First things first. I am not using the term wounded healers in the same way that Psychologist & Psychiatrist Carl Jung used it.

I am using it in the specific context of coaching to imply that in my experience, the most authentic and effective coaches are the ones who have experienced difficulties and challenges of varied kinds (wounds as I call them) or are perhaps continuing to face them and from those difficulties (wounds) bring out wisdom that can heal others they come in touch with. Perhaps it is that process of having healed their wounds or overcome their difficulties that they feel deeply motivated to help and heal others.

Executive coaches have been executives for long and hard. They have had careers filled with a fair share of ups and downs.

Be it building and maintaining relationships, expressing our emotions effectively, dealing with conflicts, coping with failures, managing our guilt, overcoming our unhelpful ways of thinking, tolerating stress, dealing with career anxieties, navigating the allowable dishonesties of Organisational life, all of us as coaches have had our fair share of highs and lows. This real and authentic experience is what makes for a real coach.

It is through this window of authenticity and through this identity of being a wounded healer that coaches are likely to make the deepest possible connection with their coachees. It is through that first hand experience that we are able to respond or challenge with authenticity because we are coming from a place of having been there and experienced it.

It is not by presenting ourselves as perfect, as having arrived, or as being complete, flawless and exemplary that we make a connection. In fact, presented in that manner may even be intimidating, a sense that I will not be understood or even worse a state where the coachee feels “I am afraid to tell you who I am because you may not like the who that I am and that is all I have”. (John Powell).

So, to be comfortable in my skin with all my gifts and my flaws makes me authentic.

To be able to therefore present myself as an equal and a co-traveler rather than as an expert make me trust worthy.

To however not burden my coachee with my issues and focus on the coachee makes me empathetic.

To seek peer guidance to be sure that I am staying within these ethical boundaries makes me responsible.

To accept all of this and feel good makes me human.

As I write this, I am reminded of the movie Good Will Hunting. Robin Williams as Dr. Sean Maguire really drives home this point.

-Ganesh Chella

In the field of Insurance, a pre-existing condition is defined as a health condition that existed prior to applying for health or life insurance.

I borrow this terminology merely to describe an often-experienced situation by Executive coaches when they are called upon to coach leaders.

The presented situation is something like this. The Organisation believes that the leader with many years of experience needs to improve his interpersonal relationships and it is beginning to impact his performance and his ability to work with peers and other stakeholders.

A discerning coach will want to know more about the situation before jumping in and signing up the coachee. He will ask how this executive with a successful track record of over many long years is suddenly encountering challenges with relationships. He will want to know what has changed or led to this need suddenly emerging in the life of the leader.

Another typical situation is that the leader is unable to carry his team along. Again, a discerning coach will want to know how this leader was able to lead teams and deliver results for several years. It would be hard to assume that this need to be able to lead a team suddenly sprung up.

I can add to the list things like inability to collaborate, poor managerial effectiveness and so on.

Often times, organisations may seek coaching support for a leader for a need that to them has now become exigent. They ask for a coach and a coach who does not explore the context well enough is likely to sign up the coachee assuming that what is presented is indeed all that is there to it. That it is a need that has recently emerged.

The truth is that managers and leaders may have pre-existing conditions in the form of long-standing competency gaps or difficulties or inabilities.

So, what caused them to become exigent now and how come the leader managed to carry on well all these years is important to explore.

Expanded role demands are one big reason for a pre-existing condition to flare up as a crying need. If a leader was in a stable environment with a few critical relationships to manage, chances are he somehow managed it notwithstanding the fact that he was not good at it and did not like it. Maybe he developed certain rules, had some work around, leveraged certain personal connections, and also relied on his manager to cope with this aspect of his role though he was never good at it. It did not come to him naturally.

He is then found to have potential for a new position based on other criteria and moved in there. Unfortunately, this relationship dimension may assume huge significance. That is when the gap flares up.

Similarly, one could be just okay in leading a team and managed to get by because the team was tenured, matured and there was stability. A sudden change and a manifold increase in team size can lead to the gap flaring up. It is one thing to lead a small team of 10 individual contributors. It is another thing to manage a team of 20 managers.

Similarly, a structural change or environmental change can lead to a pre-existing condition getting thrown up as a huge gap. A founder of a company may have run his business at his own pace for years and suddenly when he seeks funding and an investor sits on his board, he may find him lacking a performance ethic and not driven. Truth is, he may never have been driven in that manner but was fine given the autonomy he enjoyed.

It could also be that the gaps tend to get magnified when leaders have to act out of their preferences. Or use their less developed strengths suddenly.

In summary, many leaders are able to carry on with pre-existing conditions until things change.

Now, lets get back to the coach signing up such a coachee. The important question for a coach to ascertain is if the need was indeed a pre-existing one and what changed. The next logical question is if it is indeed coachable. Or is it a case of someone in a wrong position. If coaching is indeed the way forward, the coach needs to be able to ascertain the coachee’s own awareness of this reality and motivation to address it. If not, the coach may like to dimension the risks of not being able to make a difference.

Coaches are not magicians and may not want to show a certain bravado in claiming that any situation and condition is coachable, with success.

Knowing the context and how the need came about might be useful in ascertaining the possibility of coaching being able to make a real difference.

-Ganesh Chella

First things first, here are a few examples of what typically gets addressed under Transition Coaching for executive presence

While it is popular, it is also one of the most misunderstood areas of leadership competence and coaching so to speak. There are several unanswered questions about how this need came about, why it matters and what it means and so on. In the absence of clarity, I am afraid that there are so many things that coaches may be asked to do to enhance executive presence, all with very good intention but with mixed results.

My views on this subject are by no means the last word but I think it is worth a try.

First things first, here are a few examples of what typically gets addressed under coaching for executive presence:

Helping the coachee dress well
Helping the coachee speak persuasively in a seniors’ forum
Help the coachee even find the right place to sit in a Board room setting
Helping the coachee make an elevator pitch to seniors if called up to
Helping the coachee handle social settings with confidence and have things to talk about
Helping the coachee define her or his personal brand and what it means
Learning ways in which one can exude confidence, learn to be persuasive and assertive
Make the right impression with senior stakeholders
All of these are certainly helpful tips and ideas to help leaders make the right impact but they emanate from the interpretation of the term “presence” as a physical thing. As a low context way of making impact.

Origins

Things like assertiveness, influencing and executive presence became prominent after India started become globally aligned and Indians had to deal with leaders from across the world, when Indians had to compete for opportunities across the globe or Indians were evaluated based on competencies of global relevance and compared with global talent for local positions.

This is when Indian organisations and leaders became a lot more low-context in their cultural orientation – an orientation where meaning is made somewhat literally by what someone says or how one is seen. India on the other hand is considered a high context culture where meaning is made by reading individuals and situations in context. We did not judge people merely by what he or she said but by where they were coming from.

