Proactive Re-skilling

Today's ET contains a short interview with management guru Ram Charan. The gyaan he gave was more or less routine, but one paragraph that caught my eye was this one:

To be world class you need to focus on people. A leader's highest lever is people: people before strategy. People compete, businesses don't. Leaders create vision or embrace a vision, they align people emotionally, they lead other people to a certain direction, but they also have to develop people ahead of the business needs.

Let's take a closer look at the last bit: "leaders have to develop people ahead of the business needs". Companies will go through ups and downs but as a leader, you need to keep moving things forward, for which you may sometimes have to redeploy key people in new and unfamiliar roles. Such changes may especially be required in bad years like 2008 and 2013, when it would not be unusual to move someone from delivery to sales or from production to maintenance. But such a transformation cannot be achieved suddenly or in a "perform or perish" mode. As a leader, you need to anticipate the need for such role changes well in advance and start re-skilling the concerned employee. This is where constant engagement with the team becomes crucial. If you have regular meetings with your staff, even during "business as usual" times, you can identify candidates for re-skilling and get them started on the learning curve. This makes it easy for them to pick up the new skills at their own pace and more importantly, it becomes easy for you to re-deploy them at the right time.

Football and Leadership

The Corporate Dossier supplement of today's ET has an interesting article about the lessons a corporate Senior Manager can draw from the world of football. Anyone who follows the English Premier League would know that Managers of top club football teams face much more pressure than their corporate counterparts. So it is difficult to disagree with leadership expert Mike Carson when he says that if you can manage a football team, you can lead anywhere in the world. Here are the 5 key learnings from the said article, albeit slightly modified to be less football-specific.

A Manager:

1. Needs to be equipped to handle exogenous shocks

2. Should understand the values and beliefs that drive the team members

3. Has to realize that no team member is bigger than the team

4. Should know how to manage multiple stakeholders

5. Must relish the role and focus on getting the priorities right

Leadership, Guru, Broom

In a supplement of yesterday's ET, Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev says that leaders need three Is - inspiration, integrity and insight. "Leaders essentially grapple with something larger than what others are willing to grapple with, which is what makes them leaders. They need inspiration to be able to do that, else they will get frustrated. The second component is integrity, which is a key element in building trust, without which you are never ever going to be a leader. Integrity is about coherence between what you say, do and think. It is in your actions, in the way you are, the way you carry yourself. [...] Life offers leader a perch higher than other people have. If leaders cannot see any better than others, they become objects of ridicule. They must have insight into situations, into problems and possible solutions."

The guru also offers an excellent explanation for the "drought of leadership at all levels of life in our country". He says, "Being an occupied nation for centuries, we have learnt to keep our heads down. If I get up and do something, I may get into trouble." I think he has really nailed that one - whether in politics or in the corporate world, we Indians have an in-built tendency to lie low and go with the flow. We know that anyone who dares to stand up and challenge the status quo is either cut down to size or forced out of the race. To break the monopoly of the leadership elite, you need to build up a certain escape velocity, for which you need to be very strong-willed and thick-skinned.

But that is what leadership is all about, isn't it? Breaking the shackles... As the guru further says, "Leadership is neither about you or me, it is about something that needs to be done. Leaders figure out how it can be made to happen and get ten or a million people to see that this is the way to do it." In the field of politics, Arvind Kejriwal is a good example of this. Although the existing political parties tried their best to derail his popular movement, AK managed to get millions of Indians hooked on to his simple but powerful message of demolishing corruption. The results are there for all to see. What remains to be seen is how far AK's movement goes towards its ultimate goal.

AK's inspiration, one can say, was the redoubtable Anna Hazare. His insight was the realization that no system can be changed from the outside - when the political parties scuttled his Jan Lokpal agitation, AK decided that "if you can't beat them, join them". He waded into the cesspool of politics wielding the broom of his own political party, to sweep away the entrenched resistance to change. Now we come to the guru's third point of integrity, which will be the toughest challenge yet for AK and his team. If they can't walk the anti-corruption talk in terms of their own behaviour, the very citizens who have empowered their broom will also sweep them out of existence.

5 Rules for Outsourcing Interviews

Before I get to the actual rules, let me tell you a story. A few weeks ago, I was approached by an HR Associate of a Bangalore-based e-Learning Solutions company. They had an "Engineering Manager" opening, for which this HR fellow thought my profile was well suited. After going through the Job Description, I felt the role was a bit more "technical" than I would like. But then again, most companies do give a technical slant to their Project Manager JDs, to ensure that the candidate has some past coding experience, instead of being a typical "MBA-pass manager". So I asked him to go ahead and schedule a telephonic discussion. Soon he called me and told me that his CTO Mr. Charles Dickhead (not his real name) would call me on the morning of 27th December. He also said that he'd send a confirmation email, which never came. Still I remained available at that time, just in case CD gave me a call. When the call didn't come, I went on with my day, and forgot about the position.

Out of the blue, the HR guy called me again yesterday and apologized for the non-availability of CD due to Christmas (on 27th December???) and confirmed the rescheduled telephonic interview for today afternoon. Since I've been giving many interviews of late for Project Manager positions, I did not feel it necessary to do any specific preparation. If you've managed projects for 7 years, including Development, Production Support and Upgrade projects, across various technologies, you can manage practically any IT project. All that an interview needs to check is the depth of your PM experience, along with your personality and fitment to the organization. But CD apparently had other ideas, because he outsourced the job of taking my interview to someone else, let's call him Mr. AK-47. To my horror, this guy followed up the standard, much-abused "tell me more about yourself" question with a set of queries that are normally reserved for freshers straight out of engineering college.

