Leading Teams

Making Training Stick: Your Organization Needs a Process Sherpa

February 18, 2015 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Corporate training in procedures usually doesn’t stick when the techniques learned are not immediately necessary on the job. If more than a few days pass between training and application, it seems employees cannot recall what they’ve learned.

In order for training to be effective and for employees to retain their newfound knowledge, there needs to be an element of on-the-job reinforcement. A guide can observe, correct, or commend on-the-job application of the training. This follow-up approach will solidify new information and give employees the benefits of experience.

If a certain procedure is required infrequently (say, just a few times each year,) employees may never remember it, not to mention master it. This issue may arise frequently as many organizational processes are only used sporadically.

Until a skill is completely ingrained and natural, employees won’t use it effectively.

To ensure employee familiarity with all relevant processes, even those used infrequently, every organization should consider appointing a Process Sherpa, a process guide.

The Process Sherpa would be analogous to the Sherpas, high-altitude mountaineering guides who help explorers carry loads and negotiate dangerous, ice-covered in the Himalayas and elsewhere. [See yesterday’s article for more on the Sherpas and pioneering explorers Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary.]

The Process Sherpa would understand the wide variety of a company’s processes—filing expense reports, hiring contractors, searching a database of technical reports, preparing quarterly budgets, developing the annual operating plan, preparing for financial audits, and the rest. When the demands of these tasks fall beyond an employee’s understanding, the Process Sherpa could step in and help.

The Process Sherpa position could be adjustable and elastic. It could be a full-time, dedicated role, or the Sherpa responsibilities could be divvied up amongst many employees—after considering the needs of the organization and the expertise of the Sherpas in individual processes.

A Sherpa would not only assist employees, but could also improve the business processes themselves. Having personally witnessed the employees’ challenges, the Sherpa could modify processes to make them simpler and more effective.

The only thing that matters: The Relevant Results

May 15, 2013 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Consider the following parable.

In New York City, a taxi driver and a priest die on the same day and knock on Heaven’s door.

At the pearly gates, St. Peter receives them and shows the taxi driver and priest around. The taxi driver’s eternal home is a lavish new castle equipped with butlers and fancy stuff. The priest’s new home is a meager hut of a dwelling with neither electricity nor water.

The priest complains to St. Peter: “It’s I, not him, who dedicated my life to faith. I sacrificed much in life, worked hard, and delivered thousands of sermons to the faithful in New York. All I get is a mere hut when this taxi driver gets a castle?” St. Peter responds: “Yes, but when you did your work—when you preached—people slept. When the taxi driver worked—when he drove people around New York, people prayed hard.”

Idea for Impact: Your strategies, vision and mission statements, business plans, purposes, determination, ambitions, intents, ideas, resolutions, goals, hard work, sleepless nights—none of these matter if you don’t deliver the results that are relevant to your boss, your customers, and your stakeholders.

Overwhelmed with Things To Do? Accelerate, Maintain, or Terminate.

April 16, 2013 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

If you are overwhelmed by extensive demands on your time or by the number of projects that seem permanently stuck on your to-do list, here’s a technique to organize your projects more effectively.

Make a table with three columns: “Accelerate Mode,” “Maintain Mode,” and “Terminate Mode” and classify your projects.

“Accelerate mode” projects have the potential for significant benefits and therefore will need additional investment in time, effort, and resources.
Projects that you can sustain at the present pace and projects where additional investments may not necessarily translate to larger payoffs go in the “maintain mode.”
Choose the “terminate mode” whenever in doubt, especially for projects that have been lingering in the “someday I will get to” and “maybe” categories. Also, terminate those projects that are on your list because you feel that you should do but need not.

One of the key characteristics of successful people is to recognize and invest their resources in projects that really matter and to do everything else adequately enough.

Three Leadership Lessons from Ron Johnson’s Debacle at J.C. Penney

April 11, 2013 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Monday’s dismissal of J.C. Penney CEO Ron Johnson comes as no surprise.

In late 2011, J.C. Penney had hired Ron Johnson from Apple to revive the sagging fortunes of the storied retailer. He was deemed as a retailing genius who had proved himself by creating Target’s hip-yet-inexpensive cachet and then by leading Apple’s highly lucrative retail stores.

