I am starting with mini caselets newsletter (once every month) which is a series of anonymous (real / hypothetical / reality inspired) mini case studies each of maximum 2 pages from my observations of industry happenings – direct / indirect / via news articles / network / friends / problems that people face and such. Intention of each mini caselet is to highlight a set of challenges that are faced both by managers & employees or hypothetically created leading to better leadership and management styles which in turn give better environment for employees or solutions or solution direction.

Think of a situation of an ITES company office in Tier-1 city which is recruiting lot of fresh talent and working on onboarding them to become productive in 2-3 months to deliver good projects.

What can go wrong?

• Disagreements between two set of managers who manage the same account / customer in the same shared office space of an extended development center each having competing teams
• Uneven knowledge transition to fresh candidates
• Silos & lack of functional knowledge for team
• Managers deciding how the behaviors of employees should be in terms of which interactions they should have and which to avoid based in older management & leadership principles from 80s/90s command and control structures
• Cultural differences in terms of recruitment geographies of candidates leading to differing work styles – For example, somebody studied and lived in a Tier 2 city in India vs. somebody who studied and lived in Tier 1 city in non India region – both will have differing goals and perspectives
• Culture of less knowledge sharing and long working hours
• Struggle for accommodation, food, entertainment, social circle and more with a very limited salary in year 1 in Tier-1 city
• Disengagement of support functions in terms of how work is done on the ground and them differing to managers for every decision
• Add to the mix competitive landscape to go onsite, climb the corporate ladder & increase salary quickly
• All this in the influence of 1.5/2 year retention contracts for fresh candidates when they can’t leave the firm easily

Now to solve this situation simply flip the scenario and fix each point one by one by interventions / trainings / guidance / discussions / role plays / similar techniques and you have a recipe for a better culture, it’s as simple as that.

Email me: Neil@HarwaniSystems.in

Being direct, frank, authentic and natural self is ok but below is not. We should not be normalizing this:

• Achieve targets literally at any cost
• Repeated bad behaviour in hierarchy
• Messing up people’s personal lives
• Using words like professionalism & seasoned to avoid doing what needs to be done
• Playing mind games with people fresh out of college
• Delegate and then take credit for other’s work
• Judge people without knowing context
• Promote silos, avoid team work and mess up collaboration and creativity
• Pay someone less than market rate if we can afford the real salary
• Treat people like trash and take advantage of them
• Not fix the fixable
• Not doing the right thing
• Bring personal biases into the organization
• Have different set of rules for the same input and output for different groups of people
• We are not at war, we are in information technology / services industry
• Most people lose their cool or misbehave once in a while or have a bad day once in a while but if that is a habit ingrained in the culture of the organization affecting large parts of the organization then there is a problem that needs a relook

Email me: Neil@HarwaniSystems.in

Products:

• High on collaboration
• Cross department deliverables
• Focus on specific areas like products, goals and such
• They typically build their own strategy
• Various sub-cultures like entrepreneurial, open source, hybrid and proprietary may exist within this
• Controlled offerings for customers
• Innovation & creativity is valued highly
• R&D is important here
• Flexibility in terms of what employees can do beyond the organization
• Flat or semi-structured hierarchies mostly
• Inventing a new category, offering, product, culture is possible here

Services:

• No set boundaries on technologies, products & frameworks at times
• Customer, partner & product ecosystems more or less drive the strategy & evolution
• Standardization of delivery & facilities for employees
• Silos & compartments within company by design and reason
• Hierarchical & matrix way of reporting and work with management
• Typically fixed set of roles & responsibilities for employees
• Process plays an important role here

Startups & mid-sized companies:

• No set hierarchy for interactions in the company – flat or semi-structured hierarchy
• Focus on cutting edge domains and technologies at times
• Evolves & builds strategy with the market & customers – Flexible in this aspect
• Multi-tasking roles & responsibilities with potentially high growth and learning or relatively quick failure

Technology work in Non Technology product companies:

• Focus on implementations of full projects & vendor, partner, product offerings mapped to business outcomes
• Co-ordination with stakeholders within and outside the organization plays an important role here
• Maintenance & support, evaluation of products & technologies, return on investment takes up a large amount of time

#culture

Email me: Neil@HarwaniSystems.in