How often we find two organizations within the same sector with similar offerings see different results. Why some of these smaller organizations manage to be successful even in adversity while some others struggle even under favorable conditions. Why Ford decided to shut shop (though there would be small presence) while Hyundai (entered India at the same time) is thriving.

We could understand this through the Resource based view(RBV) which provides sustained competitive advantage. It talks about Valuable, Rare, Inimitable and Organized (VRIO) resources to build sustained competitive advantage. While the first three are understood very easily, the last one “Organized” is not well understood and hence highly under utilized. This results in unused competitive advantage.

I would like to explain as to how you could build strategic advantage by focusing on Organization that integrates the Valuable, Rare and Inimitable resources.

Grameen bank, founded by MR Muhammad Yunus gives credit only to those who don’t have any credit history and can’t provide collaterals. Sounds weird? Yes they do this and even give loans to beggars. You might be thinking they would be bleeding money with piling NPA (like most of our PSU banks). But this is a bank with sound financials with on time payments exceeding 98%. They have stopped taking donations as their business is strong. What they have done is to build social collateral, where they create mutual pressure amongst borrowers to pay their dues on time. They don’t measure success of a branch based on NPA, growth in business but through the development of their clients. Some measures are the client’s children are studying, they have toilet at home. Their employees are expected to have real understanding of their customers (don’t confuse this with Kyc) and develop a relationship with them. They have rigorous selection, training, performance management and reward process. Employees are bound together by a larger purpose. The bank and it’s founder bagged Nobel peace prize in 2002 for their work.

How often have you heard excuses like “high price”, “heavy competition”, “customer not convinced”, “no credit” for closing sale. Root cause for these could be traced to basic issues like lack of planning (pre call, post call), not targeting the right prospect, not meeting the right person(who makes the decision) and the vital lack of professional relationship. This is the reason we find differential performance within the organization between different HQs. I am witness to a drastic sales transformation where proper usage of CRM and selling to market rather than budget made organization hugely successful.

As business leaders we need to pay lot of attention to these people processes so that the organization is able to make full use of its competitive advantage. Key here is not just having good systems but how well it is understood and implemented in letter and spirit, that is “When the rubber hits the road”. Leaders might need some help that could make them think beyond what is possible today, have a vision and be in a position to inspire others. Meaningful interventions like Coaching, continuing education and challenging roles would help them accomplish these goals.

Noted American author, sales person and motivational speaker Hilary Hinton “Zig” Ziglar says “It’s not what you’ve got, it’s what you use that makes a difference”. Tap the human potential and unlock your unused competitive advantage.

About author: Mr. Pattabiraman Nagarajan is a HR professional, Consultant, trainer and an ICF certified coach. Has managed organization change and aligned HR practices to ensure business growth. He holds master degree in Social work and a PG Diploma in Business Management from IIM Trichy. He could be reached at npattabiraman@relyonus.in

Previous article by author: Management Lessons From Olympics

The Tokyo Olympics has been special for several reasons as it comes in the midst of pandemic and has seen best performance of our contingent. I am not a sports analyst and I intend to write about what management lessons could we learn from Olympics.

I am sharing these lessons through stories.

1. No substitute for Preparation, focus and hard work – Look at our women hockey team. They started their intense preparations about a year back. They did a break down of all small things that will help them to be successful. They worked on Stamina, Endurance, speed, Aerial shot, ball control, running fast etc. and held focused training sessions. PV Sindhu worked muscle by muscle. She did workouts to strengthen the muscle that helps her jump in the court, helps her lunge forward to reach the net and the agility to cover the court. She too worked on her mental toughness through relaxation exercises, swimming. Results are there to see. Playing in such energy sapping conditions, against stronger opponents, our teams made the country proud. If we want to be successful, we also need to break that down to the smallest of things and make improvements in each of them through focused work. For more on this please read the book “Atomic habits”.

2. Believe in your abilities – Our badminton doubles pair of Chirag Shetty and Rankireddy were playing against the top ranked Chinese Taipei duo who have a superior track record. Nothing deterred them in putting their best and defeating them. Alexander Zeyerev was up against the top seed Novak Djokovic. Zeyerev is criticised for not being mentally tough as he had given away his two set advantage against Dominic Theim in US open finals last year. But he believed in his abilities and went on to unleash of barrage of forehand and backhand shots to demolish the top ranked Serb. He went on to bag the gold medal too, only the second German after Steffi Graph. Similarly we too need to believe on our ability and just focus on giving our best without spending our energies on the the opponents. The more we work on our abilities, higher are the chances.