During his 17-month tenure, Ron Johnson had poured hundreds of millions into rapidly remaking the retailer. Mostly, his attempt at the high-stakes makeover of J.C. Penney hadn’t worked. Revenue deteriorated sharply, feedback from customers and employees was persistently negative, and the J.C. Penney share price declined by over 50%.

Lesson 1: Don’t disenfranchise your traditional customer base

Over the years, J.C. Penney’s economic moat had declined considerably. J.C. Penney lost customers to higher-end retailers and specialty stores who had started to offer better value at lower prices. At the other end, Wal-Mart and Target wooed price-sensitive customers with better-than-basic goods.

When retailing relatively undifferentiated merchandise, one of the key levers to revenue is discounts and promotions. Like other retailers, J.C. Penney had trained its customers to buy largely when its stores had a sale. Shoppers recognized that J.C. Penney’s tag prices were made-up to be marked down during sales events and were fixated on coupons, discounts, and promotions. Shoppers had come to regard of shopping at J.C. Penney as a treasure hunt for significantly marked-down merchandise.

Within weeks of joining J.C. Penney, Ron Johnson observed that three-quarters of everything sold had been discounted by at least 50% from list price. Instead of marking up the tag prices and then using deep discount sales to attract customers, he initiated a new “fair and square every day” pricing strategy. By offering good prices every day he attempted to change customer bahavior and dissuade them from waiting for markdowns. Further, by minimizing sales, promotions, and coupons, Ron Johnson eliminated the thrill of pursuing markdowns, a key characteristic of J.C. Penney’s conventional customer. When the pricing strategy flopped, Ron Johnson reinstated sales and coupons, and even brought back “fake prices.” The successive changes confused employees and customers. Additionally, J.C. Penney stopped carrying some traditional brands that many of its long-time customers had favored and injected trendy brands to appeal to younger customers. Ron Johnson’s team created exciting marketing and advertising that was seen as too edgy and further confused traditional customers.

Lesson 2: Don’t be so hubristic as to wager big on hunches without prototyping

At Apple, Steve Jobs frequently shunned extensive consumer research because he had the exceptional genius to introduce the right products, with the right features, at the right time. Drawing from his success at the helm of Apple stores, Ron Johnson was perhaps overconfident that he had all the right answers and could therefore forego the crucial feedback from employees and customers before embarking to “revolutionize retailing” by “teaching people how to shop on their terms” and “fundamentally disrupting the traditional retailing paradigm.”

The gravest error Ron Johnson made at J.C. Penney was not testing his new pricing strategy in a handful of stores. According to this WSJ article, when a colleague proposed a limited store-test of the new pricing strategy, Johnson allegedly responded, “We didn’t test at Apple.”

Clearly, what Ron Johnson thought of value was not what its customers saw as value. As a result, J.C. Penney overlooked the reality that, for its customers, pursuing discounted goods on sale was part of the fun of shopping at J.C. Penney. Ron Johnson set about to tear down an old business model before he had switched over to a new business model without prototyping.

Ron Johnson possibly had a compelling out-of-the-box vision for J.C. Penney. However, he did not stay closely connected to J.C. Penney’s customers and employees before the launch of a radical strategic change. It is challenging to be an effective leader when customers and employees don’t understand and buy major changes.

Incremental improvements to J.C. Penney’s merchandising strategy through extensive prototyping and measured makeover could have provided the opportunity to learn through trialing and encouraged ownership of the strategy by employees, especially those in customer-facing roles.

Lesson 3: Beware of the “Halo Bias” in rating leaders

We tend to attribute a manager/leader’s success to his apparent genius and we overlook the role of the context (team, product, industry, timing, and luck) in his success. Thus, we come to expect him to have the same success in a different context. We anticipate that the very tactics and devices that proved successful in the past would work for him in the new context. (See my earlier article on the halo and horns biases in rating people.)

Ron Johnson certainly proved his retailing genius by first creating Target’s hip-yet-inexpensive brand image and then, for ten years, by leading Apple’s highly lucrative retail stores where he most famously introduced the Genius Bar concept. Nevertheless, his experience with selling premium-priced products at full price all the time with no promotions at the Apple stores did not translate well to J.C. Penney’s undifferentiated merchandise and its customer base of bargain hunters.