As a result, how you spoke started mattering as much as what you spoke in more recent times.

In the book Cultures and Organisations – Software of the Mind by Geert Hofstede and Gert Jan Hofstede, the distinction they draw between American and Dutch employers and job applicants has interesting lessons for this discussion.

In this book, Hofstedes contend that in the US, people tend to discount what is stated or seen because people come from a context where it is believed that people generally overstate their credentials and use superlatives. Now, in that context, if someone let’s say from India who is already understated engages with an American and gets discounted further, there can be problems.

Many “strategic stakeholders” including Board members and global seniors who are increasingly interacting with leaders from India may often judge these leaders through their global lenses or form impressions on these leaders based on limited information. It is in this context that coaches were often called upon to ensure that this thing called “executive presence” or “gravitas” or “stature” did not come in the way of an otherwise good leader not being perceived well.

So, often times quickly learning this thing called “executive presence” is seen as a strategy to be “perceived well” and “paid attention to”.

Executive presence and power

Viewed in this manner, executive presence can be seen as “display of power” – the extent to which people are willing to do what you want them to do – the extent to which people are willing to trust you and go by what you say. The extent to which your words count. This is especially with people who do not have a need to listen to you or agree with you and that understanding is important.

It is about making one’s Leadership Coaching abilities come together to make an impact especially under unknown and difficult or even hostile circumstances.

What is it really?

First, I would like to replace the term executive presence with the term leadership presence.

The term executive is a western notion of this being required at executive leadership levels. Viewed in this manner might make it futile because by the time one reaches an executive level, it is almost always too late.

It is also viewed as somewhat different from the act of leadership – as a distinct trait. Leadership presence is all about leadership.

I would like to define or describe leadership presence as the ability of a leader at any level to be mindful about the manner in which they are experienced as leaders by the world around them and take conscious and deliberate efforts to ensure that as they grow and evolve as leaders, the quality and richness of this experience grows with them. The experience needs to be congruent at one level and uplifting and inspiring at another level. This evolving and dynamic element is important because the real challenge is when a leader is growing in position but the way they are experienced does not reflect it.

In my view, Leaders at every level need to be mindful about the manner in which they are experienced and they need to start working on it well before it is a problem.

Viewed in this manner, it is not a separate set of skills and techniques but just a reflection of your leadership – your awareness and your recognition of the place of others in how you are experienced.

Leadership presence goes beyond the current physical presence in the “here and how” and is about seeing the leader in the context of all past collective experiences, in all walks of life. It is about doing justice to yourself and your gifts. It is about your knowing and using your strengths well. It is about balance.

Having said all this, I would like to present some of the ingredients of leadership presence in four parts. I will use the analogy of a simple bank acount:

Feeling rich

A leader’s presence starts with not being rich but feeling rich. It starts with how he or she sees himself or herself first. How much do I value myself and how much do I love myself?

If my own sense of worth is poor, it would hugely reflect in the quality of my presence.

So, feeling rich is the first step.

Knowing your balance

The second step is to know your credit balance of presence. Such a credit balance comes from three sources:

Performance: How well are you perceived to have delivered results on a consistent basis?
Professional competence: The extent to which you are respected for your competence in your professional / functional areas of expertise. In the world of today, this includes the body of work that you have created and shared with the people around, your professional points of view on things. Are you’re an influencer of thought?
Stories: The extent to which there are positive impressions and stories about you that reflect your leadership. It is very important that the number of positive stories about you far outnumber the negative stories about you. This is indeed a huge challenge because replacing negative stories with positive ones is very hard.
Openness to feedback can hugely help here.

Adding to your balance

There are quite a few things which one can do to add to their balance of leadership presence. These are things that one can learn in their work with a coach.

Courage & Openness: The extent to which you are seen as someone who can bring up and communicate on difficult issues sensitively and can stand up for principles. The key word is sensitive.
Empathy: Your ability to be mindful, listen, understand and respond with empathy and sensitivity in all your relationships and interactions. It also includes articulating in ways that are engaging and absorbing.
Intellectual rigour: Your ability to connect the dots and see and communicated the larger picture including a long-term view and your ability to distill the essence of any problem or issue and articulate with simplicity to promote clarity.
Statesmanship: Your ability to see the wider ramifications and show statesmanship and take an Organizational view rather than a narrow functional view.
Professional demeanor: The extent, to which you value your and other’s time, are reliable, well prepared for any interaction and display respect.
Avoiding debits

There are two things which lead to one’s balance being diminished and bad stories being added:

Lack of self-control and emotional regulation: The inability to maintain grace under fire and remain calm and composed and also control your urges and desires. There are enough examples of leaders who have gone into overdraft because of this.
In summary, leadership presence is others experience of your leadership. We need to believe we have the ingredients and have to pay attention to knowing where we stand and how we can grow it.

-Ganesh Chella

I am sure all of you are reading a spate of reports about organisation after organisation announcing their decision to do away with the much maligned bell curve.  It now appears that any organisation of repute must be seen as disassociating itself from what is now looking like a horrible mistake. Disowning the bell curve seems to be the most politically correct thing to do.

What started off as the practice of one corporation gained popularity thanks to its legendary leader and soon became “best practice” until someday someone realized that it was wrong. 

Was it really so wicked and villainous! If it was, why did the brightest and best in organisations embrace it all these years?  

The truth is that fads will continue to rule the world of management. As with all fads, they are bound to go out of fashion. So, if the most admired companies suddenly find the bell curve a bad idea, others do not want to look silly and maintain a contrarian view.

But, these are not the questions and thoughts going through the minds of most employees and HR professionals.  The questions they must be asking themselves are:

• If organisations are doing away with the Bell Curve, does that mean that poor performers would be tolerated and not fired? Is rank and yank out of the window? Is HR saved from the torture of ensuring that performance fits the bell curve?
• Does the banning of the bell curve mean that everyone can be rated top performer and receive huge pay increases from limitless budgets?
• Does all this mean that we have returned to socialist ways and have bid goodbye to principles of meritocracy?

 The answer to all these questions is an absolute NO!

Well, the bell curve served four purposes – it helped organisations identify its best people; it helped manage pay increase budgets; it helped identify its poor performers who needed to be separated.  Of course, it was also used to ensure fairness and equity in the way all this was done.

Truth is that these purposes will still need to be served, albeit in different ways. While most of us will not get to know the internal intricacies or the fine print on how these laudable philosophies get finally translated on the ground, it is not hard to come up with some plausible predictions about what the world will look like post the BC (Bell Curve) era:

Managerial ownership: Many organisations will give their managers at certain levels pay increase budgets and make them responsible for managing within those budgets. The manager is them forced to distribute the pie based on performance data.  This will be one possibility.

