The right fish in the right pond - What makes some leaders tick..

A close friend of mine, an almost-lifer in a renowned MNC hospitality chain, collided into a terrible headwind for the first time ever in his 24-year career, when, subsequent to a transfer to a different country just at the beginning of the pandemic, he saw his stellar career ( where he had grown from front-line to COO, painstakingly, one success at a time) rendered irrelevant as his employer shrugged in helplessness & refused to honor his contract. He also met with several unfortunate personal challenges during the same period, like it happens to all of us when destiny indulges in cruel pranks. Finally, last year, after a torturous 12 months, he landed a compromised role of a CEO at a family-held outfit, and accepted it happily.

Yesterday while chatting with him during our fortnightly catch up, I was delighted to learn that he has not only managed to turn around the business he was entrusted with & given a free hand to run, but his promoters have been so happy with his work that they have proactively corrected his compensation & increased it to match the best in the industry. It doesn’t stop here. The family that owns the group, has interests in a diverse portfolio that includes mining, luxury resorts, real estate & much more. In less than a year of employment with them, they have now started planning & making targeted investments where they are entrusting my friend to lead the respective P&Ls in the new ventures. As someone who has literally grown up with him, I was so happy to see my friend back to his cheerful & optimistic self as he went on narrating his new initiatives to me with the enthusiasm of a 25-year old.

Later, reflecting on our conversation, I realized that I had never seen him so sorted & confident before, even when he was rapidly growing in his erstwhile MNC, with a new title every second year.

In sharp contrast to the above, if you study most large organizations, you’ll observe that in a frenzy to race with rookie start-ups, they have been unsuccessfully tinkering with their proven business models over the past few years and, barring a few exceptions, most of them ?stand disrupted today, floating cluelessly back and forth. Restructuring, ‘optimization’, ‘HC-cuts’, management fads, ?Analog – Digital , Old school – New school. Blah.

And this is such a pity because a majority of today’s bright young talent, with the exception of who plunge into the start-up ecosystem, have their career aspirations designed around working inside large organizations which, as they erroneously assume, have the right mix of leadership & learning opportunities that will make great professionals out of them, never for once suspecting that most large organizations today are filled with risk-averse cogs at the top who have no clue how to lead growth & fend off storms.

To borrow Seth Godin’s analogy, most large organizations today, are ‘factories’ , operating by the rules of the Industrial age and attempting to disguise it with external fluff and imagining themselves ready to take on the new Unicorns that pose a threat for them in the marketplace . The ‘Factory Model’ is a setup that thrived on interchangeable parts and interchangeable people. A play of commodity, of cheaper and faster volume. A model that needed people to ‘fit in’, obey rules, follow orders without questioning and deliver profits for the factory in form of an output that was a multiple of their inflowing labor, and paying them a tiny fixed remuneration in lieu , maybe with an insurance plan thrown in . Perhaps also a loan here, a bonus there. The landscape of the factory was filled with ‘bureaucrats, note takers, literalists, manual readers, TGIF laborers, map followers and fearful employees’, as writes Godin. Just do your job and you are not accountable for decisions, a promise that successfully seduced our risk averse ‘lizard brains’ for over two hundred years because it worked, as it followed the?‘rule of ordinary people’ with lowest possible skills to fulfil functions and to keep people dispensable. And while nobody was looking, machines started replacing these ordinary people, and these people were forced to become more and more like machines – cheaper, faster commodities perched on varying levels of manufactured hierarchy, each member in the pyramid wearing a collar that gave them a sense of self-importance for presiding over?lower collars?and a secret scowl when being ordered around by?higher collars?. Meanwhile, someone else was getting better by hiring?cheaper collars, or outsourcing collars to a low cost country, or cutting a few collars in the headcount to do their math every quarter . And while each organization was slugging it out in an over-fed market place with two teams – management (?who owned the machines) and the labor (?who followed the rules & wore the collars?), the internet came along.?And thus began the end of what Thronton May calls the ‘?Attendance Based Compensation ( ABC)’, which meant getting paid for showing up .?And as Hugh MacLeod wrote – ‘?The web made kicking ass easier to achieve, and mediocrity harder to sustain. Mediocrity now howls in protest’.

