Last evening at the Church, father John was narrating a story and allow me to reproduce it here to understand the knowing of people well.

The story goes like this. Little Tony was asked by his teacher, hey Tony, if your father has given you a dollar and I give you one, how many dollars you will have? Tony, without a blink of eyes, said one dollar ma’am. The teacher obviously got annoyed at this answer and repeated the question. Tony again answered the same. Now that the teacher got furious and snapped at him and said. You silly moron, you don’t know your math well and how come you make mistakes like this? Tony smiled and answered back. Ma’am, it’s not that I don’t know my math well, it’s just that you don’t know my father. It’s just not possible for him to give me a dollar.

It just goes to say one thing that knowing a person well determines the results. It is important to know the person well and then relation become better, results become achievable.

Know your boss, know your subordinates, know your colleagues well and you see how the business activities progress with no much hindrances. It’s the relationship that sets the mood of the transactions, it’s the connection of minds that moves the business activities.

Business processes vs social processes, that’s what I want to talk here about.

A business process is imperative for any businesses success, but the element that sustains the success is the social process. When you see a business model, a systematic approach in tackling that action to perceived results, you see only success ahead of you. But one thing which many leaders miss looking at is the social process involved in the arterial blood vessels of the business process strategy meetings.

Anytime when we interact with anyone else, there is this process called social process. A subconscious dialogue of our traits and behaviors which the other party perceives from the lower cortex of brain stems and filters in the background, pacing ways to make the business process easy or difficult. Social processes lead to results and for it to work, you need to know your team well. You need to start observing your team’s nuances of behaviors.

In a social process, that relation factor is important and leaders need to have a high level of what I call Relationship Quotient (RQ) to make sure their directives are leading to successful results. Most often the team or the leader is not aware how these social process plays a great role in results.

How meticulously leaders focus on business process and results, how focused some leaders are in getting works done? In driving the team to results? In analyzing that balance sheets? In counting that money? In putting an action plan for making more profits? , Well, how many such leaders do spend that much time and effort in improving the relationship quotient, a social process which helps them achieve all that they want materialistically?

As a leader, one need to be aware of this social process, if results are desired. Imagine a social process where the place is infected with negative energy, dialogues take the form of fault finding, everyone thinks of blaming each other, why things cannot be done  is what everyone thinks instinctively and in an environment like this, social processes go for a kill. You need not even talk of business results or success in such a place. It is bound to die a natural one by itself.

 “Creating a social enterprise brightens a glaring spotlight on broken business processes.”

The beauty is that you can nurture or manage the social process and how many leaders do that? I have seen many CEOs focus their future on financial strategies rather than building a robust social process within the organization. Many CEOs spend time unnecessarily chafing their senior executive leaders or team down the line, murdering the social process over and again, building that brick wall against them, resulting in creating a work culture where some team spends time in scheming things to make CEOs happy and some honest ones, do their work and avoid interactions with CEO as much as possible to avoid confrontations. Such relationship chaos extinguishes the possibility of building a great business delivery and a progressive work culture. It’s a shame that some of this kind of CEOs do not realize the importance of social process in their business and all that they do is murder talents every second and embrace that cheap thrill.

“Focus on relationship, connect with people, they will engage themselves for an enhanced business delivery”

 An enlightened CEO should spend 80% of his time in identifying the talents in his team, identifying the potential of his team, knowing what motivates each of his team, and above all how he should knit the different talents together in achieving to make them move towards what he wants to achieve.

A CEO who spends time in blaming his team for non-performance or keeps pulling down his senior leaders would be putting his social process at the workplace to jeopardy. A leader, be it a CEO or anyone for that matter who values effective social process is bound to achieve bright results. Everyone has a social process around them to manage and if every leader in the organization starts looking at managing his own social process within his area of influence, an organizational development is a result.

 “Your pain of unsuccessful business deliveries can only be cured by social process revitalization.”

 While building that social process, relationships have to be valued, respected. Killing the fundamentals of work relationship will curtail development. A leader has to be sensitive to the relationships that he builds in his team. Every leader has an opportunity to build relationships and nurture the social process. Once you have the right equations and right platform of social process, then the leader must focus on building talents that would make the future of the company a reality. The world is not a perfect place, so do, your own organization, your own department etc. you are bound to have talents that differ and having differentiation in talents is a good indication so that mediocrity doesn’t creep into your team. No one than the CEO or the leader is responsible for these that’s why we keep hearing that a leader must have a clear vision.