Dealing with poor performers: Organizations’ latitude for poor performance is often a function of the health of the business. When the going is good, dealing with the bottom is seldom a high priority. However, when the going is tough, organisations do not need the bell curve to identify and separate poor performers. I am sure you have been seeing media reports in recent weeks about several organisations quietly firing employees in large numbers for reasons of poor performance.  So, going forward, separating poor performers will be an on-going activity for which the bell curve may not be needed.

Other methods: Organisation might use other methods and models that combine data about performance and potential to categorize employees into various buckets – from the most valuable to the least valuable. 

BC loyalists: There are still a very large number of organisations which are struggling to convince their managers to be objective and tough minded in their assessment process and not let their heart rule over their head. Given the inability of their managers to differentiate, these organisations will continue to rely on the bell curve to create a culture of differentiation where none exists.

We said so: Finally, there will be a group of organisations which will have the last laugh and say, “we said so” – these are organisations which firmly believed that mindless differentiation was not a good thing.

To me, what matters is that the principles of meritocracy, differentiation, performance orientation and fairness are administered in the most respectful, empowering and culturally appropriate way.  The bell curve is just one way of doing it. If it did not work for your organisation, please throw it away. However, when you throw things away, remember the popular idiomatic expression, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”  

If you are interested on my research-based views on the subject of differentiation, please follow this link http://ganeshchella.com/pdf/utbsep06.pdf

For decades the Harvard Business Review (HBR) has shaped global thinking about management. Let’s not forget that several legends in the field have shared their landmark ideas through the HBR. So, when HBR says something, all of us as professionals are naturally inclined to take it seriously.

So, when I saw the July-August 2015 cover titled, “It’s Time to Blow up HR and build something new”, I was first shocked and then angered. After I read the editor’s note I realized that the title was really meant to sensationalise by making a catastrophic claim.  The editor’s note carrying the title Re-thinking HR sounded more realistic and sat well in my mind.

I then read Prof. Peter Cappelli’s article in the issue titled, “Why we love to hate HR” which I thought had some interesting insights.  For one, he conceded that HR bashing was common because, many people in business don’t like HR to tell them what they should do and bashing the function was their way of getting back. I could certainly relate with that. 

Prof. Cappelli also goes on to say that the love-hate relationship with HR depended on how much business needed HR at any point.   He clarifies that atleast in the United States, given their economic context, many in business believe that they can do without HR. He goes on to clarify that unlike in the U.S, HR is still hot everywhere else in the world. That makes sense too. 

Finally, Prof. Cappelli points out that atleast in the US, delivering shareholding  value has become more important than addressing the HR agenda and that explains why CFOs are considered more valuable than CHROs. 

In the article titled People before strategy in the same issue, Ram Charan and others argue that CEOs have a big role to play to elevate HR and bridge the gap.  This is again something I can relate to.  They even suggest forming a group of three (G3) consisting of the CEO, CFO and CHRO.  This makes sense too.

Unfortunately, even after reading all the articles, I was unable to locate the explosive materials that they claimed could potentially blow up HR.

Speaking for India, I can say this. If Indian businesses have grown dramatically in the last two decades, at least some of that is thanks to HR reinventing itself constantly.  If Indian businesses have gotten better at the art and science of adding hundreds of thousands to their workforce and developing and nurturing them, it is thanks to HR reinventing itself. If Indian businesses have been doing a reasonable job of growing talent from within, at least some of that is thanks to HR reinventing itself. Yes, there is a lot we in India can do better on the HR front but we certainly do not need to blow it up.  

It certainly maybe time to blow up HR in the United States and build something new. I even think that a few trips to India may not be a bad idea in the re-building process given that the most is happening on the people front in countries like India.

Downshifting as the very term indicates means moving from a higher gear to a lower gear in a vehicle. Derailment is the dangerous act of a rail going off its track.

It requires little intelligence to recognize that downshifting is better than derailment when it comes to vehicles. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of wisdom to recognize that what applies to vehicles applies to careers too.

Careers are always referred to in terms of paths, tracks and ladders. This rather mechanical view of careers stems from the notion that once on a path or track or ladder, there is only one option – to keep moving forward or upward; there is no getting down or slowing down. This notion of being devoid of choice makes the individual look like a prisoner. Even worse, it attaches a value judgment on anyone who stops, slows down, takes a pause or gets off momentarily.

As a result, in a vibrant economy like India, more and more executives are confronted with the need to decide what they will do in their ladder or path every two or three years.  Because every two years, they are lured with hard to refuse invitations to shift to a higher gear or climb more steps even if their hearts plead with them to take a pause or their heads tell them that they are not ready for this. For most executives, not doing anything or turning down an invitation does not appear to be an option.

Some succeed in the choices they make while many others fail because they may accept jobs for which they may not have the competence or may join work environments that do not suit their value system or may sign up to work with managers whose style is incompatible with theirs.   

These issues become extremely stark as executives become older because they fail to attach a higher monetary value to their life stage need for congruence where they can say and do what they feel. They fail to attach a higher monetary value to their need for meaning. They fail to attach a higher monetary value to their need for respect and regard for who they are.

Many may also fail to make a realistic assessment of their emotional readiness to live with the inevitable dishonesty of organisational life, especially at senior levels.      

Once in the face of these realities, they recognize that they just cannot handle it and call it quits. They recognize that they do not fit in with the demands of that higher step in that ladder or that higher gear in the car. Those who do not learn from this experience might blame the corporate world or bad luck and repeat the mistake once or even twice. By then, their self-confidence goes into a negative spiral.

So, what is the way out?

First, I believe that senior professionals, especially nearing executive positions and over 40 years of age must have a very high level of awareness about what they can and cannot do, what they value and what they do not, what is important and what is not.   They must also have the courage to accept these realities and not live in denial.

Second, executives must use this awareness to decide when they need to downshift. They must know the limits of their competence including their emotional capabilities and physical fitness and determine when is the right time to shift gears and slow down.   

They must have the grace to accept that the corporate world will be the way it is or even get worse but remember that they have the choice to engage with it in a way that works for them.

Downshifting might mean choosing to work in a smaller organisation where one is respected and valued. Downshifting might mean sticking to doing what one is very good at or passionate about and not venture into unknown or unsuitable terrains. Downshifting might mean that one stops choosing jobs that call for excessive personal and family sacrifices.  Downshifting might also mean taking a calculated reduction in pay and benefits so that on a sustainable basis, one is still fine. However, downshifting does not mean one is resisting change. It only means one is adapting to it in a harmonious way.

By being perceptive, self-aware and smart in choosing the right time to downshift, executives might be able to build sustainable careers which allow them to move out of restrictive tracks and paths and ladders and take the road less traveled.

My work brings me in touch with hundreds of executives who have downshifted and through that have been able to regain themselves, their identities and the quality of their lives.  

My experience also tells me that when one does not downshift wisely when one needs to, one might go through the ignominy of derailment.

