Managing Smart People

Most people do not like to be ‘managed’ and bosses are often the subject of unsavory comments around the water coolers and at coffee corners in the offices. That being the normal case it could really be a tough act to manage smart people. And what if many people in the team are smarter than the manager himself? This is a challenge many managers face at the work places of modern organizations. Invariably the newest crop of employees are the smartest ones just as new generations know many tricks that the older did not know. This challenge has been on the rise in the last two decades as the technology and information explosion depleted the monopoly powers of those in positions of authority.

From my own experience I learned a few lessons in managing smart people.

The first thumb rule is not to manage smart people wherever practical and in extreme situations manage them the least. Smart people are capable of conducting and managing their tasks themselves or finding a way on their own. Most often they find managing by the boss as a hindrance to their autonomy, creativity and productivity. They expect less supervision and hate micro management. They have a different set of expectation from the manager. They need the manager to clear the obstacles on their way to complete the assigned tasks- be it the over indulgence from the second level manager, or frequent demands from the functional teams etc., They expect the manager to create a conducive work environment devoid of petty office politics and provide for basic amenities, facilities and technical support to do the job. They expect the manager to be available in crisis situations and guide them when they need help. They expect the manager to appreciate good work and fairly reward the team commensurate with the tasks and achievements. And they expect the manager to be open and accept when he makes a mistake. No one expect anyone to be right all the time. But no one likes dishonesty.

The second thumb rule is to identify and leverage on the smart skills of your team. It would be smart on the part of the manager to acknowledge those skills his team has and the complementary skills he himself has. Typically a professional joins an organization with a hope that his skills, at least some of them, can be utilized on the job. It would be a winning strategy for the manager to encourage and find opportunities for his team to employ some or most of their special or new skills into the job. While the value systems and the culture of an organization are to be shared by all in the company regardless of one being new or old in the system, skills and aspirations are fast changing and the work environment needs to adapt accordingly.

The third thumb rule is to balance the scale of special initiatives among different team members. It may so happen that many members in the team may have similar skills and similar aspirations while the team at any point of time has limited special initiatives to run. The best scenario for the manager is the availability of enough initiatives matching the aspirations and skills of all his team members. This may not be the case always. The manager could ask for volunteers for the initiatives to avoid any perception of favoring any given person in the team with more visible initiatives. The other way to give opportunities to many people is to nominate different team members to lead a cyclical event by rotation. Smart people are very watchful of such dynamics and they would like to see that fair opportunity is given to all.

The fourth thumb rule is to balance competition and collaboration among smart team members. No easy task! Smart people at work often tend to be competitive and some would definitely want to outsmart others in the team. Beyond a subtle point it would be futile to lecture them on the benefits of cooperation and mutual help. They have all not come from the same family and not with the same motivation to work and life. Therefore, it would make sense to create tasks and task teams in such a way that the basic requirement of success is a certain level of collaboration and mutual sharing. If the atmosphere is one of high competition such tasks would require periodic review, sharing of best practices and private counseling of those who dominate excessively and those who are too indifferent to the goings on.

In the year 2000 I was moving out of my role as the Head of Compensation and Benefits at the Corporate office of Wipro. My new role was to head HR for couple of Divisions in the IT Business Unit serving India and Middle East. I was to manage the human resources activities for a large number of employees worked in offices all over the country, customer sites and at our computer factory. We did not have enough people in the HR department to reach out to all employees in reasonable frequency. However, by then e-mail has become quite popular and every employee had e-mail ids. Therefore, we decided to reach out to employees through regular communication mailers and a weekly magazine. While I had a brief background in journalism and functional knowledge in computer I did not know how to make smart looking communication with graphics and pictures. Two young employees in my team were smart to do these things. We used to discuss the content and layout and I used to write the editorial. The execution responsibility was completely with my colleagues who took pride in releasing the magazine every Friday without fail for over one year. They enjoyed autonomy in what they did and consulted me whenever they wanted help. Between the two of them they used to alternate the ground work for upcoming issues of the weekly magazine while the logistics of releasing remained with one of them. Of course, they had their regular day job to do. But this extra job added greater element of creativity and excitement to their regular tasks.