3. Too much competition leads to stress and ruins our happiness – One of the memorable instances happened in High Jump. Barshim of Qatar and Tamberi of Italy were tied at 2.37m after three failed attempts each at 2.39. Officials asked for a jump off to decide the winner by which Tamberi withdrew citing an injury. What Barshim said was “Could we share gold” which was accepted. Given the intense rivalry between these two athletes who never won Gold at olympics, Barshim could have half gold medal. But he did not see Tamberi as a competitor and was looking at win win. Today rival automobile companies are collaborating and sharing products/technologies to create a symbiotic growth. How often we tend to compete with our own colleagues across functions in our own organization? For not serving customer on time, we blame Manufacturing, manufacturing blames Supply chain and they blame finance. This win lose, lose lose game does not help anyone. Focus on how you could collaborate and ensure everyone emerges successful.

4. No short cut to success. Anyone indulging in wrongdoing will be caught some day or other and it will hurt – 2012 London Olympics saw a record number of 135 athletes, 39 medalist’s (13 of them had won Gold) testing positive for prohibited substances. 65 of them were caught in re testing. Authorities decided to keep the samples for 10 years to help detect substances through new technologies in future as doping was becoming very scientific. A very curious case was of Russian wrestler (late) Besik Kudukhov whose sample was found positive for banned substance in retesting in 2016, good 4 years after the event and three years after his untimely death. Yogeshwar Dutt became eligible for Silver but he did not want it and said let Kudukhov family retain the medal. Family was able to retain the medal on compassionate grounds but not the reputation. Similarly any wrong doing, unethical practices, not adhering to accounting standards may go undetected for sometime but eventually will be caught some day or other and it will hurt us very badly.

Life is a wonderful journey if we learn continuously and become better on an everyday basis. James Clear, the author of book , Atomic Habits says “The secret of getting results that last is to never stop making improvements” … true.

About author: Mr. Pattabiraman Nagarajan is a HR professional, Consultant, trainer and an ICF certified coach. Has managed organization change and aligned HR practices to ensure business growth. He holds master degree in Social work and a PG Diploma in Business Management from IIM Trichy. He could be reached at npattabiraman@relyonus.in

Other articles by the author : Click HERE

Title Image Credit: Photo by Alex Smith on Unsplash 

Summary – Managing stress involves identifying our beliefs and making those smaller changes. In this article the author draws analogy from football to explain the simple concepts.

Several of my clients keep asking me as to how could they manage stress. They seem to think they are overwhelmed. In this article I intend to provide some simple techniques that could help you manage stress. I will be using the research done regarding Penalty shoot outs in football to explain the concepts. For more on this research pl read the article cited in the end. Before that, let us accept that stress free life is not possible and some amount of stress is indeed beneficial as it keeps us on our toes.

Self-limiting belief – England believe that Penalty shootout is just a lottery and is completely dependent on chance. This is in fact partially true. But what is also true is that penalty shoot requires skill, positive approach, your energy and motivation levels. No wonder England is below average in Penalty shootout conversions by good 10 percentage points. They dread shoot outs as the memories of crushing defeats linger in their mind.

Believe in your ability and focus on what you could do in the given situation. Look for such self-limiting beliefs. For instance, if you believe managers are task masters, even a simple instruction from your manager you may find it imposing.

Focus on the goal and not the obstacle.
Psychologists say, the player after placing the ball in the spot should not look at the goal keeper for long. Instead look for the top right or left corner of the goal post as historically the chances are scoring are very high if you hit there compared to shots closer to the ground.

The more you focus on the obstacles, you lose focus on what you intend to achieve and spend most of your time on the hurdles.

Take the issues head on and don’t run away
Players are trained not to show their back to the goal keeper as it will give the goal keeper subtle clues as to what the striker is going to do. So they place the ball at the spot and walk backwards facing the goal post. Learn to face issues with confidence and learn from these situations.

Avoiding them, procrastination or denying offer little help as the issue will ultimately haunt you sooner.

