Making People Development Agile

It is our birthday (Execore Spectrum’s), and our little venture has completed six years. As I go down memory lane, many of our initial journeys have been around helping our client organizations with the learning and development of their people. I dedicate this edition to sharing our early experiences.

Our clientele spreads across two strata: the big and the mighty (large enterprises) and the not-so-big and volatile/spurting ones (small and medium firms, young and old alike!)

While the large ones mostly had their competency frameworks in place or were heavily invested in building optimal ones, the SMB belt lacked any such framework or guidelines (trust me, with so many of our SME clients, I have witnessed job descriptions being standard with just the designation changing, along with the number of years of experience and pay range!! ??).

Voilà, a competency framework therefore, guides your actions to the tee, by way of permutations and combinations of desired skill sets the organization seeks; and what happens when business diversifies or modifies? And when the business environment changes? What about these competency frameworks, then? Our discoveries indicate that not all organizations have the time to cope with change and simultaneously adapt their competency frameworks (the giants do fairly well here!).

For the rest of our client base, our observation showed repeated themes: the management was the quickest to accept and align, but the rest of the organization was slow to adapt and resisted oncoming change. This left the top management with no option but to?control the actions?of teams therein. And, needless to say, in a controlled environment, you will get controlled teamwork, not amazing team performance.

Analogy (my fav style)

Who isn’t a cricket fan out here in India? Well, if I have to give an example, most of you can’t have missed popular batting styles—Tendulkar's or Maxwell’s? How about Brian Lara’s left-handed batting? Or if you prefer football, the way Messi or Mbappé score their goals? Their typical styles and strategies? (Honestly, I’m not a fan of either sport, I just gather this from comments and phrases from ardent fans, within my family and friend circles. ??)

Well, all I want to say is if the game is a known one, with a familiar environment, familiar grounds, and familiar rules, yet some win (and some lose) consistently, thanks to not these constant criteria, but to individual strengths and styles.

Reality Check

Looking back at not just our journey with our clients but also going way back to my journeys with the several organizations I was employed with, one stark observation was that certain individuals would time and again either win (or come as runners-up) because of their individualistic nature and style, which are unique to them. It is this uniqueness that stands out as their specific competency.

Winners (and losers) are distinguishable because of the unique style they possess or lack. Now, here's where organizations need to leverage unique competencies and optimize performance vis-à-vis restricting hiring to a set of pre-defined (no matter how composite) competencies because these restricted or fixed competencies need not necessarily be agile enough to cope with the changes businesses face.

So, what we have realized across different client businesses is that competency frameworks can serve as your guiding beacons, but by limiting your talent pool to some straitjacketed framework, you will slow down your potential to succeed because changing and dynamic business scenarios need highly adaptive, competent talent, and not just talent that qualifies through established competency frameworks. Otherwise, if competency frameworks could create more of the desired talent, then wouldn’t all hires eventually become clones of Amitabh Bachchan, Neeraj Chopra, Lionel Messi, and so on? But isn’t that utopia? Hence, as I said earlier, competency frameworks serve as beacons or compasses for desired performance. Just deploying them might not ensure victory frequently. All they ensure is that your business has the right ingredients (almost perfect), but what one should look out for is, what uniqueness they bring to the table?

So how can organizations look beyond the convenience of pre-defined ways of being and behaving, and how can they embrace uniqueness in their talent pool to be a winner more frequently than not?

Another analogy here is the typical scenario when team members are bucketed into departments and restricted to their roles (Ideally, this is good – it drives efficiency, but perhaps not effectiveness). As an example, let’s look at the branch operations of a financial services firm. It is not uncommon to note that branches are not always optimally staffed, and often there are challenges when certain team members are not present. Now, if a customer walks into the branch and needs some urgent/immediate resolution, the following are some of the ways that the branch can attempt to face this scenario:

Option 1: Tell the customer to come back some other day as the concerned staff member isn’t there, sending the customer away disappointed (I’ve experienced this personally). They are unable to help the customer on that specific date, because of the absence and exclusivity of a role.

