I have observed people from all fields across cultures, genders and education levels. The lag does exist, only the degree varies. It can be wide or narrow but I have not been fortunate enough to meet people whose talk and walk are without a lag.

People harbour two different personalities – one for walking and one for talking. I am no exception. But I am acutely aware of the incongruence. Here I expose the “oxymoronic me”:

1. I feel bad when  somebody demands bribe from me for getting things done but when I have a waitlisted train ticket I don’t mind paying bribe to have a confirmed ticket.
2. I don’t accept expensive gifts from my vendors but I maintain good relationships with my business associates by buying gifts for them.
3. As per the code of conduct, any money given, if receipted, is not corruption. Following this norm, I only comply with an accounting procedure. The official receipt is only a camouflage for the real intent.
4. I hate people who don’t confront tough issues. When I don’t want to confront an issue, I don’t take a telephone call and pretend to be in a meeting.
5. I say ‘yes’ when I don’t have the courage to say ‘no’ either because the person concerned is superior to me or I need to buy some time.
6. I am a celibate in the physical sense but highly lecherous at the mental level.
7. I criticise the government for their lack of meaningful policies for the growth of the country but I don’t even cast my vote at election time.
8. I am all for the strengthening of the Indian rupee but when the Indian rupee strengthened, I felt bad because the dollars I had earned during my trip abroad got devalued.
9. A value preacher smuggled a laptop when the import duty used to be 300%. The excuse was that such heavy taxation was unfair.
10. The height of being oxymoronic is that sometimes I am ok being oxymoronic and sometimes I feel bad about it.

Seemingly prosperous, India’s silicon city Bangalore has the highest number of suicides and cases of depression in India. Engineers working as coders are nothing but white-collar coolies busy as hell.

Double income coolie families have all the luxuries but rangolis are missing in front of their houses. They have airconditioned bedrooms with all the modern gadgets but they are full of stress and have restless sleep. While they all have laptops, they don’t have children playing in their laps. Their children are being taken care of in the city’s crèches.

Just look at homeless people sleeping in the open and observe how peaceful they are. Take a walk in any slum around six in the morning. The surroundings may be unhygienic but every house has a rangoli. Their livelihood may be uncertain but their contentment is far greater than that of our engineer coolies.

While we have created Xerox copies of engineers, we have lost the artist, the master carpenter, the sculptor and the painter. Child labour is generally frowned upon but child labour in the form of preparing for various tests for admission to educational institutes is encouraged. The number of students appearing in admission tests like GMAT keeps multiplying.

Individuality, aggression and competition have become virtues while co-creation and co-existence are becoming taboos. And our moral fabric is being audited through the western lens. Our happiness index is measured by the frames which have no relevance to us and we miss the whole point of being happy. True happiness is not in multiplexes and pubs but in grandma’s stories.

Can we reintroduce humility, sharing and caring in our people? Can we bring originality back in our lives? Can yoga be revived? Can we reinvent our happiness DNA and get back in touch with our innate talents and create economic self-sufficiency?

That will mean happiness to me.

S. Deenadayalan is an HR professional doing pioneering work in the field of high-performance work systems.

You are a ladder for others when you ‘enable’, ‘let go’ and ‘give permission to fail’. Being a ladder is all about seeing people grow without any insecurity. It is the ability to see the inner potential of a person, trigger it, nurture it and facilitate enhancement.

In this fast moving world, we have no patience to experiment. When a person does not deliver, the easiest solution is to change him. True leaders have a different take on that.

Enablement

Look at the ancient gurus. All of them created discomfort zones for their disciples, frustrated them, chided them, but groomed them. That is what we call coaching or mentoring today. The gurus themselves were sometimes not as great as the disciples but that did not bother them at all. They were happy being ladders for the disciples to climb.

In the leadership lessons of today, the end justifies the means. No wonder more CEOs lost their jobs in the last one decade than the cumulative exit of non-performing CEOs in the last one century. The reason their salaries were pegged to the share market did not work always.

Since these CEOs had hefty severance pays and sign-off bonuses, it did not matter to them. Nor did it provide the right leadership to the organization they led.

As things are, leaders’ growth is always linked to top line and bottom line growth and hardly ever to their people’s growth. So whenever a so-called leader quits, there is an exodus of executives. The history repeats itself with the next leader’s exit.

It is important that the growth of every CEO and his direct reports must be made dependent to the extent of 40% for laddering their juniors with effective enablement.

JRD Tata once addressed a team of young professionals at Titan Watches in the late eighties. He did not talk to us about great fundamentals of managerial effectiveness but simple things like “How to use a stapler?” The message was clear and loud. It is all about perfectibility no matter what the task is!

Brand obsession

We have become victims of branding. No wonder people from the best branded institutes command the highest salaries. But the best brands have not yet produced any Bill Gates, a JRD or a Narayanmurthy.

