Pragmatic Growth Insights by 2 CXOs

Introduction - In the last 1 year, interviewing some of the top CXOs have helped me bring out deeper insights about personal, professional, and business transformation for professionals & founders.

I am glad to start this newsletter, whereby each week I will share some solid takeaways from interviews with top leaders around the world.

Treat this newsletter as your personal reference book for getting more clarity around business transformation, digitalisation, work culture, ecosystems, leadership, and more.

Last year I started ClarITea Chat on Linkedin Live and Youtube Live. In the first episodeI interviewed Vijay Sethi (Chairman at Mentorkart & former CIO at Hero Motocorp ) on the implications of IT management principles and business values. We also discussed how to scale up your abilities to grow professionally.

While you read the key takeaways, here is a link to the complete ClarITea Chat Episode to quench your thirst of watching detailed conversations between two CXOs turned Business Transformation experts.

Note - You can use these takeaways as a leader on managing your teams more effectively. Or you can treat this edition as a reflection point for your own growth

1)?Treat everyone equally

Organizations are made of human beings. These are the human beings who run technology. So if both of them really work together & are given equal appreciation - you as a leader can have a multiplier growth impact on your projects.

?Treat people equally - appreciate & mentor them

This way the productivity of individuals goes up. It also impacts the quality and speed of technology-related projects' implementation on a positive note.

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2)?Practise Humility - esp with your Partners

In IT, there is no vendor, all are our partners. They are partners in our success and even in our failures, they are partners in our happiness, in our sadness, and we can’t succeed without them.?

Why don't you really treat them as your extended arm, as your partner, and treat them as trustworthy guys? The moment you start thinking about that perspective, your equation with them changes.

?And when we treat them with that respect, they'll also treat us with respect, the moment we have empathy a lot of boundaries get broken.

And at that point, we can leverage the asymmetry of talents and start to learn from them, rather than creeping out and feeling limited or less talented.

Humility comes from inside. You need to have empathy - you need to really put yourself in their shoes.?

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3)??Scaling-up Professionally

To start with this, there are a few key things you need to do

●?????The first is to have a good process orientation approach rather than an ad hoc, task oriented one.?

●?????The second is to have a team, which is competent, capable, and motivated. Work towards enhancing their skills. Delegate your work with good checks and balances.?

●?????The third is, automation of the process - even signing papers has to be done digitally. The moment you start extensive use of technology, your dependence on an individual reduces and thus it reduces the processing time.

●?????The fourth is putting up lots of effort from your side, you can’t ask others to work and relax yourself.

In a company, when you are collaborating for your work, the conflict arises on a simple question - If the project succeeds, who gets the credit? If the project fails who gets the blame? Don't compete for credit or avoid blame - always remember that the company's objectives are paramount - the basis for collaboration.

4)??Setting realistic goals

Vijay Sethi interestingly quotes; We need to define failure. What is failure? So when I said, 83% of projects failed, what does it really mean? That it does not deliver to the expectations, which it was supposed to deliver.

Failure is that when you started with, "this will be my ROI or this would be my value from the entire project". If you are not able to meet the value, that is where you have failed.

Don't take failures as inevitable. Focus on learnings. How did you learn from them? How do you ensure that you really, next time, don't fail?

That is the biggest thing, which will lead to your success. You have to learn - if you fail, fail fast, fail cheap, but learn don't repeat the same mistake again and move on and do it much better next time.

5)??Modernising your technology landscape

IT Modernisation - In an organization, for continuous growth, we need continuous improvement. There are legacy systems which are doing good but that should not prevent you from upgrading.

For example, if you are on a particular version of Oracle or SAP or any such software, the newer versions will also bring a lot of best practices. Sometimes capabilities that maybe needed in tomorrow's scenarios; or from a customer perspective; or from the industry's perspective.

To protect the organisation, you will need to go through that short-term pain. The life of an organisation is way beyond those six, eight months of upgrade. So you need to really ensure that you constantly upgrade, each upgrade would be a pain, but it's the pain worth taking, that's what I believe.

?Summary & Way Forward

To summarise it all, IT is a field that changes very fast. As a professional, you need to constantly upgrade yourself. However, do not forget to enhance the competence of your own team.

That's where you learn from the partners. You cannot really be always dependent on them. You need to focus on giving more inputs, insights into your own team, building the capabilities of your team with a very specific purpose, and scaling up their skills.

In the next edition - I will share with you deeper insights on business transformation for today's organisations. I will be converting another ClarITea Chat into a newsletter.

About the Author - Jagdish Belwal is CIO turned global advisor on business growth using technology and digitalisation. He is also the founder of FlocknGo startup. He invests in new tech startups and is a regular speaker & conference moderator at various national and international platforms. His ClarITea Chat show brings out wisdom of CIOs of top organisations and is popular with the IT fraternity on Linkedin & Youtube. His podcasts are soon going to be available on all major podcasting platforms. He can be reached out for advisory, investing, training and conference moderation on [email protected] ?