egyii blog

You are probably aware of the story of the fraud committed by B. Ramalinga Raju, owner of Satyam Computer Services in India. He falsified accounts to make it appear that his company’s performance was actually much stronger than it really was. In this he was definitely a risk-taker, and this aspect of his personality may have been his downfall.

Yet the story of how he got his first business break, also through taking a risk, has some useful lessons for all of us. I quote Monday’s Herald Tribune:

“The founder of Satyam Computer Services, B. Ramalinga Raju, made a risky proposition to win his first big client, the tractor maker John Deere: If you don’t like our service, you don’t pay.

With that pitch, which is now the stuff of legend in India, he persuaded John Deere in 1991 to allow his computer programmers to work just across the street from the client’s U.S. headquarters, in a house Raju dubbed ‘Little India.’ Working only overnight shifts, with no physical contact with John Deere’s executives, the programmers got the job done – proving Raju’s theory that they could work just as well from India, and helping give birth to the country’s outsourcing industry.”

Imagine what it must have felt like setting up an office in a foreign country and working without any assurance that a result will come from it. The truth is, doing this without any guarantee most likely made the prospect of success even more assured.

This is the power of uncertainty. Let go of your tight grip on the future. Make a decision with no guarantee of the outcome and then take action and enter pure space. Accept. And pay attention to each moment, letting them flow through you. When you are comfortable with uncertainty, great courage and power will come to you.

So if you are a banker or another leader caught in the vicious cycle of thinking that goes “What specific results and I going to get if I take this action?” then my answer to you is, “I don’t know. But whatever it is, your chance of pulling yourself out of the situation you are in is better if you think carefully about your plan and then just take action with no guarantees, than if you sit tight on your hands and wait for the government, your clients, or your grandmother to do something to change your circumstances.”

My advice to you is “Don’t wait!” Take 100% responsibility for winning the game at this turbulent time, make a decision and enter the void. Now.”

James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore

It’s time for change.

No more pushing products and services at customers in an effort to meet monthly targets. No more macho, aggressive behaviour pushing employees for results without stopping to think about how to get them. And no more grandstanding about how the customer comes first without stopping to see the situation through your customer’s eyes rather than your organisation’s.

It’s time to step back. Nick Morgan, in his latest book Trust Me – Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, tells us that being authentic in all our dealings with others is the secret of building trust and loyalty. And this starts not with actions, behaviour or words, but with intent.

If you’re trying too hard to be authentic, it means you’re thinking too much. You’re concentrating on how your are behaving and what you are saying. If you’re a company, you’re focusing on crafting the perfect message for the public or your employees. All these ‘up front’ actions will continue to fall on deaf ears if you don’t step back and reflect on your true intention in meeting a client or an employee, or in creating your company strategy.

It’s time for leaders, relationship managers and organisations to look inside themselves and connect with the higher cause that drives them personally and organisationally. Forget about your targets and the pressing need to win more business. Why are you doing this in the first place? What is it about you that you want to give to the world? Why was your company originally set up? What difference does it want to make?

Connect with your intent and the world will see you and your organisation as more authentic, patient and understanding. Only once you arrive at this place can you then begin to build your business based on integrity and trust. And in the new world of business that we must now enter, stepping back and addressing the fundamental issues of intent and authenticity is the only way to create the trust that leads to hard business results.

James Irvine and the Egyii team, Singapore

How much of new learning from a training programme actually gets applied in a value-enhancing way back on the job? It’s probably somewhere between 5% and 20%. That means out of a hundred learners, only a few are actually delivering performance improvement that leads directly to business results.

The solution? Most organisations would go on a search for a ‘new’ training programme that promises to solve their immediate problems. This training will then be seen as the ‘silver bullet’ that produces the long-awaited results. Hopes are raised amid an atmosphere of expectation and excitement. And more often than not, the training proceeds according to plan, the learners finish the programme highly motivated and determined to apply their new skills, and – nothing happens. Back at their jobs they react to the same interpersonal and environmental triggers that set off their familiar patterns of behaviour, and within a few days have lost their motivation and forgotten much of what they had learnt. The trouble is, they don’t return to the same situation they were in before they went for the training. Rather, they feel deflated and exhausted, and they work with a feeling of promises broken. The impact on morale can be devastating.