In June 2011, J.C. Penney stock spiked by 17.5% when the company announced Ron Johnson’s appointment as CEO. Wall Street saw in him a proven leader with the silver bullet. Investors got overly optimistic that he would remake the embattled retailer and overlooked the fact that J.C. Penney lacked the brand image of Apple and its most-sought-after products. Alas, J.C. Penney stock slid by over 50% during Ron Johnson’s 17-month tenure. The golden boy of retail never hit his stride.

Leadership: Stay out of the kitchen if you can’t handle the heat

April 8, 2013 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Not everybody is prepared to endure the demanding responsibilities of a leadership role:

It’s tough to challenge status quo and to pilot your organization forward into unfamiliar territory
It’s tough to be long-term oriented and to propose transformative ideas that may fall eventually short of expectations
It’s tough to see around the corner and to rely on gut intuitions to develop an “end state” vision
It’s tough to prioritize decisiveness over inclusivity and to take tough—and sometimes unpopular—decisions
It’s tough to resist the urge to settle and to avoid letting circumstances define your strategy
It’s tough to gain strong credibility and communicate the direction and priorities of your organization
It’s tough to face censure and be verbally graceful under fire
It’s tough to be decisive, to acknowledge setbacks, and to change course midstream, if required
It’s tough to rationalize seemingly irrational actions and to ask for resources
It’s tough to be tough-minded without being inflexible or insensitive
It’s tough to do the right thing while resisting the temptation to please your constituents
It’s tough to say no when you must; it’s tough to say yes when you can’t

If you cannot come to terms with the pressures of a leadership role, perhaps leadership may be the wrong kind of work for you.

It is acceptable to be an individual contributor; although you must still develop your leadership skills to succeed in any role in the modern organization.

The Duplicity of Corporate Diversity Initiatives

February 5, 2013 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Corporate Diversity Initiatives Even after years of diversity initiatives in corporate America, “inclusion” is more about meeting the numbers on gender, race, and other obvious differences, and less about pursuing intellectual, ideological, pedagogical, and stylistic diversity within teams and organizations.

Overall, the workforce diversity initiatives have succeeded in deterring explicit discriminatory behavior and preventing employee lawsuits. However, to make the representation numbers look good, corporate diversity initiatives have largely resulted in exclusionary practices for the preferential hiring and promoting of underrepresented demographic groups, much to the chagrin of those who are more competent, yet arbitrarily overlooked because the latter belong to groups that are numerically “overrepresented”—reverse discrimination, indeed. For fear of reprisal, the shortchanged majority is reluctant to speak out against this veiled unfairness or to call attention to the dichotomy between the ideals and the practice of affirmative action in the workplace.

Even if nearly all corporate mission statements extol the virtues of “valuing differences,” managers stifle individuality down in the trenches. They are less willing to be receptive of distinctive viewpoints and seek to mold their employees to conform to the existing culture of the workplace and to comply with the existing ways of doing things. Compliant, acquiescent employees who look the part are promoted in preference to exceptional, questioning employees who bring truly different perspectives to the table. The nail that sticks its head up indeed gets hammered down.

Don’t be Friends with Your Employees

December 26, 2012 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Be friendly with your employees, but don’t be friends with them.

To be effective, managers need to to be obliging when they can and tough when they must. The boss-employee relationship implies a power structure that makes managing friends quite challenging. It can be difficult to give objective performance feedback to your friends, convince them defer to your authority over them, or to decline requests for specific allowances without harming the friendship.

Few managers who’ve been promoted from within to manage their peers come out of the boss-employee relationship with their friendships intact.

If you decide to be friends with your employees, don’t do it at the expense of being a boss.

Performance Appraisal Systems “Don’t Meet Expectations”

November 26, 2012 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Across the corporate world, the annual performance appraisal system has been reduced to a perfunctory exercise to “do what HR needs and check-the-box,” and produce paperwork to weed out the laggards and reduce liability against discrimination lawsuits. So much so that one company I know recently distributed copies of the book “Perfect Phrases for Performance Reviews” to hundreds of its managers to help “use relevant phrases and standardize the vocabulary” and “ease the whole process.”

Empirical evidence suggests that, taken as a whole, the annual performance appraisal system has failed to “meet expectations.” It produces no durable improvements in employee behavior and seldom assists the employees meaningfully with career development. Nor does it have a discernible impact on organizational development. Thanks to a system that is highly subjective and easy to game, this annual ritual has become a stressful exercise for managers and employees alike.