My team did not feel the weight of management above their shoulders nor did I have to worry about ‘managing’ my team!

‘I will find a lazy person to do a difficult job. He will find an easy way to do it.’ – Bill Gates

Return on Education

Increasingly people start asking, ‘what is the return on education’? Some ask this question aloud while others quietly in their minds. This question arises more definitely in the case of higher education and professional courses. This might not have been the case 50 years ago or even 30 years ago. 

So what has really changed? That question leads to another question: is education an economic good or social good?

To get into this debate let’s have some basic definitions in place. An ‘economic good’ is a product or service which can command a price when sold. Pretty much anything we buy from a shop or online is an economic good.  A ‘social good’ or ‘common good’ is a good or service that is shared and beneficial for all or most members of a given community. Examples of social good would be clean air, clean water, literacy or public services like healthcare, law and order.

At the macro level we understand that higher education or scientific research benefits the community, society or even humanity. But the perception changes drastically at micro level. A parent who spends money on her child’s education is often guided by the ‘return on investment’ principle. The average parent asks: ‘What job or a career will my child get into after the education and how rewarding that could be in terms of economic benefits besides the social influence that the degree can command’? The gravity of this concern increases as the cost of education increases.     

Recently when I told that my son joined an MBA program in a university the immediate question my colleague asked was: ‘so what companies is he targeting to join after the course’? My mind was not prepared for an answer to this question. My friend, like many other intelligent parents, assumed that my son is doing an MBA to join a company and therefore, must be targeting the best paying or most well known companies. I didn’t have any such idea, nor does my son have such an idea. For me, education is still by and large a social good. That everyone has to earn a livelihood is incidental to education.

Having been to these economic concepts I went to Google to find what is meant by education. Here is what came up on top of the page. Education is the process of facilitating learning. Knowledge, skills, values, beliefs and habits of a group of people are transferred to other people through storytelling, discussion, teaching, training or research. This definition is not particularly attributed to anyone and this may not be the best definition. But for me it suffices.

This, of course, is not to indicate that all education is for charity. Education is one of the most effective drivers of economic progress both at the individual level as well as at the community or society level. The suggestion is to reduce the excessive focus on the immediate economic outcomes of education. This will open up new and multiple opportunities to the student and probably to other people around. Some of the best educational institutions in the world are not placement focused. In fact, they don’t have job placement cells. Jobs do come to the best students if they so wish. Well, the brightest don’t seek jobs; they create jobs or focus on making life better for others. In that process some of them may become millionaires or make millions happier, healthier and safer.

Much like in many other important things in life, it is difficult to make clear cut boundaries for education or for that matter the objectives of education. It is perfectly all right for each one to have his or her objectives. However, education need not be reduced only as a means of employment.

So, what is the return on education? Return on education is immeasurable. Let that remain so! Even mathematicians admit that everything cannot be measured limited quantities. So they invented a symbol for infinity.

‘The true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.’ –William Deresiewicz 

Cheatswagen!

The “people’s car” company Volkswagen is currently in news for the wrong reasons. But before getting into the wrong side of the company, let’s get the big picture of the world’s second largest car company in 2014. The VW group sells its vehicles in 150 countries. It owns marquee brands like Bentley, Lamborgini, Bugatti, Audi, Skoda and SEAT besides, of course, the Volkswagen brands including some all time popular brands like the Golf, Beetle and Passat. Not that, they make only cars, they do make commercial vehicles under different brand names as well as motorcycles like the Ducati. The group clocked annual revenue of $ 262 Bn, $ 12 Bn in profits and employs about 600000 people. Yes, VW is truly a people’s car company catering to the needs and aspirations of millions ranging from the daily commute to flaunting the opulent mean machines around the globe.