We all know which is better, don’t we?

In recent weeks I have been hearing the term acqui-hiring (the practice of buying out a company essentially for its skilled manpower) being used by many of my clients and friends in the entrepreneurial eco-system.

There seems to be a lot of excitement around the discovery of this cool new way of acquiring talent as a package deal so to speak. Whether this will be used tactically or will become an integral part of the talent acquisition strategy of organisations is hard to predict right now.  What we can do is to reflect about its efficacy.

Interestingly, the practice of buying out a company for its skills is not new and cannot be credited to the ingenuity of new age technology companies. Companies in the design, engineering, projects, EPC or other professional services space have often resorted to the practice of acquiring a company which has employees with hard to find skills to ensure effective project completion. The process of acquisition was no different from any M&A process as far as the employees were concerned. The ones who did this successfully ensured that they used the skills but also retained the autonomy of the founder by keeping it arm’s length and even encouraging him to do work for others. Such acqui-hiring deals often took the form of exclusivity agreements or JV partnerships or equity investments. Even when it was fully merged, it did not impact employees in any real way.

However, today’s concept of acqui-hiring seems to be somewhat different.

Many of the acqui-hiring targets of today are the entrepreneurial team itself.  In other words, many are trying to acquire the entrepreneurs and make them employees. That is where I see trouble.

I would like to share my person example to explain this. I became an entrepreneur and started my consulting practice back in 2000 to honour my need for autonomy and creativity and to give expression to an idea that I was passionate about.  It was not the money or the security that I was looking for. A few years later, I was approached by the founders of two larger consulting firms with proposals to “acqui-hire” me. It did not take me too long to say NO. The whole idea of “going on my own” was to “be on my own” and not “be owned by someone else”!

Having worked with dozens of entrepreneurs over years, I can say with conviction that most of them went on their own for pretty much the same reason – to be on their own.

So, how would they like being acqui-hired? I can say for sure that if someone is truly entrepreneurial, they would certainly not like it.

A true entrepreneur would rather be in charge and in control than become rich. He would rather struggle to build something he is passionate about than sell out and become an employee and squelch his entrepreneurial spirit. He would detest the very idea of becoming an employee, reporting to a manager, complying with company policies, worrying about performance ratings, career progressions and so on.

That is if he is truly an entrepreneur at heart.

So, how do we explain the current popularity of acqui-hiring? How do we explain the fact that many of today’s young entrepreneurs are willing to be acqui-hired?

Well, the answer to that question can be somewhat discomforting.

In my personal view, a good number of today’s entrepreneurs, especially in the technology space perhaps see entrepreneurship as a means of becoming rich very quickly, carried away by the runaway success stories of a handful of billionaire entrepreneurs in the Bay Area or Bangalore. Given the easy access to funding and the strong prospect of being acquired, they may view entrepreneurship the same way they view a campus job – how much money will I make?

For such entrepreneurs, being acqui-hired might sit very well with their needs and preferences. For real entrepreneurs however, being acqui-hired means giving up their dreams to create, to act autonomously and find meaning and purpose. So, even if they do get acqui-hired, they may struggle to fit in and may perhaps bide their time until they can go back “on their own”. 

Every organisation of some standing has some form of a shared leadership platform or forum. These forums are called management committees or executive councils or leadership councils or executive committees. Typically these forums consist of the CEO and his or her direct reports.

At one level, belonging to such a form is a badge of honour. At another level, making such a forum really work is at most times an uphill task for its convener, typically the MD or CEO. More about this in a moment.

The purpose of these forums

Boards and business leaders realize that leadership is seldom a solo act. To align the entire leadership team, to get the organisation to benefit from the collective minds of all leaders to solve critical problems, to influence and include them, to co-create the future and to make the best decisions and shape the right strategies such a forum becomes the foundation.

In operational terms, these forums discuss and shape organisational goals and priorities, annual business plans and financial budgets, review progress against these plans, discuss a wide range of issues impacting organisational effectiveness, review talent and other matters relating to people. Needless to say, these forums are expected to stand together and deal with the many inevitable problems and challenges faced by the organisation.

These forums especially serve as important platforms for enabling functions like HR, Finance, Information Technology and so on to get support or draw attention to matters that transcend functional and divisional boundaries.

Simple functional organisations which roll up to the CEO tend to find it easier to secure alignment in these forums  as opposed to organisations with business division structures where the head of one business division may find little interest in another business division other than getting to know or keeping others informed or sharing scarce resources.

Current Realities

A lot of my organisation Development work is to do with making such leadership groups work better! That says a lot about these forums, doesn’t it? We often witness either substantive or interpersonal differences among team members in these forums. While some groups do manage to move from forming to storming to norming and performing, small changes in their constitution including the entry of a new member or two or even worse a new leader can throw things out of sync and send them back to forming and storming.

While some will accept that they have difficulties in making these forums effective, many tend to live in denial and depend on a formal structure and the bureaucracy of the process to keep these forums barely functional.  But in reality, many of its members just don’t enjoy being in each other’s presence.

Beyond all this is the larger question – in the age of agile working, rapid and disruptive changes, globally diverse teams and the advent of collaborative technology platforms, what purpose do such forums in their physical form with all the ceremonial trappings really serve?

Factors that impact effectiveness

If these forums are really so important, why is that many don’t work as intended? What comes in the way?

Decision making style of the CEO

If the CEO who in many ways is the convener of the forum is autocratic or at best consultative in style, he is unlikely to bring issues to the forum for real discussion or even worse have predetermined views on how things should be done and can make the forum look like a pointless charade.

Many CEOs seldom have the human process facilitation skills needed to make such groups self-sustaining.

Lack of trust and interpersonal comfort

Quite often, members of the forum struggle to get out of their role boundaries and connect with one another as human beings and individuals. Members may feel unsafe and uncomfortable to open up.

Lack of openness

Members may also not speak freely and openly or may not debate and disagree openly. They may also believe that it is best not to intrude into the territory of another peer lest he takes him on when his turn comes. ‘Why mess around with another’ might be the attitude.  So, real discussions may not take place.

Lack of ownership for decision made

Often times, decisions may be made in these forums but not carried through. So, the same issues get debated again and again, making team members feel frustrated. Everyone might agree to do something while they actually don’t feel convinced. As a result, results are seldom evident.

Interdependence

Team members may not ask for help or offer help to their colleagues. Everyone may have the need to come across as self-sufficient or ever competent and not show their vulnerabilities. There may also be a sense of competing and winning.

Form overtaking function

Finally, the whole procedural demands of having meetings every month and filing reports may overtake the real function of shared leadership.

The good news is that these situations can easily be reversed should the CEO accept that there is an issue and have the will to set things right. The field of OD is full of methods, tools and frameworks to help in such situations. CEOs can also be coached to promote shared leadership.

