What makes me perform better

High performance at work requires a lot more from individuals and just necessities of life. It is difficult for every business leader to clearly understand what makes his/her team tick. HR interventions to identify actions required to keep a team motivated to deliver their best turns out academic. Compensation and Benefits based on national surveys lead to incremental dissatisfaction than solve the problem.

Key to performance originates from an individual level and spreads to the entire team. “Me” is first. But a team has me in it. In our high-performance-discovery-workshops, we always encounter the real “me” in every “team”. The factors that make a team tick always has a few common factors. But what matters to your performance and your team is the priorities of these factors. Once you discover the factors and the priority, you can devise methods to make sure it works for you and the team.

The recent workshop yielded this list – valid for the team. It is always a discovery!

Talk to us if you need to discover and develop your team into a high-performing-one!

The Factory of Future

The factories of the future - necessary epic transformation

Digitisation and its influence on Factories of Future is on top of the list amongst all conferences around IoT, IIoT, Industry 4.0 and the likes. We had a session in one such conference yesterday attended by over 200 senior members of a variety of factories. There seems to be a level of anxiety, uncertainty and a sense of loss in many minds regarding the success of digital journeys, initiatives and possible transformations due to new technologies. Questions like - will it ever work? Is it for us? Is it worth the effort v/s the benefit? How many job losses will this result in? and so on...

But, if we look at the market situation, consumption of every product and "things" is continuously growing. Number of people joining factories is reducing. Number of people continuing in factories is reducing. Number of people being proud of working in a factory is reducing. Number of people venturing out to manufacturing is also reducing. If this trend continues, who will make the products required in the market? Where will the products be made? How will the products be made, shipped, deployed and serviced?

People in the business of making, have to start looking at this issue more than just increasing individual operator productivity, quality, cost and other operational parameters. It is important to focus on being relevant in the changing dynamics of society. Making sure that factories of the future hold the same aspirational value for people building, working and making them successful like previous generations. Digital can be a great lever to bring this transformation. Making factories of the future cool, dynamic and the best places to work for is as important like other attributes. Adopting latest technologies like AR/VR, Computer Vision, 3D printing, Robotics, AI based systems, self-aware machines, autonomous systems and tools become a natural choice in design/ re-design of factories.

Factories adopting to become future relevant through Industry 4.0 Technologies and systems are talking about growth, employee empowerment and leadership positions like the one you see in this video. This is the time to embrace the change and benefit.

Every time we work with leaders looking to transform their organisation, we see how people and purpose become core catalysts to make the change happen and stick well. All factory of future projects reinforce this aspect right through the process.

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The Power of Focus

We are working with the India centre of a global multi-national on their internal transformation journey. Interest being transforming from business support centre to global technology centre, we are working on all aspects of the organisation. In one of the streams, transformation of employee engagement is a key topic. We adopted a bottom-up approach to discover, design and deploy employee engagement programs to enable the transformation of the organisation. One of the findings during discovery was so striking to let us redesign the definition of performance.

People from operations team are always busy. They have loads of work every hour. They are measured on output. They are continuously monitored for performance - mostly availability at desk, solved tickets, re-opened tickets, SLA etc. They are so focused on getting-things-done, they do not participate in any organisational initiatives. Power of focus is what makes them perform well. So, everything other than assigned task is a diversion and performance suffers. They are talented, experienced and interested in contribution. But are unable to move above their tasks.

We worked with a cross-section of the operations team to help them visualise their next state of performance while contributing significantly to the core business of the company. One of the KPIs defined was - identifying and reporting golden nuggets in operations that can become a significant value-add for the company's core business. They come in the form of invention disclosures covering process tweaks, tools & techniques and new product ideas. In the last 3 months of institution, the team has produced over 15 invention disclosures. They are giving a tough fight to engineering and r&d teams. Making use of their power of focus for seamless transformation of the organisation.

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Take Time to Think

Business of Startups

We had the privilege of hosting over 12 international Startups under the exchange and support program today. We took a session on how to get the business right and how to pitch. As always, there'll be differences in the approaches across geographies in how a solution or a great business idea is showcased. But lately, we see that most startup founders following a pre-determined dramatic script and enacting a show of sorts while pitching. While it might be interesting for audience to get emotionally charged and aligned with the flow of the presenter, they tend to get carried away from the core purpose.

Startup founders have to take time to think before they pitch. Simple thumb rules can be as follows:

  • Know the audience - check with organisers who are present and what they expect
  • Be genuine and simple - don't exaggerate the problem you are trying to solve, neither spend too much time on the "market". Describe what you are trying to accomplish, why is it important (to you and others), how are you going to accomplish and most importantly - state how the audience can help
  • Follow the 30-90-30 rule - work on the beginning (30 sec), middle (90 sec) and endings (30 sec) of the pitch. People will carry forward how you end. If you lost them in the beginning, it is hard to make them sit-through fully and help you somehow.

Most of us associate Startups with Innovation, Speed and Ambition to change status-quo. But now-a-days we see none of these addressed explicitly. It is fine to start a business depending on your interest, possible window of opportunity and other factors. But do not position it as a Startup. Startups replace a few key aspects of building new businesses - speed v/s scale, experiment & development v/s research & development, always beta v/s time tested product/solution. It is fine for traditional businesses to adopt some of these startup culture into their system. But with caution. Similarly while starting a traditional business, if you classify it as a Startup idea, you may be setting out for failure with investors and customers.

Time to think your business of Starting up.

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Latest Leadership Workshop

Entrepreneur in Residence

We concluded the 5-week program of Entrepreneur-in-Residence with 7 new business ideas to pursue with detailed plan of action for next 12 months. This batch of 20 leaders from an aerospace engineering services company brought together a combined experience of over 400 person years in the industry. With significant expertise in project/program management and client-relationship-management, the EIR program reinforced the need of entrepreneurial mind-set, tools and techniques for building new businesses from within the company. With 7 new business ideas being fully supported for next phases of incubation and development, we will work with each of them in coming months to make them a reality.

If you are interested in knowing more and having this program conducted for your organisation, do write to us at EiR.

If you wish to explore the world of Entrepreneurship for your own pursuit, look forward to our next Entrepreneur Development Program - Building a New Venture - available in Feb 2019. Write to us if you wish to be notified at BNV.

Digital Transformation

Digital Immersion for Manufacturing Excellence

In our continuing series of digital immersion for manufacturing excellence with CII South Chapter, we conducted immersion workshop for 20 leaders from 14 companies from 4 cities of India at Hosur Industrial Association on 23 & 24th October 2018. The two day workshop had first day dedicated to understanding and exploring use of Industry 4.0 technologies for specific use cases from the participants. The interactive workshop produced detailed action plans for the participating companies to follow-through at their own pace. Second day was a visit to couple of industries who have implemented several of the industry 4.0 techniques and methods in their operations. Participants benefited immensely from the exposure and now continuing their digital journeys.

Next DIME session will be at Chennai in the third week of January 2019.

If you wish to know more or participate in these sessions, write to us at DIME

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