We hold on to CSR, as giving alms is considered, as per religion, a way to absolve yourself from the sins that you might be committing. Murderers and bandits are also known to pray!

Every since I’ve understood the farce of “CSR-washing”: I’ve been against the concept of donations and charity, to absolve yourself of the ills you might be doing as a person or as a business. For the last couple of years the world has starting understanding the differences between CSR and Corporate Responsibility. CII (Confederation of Indian Industries) is talking about it in conferences, groups promoting Conscious Capitalism have been formed – Thought Leaders have come around. It took a financial tsunami, brought by probably the so claimed brightest brains in the world, for these discussions to bubble-up.

Today when Warren Buffet and Gates, gives away their wealth for charity (showing gratitude and not covering guilt) and are here in India to promote “Philanthropy Amongst India’s Rich”, and Rao of GMR actually pledges $540 million towards Education, I hate it even more.

On one side Indian companies throw at us unsafe and badly fabricated cars, call drops, electricity cuts, mechanical failures, roads that break in 6 months, poorly fabricated buildings – including the Delhi International Airport’s fabled Terminal 3 (yes one ought to see the omnipresent shoddiness of the work done – I bet the carpet was put as putting tiles would have been a nightmare), on the other they invest in philanthropic activities for good press. It would be good to have a mandate that each and every business, has to first start ensuring that all their Services reach Customer Delight (attained through Compassion and Mindfulness) and are delivered Ethically, can invest every hour and every day to make sure what they are producing is produced for the future, which could be used, reused by upgrading and still keep working, that might be a sign of being thankful to mother nature, of using her resources optimally then invest in CSR, or maybe not!

What has hit me most is that of Air, Water and Soil Pollution, we hardly talk about soil, we hardly take soil into consideration while setting up and conducting experiments around the Agricultural System – be it Water Quality, Water Management, Agronomy, Crop Growth Amendments, etc. Today one of the grave concerns is the depletion of Organic Carbon, decline of microbial activity, beneficial bacteria, micro-organisms,  and whatever nature provided, before our fertilizers destroyed them.

It’s interesting that we miss out the very context of agriculture, in fact, of life – it all begins from the soil and ends up as soil.

Why was it so, how come? I thought and thought – We can breathe the Air and Drink the Water to know they are polluted, but we don’t ‘eat’ Soil for us to know that it has gone bad!

While working we all have cribbed about our seniors team leads or managers – a crib that remains a crib, no action is taken, discontentment brews, negativity spreads. I thought what if we had a channel for an effective two-way feedback: the 360° Feedback was not applicable to the Team Leads. One way was to have the two sit in a room and get into an “open conversation” with a moderator – how much that stays sane is anyone’s guess.

The way I experimented with was to start the QPEDS (Quarterly Performance Evaluation and Development Sessions) discussions from the freshers in the team and go up the reporting chain. There was an outpour of feedback from each and every person who was working with someone senior! It was a WOW and a Phew. Feedback was ploughed back into the people up the chain – actions were taken, changes were made apparent.

This method adds structure to the process of conducting appraisals and feedback sessions – a process that is usually run without any structure; people are lined up for discussion considering the difficultly of dealing with the person or the ones whom you know has “issues”.

This method helped pushing the cause of trust and transparency, breaking hierarchies, giving a message to the team that firstly we listen to the junior most, the most enthusiastic and absorbent and, secondly we action their feedback; helps keep sensibilities of people with more experience in place and remain accountable to all.

At HCL in all teams we needed to have 2 key roles – Defect Prevention Analyst (DPA) & Project Quality Assurer (PQA) – from within the existing project team members. In our team these roles were rotated within members to distribute the load (not to go the usual route of making these feel as a burden), but such was primarily done to have people understand the importance and benefits of the roles. By performing the roles more members understood the pains in the project and were exposed to what a Project Lead/Manager does and have to deal with during project execution.

In our team we did more – created new roles:

The youngest were made the ISMS Officers, the custodians of BS7799 Information Security Policy, ensuring compliance discipline in the team. The youngest were given the “disciplining job” to buttress the mindset change that was being engendered in the team – Listening to the Youngest, having respect, not for the years of experience, but for the role and, that the ones at the bottom of the hierarchy also have a role, the environment need to facilitate their role and being. These youngsters were rather enthused by the visibility and role they got!

A need arose from the HCL Quality Group for having Knowledge Management in the Project, we appointed a Knowledge Manager who would ensure that all the data is backed up and is available to the team (though I now know that we were only managing Information and not Knowledge). Then we needed someone to take care of birthday parties, outings and Employee Engagement – here came the Team People Representative (TPR) – the HR role in the team. The Team Training In-charge kept track of people development. And, then these roles were rotated!

This way we created a microcosm of certain different departments in an organisation – Knowledge, HR, Quality, Information Security, Learning & Development.