Modern organisations in modern times

My real worry is not about making existing Leadership or executive councils effective. The real worry is whether these forums serve any real purpose in their current form. That might sound quite an audacious statement to make but let’s examine it.

At a time when digitization is radically changing the way information is processed and decisions are made, what purpose can a forum that meets once a month with a packed agenda really serve?

In other words, are leaders in these forums leveraging other real time technology based collaboration platforms to exchange views and ideas, debate on issues, brainstorm, take decisions, communicate with one another and truly demonstrate shared leadership?

In my view, the typical monthly meetings will need to transcend their current purpose and serve to build bonds, enhance trust and have deep conversations. On the other hand, these leaders will need to leverage technology to make their forums and councils truly real time and virtual and ensure that information, support, debates and discussions are real-time.

Of course, members of these forums will need to learn the fine art of having great conversations – an art form that is almost forgotten.

If these don’t happen, these forums are likely to look and feel like the way many boards do  – become ceremonial occasions.

One of the biggest contradictions that I encounter in the HR profession and function is the perennial gap between what is perceived as functional excellence from within and what is perceived as service excellence from without.

When I meet HR professionals they are all excited about the great innovations that they are bringing about in their functional processes and products. They are ever busy rolling out one new initiative after the other all of which according to them holds great promise for the business and its people. When you listen to them you are completely convinced that we in HR are scaling great heights. We are convinced that the function is constantly striving towards higher level of excellence.

When I meet employees across levels in large numbers, I often get a completely contrarian view. To them all our internal efforts to conceptualise, design and implement great products is of little value. Their view about HR is completely influenced by their experience of some of the moments of truth. Many of their complaints, grievances, problems and wishes are very basic and devoid of all the technical mumbo-jumbo. They find something unfair, they find something not working, they see lack of transparency, lack of care and sensitivity, lack of efficiency, lack of responsiveness and of course lack of understanding of their needs. While many do have some positive moments of truth, for a large number, some of the critical moments of truth are negative.

So, as you can see there are two worlds. I often wonder how often these two worlds meet. I am convinced that the great workplaces are the ones where functional excellence is translated into a great service experience as seen by employees. In other organisations the gap between functional excellence and service quality only breeds cynicism. The only way we can bridge this is by ensuring that HR leaders and others responsible for functional excellence have a first-hand experience of the moments of truth and use this experience to shape their efforts.

Rajesh is an extremely senior and successful sales leader in a global corporation in the technology industry. He has had a very successful track record and has always been seen as a dependable hand when it came to getting things done. Be it a tough client or a difficult project or a major initiative, if things had to be moved and people mobilized and results delivered, Rajesh was the man. Rajesh loved being called upon to help in this fashion, especially by senior stakeholders and he never disappointed. Until of course it was his turn to be disappointed. Rajesh was expecting a big role in return for all the things he had done and unfortunately for him, that did not happen.

That is when Rajesh’s manager suggested that he work with a coach to figure out what was coming in his way and we started working together.As Rajesh and I started working together, we realized his many gifts – high energy, optimism, results focus, communication skills, an informal style and of course very strong relationships. If Rajesh had a second name that would be “relationships”. His view was that relationships were everything. Be it customers, senior stakeholders, his managers, his team members, his friends – it was all about relationships. He would constantly see how he could help. Being nice, liked, loved, appreciated, were important and going to great lengths for this kept him preoccupied.

He believed that relationships would always pay. Unfortunately, this came at the cost of results with the team, strategic thought in a critical interaction, misplaced humor in a social setting and inability to assert or take a stand in peer relationships. After our initial explorations, we started looking at feedback from his stakeholders and many things fell in place. The moment Rajesh was able to see these unintended consequences in his singular quest to build and maintain relationships, he was able to start making quick changes.

Rajesh and I started discussing ways in which he could be more deliberate, thoughtful and strategic in his everyday actions. He also confronted some of his unhelpful ways of thinking that were contributing to his over using his “relationship” skills. It took Rajesh several months of contemplation, action, continuous feedback and the support of a peer network to make progress. Difficult business circumstances and people circumstances served as fertile test grounds for Rajesh to try his new behaviours.

Today, Rajesh is able to demand performance and take a stand with peers on professional matters. He focuses on substantive issues in meetings, lets his competence rather than his charm do the talking and no longer goes out of his way to be seen as likeable and popular.

Caveat:

The intent of these client stories is to illustrate the typical development needs that leaders encounter – needs that come in the way of delivering peak performance. The focus is not on the “how” or the methods adopted by the coach to help the coachee.The identity of the coach and the coachee have been concealed to preserve confidentiality.

I must start by clarifying that this article has nothing to do with the subject of capital punishment.

Thanks to many years of work with entrepreneurs and PE / VC firms, I have come to witness the emotional pain that a fair number of entrepreneurs go through after they have raised capital and have given up control. Seeing their pain and unhappiness from close quarters has led me to coin the phrase, capital as punishment.  

Entrepreneurs recognize that raising capital is necessary for growth. While most of them intellectually appreciate what it means to give up control to raise capital, very few are fully prepared for its emotional implications. So, while capital is supposed to be nourishment, it becomes punishment at least in their minds. This seems especially true for entrepreneurs who have been in business for a while, are older and have developed a certain attachment to their business and their ways of doing things. 

There are at least four reasons for this sad development.   

1. Accepting accountability: A good number of entrepreneurs who haven’t worked for others or in corporate settings do not understand what it means to be held accountable by someone else. As long as they are privately held they don’t see themselves accountable to others in terms of their business plans, their performance, their strategies or their style. The moment they raise capital and come face-to-face with Investors who begin to ask many difficult questions, they begin to feel miserable. While some might protest that the Investors do not trust them, others will call them unreasonable or out of touch with reality. Only the enlightened entrepreneurs see it as their job to hold them accountable.
2.  Demonstrating interdependence: Entrepreneurs are generally used to acting in an independent and autonomous manner with little need to consult and include others in shaping strategies or making decisions. Having raised capital, many struggle to respect and honour the inclusion needs of their investors. They may find it difficult to adapt themselves to develop a more inter-dependent relationship. As a result, when investors want to know why they are choosing to do something or how they arrived at a certain decision they might see it as questioning their autonomy.
3. Accepting feedback: Most executives grow up in an environment where giving and receiving feedback is a non-negotiable reality. Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs miss this critical developmental experience. As a result, when investors give them feedback, they struggle to accept it with grace.  Many hate being told that they are wrong or that they need to do things differently.  
4.  Investor style: In addition to these entrepreneurial blind spots, the style of the investors can also add fuel to fire. If the investors are not emotional intelligent, not trained to have difficult conversations and do not have the time for all this (which can sometimes be the case, given the numbers of board some of the investors sit on) transacting all this can become quite awkward.

