Who Moved My Curry

What did we learn in the past 18 months...

Spending the last year and a half in one of our large offices in India I’ve learned so much about how another culture works, lives and plays.

Such as:

- Bangalore has a job market that is continuing to grow and gets highly competitive at all levels.

- Since I was typically hiring individual contributors and junior level managers I got a taste of how this market impacts loyalty. 

- People will leave at a moments notice with every excuse imaginable just to get out of their obligation of a 30 day notice period.

- Much of the workforce is in their early to mid 20′s and have a very casual approach to work, it’s nothing for them to have multiple deaths in the family over a period just so they can not work for days or weeks at a time.

- They are quick to scream favoritism when those that work really hard earn opportunities to do work outside of their normal duties.

- They are exceptionally clever.  They find every way under the sun to buck the system if given the opportunity.

- They will pressure high performers to work less so they aren’t expected to do more... Which means they’re capable of doing a lot but would rather not.

- Junior leadership is often afraid of the “tough” questions their teams may ask when something changes.

- Independent thinking is not common and often frowned upon or shut down by senior management.

- The incentive system is poorly designed and does not foster productivity, in fact it drives mediocre performance.

- You don’t want to overpay because they’ll just take that salary and try to negotiate higher somewhere else.

- You don’ t want to pay too low because the quality of worker diminishes significantly.  Ironically the lower paid workers work harder but they aren’t generally as skilled.

- Most of the businesses serve other businesses so they don’t see your company’s clients as their clients, YOU are usually the client.

- If you have them speaking to your clients you need to set the tone up front about who they serve, why and what’s expected.

- Job titles/ Designations mean everything.

- Being social is important, especially during meals and hanging out after work or on weekends.

- They are very detailed and will ask a lot of questions and work hard to be precise in their execution of tasks.

There are so many things learned at different levels in the organization... These are primarily at the individual level.  Senior Management is a whole segment unto itself.

Ok time to get back in the game... the last several months have been a whirlwind and my thoughts have been all over the place.

Agenda items will include:

- What did we learn in the past 18 months

- What would we do differently as a result of our learning

- What are some key take aways: what did India teach me, what did I teach India

- What happened after I left

- What next

I used to think that this blog thing would be so cool.  I would show myself to be some sort of shining beacon of wisdom and guidance in the world, steering fresh young minds away from the Kardashians and helping older more structured thinkers cope with the Kanye crowd.

Well, I hear I sit in a cancer ward as I watch my wife receiving her third round o chemotherapy. Looking around at people much older and more experienced, mouths agape, eyes closed, breathing heavily with the exhaustion of a cluster of deformed cells in their bodies trying to eat them alive.

I listen to them compare stories, not in the way that tries to come off as one-up-man-ship but more as a support to share how they’ve coped with all manner of pains... Rashes, dry mouth, random aches and pains.  Very supportive.

Sitting here... seeing all this, hearing all this, generally observing all this.  I know that we just keep adjusting to all the curves we’re thrown.

Ants do that, dogs do that.  Living things do it. 

Looking back at all I’ve written, I’ve observed: 1. I’m a horrible writer, for so many reasons. 2. The content I’ve put up is flat at best and inconsistency is the most consistent theme throughout my writing.

I’m in a spot at the moment where I’m not the “Directly” affected, but I’m affected. I do feel lost and insignificant and powerless and my default internal reaction is I want to run away.

I won’t though, I’m a stubborn bastard and I fight... a lot.

There is a concept wherein someone that likes to appear busy to others will move quickly, make a lot of noise, kick up a lot of dust and in the end if you ask for the details of what was accomplished there is nothing to show for it.

An example of this would be in our Bangalore office; here there are entire teams dedicated to creating trackers, measuring how long it takes some task to go from point A to point D using all the six sigma rules and methodologies and at the end you have a perfect pile of data.

When asked what this data represents you will get an answer.  You’ll hear how if you capture the number of times a person swipes their ID badge to enter or exit a floor that this will tell you how “productive” they are... We have “trackers” for every single thing...include a tracker of all the trackers we use.  Oh and you’ll never guess who rules the roost when it comes to tracker creation.  That’s right MS Excel.  Excel is the king of all manual software and rather than use legitimate workforce management tools we spec out another excel spreadsheet with all of our own fancy formulas and impress ourselves with our ability to get them to work even though the calculations only make sense on opposite Tuesdays.

Kicking up dust is how the teams justify existence... by the way, we hire a TON of “executive” level leaders (AVP, VP, etc...) as they have perfected the art of dust kicking.

I’m hear to tell you that dust kicking is bullshit and annoying and it feels like I’m watching money get stolen from my business when I watch people put their time and energy into such silliness.

The issue that drives this behavior in this part of the world is that Title is everything and a deep desire to rattle off ones resume is more important than understanding the business problem and how to solve for important matters.

I recently met with my Bangalore team to discuss changing our monthly scorecard. This scorecard is used to evaluate employee performance in order to receive or not receive monthly incentives.  One of the criteria of this scorecard is attendance. Basically if you miss 2 days or more of work you will lose significant points towards your score. So if you get seriously ill you’re out of luck.

I have an opinion on this that was not received by the team well at all. I believe the team has this criteria in place because we need to have a mechanism in place to discourage absenteeism.

Instead I want to implement a program that focuses more on trusting our employees to WANT to come to work and want the attendance parameter removed.

This had an instant impact of complete horror from the management team.

I submit that I believe this is illustrates perfectly the image below:

It takes work to shift any behavior and as long as we reinforce a lack of trust we will continue to reap the same negative outcomes of our work force.

And I don’t want to hear the excuse, “This is India”.  That is a cop out meant to keep minds closed and suppress positive change.

About 13 months into this project and many things have surfaced.

I have learned a lot about business politics in this environment and how much ego plays a part in leadership decision making.

That doesn’t mean work cannot get done, it just means if you don’t play ball within specific parameters, you’re likely to get less done as a show of authority of other departments.

So while it has the immediate annoyance of being a lot of bureaucratic crap, it also sharpens your mediation and networking skills.

Insert a new overall leader and everything shifts again. It’s been quite a ride and I can say that it’s been invaluable though very exhausting.