Benefits: Maturity in the team by appreciation of newer aspects of running a project, Respect for the role, being in each other’s shoes, get a bigger picture of “stuff” that happens around them – helps aligning people to the many initiatives that the organisation might be taking. A Leader’s role is to constantly make people see the interconnectedness…

Spread the message of love on the roads…Let there be a society where the truckers, at the top of the “Road Responsibility Chain“, be the most responsible and the pedestrians, be the most taken care of…

The 4 Value Adds Framework

Our Work-life normally has 3 spheres of impact – Self, Team, Organisation. I added another sphere called Society, making it the “4 Value-Adds Framework”.

It is said that enlightenment starts from self. Much has been written in religious and spiritual texts; in management we promote this concept as Self-Leadership – only when a person starts adding value to self can one add value to others. However, by nature most of us are rather inert towards operationalising these concepts, keeping individual potential untapped. As a leader of a group it is best not to wait for this to happen; such enlightenment can be stirred by an enlightened and inspired leader – through this Framework.

“It all begins from the individual, by the individual”. The first one is Value Add ‘to’ you, rest are Value Adds ‘through’ you”.

The Initiation & Growth Stages: A classical level/stage-wise approach. The Maturity Stage: Where one acts on all 4 spheres simultaneously, maintaining balance.

If one is a getting introduced to these concepts, start with the Initiation & Growth Stage, however if a level of maturity is exhibited by an individual, operationalisation can start from The Maturity Stage. Eventually, people have to grow from the growth stage to the maturity stage.

As leaders you first identify these for yourself. Then through tools like the Time-to-Talk, help the team members discover their gifts ‘through’ which they can identify the “through-them” Value Adds.

Operationalisation

Not all at once, but phase wise intro and make people see successes.

During our Time-to-Talk team members were asked to plan what would they offer in these 4 spheres and how would they do it. People would normally understand the first two, as these were within reach. The rest two needed the right kind of probing and discussion. 

One common response, if I were to sum it up was: “How can I contribute to the organisation or the society? Am I not too small?!!??”. The process of discovering that “it all begins from the individual, by the individual” was rather empowering for some, developing the faith that their contributions were impacting the organisation and the society and that there are many-many ways of having an increased impact. We continue to read about such individuals who have gone beyond the call of duty and their limits and feel that maybe I could have done it as well; well here and now was the time to be That Individual.

To enable organisational contribution one of the steps was to create organisational roles* within the project team and second, was to make people see how the assignment connected to the Whole and the organisation.

As a contribution to the society, the higher purpose of work/engagement* is to be realised the emotional angle to the work, cutting across the clutter of client comments, bugs and review comments. Contributing to social organisations notwithstanding, the least people can be encouraged to do is to be responsible citizens – following traffic rules was my favourite (about which I have a paper dedicated – available on the blog too).

As a leader you need to be clear of these linkages, only then can you make others see. As a leader you need to be on the path of maturity to be seen as a genuine, having faith in the process, for the people know very fast of the missing depth and commitments.

Impact of running with this method

The excitement of working with “new stuff”, if the project is getting mundane, the opportunity to explore your self and to enable others. Once individuals realise that through them they can make a positive difference to others, the sense of empowerment and self belief makes them take up daunting tasks.

Individuals within a team builds appreciation in all these spheres, it increases awareness of the surroundings, the correlations among these 4 spheres start becoming apparent, which completes the context of operation which makes for a clear view of acting within the context.

This is akin to enlightenment, when you go beyond self and generate compassion in all other spheres to give more to them. Self development in this state of enlightenment is a given.

For this magic to happen continuously, humility* is to be maintained and a supportive environment to be created – by the leader.

*Covered in detail in another blog post

Something that I experimented and some of my junior team mates ran with it too – It’s to try and make yourself redundant in your current role by passing on knowledge and building competence of the people reporting into you. Your focus should be on quickly increasing the productivity of the junior.

This way you have more time on your hands, to learn more and take on additional responsibilities from your boss. You help your boss grow too, as the time available on with him also increases. You increase the productivity of the overall system.

One of the team members caught on this was able to grab an onsite assignment, doing work that really excited him. He came over and thanked me for the guru-mantra.

While I read about this process later on the Internet as it is a greatly followed one, I did it out of a situation where I was handling a project single handedly, to take out time for myself to work on stuff of interest – RFPs, estimation, processes, to keep the pace of growth, etc, I had no other option to train-train-train.

So remember leaders and managers, “don’t think that you are losing your skills if you pass them on, you are just creating space for you to take on more [exciting skills]”. This puts you on a path of continuous growth. However don’t move till the time the person receiving the skills is 90% as good as you wanted him/her to be.

Enjoy the joy of giving and genuinely feeling for people around you – at SOIL we would say, this is Compassion in action.

“Time to Talk” was rolled out in the first (Jan ’06) Quarterly Performance Evaluation & Development (QPED) feedback sessions I did in my team as a Project Lead. A typical “QPED discussion” was a 15 minutes affair – Project Leads evaluated the work done by a team member, only small contentions were dealt with in some detail.