As a result of these and other factors, many entrepreneurs end up feeling quite miserable on a day-to-day basis even though the financial upside keeps them going, albeit with a certain level of disengagement. The good news is that the situation can easily be avoided provided there is sensitivity and preparation on both sides.

Two critical preparatory steps come to my mind:

1. Relationship before task: It is important that at least one or two Partners or Board members enjoy a trust based relationship with the entrepreneur. Building this foundation of trust is critical before difficult conversations can happen. I have seen many entrepreneurs enthused or demotivated because of one good or bad conversation. A trust based relationship means that the entrepreneur feels respected, sees the investor as genuine and also sees him as having his best interest in mind.  This will of course call for time and a genuine intention. Without this foundation of trust, difficult conversations can become dysfunctional.  Partners of PE / VC firms may also benefit from being formally trained in the art of great conversations.
2.  Support in transition: Entrepreneurs must recognize that the process of raising capital and giving up control is a huge and often life altering transition from a psychological stand point and managing it well is not as simple as turning a switch on. Seeking the support of a mentor or coach to manage this transition might be a great idea – even a necessity. With help, they will be able to learn some of the new skills that they may need in managing multiple stakeholders, being more inclusive, being more open to feedback, accept accountability and so on.

When PE/VC firms, its Partners and entrepreneurs act with maturity and preparation, the marriage is likely to be a great success and there are many success stories indeed.  If that doesn’t happen it may appear to be as fateful as capital punishment.

I must start by clarifying that this article has nothing to do with the subject of capital punishment.

Thanks to many years of work with entrepreneurs and PE / VC firms, I have come to witness the emotional pain that a fair number of entrepreneurs go through after they have raised capital and have given up control. Seeing their pain and unhappiness from close quarters has led me to coin the phrase, capital as punishment.  

Entrepreneurs recognize that raising capital is necessary for growth. While most of them intellectually appreciate what it means to give up control to raise capital, very few are fully prepared for its emotional implications. So, while capital is supposed to be nourishment, it becomes punishment at least in their minds. This seems especially true for entrepreneurs who have been in business for a while, are older and have developed a certain attachment to their business and their ways of doing things. 

There are at least four reasons for this sad development.   

1. Accepting accountability: A good number of entrepreneurs who haven’t worked for others or in corporate settings do not understand what it means to be held accountable by someone else. As long as they are privately held they don’t see themselves accountable to others in terms of their business plans, their performance, their strategies or their style. The moment they raise capital and come face-to-face with Investors who begin to ask many difficult questions, they begin to feel miserable. While some might protest that the Investors do not trust them, others will call them unreasonable or out of touch with reality. Only the enlightened entrepreneurs see it as their job to hold them accountable.
2.  Demonstrating interdependence: Entrepreneurs are generally used to acting in an independent and autonomous manner with little need to consult and include others in shaping strategies or making decisions. Having raised capital, many struggle to respect and honour the inclusion needs of their investors. They may find it difficult to adapt themselves to develop a more inter-dependent relationship. As a result, when investors want to know why they are choosing to do something or how they arrived at a certain decision they might see it as questioning their autonomy.
3. Accepting feedback: Most executives grow up in an environment where giving and receiving feedback is a non-negotiable reality. Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs miss this critical developmental experience. As a result, when investors give them feedback, they struggle to accept it with grace.  Many hate being told that they are wrong or that they need to do things differently.  
4.  Investor style: In addition to these entrepreneurial blind spots, the style of the investors can also add fuel to fire. If the investors are not emotional intelligent, not trained to have difficult conversations and do not have the time for all this (which can sometimes be the case, given the numbers of board some of the investors sit on) transacting all this can become quite awkward.

As a result of these and other factors, many entrepreneurs end up feeling quite miserable on a day-to-day basis even though the financial upside keeps them going, albeit with a certain level of disengagement. The good news is that the situation can easily be avoided provided there is sensitivity and preparation on both sides.

Two critical preparatory steps come to my mind:

1. Relationship before task: It is important that at least one or two Partners or Board members enjoy a trust based relationship with the entrepreneur. Building this foundation of trust is critical before difficult conversations can happen. I have seen many entrepreneurs enthused or demotivated because of one good or bad conversation. A trust based relationship means that the entrepreneur feels respected, sees the investor as genuine and also sees him as having his best interest in mind.  This will of course call for time and a genuine intention. Without this foundation of trust, difficult conversations can become dysfunctional.  Partners of PE / VC firms may also benefit from being formally trained in the art of great conversations.
2.  Support in transition: Entrepreneurs must recognize that the process of raising capital and giving up control is a huge and often life altering transition from a psychological stand point and managing it well is not as simple as turning a switch on. Seeking the support of a mentor or coach to manage this transition might be a great idea – even a necessity. With help, they will be able to learn some of the new skills that they may need in managing multiple stakeholders, being more inclusive, being more open to feedback, accept accountability and so on.

When PE/VC firms, its Partners and entrepreneurs act with maturity and preparation, the marriage is likely to be a great success and there are many success stories indeed.  If that doesn’t happen it may appear to be as fateful as capital punishment.

Here is a typical (but fictitious) discussion in a talent council meeting in a typical company:

You see, Kavish is great at getting things done. His execution is flawless. He is also good with people. It is just that he is just not strategic. He is too immersed in the day to day.

Let’s talk about Ranjit. He is excellent in his functional area. He is very dependable. Unfortunately he just does not have that stature you see. It is hard to put him in from of the Board. A few hard questions and he will begin to fumble.

The discussion then turns even more complex.

Let’s talk about our two Manufacturing Heads – Raj and Kumar. Raj is great with people and very emotional intelligent but does not have intellectual rigour. Kumar is intellectually so goo but insensitive. If somehow we could make an amalgam of both and bring out two manufacturing heads with the best of both, how great would that be?

The world of leadership development and Human Resources management has made great strides in the ability to define competencies, assess leaders against those competencies and quite accurately conclude each person’s strengths and development needs. That is good.

The ability to define what an organisation expects in term of leadership behaviours is also outstanding today. Our literacy on this count is terrific. We can clearly establish the 16 competencies and 24 skills that a leader should possess. That is of course in addition to defining what he needs to know in his job and also what he needs to know about other functions and his business and the business of competitors.

That is unfortunately the problem. The more elaborately and minutely we define what we need from leaders and the more that list becomes longer, the more our existing leaders appear wanting. Assessed against this daunting list, the leaders of even a consistently high performing organisation can come out looking quite bad and give the CEO team some sleepless nights. (if not read in context)

This is no different from the fact that we now have elaborate lists of what good looks are, what good health is, what physical fitness is, what a happy life is and so on. The more we define these standards in almost idealistic terms, the more all of us look bad, feel terrible and think catastrophically. Read those lists every day and you can wake up feeling hopeless.