At many companies, performance appraisals center too much on filling out forms. The actual performance appraisal meetings tend to be uncomfortable encounters for both managers and employees. Much time during these meetings is devoted to disputing the self-evaluations of employees, summoning up their failings, and defending the employee rankings previously determined by a “consensus” process administered by HR. Besides, during the ranking process, managers tend to overstate the accomplishments of their own employees and put down other employees—after all, managers do not want to incriminate themselves and admit failure in managing employees as successfully as their managerial peers might assert.

Core to this problem is that most managers fail to understand that employee performance management is about establishing relationships and ensuring effective communication about how employees, managers, teams, and organizations can succeed and create enduring value.

Performance management should not be limited to just once a year during the annual performance appraisal. Helping employees to reflect on their performance and learn from their mistakes, and coaching them should be part of the everyday interactions between employees and their managers. This way, the employees can solicit feedback promptly, know where they stand, and make small ongoing improvements. The managers do not have to wait until the appraisal time and then make an extraordinary attempt to convince their employees to correct themselves. The constant communication can eliminate any surprises for both the manager and the employee during the formal performance appraisal exercise.

As part of this informal practice, the managers can keep a diary on employee performance. Recording significant and relevant examples of an employee’s performance (achievements and shortcomings) can help the managers write objective performance summaries. In addition to diminishing the recency bias, the awareness that a manager might write up opinions may persuade an employee to pay attention.

For now, HR can develop a “Performance Improvement Plan” to overhaul the performance appraisal system and truly help improve individual and organizational performance.

More Ideas for Career Success

Defend in Public, Reprimand in Private [Two-Minute Mentor #3]

November 19, 2012 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

When Richard Branson, founder and chairperson of the Virgin Group, was seven years old, he took some 50 pence in loose change from his father’s table and walked over to a candy store. The shopkeeper suspected Richard and wanted to call his mischief. The shopkeeper called Richard Branson’s father and asked him to come down to the store. The shopkeeper told the dad, “I assume your son has taken this, that you didn’t give it to him?” Richard Branson’s dad seemed irritated at this suggestion. He retorted back to the shopkeeper, “How dare you accuse him of stealing!” Although the senior Branson knew Richard had taken the 50 pence, he avoided humiliating his son in the open. Back home, Richard Branson admitted he had taken the coins from his dad and swore never to take money again without permission.

Idea for Impact

Most people are conscientious enough to recognize their mistakes. They do not want to be humiliated or shamed in the presence of peers and team members. Nor do not need their managers, parents, or other authority figures to ram mistakes down their throats.

When you think you can nail someone’s mistake in the open, take a breather and give a face-saving opportunity for the other. Avoid the temptation to put them down in public. In the privacy of one-on-one meetings, listen to their points of view, describe the impact of their ideas and behaviors, encourage them to reflect on their mistakes, and correct themselves.

When an Employee Threatens to Quit

November 12, 2012 By Nagesh Belludi 5 Comments

If an employee decides to use the threat of quitting to coerce your organization into fulfilling their demands, it’s time to take action.

Of course, it’s always important to listen to and consider employee requests, but when these requests escalate into persistent threats, it’s time to communicate firmly with the employee. Let them know that this type of behavior is unacceptable, and if they cannot accept the organization’s decision, they are free to leave.

Documentation is key in these situations to protect the organization from potential wrongful termination claims. It’s important to have a clear record of the events that led to the employee’s departure, including any attempts made to resolve the situation.

While a valuable employee may seem irreplaceable, it’s important to remember that no one is indispensable in an organization. That’s why succession plans are crucial to ensure that continuity and stability are maintained even in the face of employee turnover.

Giving in to an employee’s threats sets a dangerous precedent that can erode organizational control and encourage further bad behavior. It’s important to stand firm and reinforce the organization’s position, making it clear that threats and coercion will not be tolerated as means of achieving goals.

« Previous Page

Leading Teams

Until a skill is completely ingrained and natural, employees won’t use it effectively.

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Lesson 1: Don’t disenfranchise your traditional customer base

Lesson 2: Don’t be so hubristic as to wager big on hunches without prototyping

Lesson 3: Beware of the “Halo Bias” in rating leaders

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

More Ideas for Career Success

Wondering what to read next?

Idea for Impact

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?