Abhijit Bhaduri's Official Website » Management

Building Learning Organizations

Abhijit Bhaduri — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 03:25:19 +0000

Times of India invites practitioners to have a webchat at Timesjobs.com. It was my turn to answer questions on 1st Feb 2012. I wish there was a way to have a “conversation” and not a Q&A. On second thoughts that may be hard to do with 2500 people at the same time. Several people had difficulty signing on and the server was down for a while during the chat. These technical hassles apart, this was fun.

Raghavendra: What is a learning organization?

Abhijit : Hi Raghavendra – a learning organization is one that has the capability to continuously learn to adapt to internal and external changes.

Neha: What essential things should be kept in mind while building a learning organization?

Abhijit : Hi Neha – The organization does this by creating processes and systems that encourage people to calibrate the assumptions that govern business and people. Every assumption is a hypothesis that can be tested. That can be something pertaining to customers, the product or service or its employees… It can be anything.

Rati: Which organizational functions are responsible for turning an organization into a learning one?

Abhijit : Rati – The onus is on every employee. Each function plays a role in keeping the organization nimble. Unless every function brings in their expertise, one part of the company will fall behind.

Ratikanta: My question would be what is the key attribute of a learning organization? How do we measure the transformation?

Abhijit : The attribute would be how tuned in the organization is to the shifts in business opportunities, the environment, the skills needed etc. The ability to ask the right questions is the first sign of learning. Transformation would be measured in the long run. Today many organizations are notoriously short-lived.

Satish: What are the challenges/issues/problems in creating a learning organization?

Abhijit : Hi Satish, success is the biggest enemy. When an organization is successful, it is hard for them to question their assumptions. Successful organizations progressively become inward looking that makes it hard for new ideas to take root. It is hard for people coming in from other companies to be heard. The old culture acts like a filter.

Mithun: Would a learning organisation provide benefits on a global scale?

Abhijit : A learning organization has the ability to succeed on a global scale because they can navigate the new markets better. They will know which learnings from their old world can apply in the new country and what wont.

Ranjan: Hi, I run a start-up. Continuous upgradation of the human resource to make a learning organization involves too much of cost. How can I optimize the process?

Abhijit : : Ranjan – Continuous upgradation has more to do with the mindset than with resources and the least of all – with training programs. MIT makes its courseware available to everyone for free. In the same way there are links one can follow on twitter. This keeps people tuned to what is happening. Within the organization create a culture where people can speak their mind and bring in new ideas. Get the younger/ least experienced/ newcomers to speak first in any meeting. Above all you can be a role model.

Eilesh: Hi, How important is it to have dedicated learning department in organizations?

Abhijit : Eilesh – A dedicated learning department helps in getting some resources across. But I believe that a learning organization uses learning outside of a classroom as much as it does its training program. Learning from peers and novices is as important as learning from experts. Play is as important a form of learning as studying. All it needs is someone who has a curious mind. (Ranjan – also an answer to your question)

Rimjhim: What are the challenges for a company like Wipro? How does learning play into meeting those challenges? How does learning play into helping Wipro?

Abhijit : Rimjhim – We have to continuously unlearn what made us successful. That is always hard. It is hard to let go of the very assumptions that have made us so successful in the past. So learning is a challenge for everyone. The ability to remain relevant to every stakeholder is the best measure of where we are doing well and where we need to improve.

Mithun:Hi Abhijit, Is building a learning organisation structured or does it evolve with the way business is conducted?

Abhijit : Mithun – I believe that the biggest challenge organizations face is to question the very ideas that they have worked with over the years and succeeded in the market place. For example: Even after research has shown that ulcers are caused by bacteria, (A nobel prize has been given for that discovery as well), we still believe that they are caused by stress or spicy food.

Shantanu: Why do companies not find employee training & learning critical and spend little when compared to spends on other areas?

