HR Value Chain...Cornerstone of Successful HR Foundation by Raj Gupta

As an HR professional, our key job is to attract, retain and grow human capital. However, to do that, it would be an added advantage if we have an exposure to other functions i.e. sales, commercial, business analysis, quality, marketing etc. There are 4 key part of HR value chain as outlined in the picture i.e. Talent Acqusition, Organizational Development, Employee Engagement and HR Service Delivery which includes entire spectrum of HR transcation including compliance with law of the land.

To build successful career in HR, it is imperative that we build depth and breadth in each of these and subset of these strands and deliver consistently on defined CTQ's (Critical to Quality). If we skip any of these and somehow manage to reach to leadership positions in HR, we will find it difficult to strategize and even if we strategize, it would be difficult to visualize the entire execution phase.

Most of strategies fail not because they lack perspicacity and sound judgement on the part of strategist, however, they fail as it is difficult to execute them and the person who strategize without going through the rigmorale, fails to antcipate the bottlenecks in execution. I have seen HR People more willing to do employee engagement / Organizational development related roles and shy away from gettting their hands around transcational spectrum of HR which is a backbone of any HR organization.

In my view, aspiring HR professipnals must build the efficiencies, depth and breadth around all these strands. This will help them in the long run and catapult them into "hands on" HR leaders where they will not demand, however, command the respect of their staff.

Source:

HR Success Mantra

What Wise Leaders Always Follow by Prasad Kaipa

Smart leaders make New Year resolutions and set quarterly milestones, charting progress against ambitious plans and goals. Wise leaders, however, take a different approach: they root themselves in a noble purpose, align it with a compelling vision, and then take action — not just for that year, but for the rest of their lives. That noble purpose becomes a North Star, giving direction when the path ahead is hazy, humility when arrogance announces false victory, and inspiration when the outlook seems bleak.

In India, we call the north star "Dhruv Tara" — or "Dhruv Star." According to the story, Dhruv was a prince transformed into the ever-fixed star as a reward for his perseverance. But the idea of a guiding star can be found in many different religious and cultural traditions. North Star is a concept (pdf) that I have been using in my teaching and coaching for over 20 years to represent our highest personal aspiration — especially when it's connected with a noble purpose. (Those of you familiar with Bill George's "True North" concept may notice some overlap.)

One of the best examples of a wise leader is Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy (also known as "Dr. V"), an ophthalmologist with crippled fingers who started the Aravind Eye Care System in 1976 — with no business plan, money or resources. Aravind now sees 2.7 million patients every year, and even more impressively, treats the majority of them for free. Aravind has become a business example of compassion, as well as proof that wise leaders can radically change the world by following their North Star. The case study written about Aravind has been required reading for all Harvard Business School students for over a decade.

We have a choice in creating the life that we desire. With our judgment, choices, actions we take, we change the course of our future and steer our destiny, moment by moment. Wisdom is not about focusing on the future, but rather about acting in the present, aligned with our North Star.

North Stars align our energy, emotions, and actions in the service of our vision. Though it is not always simple to find one's North Star, once it appears, its guidance helps simplify one's choices. As paradoxical as it may seem, wise leaders are, first and foremost, wise followers. Once they become clear about their North Star, it becomes their calling, and they serve that calling willingly, happily, and infectiously.

So what was Dr. V's North Star? He dreamed a seemingly impossible dream: to eliminate needless blindness by providing appropriate, compassionate, high-quality eye care for all. Along with his siblings and their families, many of whom he had guided into medicine, he started his simple 11-bed clinic with three revolutionary guiding principles:
•Turn no one away, regardless of whether they can pay or not;
•Give everyone the same high quality of care;
•Don't depend on any outside sources for funding;

These constraints, despite coming from a deep conviction in his own values, seemed to destine him for limited impact.

Instead, Dr. V changed the face of eye care on the planet, and he did it by owning the entire problem — providing community outreach, eye care, training, eye banks, research and the production of inexpensive but high-quality eye care supplies. He realized that if he wanted to eradicate curable blindness from the world, he had to start thinking not only about his organization, but also about training others. Conventional wisdom would be to guard your secret sauce, but Aravind did the exact opposite. By giving away all its secrets, Aravind has trained approximately 15% of all ophthalmologists in India and thousands more from over 69 countries. The work of this one man is said to have touched 40% of eye care patients in the developing world to date.