Option 2: One of the existing team members steps into the shoes of the absent team member and manages the customer's requirement, sending the customer away with a resolution. The customer is unaware of your internal challenges in roles.

Option 3: Escalate the customer to the branch manager because the relevant staff member isn’t there and the manager therefore either buys time from the customer after setting expectations or partly resolves the concern by herself/himself.

Now, which option shines out as ‘Success’? Without a doubt, Option 2….so what worked differently in this case? While there are multiple contributors, adaptability visibly stands out. Possibly, this is also where the organization encourages a culture of ownership and earliest resolution, irrespective of KPIs (key performance indicators).?

What I’d like to highlight from the example above is that if you create fixed parameters for performance, with extreme focus on individual metrics then, in a way you are clipping their wings, to even think of ‘beyond duty’, let alone going there.

When organizations foster cultures that encourage going beyond respective roles, thinking out of the box, wow-ing customers, setting new benchmarks, etc. it opens new pathways to its employees, which doesn’t only emphasize fitment within the frameworks defined but also provides opportunities to nurture the uniqueness in them. That’s what will set that brand apart!

So, are JDs and KPIs passé?

My apologies if I’ve made you think so. Of course not. The relevance of JDs to an outcome is similar to that of ingredients to a tasteful dish. Any shortcoming there, and you can expect a deficient outcome. Job descriptions and KPIs set the ground rules – they are very critical communication from the organization while onboarding the employee. Without this clarity, in what direction do you expect the employee to perform? But it rests there – direction. That’s what defined frameworks do. These are requisites to uniform understanding, cornerstones of high-performing teams, and alignment to common goals.

Ever wondered why some people want to belong to someone else’s team/department, even though it is the same organization? Both teams will have their performance metrics and rules defined, but it is the ability to be able to shine, stand out, do more, blossom, and grow, that makes employees belong to a team. This is an environment that only the team leader can foster.

As a change agent, I have seen leaders across spectrums of desirable leadership traits – process-oriented, quality-conscious, risky, prudent, bold, diplomatic, cautious, etc. and along similar lines, I witnessed their teams in similar nuances. But certain teams that amazed me were those where –

• the members are allowed to explore and discover vs. constantly being told what to do

• the members have complete clarity on what needs to be done
• the members function autonomously
• the members don’t fear failure
• the members stand up for each other
• the members know that their leader has their backs

How to manage talent pools?

If you agree with me so far, then I am positive you will find my 3Es meaningful too.

Engage

• Convey why the team exists – what is its role. Why do team members do what they do?
• In line with the purpose of the team, what are the ways of working – processes, policies, timelines, and other critical metrics?
• Provide clarity on what the individual’s role is, and how it ties into the larger, collective goal of your unit. Share ‘Good-to-haves and Not-Good-to-haves’.

Embrace

• Understand perspective. Check with your team members about their thoughts on completing projects.
• Drive collaboration. Showcase great teamwork and related ethics and best practices.
• Nurture the spirit of learning, not fearing failure – individually as well as collectively.

Empower

• Equip your people with adequate resources to take on their tasks head-on, confidently.
• Keep communication lines transparent and open; there should be fluidity in communication across teams in your organization. Communication is one of the major contributors to organizational effectiveness and success.
• Reinforce right/desired behaviors and outcomes. Celebrate your wins and credit your winners!
• Eliminate ambiguity. Be clear about what’s not acceptable, what doesn’t add value, and what is counter-productive.
• Build and grow the trust you have in your team. Allow for autonomy (with essential checks in place), it is a powerful success driver.

If you deploy these 3 Es, you are bound to witness transformation in your talent pool. While as a manager, you would prefer to have control over how results are arrived at (yes, because you have fixed targets to meet and defined parameters to measure up to), you might be just limiting your chances of achieving amazing outcomes with a slight shift in mindset.

Predictable Performance vs. Passionate Performance. How would you choose to making people development more agile? Here’s to wishing every leader being able to make the right choice.