This is what I call the made to measure syndrome of leader development – the belief that we can tailor make those perfect fit leaders and that for that all we have to do is define on a PowerPoint presentation what we want. On paper, it would be great of a leader had 75 counts of strategic thinking, 68 counts of business acumen, 83 counts of emotional intelligence, 65 counts of executive presence, 72 counts of coaching and mentoring and so on.

Unfortunately our assessment and development centres are likely to turn in results that might disappoint. Until the point of assessment, it is a perfect science. After that, we begin to feel humble.

So, one might ask if the answer is to live with poor leadership or to drop our standards. No, not really. The answer is to emphasise not just competence but also acceptance. The ability to see each executive as a complete and unique person with a combination of abilities and limitations is a great starting point. While the ability to learn all through one’s life is worth emphasising, the ability to respect that each executive will be different and brings unique gifts is equally important.

As a Leader as coach, while I certainly work with my Internal Coaches to help them pay attention to some of their troubled zones, I also feel this strong urge to tell their sponsors to show greater acceptance of their gifts.

The role of defining competencies is to promote learning and not encourage dissatisfaction with what one has. In fact it is this dissatisfaction that pushes organisations to believe that an outside hire might come with a closer fit to their competency definitions that the ones they already have and we all know how that goes.

The truth is that leaders cannot be made to measure. As long as the fit is comfortable and does not pinch or suffocate, that is a good place to be in.

Coaches are human beings – they did not descent from heaven. Coaches also play several roles in addition to being Coaches – they are spouses, parents, children, colleagues, managers, leaders, Board members and citizens in this society.

Their training to become a coach as well as their professional demands of being a coach or coaching oriented leads them to show respect, listen empathetically, respond with understanding, refrain from giving advice and display humility. By and large, when well trained coaches are “playing the role” as coaches or coaching oriented leaders and managers they manage to uphold these values and demonstrate these skills.  Otherwise, they may not be in business.

The question is – how are they when they are not “playing the role”.

Let me explain this with a personal example. There are times when I am not fully present or listening attentively when my wife is speaking to me. Sometimes she lets it pass because she realises I am preoccupied and at other times she reminds me that I am a Coach, albeit jokingly.  Similarly, my executive responsibility sometimes requires me to give instructions and not remain tentative.

I say this to emphasise that it may not be possible or even necessary for a coach to behave in a coach-like manner at all times.

Having said that, it might be very important for a coach to lead a congruent life. In other words, the manner in which a coach conducts himself or herself “in the role” cannot be incongruent with or contrary to the way he or she plays other roles or lives his or her normal life. So, what are the areas where congruence is an absolute necessity?

1.      Whether one is coaching or not, one needs to demonstrate respect. This will include the way one treats others, the language one uses, the regard that one shows and the extent to which one makes others comfortable in one’s presence. Incongruence in this area is unacceptable.

2.      Suspending judgement and being more accepting of others is critical even when a coach is not coaching. The ability and willingness to suspend judgement and be more open is crucial. Incongruence in this area is also unacceptable.

3.      The propensity to offer advice to others or tell others what they ought to do is most dis-empowering. Coaches must attempt to refrain from offering unsolicited advice irrespective of whether they are playing the role of a coach or not.

4.      Whether one is coaching or not, the quality of one’s conversations needs to be superior. A high level of presence, good listening and empathetic response must be present in all conversations, coaching or otherwise.

5.      In or out of the coaching role, Coaches need to display a certain level of comfort with self. Comfort enough to not have the need to talk about one’s accomplishments or acts in egocentric ways. Humility is an essential sign of congruence in the lives of coaches.

6.      Whether one is coaching or not, coaches need to display a certain hope and optimism about the people around them and their chances for realising their potential.

7.      Finally, given that coaches swear by self-awareness and feedback, they must serve as role models when it comes to investing in their self-awareness or receiving feedback with openness and humility.

Coaches are human and are not infallible. Coaches are also not perfect and blessed with all goodness in their life and personalities. The only difference is that, having chosen to become a coach it becomes necessary to constantly ask if one is being congruent and if one is attempting to live up to what one is preaching.

Coaches must get richer by their experiences and be willing to allow the benefit of those experiences enrich their clients.

Coaches must be aware of their shortcomings and struggles and learn from it and must be able to let that learning stand out for their clients.

Above all, coaches must be fully human, fully alive and even vulnerable and through that humanness, touch the lives of the people they come in contact with.

It is by being related and not right that coaches make a difference. Congruence is the key.

Ryan Bingham works for an HR consulting firm that specialises in termination assistance – basically firing employees.

Ryan is called back to office to be familiarised with a new program promoted by a young employee Natalie Keener, who now has a web based program to do the termination, to save costs. Ryan opposes it because he considers the process insensitive.

The Tech Mahindra audio clip that went viral has seemingly made the HR lady the cause of all the trouble. I think the issue is much much deeper. And the movie explains it quite elegantly. 

If we think more deeply, several realities and questions will hit us hard:

1. In the IT industry, employees are not considered employees. They are often and unfortunately viewed as inventory hired for deployment to clients. That is why, in the great days of growth, we adopted supply chain management techniques for managing the hiring process. Now organisations are wondering how to deal with the excess.
2. Employees in the IT and other modern businesses liked the “market oriented philosophy” of free movement and and competitive pay for skills when the going was good. Now, a bit of protectionism and a socialistic and benevolent approach seems favoured by them but organisations are not listening.
3. Given lack of attachment to any ideology or collectivism, trade unions never took off. What we see is the formation of “interest groups” in small numbers around specific issues using social media.
4. Asking an employee to resign or face termination is one of the oldest methods adopted by HR professionals for decades. It was not invented by the IT industry. Only difference is that in the past the HR profession had more Ryans doing it, with experience and maturity. Today, there are very few Ryans left. Young Natalies with scripts are expected to do this. The audio tapes clearly reflect the lack of experience and conviction, a poor reflection of HR leadership, not that individual.
5. The issue is certainly not about whether organisations will stop restructuring and laying off. Of course they will. That is the new order. They question is, how will it be done.
6. This brings me to the last point. In the coming years, will organisations develop this skill and value or will they outsource the task to firms like the one Ryan worked for or will the wave of technology that is sweeping all of us, offer an automated solution to make this devoid of human contact, like the one that Natalie was promoting?

What is your take?

If you walk the streets of any of our cities, you will see innumerable scan centres, imaging centres, diagnostic centres and labs and so on.

Talk to your doctor-friend and he will admit in private that there is a huge amount of inappropriate and unnecessary diagnostics that patients are put through. Technology and financing and the desire to establish a business is driving the proliferation of diagnostics.

The field of leadership development is no different.

Talk to any senior leader and he will baffle you with dozens of psychometric assessment reports that he has been subjected to. Ask him what meaning he has made of them and how it helped him and you will only see anger and frustration.

It is my sense that an ever increasing percentage of Future Leader Development budgets are being spent on diagnostics, leaving little money, time and energy for development!

