Back to Your Roots

"Understanding where you are from help you better understand where you want to go."
                          - US Ambassador to India Richard Verma, describing his recent visit to his hometown in Punjab. 

Importance of values in our personal and professional lives

Becoming a leader, says Warren Bennis the leadership guru, is if not identical, similar to becoming a fully integrated human being. Leadership, says Bennis is about self awareness, as well as being aware of the effect of others. I have experienced the truth of Bennis' observation in my coaching practice where I adopt the 'whole person' approach.

A man they say is the sum of his parts and in the whole person model, we call these parts

1. The domain of self management
2. The domain of people management and
3. The domain of organization management

In my experience,  the best outcomes happen when we focus on the first, i.e. the domain of self management. This domain deals with values, attitudes, beliefs and emotional intelligence - the building blocks of self awareness. Once self awareness happens, it becomes much easier to deal with one's relationships and environment (aka organization). Of all the elements in the self management domain, I find working on  values  to be the most useful in getting a handle on one self. Unfortunately however, I find that values in the minds of most business leaders are something which are either too abstract, or thought to be  irrelevant. Why are values so important? 

Jack Welch's definition of values brings out their importance in the organizational context, as well as describes them best.  Values according to Welch, are just behaviors – specific, nitty-gritty, and so descriptive they leave little to the imagination. People must be able to use them as marching orders because they are the how of the mission, the means to the end -- winning. In other words, values are an organization's formula for winning in business. In fact, Welch thought values to be so important, that he developed a matrix of 4 types of managers -  those who lived by their values and those who didn't. Those who lived by them, could continue in his organization and those who did not, were summarily fired!

Thus managers falling in the Q2 and Q3 category, were to be fired, those in Q4 were to be coached and the ones in Q1 were considered invaluable. So invaluable,  that they were to be "handcuffed, making sure they did not leave the company for the next five years!"

Given this understanding and critical importance of values, it is not hard to understand the importance of their role in our personal lives too. Values are our personal formula to winning in life, and inventorying of our values gives us a deep insight into the moorings of our aspirations, and help us immensely in carving a solid goal plan to achieve them.

Here is what Mr A, the MD of a large chain of hospitals, wrote to me after  doing one such exercise,

" ...the coaching process that I went through with you was extremely useful in helping me to understand myself. It helped me to focus myself for the first time of the direction that I always wanted to take and it helped me to make a commitment to myself.  I am now very aware when I take any action as I go along and do question whether the action and outcomes are in sync with the goals that I set for myself."

The Power of Positivity and Vision

In my earlier blog, I had talked of how critical a positive attitude was to strategy making, and had cited the case of such a display by Vivek Nair of Leela Hotels. Another great example is that of Sam Pitroda, advisor to the PM on overall conceptualisation and planning of the Public Information Infrastructure (PII).

The PII project is massive and attempts to do what no one has attempted to do before. The project will create opportunities for the people at the bottom of the pyramid by creating a vast information network that would make India's shoddy, Raj-era governance instant, transparent and ready for the 21st century! Which means connecting 250,000 panchayats by fibre,3G, Wimax and other digital links to schools and even bus-stands!

Merchants of gloom (MoG) say the challenges are severe due to the federal nature of the country's stucture, where there is severe distrust between the state and central governments; even between the states where the party in power is the same as at the centre. Then, the MoGs say, comes the problem of silo-ism between even central government departments. So, say the doom-gloom bunch, it is by no means a given that simply provided the platform, the departments and states will jump on to the PII platform.

in contrast to such cynical thinking, Pitroda's passion and positivity about the project shines through when he talks about the project. India, he says, has a huge infrastructure broadband and GIS ( geographical information system) which has the potential to zoom in on , like Google Maps, on every tree and every panchayat in India. Integrating this infrastructure with the Unique identification Database, which tags every Indian with a unique number, and tagging of every government project would create a public information system accessible to every Indian.

From the days of the rajas to the British to our modern politicians, a handful of persons has controlled information in India. "You can now," says Pitroda, "begin to democratise government, create open government in the true sense, create opportunities at the bottom of the pyramid. This is the vision."

Pitroda's masterstroke of positivity - "I would like to do it in two years."

Leadership lesson: Believe in yourself and don't let nay-sayers throw you off-course. Let your positivity shine through your every action and speech!

Importance of Core Values

In a recent issue of the Corporate Dossier , Ed Cohen, the ex-chief Learning Officer at Satyam Computer Services reveals an interesting factor behind the downfall of the founder and Satyam, and its founder Byrraju Ramlinga Raju - the absence of defined core values. Since its inception in 1987, Raju had outlined the purpose of Satyam Computers as 'AICS Delight' (an acronym for Associates, Investors, Customers and Society at large) and this certainly seems to have worked for him in the golden years of Satyam's growth. He won several awards and honours including the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year for Services in 1999, Dataquest IT Man of the Year in 2000, CNBC's Asian Business Leader - Corporate Citizen of the Year award in 2002 and E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2007.

But, according to Cohen, AICS wasn't enough and the company needed core values. Reason - the articulating of core values would create a conscious choice with a deliberate choice around the core values. The lack of core values coming down from the top, resulted in their being defined from the middle and bottom line and these core values defined at the lower levels, stood the company in good stead when the crisis hit. So even though Raju and Satyam were synonymous in the minds of his employees, when the failure happened and the initial shock had subsided, everyone responded with 'How can we save this? How can we pull it together? We have responsibility to our customers, employees investors, even to society.'

In this crisis situation, the 'AICS delight' mission statement would not have helped - the delight had gone out of the window with the scam revelations. It was only the core values defined at the lower levels (Cohen does not tell us what they were), that the risk of the company going bust was mitigated. People started planning scenarios of various possible arising situations and drafted a 30/60/90 days start-stop-continue plan.

A company's resiliency is sorely tested during a time of crisis and Cohen talks about the 'heart' the people of the organisation showed during the crisis. One of the 'heart' factors was surely the core values.

Leadership lesson: A company's core values shape the culture and define the character of a company. They guide the behaviour of it's employees and the way decisions get made.

Have you defined the core values of your company? And if you have, are you making sure they govern your own, as well as the actions and behaviours of your employees?