Often, the reasons why the learning was not applied on the job do not lie with the training programme. Much good training has met with similar results. It is a waste of time to blame the training programme and then go on to sign up an alternative training provider in the hope that this time it will be different.

Instead, a holistic approach needs to be taken. Training on its own will never result in performance improvement. What is needed is a whole-organisation approach to performance improvement and training support. Training effectiveness is influenced by many organisational, cultural and systemic issues.

For example, research indicates that new skills will only be applied back on the job if the employee receives proactive support for the change from his line manager. In many cases, learners return to work full of enthusiasm to try out their new skills only to receive at best a lack of interest and at worst an injunction to do things the way they’ve always been done. I have received feedback many times from participants on business writing skills courses that it is all very well learning new ways to communicate, but when they produce such writing in the office their boss changes it back to the ‘old’ style of writing. What a waste!

But merely acknowledging that the learner has some new skills and passively observing him trying them out is insufficient. The line manager needs to have a method for systematically following-up with the employee, monitoring the results he produces, giving regular feedback and support, and providing the Learning and Organisational Development Department with sound evaluations of performance resulting from the training.

This is but one of a variety of actions that can and should be taken before and after the training event so that training moves from being a one-off event to a performance improvement process. It requires the inclusion of all the stakeholders, from learning executives to line managers, senior managers and employees who all need to be aligned behind an agreed set of objectives and actions to be taken.

Training done the right way is one of the most powerful methods for creating positive business results, so let’s bring it out of the closet and let it show us what it can really do.

James Irvine and the Egyii team, Singapore

It’s at times like these that I find re-visiting classic pieces of writing about performance and success worthwhile. Yesterday I took another look at Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, which included this item written in 1934:

“One of the first people in American business to be paid a salary of over a million dollars a year (when there was no income tax and a person earning fifty dollars a week was considered well off) was Charles Schwab. He had been picked by Andrew Carnegie to become the first president of the newly formed United States Steel Company in 1921, when Schwab was only thirty-eight years old.

Why did Andrew Carnegie pay a million dollars a year, or more than three thousand dollars a day, to Charles Schwab? Why? Because Schwab was a genius? No. Because he knew more about the manufacture of steel than other people? Nonsense. Charles Schwab told me himself that he had many men working for him who knew more about the manufacture of steel than he did.

Schwab says that he was paid this salary largely because of his ability to deal with people.”

Fast track to 2008 and Joe Takash says in his book Results Through Relationships, “It doesn’t matter whether I’m called on to deal with dysfunctional teams, to coach a talented but flawed leader, to increase profit, or to improve productivity and morale; there is always a relationship issue. There may be other issues contributing to the problem, but relationships always play a large part in the cause of the problem… and its solution.”

I know that obtaining degrees and certificates helps to qualify you as an expert in a particular field. I also know that the way most businesses are organised, you are spending the vast majority of your time dealing with tasks such as emails, reports and research. Yes, knowing your business inside out and dealing with everything that lands on your desktop are critical. But isn’t this time of economic turbulence a great opportunity to step back and assess what areas need a laser-like focus to bring you career success and your company growth and profitability in the next few months and years?

The secret is relationships. Your ability to deal with people is now the critical success factor. In fact it always has been. And the only way to deal with people effectively and to get them to do anything, is simply to give them what they want. And what they want is, as John Dewey, one of America’s most profound philosophers said, “to have a feeling of importance”. I doesn’t matter what situation or task you apply this to – what will enable you to forge lasting relationships and influence people is to make them feel valued and recognised. And this, above all else, leads to results.

So let’s spend some time thinking about our people skills and how we are going to use them to achieve much more than we ever thought we were capable of.