Don’t be impulsive. Take your time
Players who took less than 200 milliseconds for the shot after the whistle of referee have only succeeded 57% of time while those took about a second were successful 80% of the time.

Take a deep breath. Visualise the best possible outcome and give it your best. You are more prone to make mistakes when you are in a hurry.

Always focus on best possible outcome rather than setbacks.
Study suggests that when the player takes the kick which would result in a win, he/she is successful 90% of the time. While a player who takes the kick where missing would lead to defeat, he/she is successful only 57% of the time.

You need to fill your mind with things like how does the best outcome looks like and what could you do to get there. Too much focus on loss aversion might result in higher chances of failure and frustration.

Managing stress comes by practice and you working on your beliefs. It happens over a period of time. Keep focused and keep making improvements. You will emerge successful. There is a quote which goes like this “difficult roads lead to beautiful destinations”. Think about beautiful destinations, journey becomes less stressful. Choice is ours.

About the author:
Mr. Pattabiraman Nagarajan is a HR professional, Consultant, trainer and an ICF certified coach. Has managed organization change and aligned HR practices to ensure business growth. He holds master degree in Social work and a PG diploma in Business management from IIM Trichy. He could be reached at npattabiraman@relyonus.in

Previous article by Author: Leading In Adversity- Leaders Need To Change Their Belief

Employee selection has been an area of focus and concern for organizations. The role of consultants in employee selection needs a closer look by organizations. Selection of right consultant, transparent communication and robust performance tracking could help organizations manage consultants and reduce lead time in selection while ensuring higher employee retention.

Do you sometimes take longer to fill positions or have a need to fill the same position few times or find it difficult to attract the required talent despite engaging multiple external recruiters (I will call them consultants in my article). It may seem as though these consultants are not able to find suitable candidates and you may think finding newer ones may solve the problem.

You may be surprised to note that more than 90% of the positions filled are in fact replacement positions. This sort of explains the problems faced by our industry in talent management. When companies are busy finding replacements, where would they have time to groom them and develop them. When companies are grappling with an issue of such magnitude, looking to consultants for help may not solve the problem.

Though there are no ideal metrics, I feel that if you take more than 60 days to shortlist and issue offer letter to the successful candidate, your hiring process needs an introspection. In this article I would like to write about how you could better manage the consultants so that you not only get the right candidates but also get them on time and at right cost.

Why are you filling a position?

The first question that you may want to ask is why I am hiring a position. Can this be done by someone inside through job enlargement or job sharing. Could part of the job be eliminated or even outsourced (if it is mundane or very niche). It is a good practice to see if you could find someone internally who could fit. Also asking these questions helps you to be very clear on the requirement. There could be several cases where you start the hiring process only to stop it midway and put the position on hold. Remember every hiring activity that you do costs the company and you may need to be judicious

How could I best fill the position?

What options do you have once you have looked at your internal talents? You could look at employee referrals, database, company website, job portals, job fairs, campus recruitment or look at consultants. Remember you need to maintain a healthy mix of sources in hiring if you want to get a diver set of employees. Each source has its own advantage but also comes with its downside. Job portals might be good at getting more resumes in quick time but how many of them would be suitable or interested is a question.

You may need to decide on the source of hiring depending on the position and your needs. Sometimes you may even look to close positions through multiple sources if the number of positions to be filled are high. Consultants are very handy if you are looking for confidential search or looking to head hunt from a specific company(or competitor) or the requirement is very niche where you do not have the expertise. You may engage consultants if you are looking for some diverse set of candidates or those from other industries/geographies which you have never worked upon.

How do I work with consultants?

Having decided to engage consultant to fill a particular position, please look for a consultant who has very relevant experience and has closed similar positions in the past. Good to seek references from their clients. Please develop a criteria to engage a consultant (things like domain experience, clientele, ability to work across geographies etc) and reach out to them. Evaluate them on these objective criteria and arrive at a decision. Please be clear on the commercials and sign an agreement before you ask them to start working on any position. A few things that I find as good practice are given below;

Professional fee – Do not consider professional fee as make or break criteria. A consultant who could help you close position with right candidate in less than 30 days helps you save cost. Especially if it a sales position every day lost is revenue loss. Even if you pay a slightly higher fee, it makes sense and has a good pay back. Remember, the harder you negotiate and beat them down to lowest rates, there is also a possibility that they may assign lesser priority to your positions. To close a position, consultant too needs to spend lot of resources and they look for better ROI like how you do. A better way to deal with it may be tie the fee with time to fill whereby the consultant gets a higher fee if they could get right candidates within say 2 weeks. This serves as an incentive to the consultant to close the position faster.