I've had the opportunity to meet Dr. V and work with Aravind over the past several years. I am deeply touched, moved and inspired by the revolution he set in motion and sheer impact of his contributions on the world. How did Dr. V come up with his North Star? Was he a wise person to begin with? Can you and I do something that can have a significant impact like Dr. V?

To my mind, Dr. V was not born wise — he became wise because of his decisions and actions. Here is an extract from Infinite Vision: How Aravind Became the World's Greatest Business Case for Compassion by Pavithra Mehta and Suchitra Shenoy (a special note: Read this book!):

To Dr. V, the cultivation of empathy, the effort toward equanimity and self-awareness, the stepping back from ego, and the attempts to align with a clear-sighted, inherent wisdom are all part of his larger aspiration to be a perfect instrument.

His story provides tremendous inspiration and guidance for those looking to follow their North Star. His story also flouts many conventional rules of business. Wise leadership does not fit the strict patterns of smart analysis, but instead taps into an intuitive part of who you are at the core, unearthing counterintuitive principles:
•Compassion doesn't have to come at the cost of efficiency — it can actually drive systems and operational excellence. You don't have to separate Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) goals and project goals. You can make CSR the strategy or even the end goal for your business growth.
•If you truly focus on service, resources do organize themselves — if your main interest is in solving a problem, then there's no question that cooperation beats competition. Businesses should focus on the customer, not on profit or business model.
•When individuals (and especially leaders) stay rooted in inner transformation —being true to one's calling, paying attention to one's values and being aware of one's emotions and actions — it fundamentally alters the way in which organizations develop. Leaders aligned with their own North Star inspire their teams to do the same, not simply by words but by the power of their example.

In order to identify and then follow your own North Star, you have to ask powerful questions of yourself. Those questions will yield new insights for you and help you find inspiration in the most unthinkable places. For Dr. V, inspiration struck when he learned about McDonald's. Due to his experience as a government doctor with rural camps, he knew that he had to develop highly efficient, scalable, repeatable processes to treat the masses that came. In McDonald's, he saw that throughout the world McDonald's franchises had similar quality meals for low prices. "If McDonald's can do it for hamburgers, why can't we do it for eye care?" And sure enough, he developed systems that allow Aravind surgeons to do more than five times the number of cataract surgeries done by the average Indian doctor (and ten times that of an average US physician).

Following your North Star can also lead to quixotic decisions. When intraocular lenses (IOLs) came on the scene in the West in the early 1990s, global health professionals called it a luxury that developing countries could ill-afford. Dr. V saw the value of IOLs and literally manufactured a revolution. At a time when India was far from being the hotbed for technology outsourcing that it is today, Aravind started manufacturing these IOLs at world-class quality, driving the global price down from $150 to $10. Aravind now makes 7% of all IOLs in the world.

I hope Dr. V's story brings you closer to your own North Star. The key to making 2012 a special year is to first find our North Star, our noble purpose, and then to execute on it as if it is the only thing that matters — because it is. Wise leadership comes from identifying our own North Star, then using the light to enable others to find their own.

What is your North Star? And how can you be the perfect instrument of a higher calling? Share it with us here.

4 Traits of Great Leaders by Matthew Swyers

It is often said that hindsight is 20/20. By looking to the past we can learn how better to adapt and achieve in the future. By learning from lessons of old we can accomplish great things if we only listen to what we have been taught.

Throughout my life I have been fortunate to have been mentored by leaders great and those individually successful yet lacking the ability to lead others. Some individuals can achieve a great level of success but lack the ability to drive a great organization forward. As such, they are always limited to their individual accomplishments. Great leaders, however, can lead many to accomplishments above what they themselves thought possible and, in turn, to levels of success above and beyond what the individualists will ever accomplish.

Here are the traits that these leaders exhibit that give them the ability to achieve these lofty ideals.