Abhijit : Shantanu – Today we live in a time when we have more resources available to us as individuals than ever before. With a cell phone and a broadband connection the world is at your command. What we need to do is to stop thinking of a classroom as the only place where we learn. So stop waiting to be sent to a training program. When people learnt to play the guitar in college – so many learnt it by asking their friends and peers to teach them. Today you have thousands of sites that will teach you anything… I mean anything and for free. We need to find the time and the persistence to see it through.

Sambhavna:Mention some new-age ways, methods and techniques to build a learning organization?

Abhijit : Create immersion experiences. For instance to teach a group of our business leaders the art of storytelling we went to the Jaipur Lit Fest to give them an immersion experience to learn from the masters. Ask employees to create the course content – maybe apps for the phone that allow people to learn new stuff. Ask people who do not know the subject (novices) to advice the experts – reverse roles. I have seen that the novices can give simple solutions that elude experts because they simply know too much LOL! It costs nothing to have people who are curious. And everyone is naturally curious. Organizations have to learn to get out of the way of people’s ability to learn naturally from informal sources. Too much emphasis is placed on formal training programs. Time to break that mould – peer learning, social learning, leveraging social media eg twitter, slideshare is the key. When I read something on twitter that I find useful, I pass on the link to others. You are welcome to join me @abhijitbhaduri or try slideshare.net for presentations on any topic. For that matter wikipedia is getting better and better as experts spend their time improving the contents. Learning is no longer about having access to resources. It is about being able to have a curious mind and to filter the information that is gushing all around us. So we must learn how to sift the information and contextualize it.

Shreeyash: What is the major difference between “Training & Development function” and “Learning & Development function” in an organization?

Abhijit : Shreeyash – Training focuses on telling people the single correct answer. Learning is about helping people to ask the right questions.

Aditi: What do you suggest organizations should resort to: internal training & development programmes to enrich their human resources or external workshops and seminars? Which of the two is more effective and cost efficient?

Abhijit : Aditi – I believe that we need to get the inputs from the external world. Calibrate it with our own internal research and then create learning around that model. Sending people to generic training programs without a specific learning goal in mind is of limited value. Either case that is not something that can be scaled. Giving people regular feedback is an underutilized tool. That in itself can improve learning.

Richa: Hi, how can one transform the manual working L&D organization to process oriented, as employees show lot of reluctance to change?

Abhijit : Change is equally hard for everyone. We often try to change one part of the organization without looking at how to create the supporting adjacencies that will make the change stick. The L&D department needs to leverage technology to make learning fun, easy and accessible. Renaming a training department to calling it L&D deptt does nothing unless the approach to learning is changed.

Prashant: How do you build up a learning organisation – is it a top down approach or a bottom up approach?

Abhijit : Leaders need to be role models of the behavior. The junior employees should be leveraged to examine the organization from a fresh pair of eyes. The organization has to celebrate people who are able to help the others calibrate themselves with the changes in the external world. Also if people use learnings on the job and feel the difference it acts as a motivator to keep learning. Applying learnings is the very key.

Varnika: Why there is a gap in individual and team learning as organization’s size gets larger?

Abhijit : Hi Varnika – It is for the same reason that a fat person finds it harder to exercise. As the organization grows larger, it is important to continuously check if the processes are making it hard to listen to the signals from the field (or customers/ consumers). Does the organization have processes to check for the external trends?

Rimjhim: Hi Sir, In Indian companies top management often ask human resource Department about the ‘return on investment on learning – show me the money’. what will be a chief learning officer’s response?

Abhijit : Rimjhim: It is easy to show the return on skill training. So that’s an easy one to answer. But when you are looking at learning, it is harder to show the learning. I have a link to suggest to you for this http://abhijitbhaduri.com/2011/03/roi-of-leadership-development/. But when do we say that learning is effective? When we learn it or when we use it? Or when we combine what we learnt with what we knew and blend it with suggestions from others. So it is harder to do ROI calculations for learning.

Sambhavna: Should employee learning and receptivity to better ideas be linked to their performance?