Treat them as your business partner – Communicate clearly about the requirement and also about your organization. The working conditions, reporting relationship, opportunities in future. If you have already seen some candidates, pl consider providing the list so that they do not approach the same candidates. Encourage consultants to interact with the hiring managers so that the requirements are clear. Remember, any candidate would want to know more than what is mentioned in the Job description. It is good to provide all relevant information to candidates so that there is transparency. Also show consultants on how you are growing and the value of long term relationship.

Kindly provide timely and specific feedback on the profiles presented by them as this helps them understand the requirement better and find suitable candidates. It is a good practice to revert on a profile in a week and see the logical end in about 2-3 weeks. Any consultant would love to work with organizations that are quick on their selection process and lose interest if there are undue delays.

How many consultants for a position?

Two consultants working on the same position can’t reduce the lead time by 50%. Though some bit of competition might help speeding up the process, there is also a risk that they reach out to same set of candidates. When candidates are getting calls from multiple consultants for the same position, they get a feeling that the company is very desperate to close positions. Worse still is you don’t want to get into a situation where two consultants claim for the same candidate.

Better way to manage is to find the most appropriate consultant and ask them to work exclusively for a week or two. Remember, engaging consultants is like using anti biotics. Excessive usage might be counterproductive.

Track performance – After assigning a position, how do you monitor performance of consultants. Do you track in how many days are they able to get the relevant resumes, how may profiles for a closure, and how long do they stay with the organization. For instance when I was managing HR function, we found out that consultants had given close to about 150 resumes for about 5-6 closures while employee referrals contributed to 15 hires with half of the resumes. A good performance tracking helps you identify the right consultant and also fix issues, if any in your selection process.

Conclusion

As you could see from the article that consultants could be very good source of hiring provided, they are used very judiciously. A good selection of consultant, transparent communication and a robust performance tracking would go a long way in managing your selection process and getting candidates on time. In the absence of these measures, we may leave success to chance and blame consultants for delays/failures while some the problems might be out of their control.

About the author: Mr. Pattabiraman Nagarajan is a HR professional, Consultant, trainer and an ICF certified coach. Has managed organization change and aligned HR practices to ensure business growth. He holds master degree in Social work and a PG Diploma in Business Management from IIM Trichy. He could be reached at npattabiraman@relyonus.in

Synopsis: Covenants are part of any contract including employment contract. They are aimed to safeguard the strategic assets of the organization. Though covenants are common in employment contracts, only a fraction of companies are able to enforce them or initiate legal action in case of a breach. This article speaks about types of covenants in employment contract and what measures could companies take so that they could enforce.

Recently I came across a client who was insisting on a bond to be signed by new joinees which required them to serve for min 3 years from joining else pay six months salary. This too came as a surprise to the candidates and me. Several candidates backed off and hiring was made more difficult. This made me think about the usefulness of these covenants in employee contracts. Would like to address the issues as to how to manage them and make use of them in a most constructive manner.

What are covenants

Covenants are written promises between two parties that requires them to adhere to some commitments . They are widely used not only in employee contracts but also in financial industry, Mergers, acquisitions etc. Focus of this article would be on the covenants in employee contracts. These covenants are of two types. They are.

• Affirmative covenants – They require the employee to do something and mostly apply to the period they are in service with the company. An example is requiring the employee to serve the organization for a minimum period and pay a sum in case of breach
• Negative or Restrictive covenants – They are just the opposite of affirmative covenants where they require the employee not to do something. They may apply during the period of employment or for specific duration even after the employment. Example is a non-compete agreement

One of the primary objectives of these covenants is to safeguard the business interest of the organization and larger interests of the stake holders (including employees). For instance, every organization invests lot of time and resources in hiring, training and developing employees and for them to achieve a reasonable return on investment, the employee may need to work for a minimum duration. Every organization has key trade secrets, information like clients list, pricing which could cause significant disruption if it is leaked to a competitor. There can be little doubt that these covenants are indeed required. Question is are they serving the purpose? Are they being utilized to fullest? Are there some other ways that could help organizations manage risks?