?If you closely examine any struggling large MNC, you’ll discover that its leadership is filled with factory workers, just with different collars for the sake of identity. They have been brought up in the rules of the industrial era, educated in a system designed for the industrial era ( get kids to fit in, cram books , chase examination scores and enlist in a never ending rat race at some university, maybe even earn a degree in Trigonometry or some equally distant subject that has no relevance to real life of most mortals ). They are , what William Deresiewicz calls in his book by the same name, ‘Excellent Sheep’ – men and women who are designed to obey rules and fit in, to avoid risks, to kiss ass, to avoid questioning the status quo. Till the 20th century, such sheep were assets ( even with their Trigonometry degrees , which actually gave them an edge & an air of pompousness). In the today’s digital age however , they are liabilities for all large organizations because they are hired for skills on their resumes that are no longer relevant in today’s world . They fail to move the needle because they are?designed?to wait for ‘instructions’ . They don’t understand accountability and are petrified of?risk ownership. They then devise complex survival games to hold on to their jobs. They snub meritocracy, shun originals and build fiefdoms for themselves which they fill with other like-minded sheep who will listen to them, laugh at their stupid jokes and ‘Like’ their silly social media posts. Meanwhile, some rookie newcomer in the field kicks their ass and they have no clue how to play defence, let alone offense.

?The internet era has flipped the traditional industrial model on its head. The top heavy centralized model of big organizations of the past has been hit by the internet which rewards niche businesses that have high differentiation and can charge a premium for the same . The modern era?also rewards speed & scale in businesses that make profits in a seamless world , at a scale unimaginable by even the largest of conglomerates of yore . Large yesteryear organizations are trying to compete with incomplete information to lock in long-term consumer loyalty, with mediocre, one-size-fits-all products. But in a world of instantaneous?information, cheap online advertising, design thinking, lean start ups (led by fearless and young innovators) , creative supply chains & agile manufacturing , this is getting increasingly tough .?

So if you are a leader who genuinely wishes to transform his factory into a vibrant, winning workplace, it’s time to step off the treadmill , take a pause and revisit the basics. If you examine closely, the game has always been about basics. Only the cosmetics keep changing with each era. . Rest of it was always about the transfer of the right emotion to the lowest common denominator – the employees. Infusing an authentic can-do and a pride in them. Empowering them & making them indispensable. And when your employee is indispensable, you too become indispensable.

Coming back to my friend again, as someone who has observed him wearing both hats – that of a large-MNC executive & now in his new avatar as an indispensable member of a successful group, I instantly see the following ten changes. Maybe if all employees in large organizations embrace these changes, they will be able to wing it too.