"What are the differences between the deployment of a Java project and that of a PHP project?" was followed by "What are the key features of MVC architecture?" By the time I'd wriggled my way out of those two, I realized that AK was at best a Technical Architect, at worst a Tech Lead, and most likely that amorphous entity called a Project Lead. He had probably never met a person with 14+ years of IT experience, much less interviewed one. As I desperately tried to talk myself out of jumping through the window, AK came up with a classic: "What are the 4 pillars of Object Oriented Programming?" As I hemmed and hawed, not knowing whether to kill him or strangle myself, I managed to blurt out "polymorphism" and "inheritance". Sensing that I was choking on the question, AK helpfully came up with "abstraction" and "encapsulation". At this point I was wondering how to end this nightmare, when AK went and outdid himself, if at all that was possible. He said, "Give a one-line definition of each of the 4 pillars." That was it for me; I openly told AK that his questions were far too technical for me, and that I couldn't answer them. AK decided to put me out of my agony by ending the interview and offering to convey "his feedback" to the CTO.

So, without further ado, here are the 5 rules you need to follow while outsourcing interviews, which you were supposed to take, to your juniors:

1. Team Member interviews can be outsourced to Team Leads and above
2. Team Lead interviews can be outsourced to Project Leads and above
3. Project Lead interviews can be outsourced to Project Managers and above
4. Project Manager interviews can be outsourced to Senior Managers and above
5. Never break any of the above 4 rules. Never! NEVER EVER!!!

Leadership and Transparency

This morning, while reading the Economic Times, I came across this quote from the global HR head of one of India's leading Consumer Products & Services companies: "In turbulent times there is a need for greater transparency at the workplace, which will lead to higher accountability, responsibility and responsiveness on [the employee's] part". This struck me as a very powerful idea, one that I believe needs to be implemented urgently by all companies.

Whether your company has just lost a big deal, or has run out of working capital in a recession year, or is facing a hostile takeover by a rival organization, be transparent - go ahead and tell your employees all about it. Also tell them the short-term and long-term impacts of the problem. Normally, whenever a company faces tough times, the natural reaction of the leadership is to shut themselves off from the employees. They feel that, by not conveying the bad news for as long as possible, they can protect the employees from demotivation and low productivity. But we need to realize that such an information blackout normally has the opposite effect on our team. An employee who knows what is going on is more secure mentally, since there is no uncertainty about the situation of the company. Such an employee has two straightforward choices - either stick with the company and help it tide over the bad times, or leave immediately for greener pastures. On the other hand, an employee who is kept insulated from the bad news will soon realize that something is being hidden from him but at the same time will not be sure as to what that hidden matter is. This uncertainty will keep preying on his mind continuously, thereby reducing both his immediate productivity and his long-term engagement with the organization.

Another aspect of transparency is to treat all employees equally during a crisis. If you apply one set of rules for some employees, and another set of rules for others, you run the risk of alienating both groups by making each think you favored the other. For instance, if you implement a cost cutting drive, ensure that applies to everyone, including the leadership team. If the leaders don't lead by example, they will find it difficult to push through any unpopular measures in their respective departments. Or else, if there is a cash crisis and salary payments are delayed, ensure that all the employees are paid at the same time or nobody is. If you decide to pay the junior employees first, saying that they are more dependent on salary income, the seniors will definitely support you. But somewhere in their minds, they will feel betrayed and the first thought of quitting will begin to arise. A third instance where transparency is needed is during appraisals. When one employee gets a good rating, or an award, or a promotion, it is your responsibility as a leader to explain to the rest of the team why that person is getting the special recognition. This will guard against bad blood and allegations of favoritism.

RoR Music Database Project

Finally, I've created a Rails + SQLite version of my favorite practice project - the Music Database. This one looks very different from my other (Perl, Python, PHP, ASP, ASPX) implementations of the project - as Ruby is an object-oriented language, I tried to model the application as closely as possible to real life. Usually I store the details of each song in a row of the database table, with the album details (Album Name, Year, Artist Name) being repeated for multiple songs. But here I made Album the primary model and Song a secondary one. So the user has to first create an album and then add multiple songs to it. Here are the steps I followed, once I had the design ready in my mind:

  rails new MusicDatabase
  cd MusicDatabase
  rails generate scaffold Album albumname:string albumartist:string albumyear:datetime
  rake db:migrate

Edit the file "config\routes.rb" to open "views\albums\index" by default, by adding the line:
  root :to => "albums#index"

rails generate model Song songname:string album:references
rake db:migrate
rails generate controller Songs index show new edit

Edit the file "controllers\song_controller.rb" to have the standard methods for showing, adding, editing and deleting songs

Edit the files under the "views\songs\" directory to have the standard forms for showing, adding, editing and deleting songs

In my case, because of the form code that I copied from the Rails tutorial, I also had to edit my Gemfile to include the line "gem 'dynamic_form'" and then do a "bundle install". And thus, I completed my Ruby on Rails "self test" by getting the Music Database project running successfully

Steps Taken to Revive Galaxy Tab 2 P3100

When my tab recently suffered a battery drainout issue, these are the steps I took to revive it:

Charge battery to 99%
Perform factory reset
Connect to Wi-Fi
Provide Samsung account settings
Provide Google account settings
Update Samsung apps
Power off
Insert SIM card and Micro SD card
Power on
Save GPRS settings
Install essential apps only (Clean Master, Facebook, Blogger, MyMail in my case)
Update stock Android and Samsung apps as needed
Add apps and widgets to home screen as needed