Back to the more recent news. After the US investigators accused the company of cheating the emission tests on their cars, the company has accepted that it has indeed deployed a software algorithm that can show the pollution levels within acceptable levels while actually emitting many times higher levels of pollutants. It is found that this has been happening since 2009 on many of their diesel models affecting at least 11 million Volkswagen cars. Yes, 11 million, not a small number. Accepting the crime is probably the second best thing the company could do after being caught rather than defending. Well, they fired the CEO and took many other steps to contain the situation.

German engineering is renowned for its precision and reliability. Now, they prove to be good at engineering legal compliance. Or is it moral engineering? Like many of us they too know that when being good is difficult make sure you look good. Is it something attributable only to one company or one country? The answer is no. We can say that it happens with companies and not with individuals. Well, companies are run by people like us.  

Most humans cheat, regardless of nationality or ethnicity. It is not a western thing or an eastern thing. It is not a capitalist or socialist phenomenon. It has little to do with urban or rural difference nor has it do with rich or poor. This is not to say that everyone is equally capable of cheating. As in other human capabilities different people have different threshold and risk limits. Some resist cheating beyond a certain level and some go too far depending on various factors. These factors could among others, include the skill levels of the person to carry out such acts without attracting the public scrutiny.

Individuals can improve skills and companies can hire skills. Public companies do plan and provide for legal and reputation risks. There are legal departments and image consultants advising and protecting them. There are insurance companies that undertake such risks for a huge premium. In legal parlance, the materiality is what matters and not the act itself. For instance, in the case of VW, imagine they were caught in this cheating act within three months in 2009 and it affected a few batches of cars from the production line, this would have been listed as a technical lapse requiring a fix and at best the recall of a few cars. Therefore, smart companies manage their risks by staying below the radar of materiality either by limiting the quantum of such instances or by controlling the time limits of defective delivery.

Most of us intrinsically know the Lincoln dictum that ‘you can fool some people all the time and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time’.

But what does it mean really?

The average human beings (majority) are capable of cheating only some people for all the time or all people for some time. And it is only the super intelligent or super foolish people attempt to cheat all people for all the time!  If you find it a disappointingly pessimistic, I can present it very optimistically for you. The average human beings are capable of being honest with a few people all the time or with all the people for some time; only the super intelligent or super foolish can be brutally honest with all the people all the time! Would you like to socialize with the minority, or go with the average Joe?

 
‘Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.’ – Abraham Lincoln

Revisiting Human Capital

There was a time when human beings were just that-human beings distinguished from other animals. Then came the industrial revolution and the ‘capitalists’ took centre stage of civilization. They distinguished humans from ‘capital’ eventually leading to the Marxist class war.  The struggle continued between the capitalist class and the labour class to establish relative prominence. In the recent decades some management practitioners tried to place the labour class (of course within the labour class there are many sub classes-uber, upper, middle, lower and ‘BPL’-Below Poverty Line) as part of the capital stock and started calling human beings as ‘human capital’. 

Most classical economists and even some of the modern economists like Thomas Piketty would not approve this extreme turnaround in thinking. Some socialists thought that the reason for all economic value is labour or human endeavour and capital is just a consequence of labour.

Which one to pick- the capitalists or the socialists? Is that a catch 22 situation?

We do not have to necessarily reduce every duality into Newton’s third law of motion. Everything need not have an equal and opposite force, at least in the realm of thinking or human imagination. We all know that capital, tools and ‘apps’ have greatly enhanced the human potential and made life a lot easier for most people, though making parents of gizmo-loving millennial children a lot anxious. Terming capital an exploitative weapon is at the least biased thinking in a progressive society. Human thinking, imagination and efforts led to path-breaking inventions and vast accumulation of capital, albeit in the hands of a few, not always in the hands of the inventors though. Counting human beings as part of the capital stock is to equate the producer with the tools of production or at the least, poor economic accounting.