What is the Problem?

I am not a lawyer and am not planning to go in depth into of legality of these covenants. In my experience I have found issues in two areas;

•  The content. How is it worded. Is it reasonable so that it serves the purpose?
•  The Intent. Is it implemented in letter and spirit?

On the content, several organizations believe that if they make it more stringent, the safer they are. But the biggest test for any covenant is it must be fair and reasonable. It should not be curtailing the constitutional freedom of the employee. For instance, in the above cited example of a retention clause of 3 years else 6 months’ salary to be paid by the employee, would the organization be able to substantiate that indeed they invested so much on this employee on his/her development? What is the rationale for a 3-year period? Similarly, some organizations bar employees from taking up any job with competitors upto 5 years from the date of leaving their current employment. Is this not curtailing the right of the employee to pursue any legal profession of his/her choice? The issue with writing this type of contract is it makes it impossible to enforce. Once you are unable to enforce it becomes just a piece of paper.

Coming to the intent, it is an irony that organizations having a strong non-compete agreements tend to hire talents from their competitors who too have similar non-compete covenants. Does it mean these rules apply only to those employees who choose to pursue their career elsewhere? If an employee who is leaving is barred from taking up any position with any other organization in the same industry for a specified period, are there provisions for adequate compensation for the employee so that they could sustain their livelihood. On several occasions, organizations go after an ex-employee citing confidentiality agreement simply to cause embarrassment to them. They need to carefully define what type of information is confidential. Often, we fail to recognize that most of these so-called confidential data is already available to others just like how we get “market intelligence ” about other organizations. When a senior leader leaves an organization, it is not uncommon to see his team too joining the newer organization with him and they create an alumni group. All these actions spell out our intentions on how we approach these covenants that makes them just another sheet of signed document.

What could we do?

Based on my experience, I would suggest few measures that could make these covenants enforceable.

• Make them fair and reasonable. Don’t be too harsh or unrealistic
• Train and communicate – Please take time to train your employees on these covenants and preferably with relevant examples. When there is a revision, they should be informed in advance and their consent obtained. Consider periodic re training to help in retention
• Set example – The senior management team has the responsibility of leading by example. If you insist on non-compete, non-solicitation please hire from your competitors only after ensuring that those recruits are not in breach of those agreements that they have signed. If you insist on current employees serving the entire notice period, do not hire new recruits by offering to buy out their notice period
• Initiate firm and decisive action in all deserving cases. It takes significant time and resources in initiating corrective action on erring employees. You may need to commit these resources to take the case to its logical end. Else it will lose its seriousness.
• Engage your employees – Listen to your employees and learn to manage their aspirations. Any employee looks for opportunities outside the organization only when he/she believes such an opportunity does not exist in the current organization.
• Hire smart – Look for motivational fit and cultural fit apart from job fit. You need to make it attractive for applicants to join you despite having these covenants. This requires you to build your brand in the market.
• Manage your confidential information by obtaining patents, trade marks, copy right. Provide access only those who require it and have robust IT security infrastructure.
• Vision and Values matter – Please live your values every day. Celebrate instances where you see someone has set an example. Institutionalize these values by sharing with all employees with real life employees. Like how you reward them for performance, reward them for living values.

Conclusion – A mere agreement might not be sufficient, and it must be ring-fenced with factors like being fair, transparent communication, leading by example and being assertive when needed. You can’t be assured of employee retention just because your employees have signed an agreement to serve for x number of years. I am reminded of a saying by the great Persian Poet Rumi which goes like this ” Everything that is made beautiful and fair and lovely is made for the eye of one who sees”, apt summary.

Please let me know what you think about this issue by writing to me at npattabiraman@gmail.com.

About the author:
Mr. Pattabiraman Nagarajan is a HR professional, Consultant, trainer and an ICF certified coach. Has managed organization change and aligned HR practices to ensure business growth. He holds master degree in Social work and a PG diploma in Business management from IIM Trichy. He could be reached at npattabiraman@relyonus.in.