If you ever want to be in the paths of leadership, you ought to be thinking away from the crowd about the crowd and for the crowd.

 By Binu Prasad

Image courtesy: google.

What is searching for discontinuities? Perhaps the title of my write up here would stir curiosity. I know it may sound vague but coming to think of it, do we face discontinuity every day in life? Isn’t there something that we get used to and we keep wanting different things in life every time? I guess it’s natural for us to be comfortable with something which we craved for and then the living with it takes us to wanting more.

Hey, I am not driving your mind to anything else here, come back and let’s start looking at it from the perspective of an organization and leadership of talents. Just start comprehending the challenges that leaders have in managing the discontinuities of the team’s desires of growth. Then start reading on.

 A leader makes himself valuable the moment he keeps searching for the discontinuities of opportunities that his people experiences.

The world outside is where your team is at work, they keep doing the job that you assign them. And they execute your directives. They make things happen for you and they hold your work process intact. What a wonderful place it would be if the team holds everything that you want them to in full spirit. But what do you do to them? Do you provide more opportunities of learning for them or do you close the opportunity of learning once you have put the system, processes and workflow in place?

You would be killing talents if you keep yourself in a comfort zone of your team’s adroitness. 

You must find trajectories of new opportunities for learning for your team. You need to keep conceiving and executing different opportunities for your team. The work that your team do for you is not just a job but it’s an experience and one needs to value it as an experience than a mere job or task. A leader must visualise how new opportunities of learning can be developed, how new processes can be incorporated, how one existing process can be reengineered.

The team at a leader’s arms would be diamonds if they are constantly challenged to nearing perfection. In HR (that being my subject of interest), for example, a leader needs to find out how best he can make his team or himself connect to his employees, how well he can make the  experience of HR in the minds of employees valuable. Here, I see the needs of people, I mean the employees of your organization discontinuing, leading to a new one constantly. An opportunity that you spot to satisfy the employees discontinues at some point after it has been tapped and another one or extension of what you did emerges soon. Similarly, there is always a discontinuity of learning experience that your team will reach, expressing a new one to you.

Searching for the discontinuities of opportunities in that outer landscape is essential for a leader to keep his team talent on the sharp edge. As a leader you need to have an innate ability to find new ways of doing the routine stuff, better way of nourishing the talents in your team, yielding to the healthier organisation.

Searching the intrinsic talents in your team is another quality that a leader must have and a leader should be challenged with. If you discontinue the search for discontinuities in the world around you, you could soon be an extinction.

The world around you, especially the talents around you keep discontinuing what they needed and keep hoping for new. A leader must keep searching that discontinuities and foresee the next that the talents look out to keep managing them to perfection. 

The need to look for best talent and  also to look for that talent which thrives for sharpness must be an innate quality in a leader who desires success. One need to visualise the need of business, need of a specific function’s objective and must work towards searching for the talent to tackle that consistently.

I have a tendency to keep falling into HR domain. In HR, for example, the search that a leader should be pursuing is to build the trust in the employees of organization on HR team and he must strive to see all discontinuities in them so that a new opportunity can be created or formed or visualised.

Similarly, you should not leave the talents around you uncared. One need to be intimate with the talents, must know the essence of each individual and then start looking at what is needed for them next to make more experience in their life resulting in betterment of your business, function etc. While you search for the relentless nature of talents, you may come across talents that do not go beyond certain limitations of capabilities and that’s when one need to shed that talent or perhaps direct that talent to somewhere else for better suitability. A tough decision, though, but is essential for a true leader. The moment one’s hunger for more discontinues which rarely happens, and it shouldn’t happen when a leader holds the buzzer button on performance always, the time has reached for searching for new talents.

As leaders look for what the market needs and what market stop needing and what’s going to be their need and drive the business models to meeting the perceived need of a customer much before competition dreams of it, it is essential for a leader to identify the discontinuities of the need in talents around and be close in observing the changes in these talents and drive them to steer new business models to success, else one will face a struggle of having lack of talents to meet the new dream of business.

To put things in simple perspective, all of us have desires to perform and grow so do our team down the line. And the beauty is that the desires discontinue once achieved and experienced to its entirety, giving birth to new desires and wants for more growth. This obviously means a leader has a tough job in observing the discontinuities of career desires of the talents that he has to manage. Thus, he needs to steer his actions towards anticipating the new desires and wants that the talents in his team have so that talent drains do not sabotage the organization.

By Binu Prasad