Why are organisations doing leadership assessments with a vengeance so to speak?

For one, immediate managers are unable to delivery high quality, actionable and objective feedback that the employee can pay attention to and act on. Also, many employees who have been successful personalise the reasons for success and feel invincible and choose to live with their blind spots and flaws, often to the detriment of not just themselves but their teams and the businesses they manage. Then there is data from engagement surveys and other sources which might point to concerns about the style and sensitivity of certain leaders. Then of course is the fact that today’s young team members are less tolerant to and accepting of bosses whose styles and approaches are dysfunctional.

So, the desire to somehow get leaders to “wake up and smell the coffee”, to get leaders to become more self-aware, to shine the spotlight on some of their dysfunctional blind spots is understandable and even important. It is also understandable that some of these assessment tools can be very effective in doing this.

However, most talent managers, L&D professionals and HR leaders fail to understand the human and psychological dimensions involved in doing this well. They fail to realise that challenging someone with strong feedback is like throwing a bird off its nest or opening up something hard and unpleasant for a person.

Many underestimate or even ignore the fact that the process of challenging individuals through such assessment processes must be done in a climate of care and empathy and must be accompanied by an equally adequate amount of support to do deal with the emotions it evokes and thereafter help in doing something about it.

Often, firms and individuals who have been retained to assess and debrief the results of assessment tool at best have one session with the employee for about an hour or so to walk the employee through the report – that is it.

To leave a person with assessment data without adequate support is worse than not doing anything.

When assessment is accompanied with support in terms of help in interpreting it, making meaning out of it, dealing with the emotions that it throws up and crafting actions to overcome it, it can be an empowering experience. Such support must come from a qualified helper who can spend at least a few sessions with the person to convert the assessment data into actionable ideas for one’s benefit.

For this to happen the HR team needs to develop empathy. As a first step, all team members in HR must subject themselves to all assessment tools that they plan to administer on their employees. They must experience the emotional stages of S-A-R-A-H (shock, anger, resistance, acceptance and help) first hand so that they can empathise with their employees. When they implement these programs, they must come from a first-hand experience of having gone through this and benefitted so that they are credible and empathetic. (No different from first filling for yourself a KRA form that you design for others).

The ability and inability to delegate at a level that is appropriate to one’s position in the organisation very often figures as an acute development need for entrepreneurs, leaders and managers across organizations.

Trainers and Coaches spend an enormous amount of time and effort in helping these executives develop the right skills and mind-sets so that they are able to practice delegation in a manner that is befitting their level and context in the organisation.

If the delegation problem were to be placed on a continuum, on one end of the spectrum would be the inability to let go or what is popularly called “micro management” and on the other end of the spectrum would be the inability to remain hands on and take ownership or what is popularly called “abdication”.

Unfortunately, there is a popular notion within organizations that more managers and leaders need help with overcoming their tendency to micro manage. As a corollary, it is believed that abdication is seldom an issue and developmental challenge and has therefore received very little attention among trainers, coaches and even thought leaders. In other words there is an assumption that a vast majority of executives are taking more charge than they should and that we do not have as much of a problem with people not taking charge at all.

My experience tells me that this is a huge fallacy. My first point is that executives in organisation suffer from both problems – micro management and abdication. My second point is that there is a certain correlation between organisational hierarchy and the prevalence of this problem in an interesting way. My third point is that abdication is a more acute problem than micro management.

So who in the organisational hierarchy suffers from which kind of delegation problem?

(I must hasten to add that this post is about leaders and managers who do have problems with delegation. There are many who do a fine job of delegation and to that extend I am not generalizing.)

Leaders and Micro-management

It appears that a fair number of leaders are unable to let go and struggle to develop an appropriate delegation style of being hands on but do not micro managing.

The problem of micromanagement starts right from at the Board room. Many board members are often guilty of getting into operational issues or telling the CEO what he or she ought to do or how they ought to do it.

CEOs, anxious about their own performance and subject to pressure from investors find it hard to allow people below them to take the time to make decisions. They might direct, tell, strongly suggest or just mandate.

New CEOs often plead about the need for “alignment” which is a euphemism for “towing my line”.

Their direct reports also use the office of the CEO to “drive initiatives”  or “intervene when things don’t work”.

Executive leaders often display their anxiety by asking for a lot of information, having too many review meeting or having too many catch up calls. Middle managers are often lamenting about the time they have to spend managing upwards.

Sometimes, entrepreneurs and business owners who have built businesses from scratch have an unreasonable expectation from their direct reports (Presidents, EVPs and VPs) that they should know everything about everything. When they ask one of their Presidents about some micro issue and he says I don’t know because that is being handled by his team member a couple of levels below, the entrepreneur might be deeply anguished. He will use his personal benchmark of how he knows “everything” to judge the senior leader. These senior leaders will soon do what is good for them – micro-manage.

In essence, the higher one goes, the greater the propensity to micro-manage.

Managers and abdication

This is what needs some explaining.

Many Managers find themselves in a situation where they are less competent than their team members when it comes to “actually doing the work”. This is especially true in technical and skilled jobs.

Managers also quickly figure out that their proximity to the point where actual work is being done and delivered is quite high. This could be sales revenues, customer service, patient care, project execution, hiring, query resolution, problem solving and so on.

If they dirty their hands and micro manage, they know that bad outcomes will stick to them easily. So, many take the misplaced and of course convenient position that they have “delegated and empowered the troops to do their work”. What that really mean is that if something goes wrong and there are escalations right through the hierarchy (and that is often the case because we live in an escalation matrix society) nothing will stick to them. The preference is to be an escalation point rather than in the line of fire.

Ask front line employees and they will tell you that they wish their manager stepped in more often when things went wrong, or when they were unclear or unsure or did not have the ability to do something. They wish their managers were more available to them to help them and were not busy managing upwards. They want managers to lead from the front more often.

Go to a retail outlet or a restaurant or any professional services firm or a hospital or a call centre or a customer support centre and you will find more abdication than micro management.

So you see, strangely as people get closer to the point of actual work, they find it convenient to “empower” (meaning abdicate) and as people get father away from actual work, they find it safer to be “hands on” (meaning micro manage).

My heart goes out to the thousands of young front line employees in a variety of businesses who have to often fend for themselves with little support because their managers have chosen to interpret the meaning of delegation to their convenience. My heart also goes out to senior managers and leaders who need to expend enormous energy to deal with the micro-managing ways of their bosses.

The manner in which we manage performance and rewards, the widespread use of fear and escalation as a means of securing results, the lack of importance paid to functional expertise among managers and the inability of organizations to allow for mistakes can all be listed as potential reasons for such a culture within organizations.

It is my hope that more and more organisations will pay attention not just to micromanagement but also abdication and ensure that everyone displays a style of delegation that is level and context appropriate.