Abhijit : Sambhavna: There are two conditions to be met: One is that I should learn something. The second condition is that I should have an opportunity to use it (assuming the problem can be solved by whatever I have learnt). If I have learnt to drive well, I should be able to drive in heavy traffic. But then I have seen the best of drivers get flummoxed when they have to drive in a country where they drive on the other side of the road. Learning is about being alive to possibilities. So it should improve performance.

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Read the full chat transcript here <click here>

Being Unreasonable and Impractical

Abhijit Bhaduri — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 00:55:26 +0000

This is the season for making resolutions. Everyone is making them. As I make up my mind about what resolution I should make, a little voice tells me that in order for me to achieve what I set out to; I must do what is practical and what is realistic. Being practical is defined as “likely to succeed or be effective in real circumstances; feasible.” Being realistic is defined as “expressing an awareness of things as they really are.” The pay off for doing what is likely to succeed and as close to the way they really are is the best way to make sure that your resolution will not raise any eyebrows. It will be a safe option.
When Dr Devi Shetty, dreamt of making sophisticated healthcare available to all irrespective of their economic situation or geographic location, it would have been an impractical and unrealistic idea. Today it does not sound so farfetched. Today his network of hospitals performs 32 heart surgeries a day and sixty percent of the treatments are provided below cost or for free.
When someone sets up a company to explore renewable sources of energy based on a sustainable development model for alleviation of poverty, creating new employment opportunities and reducing green house gases, the idea seems too big for someone to go after. Especially when you learn that Kumar Ankit is a 24 years old MBA who could have chosen to be in a high paying job instead of sweating it out in the rural areas. His dream sounds so impractical and unrealistic. Breakthrough ideas will always start off being impractical and unrealistic.
What comes in the way of dreaming big? It is the fear of failure. Psychologists tell us that when we miss a goal by a whisker, the regret that we experience is deeper than what we feel when we miss a goal by a wide margin. So why not leverage this opportunity to dream on a large canvas. At worst, we will miss it and not have much regret since it was too lofty to begin with.
Your dream must be unrealistic and impractical. Only then will it be lofty enough to inspire. Look around and you will see that there are people who are dreaming of audacious goals that are way too complicated to be done in a lifetime. They don’t care about how difficult it will be to achieve their dream.
When someone dreams of raising money to run schools for slum dwellers, it instantly smacks of being unrealistic and impractical. So is the desire to find a cure for a disease that kills our loved ones. It could be a dream of finding something to conquer inside of us – learning to fight our own monsters. Learning to challenge our own abilities and what we think of as our limits can be the most impractical and unrealistic wish we may set out to fulfill.
Let this be the year when you dreamt of something impossible. You know you will falter as you chase this dream. Let me tell you that impractical and unrealistic people are not deterred by setbacks. They develop the ability to pick themselves up and go right back to where they had left. A dream that is unreal and impractical has the ability to generate resilience like nothing else. Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life said Sophia Loren. I would wholeheartedly endorse that philosophy. Let the fear of not achieving the dream not come in the way of our desire to dream of something grand.
This year why don’t we all do something that is impractical and unrealistic? Think about it.

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Here is the audio version of this article. You can download it or play it right here. Go ahead, try it

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How Companies Build Leaders

Abhijit Bhaduri — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 03:41:49 +0000

Photo Courtesy: Rajbir Ahluwalia

Fortune Magazine’s annual list of top companies for leaders was announced recently. The Top Companies for Leaders study is conducted by Aon Hewitt, the global human resource consulting and outsourcing business of Aon Corporation, in partnership with the RBL Group, a strategic HR and leadership advisory firm, and Fortune Magazine. The research examines how organizations choose and develop leaders, and determine if there’s a correlation between leadership practices and business results.

So who are these companies that are developing leaders: IBM, General Mills and P&G take the top three spots. Two years ago, 17 of the 25 companies on the global list were based in the US. This year: only 13.