Aspire

Great leaders aspire to reach beyond that which convention says is possible. They know that greatness is not achieved by reaching for mediocrity. They reach for figuratively, and in one instance literally, the moon.

President John F. Kennedy stepped to the podium on a warm September day in 1962 and delivered the memorable lines “…We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills…”

In this moment he set an aspiration we had never believed possible. He aspired for greatness for an entire nation. To break free of our earthly limits and land a man safely upon another terrestrial body. As a result of those public aspirations within the decade Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would take mankind’s first steps on the moon.

Great leaders do not aim for the easily achievable. They aspire for loftier goals. Why, you may ask? Because if you plan for mediocrity all that you and those around you will ever achieve is just that, mediocrity. But if you aspire for greatness, even if you come up short, more likely than not you will still achieve a level greater than that which you knew you could reach. Great leaders always aim for goals higher than others think can be achieved.

Aspire to greatness.

Plan

But to achieve greatness you must also have a plan. Aspiration without a plan is simply a dream. What materializes the aspiration into reality is the plan. On June 6, 1944 the Allies did not wake up and say, “Time to take back Europe from the Axis – Let’s Go.” There was a plan. In reality, a plan that took months to develop and one of the most carefully and detailed in military history.

By 1944 the Germans occupied all of continental Europe. To win the war the Allies had to reclaim France and other occupied territory. Planning for the invasion began months in advance. The Axis feared an invasion on the Western Front. It created what became known as Fortress Europe building the Atlantic Wall, a defensive barrier of concrete, steel, imbedded troops and weapons more than 1200 miles long stretching from Denmark to the Spanish border.

The shortest shipping distance from England to France was to the Pas de Calais region. It was here the Axis expected the Allies to invade. It was here Fortress Europe was strengthened with mines, barbed wire, other obstructions and powerful artillery.

But the Allies had a better idea – a better plan. The British and Americans selected, instead, a landing place further south, on the coast of Normandy. It was nearly 75 miles from England but was much less defended than Pas de Calais. Every detail of the invasion was scripted. Nothing left to chance. And as we now know, the details of that plan, and the countless sacrifices made in executing the same, turned the tides of the war in Europe and the fate of the world as we know it.

Have a plan.

Inspire

But before you can execute the plan you must inspire those around you that they can achieve by following the plan. You must inspire them to achieve the aspiration through the plan.

We need not look to world leaders or now iconic military figures to demonstrate this point. We need only look as far as our local heroes and those who mentor us on a day-to-day basis.

Many years ago I was fortunate enough to play football for the legendary Florida high school football coach Sam Budnyk. For 47 years he coached the Cardinal Newman Crusaders of West Palm Beach, Florida, to countless wins including victories over teams that, on paper, were superior to Coach Budnyk’s teams in every way. But as the old expression goes, that’s why they play the games.

Coach Budnyk believed in his teams and the young men who played for him. For nearly five decades every fall Friday night he challenged young men to rise to the occasion and be the best that they could be. To accept any challenge and turn them into opportunities. In short, he inspired generations of young men to accomplish more than they thought they could achieve. And we did.

To this day Coach Budnyk is the all-time winningest football coach in Palm Beach County, a region of the country which arguably can claim the largest percentage of active and retired professional football players from the NFL as well as countless athletes that played on NCAA championship football teams. Coach Budnyk’s teams included some of these athletes, but played against more, and won against most. Why? Because he inspired us to do so, to be better, to achieve greatness.

Inspire those who will act on the plan.

Execute

But as Coach Budnyk would always tell his young men, potential in the absence of achievement doesn’t mean anything. You must aspire to greatness. You must plan the path to get there. You must inspire to achieve the aspiration. But ultimately you have to execute the plan to reach your goal. There is no better example of how these four factors come together to achieve great things than the events which began to unfold on April 14, 1970 173,790 miles from Earth.

On April 11, 1970, Apollo 13 launched from Cape Kennedy. Apollo 13 was the seventh manned Apollo mission and third intended to land on the Moon. Three days into the mission an oxygen tank exploded crippling the spacecraft. In a millisecond NASA’s planned third landing on the moon shifted into a rescue and recovery mode.