In an interview published in the now long extinct ‘Illustrated Weekly of India’ the late Osho (Acharya Rajneesh) once jovially said ‘Jesus saves, Moses invests and Rajneesh spends’. In a society there are people who save, others who invest and almost everyone who spends. Probably, the Acharya did not want to give any particular significance to any one of the three or wanted to justify all that money spent on the multitude of Rolls Royce cars. Yes, savings and investments lead to creation of capital. But capital is of what use if there is none to buy the products of capital, including the Rolls Royce cars?

Re-imagining people as human beings rather than resources or capital may be reinventing the wheel or even going far back in the past when the wheel wasn’t yet invented. What would that mean to HR practitioners? For one, this may prompt organizations to start viewing people as different from other asset classes. Assigning a price tag or even a rental value to human beings is devaluing human ingenuity and freedom of choice. Companies can hire the ‘services’ of employees, buy ideas and even inventions, still retaining the freedom with the seller.

In the not so distant future, 'hiring' people may sound derogatory and probably illegal just as trading slaves became illegal; 'full time employment' too may become impractical, if not illegal. Who can utilize a human mind full time, if at all available for hire? Surely, the owner cannot; leave alone the buyer. Employment is becoming ‘employmind’ expanding human possibilities and making human accounting evermore error-prone.

Is there a killer app waiting to solve this accounting problem?  

“Business is about profit, yes and it is about more than profit. At its best, it is expanding the possibilities of humanity.”- Jon Miller

Trials and the Tragedy of Errors

A fair trial is the right of the victim and the accused. Yet, we all intuitively know that not all trials result in a fair judgment. One may even be pardoned to imagine that most legal trials in India result in errors. Occasionally, we make an outburst about a judgement gone wrong or perceived to have gone wrong. Yet we take it on our stride and believe that life is a chain of trials and errors.

Courts are meant to dispense justice. However, the long chain of the justice system is often a test of smartness or skilful work by a whole lot of intermediaries in the chain right from the local police who registers a complaint or a First Information Report. A small twist by an intentional or unintentional error in the FIR can change the entire course of trial and even the outcome. Similarly the collection and presentation of evidence and trial of witnesses at different trial courts can make or break a case. Truth usually doesn’t stand up on its legs. It always needs some artificial limbs provided by interested and sometimes uninterested parties. ‘Satyameva Jayate’ is a fascinating aspiration like many other ideals. Truth manifests differently to different people and at different times. OK, that is philosophy.

Let’s return to reality.

An article in the recent Fortune magazine (August 1, 2015) adapted from Geoff Colvin’s book titled ‘Humans Are Underrated’ cites an interesting research study. Parole decisions are made by judges in some countries, such as Israel, where researchers investigated how those decisions are influenced by a routine human act like lunch. Over the course of a day, the judges approve about 35% of prisoners’ applications for parole.  But the approval rate declines steadily in the two hours before the lunch break. Immediately after the lunch, it spikes to 65% and then again declines steadily. If you are a prisoner, the number of years you spend behind bars could be affected significantly by whether your parole application happens to be the last one on the judge’s stack before lunch or the first one after!  

Data-driven algorithms have proved superior to human judges in such decisions. Rationally we prefer a computer that doesn’t take a lunch break to a judge who takes a lunch break whose body metabolism and mental agility or emotions depend on many external factors. Yet, we may not reassign such jobs from judges to machines. Why? The issue is not computer abilities; it is the social necessity that individuals be accountable for important decisions.

Corporate situations are similar too. Will the manager who writes the appraisal of five employees at a stretch apply varying judgements based on when he is taking a lunch break? Quite likely! You may want to pray that your appraisal comes up in the morning list and not closer to the lunch break. It can potentially make or break a career, or affect your salary increase or promotion. It is not a question of fairness. It is a matter of hunger! Seriously, ask your boss, ‘hungry, kya?’

Well, lot of transactions have been automated in many companies, making a day’s job easier for the average employee and the HR Department. But not many decisions are automated or moved to self-service mobile app. It appears, the higher the impact of a decision the greater the chance of error. Alas, human judgement after 200,000 years of evolution, still remains in the realm of trial and error!

 
‘The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.’- Jiddu Krishnamurti