There are five global companies that are headquartered in India in that list: Hindustan Unilever, ICICI, Aditya Birla, Bharti and Wipro.

Interestingly, HUL is at number six while Unilever is at number 19. The only company from China in that list is China Vanke – China’s largest real estate developer.

What is common to all the companies that build leaders: They all have a deep alignment of business strategy and the people strategy. They all have a deep faith in grooming talent from within. Chief executive Jeff Immelt devotes about 40% of his time to leadership development.

It is this philosophy that guides why they invest in leadership development. They take a view of talent that goes beyond the boundaries of the corporations. Indian companies, for example, tend to stress their leadership role in society, which explains why rising leaders at Hindustan Unilever and Wipro devote significant resources to building hospitals and schools in Indian communities. Aditya Birla honors employees who teach villagers skills like composting and pump repair.

WHAT:

What are the companies doing to develop leaders? They are giving their leaders experiences to deal with a changing socioeconomic global landscape. Those changes are putting new demands on the nuances of markets and consumers that the leaders need to know.

For example: at Wipro we work with our leaders to understand how to deal with ambiguity. Leaders need to know how to succeed in a world where they may not have all the data and answers that can help them take the right decision. If they keep waiting for a state of equilibrium to happen they will be paralyzed by indecision. Dealing with ambiguity is a thin line they need to tread between being brash and being indecisive. The definition of leadership is also changing to go beyond the boundaries of the corporation to impacting the community.

HOW:

Companies are looking at using many different methodologies beyond the classroom to drive home these lessons. IBM sends SWAT teams around the world to coach local staff. HUL sends young managers to live in Indian villages so that they can understand the needs of rural consumers.

PepsiCo creates 10-year growth plans for individuals who are thought to have C-suite potential. The Spanish bank BBVA offers theater workshops to help boost managerial communication skills. Wipro chairman Azim Premji personally mentors 25-30 leaders at various levels.

WHY:

The most important piece that is also the hardest to replicate is the underlying philosophy that drives our actions. At General Mills, over 90% of management promotions are internal. Every single CEO of P&G started at the entry level. If someone is two-thirds ready, Wipro will take a chance on an internal candidate before looking outside.

To summarize, what is easy to replicate. The how is tougher. The toughest question to answer is why we need to invest in leadership. That reflects the beliefs the organization has about its people. Beliefs are intangible and therefore the hardest to replicate and the greatest differentiators. Think about it.

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Originally published in The Economic Times for my column Intangible Opinion on 22 Dec, 2011

See the Fortune Magazine’s article on How do great companies groom talent? <click here>

Hearing All Seven Notes

Abhijit Bhaduri — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 13:29:51 +0000

When I was in college, I had the opportunity to spend a day with Pandit Ravi Shankar, the sitar maestro. I was interviewing him for a college magazine. It was a magical day for me to sit and watch the legend practice his craft. As I was leaving he called me back and said, “May you always enjoy all seven musical notes”. That statement stayed with me. Imagine how enriching it would be if we could really train our ability to enjoy the distinctiveness of each musical note across the different octaves and scales. What distinguishes a connoisseur is the ability to recognize the notes and patterns during a musical performance.

Tone deaf people are not able to distinguish between musical notes and that is not due to lack of musical training or education. Interestingly tone deaf people have a problem only in recognizing musical notes. They can fully understand intonations of human speech. The incidence of people who are tone deaf is lower in cultures that speak tonal languages. That is perhaps because tonal languages use the same word in different pitches to mean different words. Mandarin Chinese has five tones. Depending on which tone you use to say the word “ma”, it could mean mother, horse, hemp, scold or just an interrogative particle. That must make learning such a language so interesting. We use tones to convey emotions. Try saying that sentence by stressing on a different word each time and you’ll know what I mean.