Could they fix the craft remotely? Could they get it back to Earth? Could they save the lives of the three astronauts still hurdling through space towards the moon?

NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz famously stepped to the plate and with the oft uttered creed “Failure is not an option” led a team that would ultimately bring home James A. Lovell, John L. "Jack" Swigert, and Fred W. Haise.

Presented with a near impossible evolving series of challenges Kranz and his team aspired to bring the crippled ship home. They planned, tested, and re-planned every aspect of what would be needed to accomplish the goal. The team was inspired by the setting forth of all options and that failure was never considered as an option. And finally, and most critically, the team executed the plan accomplishing arguably NASA’s greatest feat: on April 17, 1970 Apollo 13 came home.

Aspire. Plan. Inspire. Execute. Achieve your greatness.

What Do Good Global Leaders Do? by Tobias Fredberg and Flemming Norrgren

Is there such a thing as a consistent pattern of successful global leadership?

To answer this question, during the last few years, we have met with about 30 CEOs who pass two critical tests for succeeding globally: (1) they have outperformed most of their industry peers and they have gained respect from their stakeholders in multiple ways; and (2) they lead companies originating from different cultures and successfully operate across the globe. Despite the differences in culture and mindset, our research suggests that these global leaders — whether they are from North America, Europe or India — seem to lead their companies differently than their peers. Most strikingly, they pioneer a leadership style which engages people in very different settings. For example, they put immense emphasis on:

• A higher purpose — These leaders make people feel emotionally engaged and inspire them to walk the extra mile. The company has to mean something to people rather than just being a place to work. This is probably especially important if the company center and the local offices are far apart. An example: When Jorma Ollila of Nokia describes their purpose as connecting people, it applies to the local office in Kenya just as it does to the head office in Espoo, Finland.

• Responsiveness to communities — In many of the developing countries where these companies are active, it is not self-evident that you get a license to operate. To be accepted, you need to build trust. More than simply being a good citizen and helping to educate potential future employees, being responsive to the needs of the local settings has to do with becoming a trusted insider. That is, for example, how Carlo Pesenti of the Italian cement giant Italcementi explains how they try to act when building up cement plants that minimize negative environmental impact in developing countries.

• Creating an internal social fabric enabling good collaboration across borders/levels — These leaders seem to put a higher and higher emphasis on local activities, and on attempting to connect these local activities in a smart way. This is complementary to the global processes that they also develop. Peter Sands of Standard Chartered Bank, for example, seems to give pride to connecting local offices on different continents to help build a truly global united firm and reward people that make ideas travel across functions and geographies.

In addition to these overarching guiding principles, we found that these leaders also share a set of practices. These common practices are similar to those that leadership scholar Robert J. House and colleagues found in the late 1990s when they studied leadership in 62 countries to explore if there were leadership characteristics that were universally seen as good or bad. They found that people all over the world described good leadership with terms such as reliable, have high expectations, win-win problem solver, communicative, team builder and fair. These characteristics are even more relevant today, and we found that they still drive the success of the global leaders that we talked to:

Reliable: These CEOs are strong advocates for creating long-term successful strategies that speak to both head and heart. They have what the Finns call sisu — they stay the course, build success quarter by quarter and are persistent in creating both economic and social value.

Have High Expectations: They invest heavily in growing both the social and economic side of the corporation, and they set high objectives for both — their performance management takes both of these aspects into equal account.

Win-Win Problem Solver: They do not compromise by doing trade-offs between social and economic value — they creatively find ways to get the two to be mutually reinforcing.

Communicative: They work hard to be present in company locations all over the world, not only to spread messages but to learn and listen. They seem to prioritize direct meetings, but use all sorts of modern communication technology extensively to connect with the vast ends of the global corporation.

Team Builder: Not only do they take great pains in building long-lasting top teams; they are also very focused on building an aligned leadership system, engaging with dozens of management teams to ensure that the values and practices are spread around the world.