Our team was on a process and output improvement drive – a lot was happening. In Jan 06, one of our most effective junior team member resigned. As expected from a Project Lead, I started having longish conversations with him on the reasons of discontentment, exploring possibilities of his staying back. These conversations were done walking outside in the HCL Sec-60, Noida campus – it was winter!

The take-aways from these conversations were powerful. I got to know a lot about this team member and additionally became aware of our team’s dynamics; I so much wished we’d had this heart-2-heart earlier. The guy was struggling under a commitment which we, the management, could have better served. Well, I could not have him back, but till the time he was still around got to know him much better, we became rather open with each other.

At the same time, OND* QPEDs came along, it struck me – “what if I were to have this beautiful conversation with every team member” – and I did have these conversations. QPEDs were done walking in the campus – the initiative got labelled as “Time to Walk”. As a further process improvement I talked first to the people with least experience and went upwards, this to provide feedback to the team member’s leader***. Next, I took feedback on how am I doing – what do I need to change or continue doing more. After the initial incongruity of putting this question across, I got open and valuable feedback, some of it as if waiting to come out – no holds barred! Both these turned out to be very effective.

I got to know the team members, the dynamics of the team and, the team members got to know me and my thoughts. I could give the reasons and rationale behind some decisions being taken and how they impacted each of us, their career plans, areas of improvement, work planning, the importance of process changes and methods of doing great design. Through these conversations came out many initiatives; two most significant were – a highly effective skill building approach and a methodology to execute internal projects**. We together got prepared to take on a challenge to do something in this team to achieve excellence in everything we do.

The summer QPEDs were done in rooms and “Time to Walk” got rechristened as “Time-to-Talk”.

The conversations were captured as an output** (This was then given to the team member in an envelope for the record – I kept a copy to be discussed in the next cycle) on an A4 paper under 4 sections:

1. How have you done in the last Quarter?
2. What can be made better in the coming Quarter?
3. Your 4 Necessary Value Adds (covered in a later post)
4. My Feedback (imagine getting a feedback from all team members quarter by quarter)

“Time to Talk” became an integral closed-loop feedback system (some call these as “Listening Systems”); it became a game changer for us, we normed and performed (Buckman, 1965). Later, rather than waiting for the QPED cycle, people used come up to me: “Uday, it’s time to talk”, whenever there was something brewing up, feedback was needed, etc.

I continued to use this approach for appraisals and development feedback in all other teams I worked with, the reactions and results were similar. In fact when I took over a new team in my next company, GlobalLogic, this is the first thing I did – talked to all in my team after a month of being there. This initiative, in my learning, travelled from being a reactive step, to an operational process, to a proactive way to start in a team.

Conversations with team members is a powerful two-way exchange about the emotions, drivers and leavers of people, use them for the benefit for everyone around you.

*OND – Oct Nov Dec, JFM – Jan Feb Mar, similarly AMJ & JAS are terms used for quarters in HCL

**As a part of another concept OaEvS (Output at Every Stage) we started creating outputs out of everything we do; the output of QPEDS was the A4 sheet.

***Will be covered in detail in another post

These years were also full of action in the Social Development Sector (the efforts I refer to as “Nation Building” efforts). This was the duration of cross-using and inter-relating knowledge and capabilities, from wherever I was engaged in my life; a period of discovering what it is to be a Whole Person.

One aspect that surprises me too was I did not read a single management or leadership book or article in this period, what I read about was India – the education sector, the traffic sector, democracy, some religion, some Constitution and I thought a lot. I also lived the years of transformation of HCL Technologies, the era of Vineet Nayar.

Courses at SOIL were interestingly an affirmation – that the work done and fundamentals developed, at HCL and while Nation Building – were aligned to the latest thinking and some, even before time.

With this context and the spirit of “that knowledge shared is knowledge doubled” I dedicate, to the people I worked with at HCL a series of stories in blog posts to follow – labeled: “Stories from HCL Technologies Feb04-Apr08: dedicated to the people who gave me the opportunities and the opportunity to work with them”. Hope they would be useful and yes, I would be eager to hear your comments and improvement suggestions…

Dedicated to: Abhishek Jain, Ajai Ramachandran Pappu, Avijit Manna, Charu Kwatra, Gaurav Grover, Itika, Kshitiz Saini, Mohit Tandon, Mohit Vaish, Namita Mishra, Neeraj Kumar, Pragya Sarswat, Prashant Srivastava, Puneet Mehta, Rajesh Gupta, Sachit Tewani, Sandeep Jindal, Sanjeev Kumar Gupta, Saurabh Grover, Sanjeeva Nand Sharma, Shashidhar Murthy, Shashikant Renake, and Shilpi Jain.

This options would be in line with concepts and principles of sustainability.

As it is people keep getting the interiors of these buildings renovated time and again. This might be a completely new market – A Blue Ocean waiting?