“May you always enjoy all seven notes” Can you imagine how this blessing would transform the workplace? To me that would mean being able to hear seven different kinds of stakeholders: The leadership team, the peer group, the team members, the shareholders; the community, the employees of the opposite gender and the alumni of your organization would be my choice of the seven notes we all should tune in to. Here are my reasons:

1. The Leadership Team: to understand the strategic perspective of what is happening in the industry and what the future looks like.

2. The Peer Group: to get a cross functional view of the business.

3. The Team Members: to get unvarnished feedback about your skills as a leader and team member.

4. The Customers: to ensure that you are building a business that is sustainable in the long run. That can happen only if you can delight them.

5. The Community: at a minimum, we must understand how we can impact educational institutions in the community by upgrading their curriculum and supplementing their resources by having the employees spend time volunteering in the schools and colleges from which you are hiring.

6. Employees of the Opposite Gender: I am always fascinated to see how men and women have different takes on the same events. Being able to tune in to the views of the opposite sex can make you more sensitive as a leader.

7. Alumni: I find this to be a great resource to leverage. This is not about doing impersonal exit interviews. Ask the alumni six months after they have left your organization about what pushed them out of the door. Ask them what they miss the most about the workplace they left behind and what they love about their new employer. This is a source of great ideas.

Being able to hear all seven notes is a blessing even in the workplace. Think about it.

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First published in The Economic Times for my column Intangible Opinion on 1st December 2011. <Click Here to Read>

Read previous columns of Intangible Opinion

Who Owns Your Reputation

Abhijit Bhaduri — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 07:05:43 +0000

Image Courtesy Varun Madan

Every time I visit a business school campus I come back with new ideas about careers. I met Nisha, a first-year student, who wants to be an entrepreneur. Her big idea is about launching a service that helps individuals and organisations manage their online reputation.

The social media monitoring service Reppler recently surveyed more than 300 hiring professionals to determine when and how job recruiters are screening job candidates on different social networks.

The study found that more than 90% of recruiters and hiring managers have visited a potential candidate’s profile on a social network as part of the screening process. And a whopping 69% of recruiters have rejected a candidate based on content found on his or her social networking profiles – an almost equal proportion of recruiters (68%), though, have hired a candidate based on his or her presence on those networks.

Nisha says that the real market for her lies in coaching individuals on building a positive online reputation for themselves and the mistakes to avoid. Nisha has advised her classmates against putting up photos that show them in a less flattering light.

Do not put them up in the first place is her rule number one. Rule number two is about making sure that you know what people are saying about you online. In a digitally connected world, your online reputation spreads faster than you imagine. Rule number three is to make sure you build a positive reputation about your skills. You could do that by sharing links, readings and resources on a subject.

It is like becoming the Wikipedia on at least one subject in the world. So managing your reputation is not just about guarding against negative reputations – it can be actually used positively, says Nisha. We have opinions about people we have not even met.

We have opinions about products and services we have not used or will ever be able to afford. We have opinions about companies based on what their employees are saying. Every employee is a brand ambassador of the organisation’s reputation. What the consumer says is always more believable than what the manufacturer says about the product.

Clearly, one’s opinion could be another’s reputation. Organisations are rarely aware of their reputations being sullied or built by inaccurate information put online by well meaning employees and well wishers. Worse still are pranks that can damage the reputation your organization has built over the years. In 2009 two employees of Domino’s Pizza filmed a prank in the restaurant’s kitchen and posted it online.

The video went viral with a million disgusted viewers and created a major public relations crisis. How can the firm track this stuff ? Have a specialist firm track your online reputation. If your company already has a clearly articulated policy about what employees can talk about or not in the social media then make sure you periodically reinforce it. What is once written on the Net is rarely erased forever.

Wikileaks told the redfaced government officials that even diplomatic chatter was not immune to being put into public domain. What if there were to be a Wikileaks version for corporations or for individuals, how would that change our world, I asked Nisha. The social media even in its current avatar has taken on that role is her retort. Your reputation does not belong to you – it is actually owned by others. Think about it.

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Originally published in The Economic Times on 24 Nov 2011 >