1. An indispensable employee doesn’t fit a job description. She steps up, stands out, takes charge without sticking to a spec. Indispensable employees find ways to do more than their pay cheque, instead of ?hiding behind excuses of?job descriptions and lazily waiting for someone else to take charge (?while secretly hoping that no one actually does so).
2. An indispensable employee doesn’t?bring a linear , transactional ‘what’s-in-it-for-me??’ approach to his daily work.
3. An indispensable employee doesn’t fall for the pseudo meritocracy trap. Let’s face it – Meritocracy as a concept, stands distorted and abused today. We hire on the basis of grades and pedigree of a candidate’s formal education, a system that is defective on its own . We promote obedience, we applaud note-takers who ‘don’t fail’, who meet deadlines and who fit in. If you too hire and promote people on the basis of degrees and PPT making skills , you are setting yourself up to have your ass kicked by an upstart in the marketplace.
4. An indispensable employee ‘owns’ the company. She picks up the crumpled piece of paper from the floor to toss into the trash bin and she takes 2-sided prints for her air ticket. She chooses the cheaper hotel and flies economy. As companies get fatter, the employees start ‘following rules’, meaning -?that they invariably stretch their expenditure to the ceiling of their budget. Flying miles and Loyalty points of Hotel chains become their new contests. They go on extreme spending sprees on useless strategic leadership meetings ( at exotic locations)?in Q1 and then resort to travel bans & headcount cuts in Q3 to scrape through their numbers. Sounds familiar ?
5. An indispensable employee brings?both?his brains to work. For many decades we were taught that it is only our left brain ( our logic, our math and our science) that gets us ahead at work. And exposing your right brain ( your creativity, your empathy, your sensitivity) was an unpardonable offence. As machines take up more and more of our cognitive work, this approach is not only dated but it is also stupid and dangerous. Every dispensable employee, in your competitor organizations and your own, has a comparable left brain today ( the internet playing the biggest leveler). What will differentiate an employee and make him irreplaceable, is his right brain – his inter-personal skills, his emotional capital, his ability to feel, to express and to balance sensitivities. Sinking ships are still promoting the yesteryear plastic employees – the suit clad robots who show up, smile only when their boss smiles and who scoff at a team member who breaks down due to some personal issue.
6. An indispensable employee is human. She is not a six-sigma certified piece of machinery that is designed to be near perfect. It was always this way. We humans, like artistes, bring out their best when we direct our own movie. Bad workplaces are about control, about reviews. About chasing an illusive zero defect world. Great workplaces have always been full of employees who occasionally fumble and stumble, but also who often strike gold and discover new worlds. All good companies start with humans. Then they turn them into machines. Then they become bad companies.
7. Some years ago, in a Twitter conversation with his fans, Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan was asked by a fan what rent should he pay if he wanted to rent a room in ‘Mannat’ ( Khan’s landmark sea facing bungalow in Mumbai). Khan( the richest actor in the world today)?wittily quipped – ‘?Thirty years of hard work’. In an interview few years back, when asked about his work philosophy, SRK had stated that he just gets up every morning and goes to work for his employer – SRK the brand. All indispensable employees of indispensable organizations are somewhat like this. They get up, go to work, get shit done. You cannot ask them to quantify their contribution in a one-page document. If you can quantify it, you can replicate it and replace it.
8. An indispensable employee rarely has a well-written resume. Headhunters would know this that it can be a daunting task to have a great candidate come up with an updated resume. Chances are, she has not bothered to update a resume in over a decade because she never had to?apply for a job. Because people referred her, people approached her, cajoled her and hired her. Dispensable employees in dispensable organizations are excellent resume writers. They need to document every course they did, every sale they concluded and every accolade they won. And still, employers reject them because the same resume that they create to glorify themselves, limits them and corners them. Indispensable employees are never restricted to resumes. They let their reputation act as their resumes.
9. Indispensable employees are trouble shooters. Do you remember that funny story of how a bunch of cannibals who were hired in an office, got away for a year, eating one manager a day. But the day one of them ‘ate’ a departmental assistant, all hell broke loose & they were caught . Why ??Because work stopped?! Indispensable employees, whether employed?in a start up or a 100-year old behemoth, are like that departmental assistant. They?repair?things when they break. They are custodians of information . They have solutions to problems & not problems with solutions. Remember that IT help desk guy you always go to, when your laptop conks off ? Who always manages to fix it and also gives you a smile ? Mark my words, he won't be laid off.
10. ?Indispensable employees say a lot of ‘NOs’.?They have a fair understanding of their value proposition as they have of their limitations. They are not people pleasers. They take on only things they do really well and then they over-deliver on their commitments.?The problem with most large organizations today is that saying ‘No’ is perceived to be a negative trait. It tarnishes your reputation, brands you wrongly in the company grapevine and gets you passed over for promotions. In a bid to be considered inclusive and positive, cogs in such organizations say yes to every project that lands on their table. They end up delivering mediocrity, which in turn gets their companies to get into the price game and go mass-market. Soon there is not enough food on the table. And the cog is kicked out.

I guess this is about it. Think about these dear leader. Think about these often.