blackberry?
Scratches on the corner,
The silver paint peeled off
Like blood from my pet
Koochie coo it a little
As it stops.

The black thing in my hand
Dead

Learnings From The Week

A lot happens in a week and here is a quick read of the learnings from my past week:

• People are people (anywhere in the world), most of the participants in the Singapore conference were shy and reluctant (at first). 
• Involve people and they like to respond and would like to be heard.
• Compensation problems in South East Asia seem to be heading towards more variable pay over the coming years.
• New Practices will gain over Best Practices ( since the world is becoming dynamic and by the time Best Practices seem to take root, other ones have come up).
• Compensation is the reason number 1 for people to get attracted and stay put in the company.
• Engagement will make people productive and add value to the places of work

Compensation is Tricky!!

It is early morning in Singapore and the sun is still not out yet. I am here for the 3rd Annual Compensation & Benefits in the Financial Sector seminar by Marcus Evans and looking forward to the panel discussion and presentation. I will be speaking on Top Talent in Growth Markets : Fitting in Compensation & Benefits.


Compensation always generates a lot of interest and is the base level reason for all of us to work. It has interesting nuances and can make us behave in strange ways; it can attract us to a company, keep us in there till a reasonable threshold but can not engage us in our work...for that we need other stimuli and that will be the topic of my discussion.