Fair: Most of them addressed how they were driving not only respect for diversity, but — taking it a step further — building a strong community out of diversity rather than one built on similarity. They also described how they attempted to create processes for strategy and development that would feel fair to those involved, and how fairness became especially important when people had to be laid off.

Our findings lead us to believe that a new model for global leadership is emerging — one which is not simply headquarter-centric, but one that embraces the complexity of a large organization and its role in the world, driven by the principles and practices above.

What models of global leadership, irrespective of country of origin, have you seen? What do you think qualifies as good global leadership?

Followup good reading material:

http://www.forum.com/_assets/download/61ab1fbb-5ac5-4ade-8813-68554368292c.pdf

Where Are the Talent Shortages As We Start 2012? by Keith Cline

The year flew by mostly because it was a very, very busy one.Although the economy continues to face many challenges, the startup and tech industries are very much alive. The IPO window slightly opened up for companies like LinkedIn, Pandora, Groupon, Zynga, and Carbonite.We saw monster rounds of funding for companies like Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox. The appetite for seed and angel investing was extremely active. Tech incubators and accelerator programs kept popping up.

It was also a very busy year for hiring at startup companies, as you know, and it doesn't look like that will slow down in 2012. We've certainly seen opinions on both sides of the fence as to whether or not there is a tech bubble or 2012 will be another active year of investing. I'm an optimist and I believe the pace of investing will remain consistent. Yes, some companies will fail, of course, but others will scale and grow their teams at a steady clip.

Hiring the best of the best is an absolute must if you are going to build a successful company. You will need to be prepared to compete against big companies with deep pockets and other up-and-coming startups that also have blue chip investors and a game-changing idea.

So, what are the most competitive areas for talent these days? Here's a look:

Software Engineers and Web Developers

The demand for top-tier engineering talent sharply outweighs the supply in almost every market especially in San Francisco, New York, and Boston. This is a major, major pain point and problem that almost every company is facing, regardless of the technology "stack" their engineers are working on.

Creative and User Experience

After engineers, the biggest challenge for companies is finding high-quality creative design and user-experience talent. Since almost every company is trying to create a highly compelling user experience that keeps people engaged with their product, it is tough to find people who have this type of experience (especially with mobile devices including tablets) and a demonstrated track record of success.

Product Management

It is always helpful for an early-stage company to hire someone who has very relevant and specific experience in your industry. This is especially true for product management, since the person in this role will interface with customers and define the product strategy and use cases. However, be prepared, as it will be a challenge to find people with experience in these high-growth industries: consumer web, e-commerce, mobile, software as a service, and cloud computing.

Marketing

I'm not talking about old-school marketing communications. Companies are looking for expert online marketers who know how to create a buzz of inbound marketing or viral traffic through the web, social media, and content discovery. Writing a good press release just doesn't cut it anymore, as everyone is looking for the savvy online marketing professional who understands how the current state of the web operates and knows how to make it work to their benefit.

Analytics

Since data is becoming more and more accessible, smart companies are increasingly making decisions driven by metrics. Analytics is becoming a central hub across companies where everything (web, marketing, sales, operations) is being measured and each decision is supported by data. Thus, we are seeing a high level of demand for analytics and business intelligence professionals who almost act like internal consultants; they help determine what should be measured and then build out the capability for a company

Source: Inc

3 Emerging Trends in Employee By Kara Scharwath

From the Brighter Planet Report, "Greening the Workplace 2011"

Two years ago, when the concept had just started to really gain traction, we reported the results of a survey conducted by Brighter Planet on engaging employees on sustainability issues. The company just released an update to that study which includes responses from employees at some of the companies leading corporate sustainability efforts including Wal-Mart, UPS, and Coca-Cola. Since the first survey two years ago, employee engagement practices around sustainability have become increasingly more common and organizations are seeing and monitoring the impact of these programs. The results of the study suggest three surprising trends that sustainability practitioners should take note of:

1.The results aren’t all positive. Although more than half of the employers in the survey are frequently promoting sustainability within their organizations, most still lack official engagement policies, and fewer programs were rated as effective at actually eliciting the desired behavior from employees. According to Brighter Planet, this could be the result of companies not implementing best practices established by the leaders in the space; or, it could be that employees have been slow to adopt the newer programs. Regardless, there is the possibility that ineffective programs could undermine the progress made so far on employee engagement overall and threaten the effectiveness of this approach to implementing sustainable practices.

