Myth of Work-Life Balance

We love to cut up pieces of life. We like to be in control by making byte size pieces of our whole. We love to live life and hate to work. We love the dichotomy of life and make sure that we say that we work to live a life while primarily we are but living. We find a lot of meaning in our life while most of us are constant cribbers about our work. Our work has become the venom and our life is the antidote on a day to day basis.

There is only life, the myth of work life balance has been created by someone who does not understand the concept of Life. Life is holistic, it consists of all parts, work is but one of them. The minute you say work life, you are negating life and you are pitting work against it. All corporate employees have been brain washed into thinking that what you do outside of work is life and what you do at office is work.

Is this notion not ridiculous?  Take a look at all of us and specially human beings who do not work for  the corporate, do they not do work? Are they not doing something or the other to earn a living and  live a life. It seems that corporate is a different  world existing within this world. The thought of corporate being another world and having to live by the rule of work life balance is demeaning.  I think we need to reinvent the work life balance paradigm and get back into the paradigm of life where work is part of life. Work happens without corporate too and in corporate. We need to think of ways where employees who truly value the organisation should be working there, the purpose of the organisation should resonate with their purpose, with their life.

Work life balance negates the purpose of work and makes it the enemy of life.  We try to keep on balancing the two, imagine a paradigm where you do not need to strike a balance. The best work life balance is to be seen in the arena of sports, art, drama etc,  it is but one for the actors, poets, artists. If the artist does not love what she is doing, it shows and public does not respect her work. If she is working all the time, how boring arts will become. The purpose of drama and art will disappear and it will just be work, how meaningless!!

The reason it is so simple in many of the other forms of life (which are different from corporate) is that the very purpose of existence of a person is joined together with the work she does. The "Why" of work needs no explanation, it is the purpose of existence.

Simon Sinek beautifully shares in his TED talk, the importance of explaining 'Why' of work. If most of the organisations explain the ‘Why’ of their existence, we will have better organisation and productive employees. To take work out of work, organisations will have to make sure that they keep their efforts “on” to continuously explain the 'Why' of work.  We have to make an effort to get this going and it is like the revolutionaries pursing a cause, they have to keep going at it and keep on explaining the reason for existence constantly. For they fear if they lose the touch with the reason for existence, people will not be motivated to join and nothing will keep them together, they will wither away.

In modern day organisations, we have to be explicit about the "Why" of existence. This “Why” helps many employees with the purpose they are working for and no longer the demeaning work they undertake eveyday. Work Life merge into one and no longer be enemies of other.The myth of Work Life balance needs a lot of undoing for it to become meaningful for employees and organisations. 

Let us live Life and make Work but a part of it.

Follow Up

Follow up

If there was one thing which distinguishes great managers from good, in my opinion, it will be ‘Follow up’. There are many ways to distinguish between the two but ‘Follow up’ is an essential ingredient in the success formula to be a ‘Great’ manager. This is the distinguishing quality because it does not come naturally to us. This has to be consciously developed, thought about, kept in mind and the quicker we learn about this, the faster we climb the ladder of success in corporate.

All of us are daily dealing with our colleagues/subordinates making promises to complete assignments, or help us with certain jobs. We have a plethora of things on our calendar to finish, we have meetings to go to, we have clients to meet, we have jobs to complete, we have deadlines to meet and we have reviews to finish....the list is endless. When we complete the mindless act of round robin, we realise that some of things said in the last meeting have not moved an inch, the client meetings were fantastically good and we felt nice but we have not sent her the requested information and we also have not followed up on the proposal, we completed 95% of the job 5% is still remaining and the critical approval has not yet come in. We finished the review with the subordinate and agreed on a set of things to be done and both of us were just silent on the same till a quarter passed. The developmental promises made between us have not been fulfilled.

“Follow up” is an essential ingredient of our success framework. We need to make sure that if need to move to the next level then we need to follow up. We need to make sure that we get things done, execute flawlessly. We need to follow up with everyone else and we have to “Follow up” with ourselves. We keep on making false promises to ourselves. It is easiest to postpone things which no one knows about. Make sure to "Follow up" with yourselves.

It is that time of the Year – Performance Management , Tips for the Boss

I promised I will be back with the tips for the Boss.

Over the past 2 decades of personally engaging in performance appraisals as a Boss, I have gathered few tips, these tips will make the appraisal discussion a lot easier on you as a Boss. I am sure you can relate to them and see both the sides (specially if you have read my earlier blog on the subject). 

Here are the tips for you as a Boss:

• Empathise...this is the single skill you need to have/learn to be the STAR in performance appraisal meetings
• Prepare and conduct  2 different meetings for the appraisal discussion, yes, 2 meetings for 1 subordinate; 1^st one for listening (no interruptions from your side and a wonderful opportunity for subordinate to present) and 2^nd one for sharing your observations, feelings and data...give constructive and not destructive feedback
• Gather data about your subordinate from his colleagues & customer (make it clear to the subordinate that you will be doing this). Data thus gathered is objective and has multiple perspectives and hence more acceptable
• Share Feeling s about the performance and the year (separately) & qualify these feelings, talk about your feelings, share your perspective(s) with out either being defensive or aggressive
• Summarise and headline subordinate’s strengths, spend considerable time on what you like about the person more that about his development areas
• Be crisp about the development area – help her see it through your eyes
• Be prepared for awkward situations and do not be surprised at the reactions on development areas, many times the person can not see it and this is a blind spot
• If you have the same subordinate for several years, do take care not to be repetitive, if you do not anything new to share...just share progress over last year and if subordinate has done some special efforts to overcome a development area...share your appreciation
• Share Progress over last year’s development plan & talk about it
• Do not share your rating in the first meeting, listening gives you better time to prepare for the 2^nd meeting where you can share the rating and the process to a rrive at it
• Share specific agreements  and disagreements on the KRAs and be specific for each KRA rather than being generic about the performance
• Show the path to development (please bounce off with HR before the meeting) with specific commitment from your side and gain one from her side
• Listen, Listen, Listen, Listen, Listen................................
• Gather & Present Data
• Above all “Be Fair”, even in the most trying circumstances ( you will sleep well at night)
• Subordinates will remember “How” you treat them for the rest of their lives
• Empathise

Happy Reviews!!

It is that time of the Year – Performance Management

Most managers I know dread this time of the year because it is time to review performance,  give feedback, take feedback and decide on bonuses & increments (this should not be that bad!).

The outcome (bonus/increment ) is pleasurable but the process; to be fair, transparent and judgmental to another human being, specially the ones who we see 8 hours of the day is not easy. Switching to an objective hat does not come naturally and many of us keep on postponing this crucial work till the last moment. When there is no choice and the last date is approaching (complete the inevitable), we sit down, try to remember vague details from the year gone by  and conjure up ratings basis recent memories (not all but most of us do follow this process).

I know I have been a little harsher than I should be but believe me that even the objective journalists, clinical doctors, surgeons, CEOs, lawyers & just about everyone shies away from this task. Corporate managers hate and abhor it.

Wouldn’t  it be nice if someone made the whole process easier  with a magic wand. The hard process should somehow disappear and the easy part of rewarding  simply happen. Alas!

Over the past 2 decades of personally engaging in this exercise, I have gathered few tips as a subordinate, these tips will make the appraisal task easier for your boss:

•  Gather & Present  Data
•  Share Feelings about the performance and the year (separately) & qualify these  feelings
• Summarise and headline your achievements (on top of your appraisal form, attach a separate sheet) 
• Be modest (supervisors hate it when you come with a chip on your shoulder)
• Show Progress over last year’s development plan & talk about it 
• Do not inflate your ratings, remember your boss is someone’s subordinate (& knows the same tricks) 
• Listen, Listen, Listen, Listen, Listen................................ 
• Gather & Present Data

I am sure you want a great appraisal rating and excellent feedback, take the initiative and write your appraisal with passion, sincerity and dedication (do not forget the data!!). 

Your boss is bound to notice it and be fair in return. Fair rating is a great rating, it will genuinely help you move up in your life.

I will be writing tips for the bosses in the next blog !!

Happy Reviews!!

2012 - Trendspotting in HR

2012 is going to be another year of adjusting, giving up familiar terrain and adapting to the new. The economy has a mind of its own and keeps on acting like a twirling river. The predictions for the year are all out now and strangely nobody seems to know  which direction are we heading in. It becomes very difficult to say what the large trends for HR in 2012 will be or whether we will survive the Mayan predictions.

There is certainty that HR will be in forefront of business whether we are laying off or whether we are hiring (baked) talent. HR has become the new all pervasive function,  any CEO who wants to stay ahead in race will have to learn this new skill, partner consciously and deliberately with HR. HR function which largely stayed in the background is suddenly under spotlight.

HR Head(s) will have to learn new skills of managing the up and downturns of a twirling economy and getting out of the stability mindset, they have been used to all these years. Agility and managing ambiguity are the competencies one will have to add to the quiver. There will be little difference between the Business leaders and HR leaders, the gap needed to run a function effectively has been narrowing down over the years and will further reduce this year. More HR leaders will start their transitions into Business roles,  few of them will leave their functions to take on fresh roles and some of them will add more functions to their portfolio. Many of the current HR heads who are scared to make the transition will have to let go of their chances of promotion and value addition to the business.

Another area which will get impacted in 2012 is coaching. The current unregulated and non standardised infant industry (in India) of coaching might see more clients asking for credentials before engaging in the process. Early signs of certification in the (Indian Coaching) industry might start seeing the light of the day and ask for credentials of self claimed coaches .

Engaging with a younger, short attention span and multitasking workforce will call for different bag of tricks. It may mean more communication through social networking tools, using twitter, facebook and  blogging  for company communication and networking. HR Heads will have to get familiar with latest  technology and make sure that their management team also familiarises itself with the same. This will be essential for leaders of future and might start getting added to the management leadership competency list.

Compensation will be under stress as businesses reel under the pressures of economy and the nature of compensation will move to more variability and pay for performance schemes.  Fixed increases will move from double digit to single digit numbers in India.

HR Analytics will start playing a major role in defining the new dimension of decision making in the HR function. Buying/Leasing latest technology to effectively use this technology for business decisioning will see increased usage with many companies especially in the service industry,

Discretionary effort of the employees will be under pressure and hygiene level engagement will keep average performers in the company while high performers will be on the lookout for better opportunities...not a bad time for companies looking for talent. 

Highly competitive job market will see a war only for high performing talent, very different from the earlier years.

An interesting, adventurous and pressure cooker year in the offing which will bake the talent...much needed....isn’t it?

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!!