The upbringing of these leaders, their family values and their discomforts made them what they became and not the branded educational institutions. They built successful empires that resulted in scaling by, large employability, economic growth, community wealth and societal prosperity. It is a different matter that they too push their own children to the assembly line of branded institutes.

Let us trigger our originality. Let us not be fooled by the crowd behavior and force our children to sit for entrance tests of these branded institutes. Who our children are is more important than the branding that these institutes will provide.

Laddering

I have had the pleasure to interview some unbelievable leaders who not only had laddered their employees but created wealth for their neighborhoods, for their country and for the society at large even though their beginnings were extremely humble.

The chairman of Suguna Poultry that runs a 500-million US dollar empire is a school dropout and once worked as a porter at Bangalore railway station. As early as the 1980′s he contemplated business process outsourcing and created 45000 women entrepreneurs ‚Äì which no global leader with the best of branded education has ever done.

It was a win-win. He laddered others and became a leader in the best sense of the world. Laddering others is what leadership is about.

1. From 1969 to 1992, my one resolution was to quit smoking. But Wills power was stronger than my will power. Wills was my favourite brand of cigarettes.

2. Celibacy practice – I stuck to it in the physical sense but never at the mental level.

3. Keeping commitments and time management – as far as possible. How convenient!

4. Will not condemn, criticise and complain – resolutely strong to make this resolution every year but with little success. And this year will not be an exception.

5. Aggressively spot only good things in people. But it seems to me that I am the only person in the world with good things. Match my ego!

6. I will be very good – except lying every now and then.

7. Practise before preaching. Since I am told to do simple things first, I stop with preaching.

8. I will not be a slave of the computer. The computer has not permitted me to do so – waiting for the mouse-click approval.

9. Definitely bar on bars from the end 2008 to beginning 2009.

10. Will come home on time. Yes, it is the only resolution that I keep up but then it is anybody’s home I come to!

My experience is that most resolutions last for a few hours to a few days. Jokes apart, one learning I have had is to take a public oath before people who respect you, and the chances of your standing by the oath are for higher than a resolution made on your own. Of course this is only for fickle-minded people like me. My guess is that most people fall in this category. Maybe I don’t meet great people.

Happy new year!

S. Deenadayalan is an HR professional doing pioneering work in the field of high performance work systems. With three decade plus experience, he is a consultant to various organizations across the globe including Fortune 500 companies. Visit his website http://www.exploreceo.com

Research indicates interesting facts about HR professional’s career span – less than 1.5 years at the junior level, less than three years at the middle level and up to 5 years at the senior level. Few organizations can boast of HR longevity. Is that a boon or a curse?

Someone might point out that when entire governments are run by short-term heads of states – clouds passing by – then why single our HR for short spans at a position?

A US president serves for 4 years. If lucky and elected again, it could be a maximum of 8 years. The story is the same in almost all parts of the world. Prime ministers hardly ever last for more than 5 years.

If such is the volatility in the larger space of governance, HR is a small player in a particular industry and should not be singled out for shorter life spans.

But there is an inherent paradox in case of HR people. On the one hand, they bat for the idea of retention, on the other hand they themselves have such short tenures.

It is therefore important that industries should reconcile to the rotating model and accept HR retention as a non-value add. They need to look at rotatable HR as a positive process for better value adds. Academic institutions training students for HR should focus on the art of making permanent impact in semi-permanent roles.

Another challenge for HR people is their ‘out’-standing contributions. Yes, their contribution is very high in the periphery Рin public presentations and forums.
But when it comes to internal customers – be it line managers or business managers – HR people are seen as just gate-keepers.

They are considered a nuisance and their inclusion in business process is more for being politically correct rather than for any business value add. The general perception is that if they are not in the limelight, they become dangerous distracters.

The reason is that HR DNA is linked to power and powerlessness is unthinkable for the HR fraternity. Unless all that changes, there is no hope.

It is about time HR became ‘in’-standing rather than outstanding. HR professionals need to learn the art of

1. Co-creating.
2. Co-ownership.
3. Magnanimity.

HR needs to imbibe servant leadership, not as a spiritual journey but as a success tool for the right journey. The key ingredients of servant leadership are

? Be behind.
? Have ability to enable and empower.
? Let go.

These are high-end competencies which need strong nurturing. But then this nurturing will eventually change the nature (the very DNA of HR).

HR manager’s KRA should include tangibles in terms of the number of managers with multi-tasking, grass-root teams with multi-skilling and driving lean processes. Uptime on employee engagement should be the critical indicator in the HR score card.

When it comes to equipment, we talk of OEE (overall equipment effectiveness). When it comes to people, do we track their OPE (overall people effectiveness)? Can we bring in measurability to OPE?

In their semi-permanent roles, HR people need to become the custodian of “share and care”. Will they rise to the occasion?