2.Effective programs go beyond traditional issues. The more effective engagement programs promote action from employees on a variety of different issues. Instead of focusing narrowly on more traditional green office initiatives like recycling, energy use, and commuting, the best programs go a step further by giving more attention to emerging sustainability issues such as water use, sustainable procurement, and business travel. It’s possible that by expanding the breadth of their initiatives beyond the status quo, these companies are demonstrating to their employees a more serious commitment to sustainability as well as a more innovative approach which is likely to inspire greater motivation and action.

3.Data and information are key to success. Of all the organizations surveyed, those that collect and report data relevant to employee engagement efforts were three times as likely to have a program that was rated as “very effective.” This includes information on employee sustainability efforts, data on the organizations environmental footprint, and on travel and commuting. The number of employers that are collecting this type of data also increased 15 percent since 2009. In addition, the programs that empower employees to share sustainability-related ideas with each other had a strong correlation to overall program effectiveness.

Although employee engagement is becoming increasingly mainstream, it is still a young tool, and the effectiveness of different approaches vary widely. As companies implement and refine their employee engagement efforts, it’s important that they continue to collect the kind of feedback that this survey from Brighter Planet provides so they can continue to improve their programs

You Can't Predict Talent; Foster It by Margaret Heffernan

In his recent book Thinking Fast and Slow, behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman tells the story of observing army recruits out on exercises and his belief that he could spot the potential leaders amongst them. Years later, it turned out he'd been almost entirely wrong. His confident judgment had been a morass of bias, heuristics, and narrative fallacies.We like to imagine that our powers of discernment are greater than the evidence demonstrates. Similarly, investment banks like to imagine that their fund managers are impeccable pickers—even though the data shows almost no one is over a significant period of time.

We like to think that we know what is not knowable. I was reminded of this when I was asked what had made me so good at picking talent. Many of my ventures—broadcast productions as well as businesses—had involved individuals who went on to great things: stardom, fame, or success running their own businesses. How, I was asked, had I been able to identify ability to early?

On reflection, I knew I hadn't. Some of the entrepreneurs gave no sign that one day they'd be their own boss. Some of the TV talent I most liked went nowhere while others have developed rich public personae. I don't think I picked them; rather, I created the conditions in which they could grow.

So what were those conditions?
An open atmosphere. Every team I've ever run has, I realized, been profoundly democratic—which is to say that any good idea got attention. I've never cared about status except in disliking those who do. I take huge delight in good ideas from anywhere for anything: making the lunch room more pleasant or improving the core technology. Ideas didn't have to fight their way through a structure. They could be blurted out.Extravagant diversity.

It wasn't just that we employed Russians, Taiwanese, Indians, Americans, Brits, and Italians. Our youngest employee was eighteen and our oldest was 68. They'd worked in different countries, states and industries. Some demonstrated enormous emotional intelligence; some had virtually none. We hired more women than most technology companies—it wouldn't be hard—but you'd be hard pressed to make any generalization about the kinds of people we employed.

Time didn't matter. I've never cared when the work got done—as long as it does get done and in a way that doesn't cause co-workers undue inconvenience. Hours are not what count; productivity is. The same applied to maternity, paternity, and family leave. Individuals figured out what worked for them, and for their families—and that worked for the business. Too many companies seem to feel they have to fight for priority over family life and in that jealous feud, vast amounts of energy and goodwill are dissipated.

Stretch goals were just the start. Almost everything we tackled was hard. And if we cracked it, work got harder. We liked big challenges and cheered anyone who met them. I think it was clear when people came for interviews that the company was fun but not an easy option.
Was this enough to attract and develop wonderfully talented people?


I was probably also lucky to hire a few exceptionally creative individuals who then attracted others like themselves. But none of that would have mattered if the work itself hadn't been joyful and hard. It may sound like a contradiction, but doing great work is hard—that's why great people love it.