Monthly Archives: April 2014

How your hiring abilities impact voting decisions

Posted in Decision Making, Hiring
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It is that time of 5-year period when you have to make a political choice. The good news is that more people are making this choice. The polling figures so far shows around 20-40% increase in the polling. There is a sense of urgency in the people. However, many people are still struggling to decide who they can vote as the best candidate.

I want to compare how this decision making process is similar to the decision making during hiring process. Hiring process typically involves a panel of 4-5 people with a hiring manager. Many of us have been part of such panels. The outcome of hiring process is a boolean – Yes or No. You either select or reject a candidate.

If you have been on interview panels for long enough, you may not be surprised to know that there is at least one person who actually ends up with a “maybe” vote. And many companies support this “maybe” decision by having a 3-pointer scale or much worse, a 5-pointer scale. The worst is when the entire panel declares a “maybe” decision resulting in “on-hold” candidates.

Interview

Now if you are an interviewer who replies with a clear Yes or No, you should not have much trouble in deciding your candidate for this election. It is possible that you have done a detailed research, asked references, attended a campaign or just used your gut.

If you are an interviewer who often replies with a “maybe”, you are in trouble. What do you do when you are the hiring manager and you are forced to select or reject a candidate? Do you try to find more information about the candidate? Do you discuss with other interviewers? Do you search their web presence? Do you do background verification? Do you talk to references to know about their past work? You will probably do anything that will help you to make a firm decision.

There are many things that you can do if you want to make a good choice. The below quote by Jim Collins is applicable to both hiring and voting.

“Get the right people on the bus and the wrong people off the bus”

Note to my international friends and followers – India follows multi-party democracy with 6 national parties, 47 state parties and 1563 other parties.

The Elephant in the room

Posted in Leadership
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During my childhood days, like many of you, I have followed the Indian parable of six blind men describing an elephant. Each blind person thinks of individual elephant part as something else. John Godfrey Saxe has written a beautiful poem about this short-sightedness.

elephant

This is a great challenge many organizations are facing where very few people are able to visualize customer needs, product vision and what to build and map them together into a cohesive picture that can be communicated, built and delivered to the customer.

Now think of what leadership is about? In simple terms it is about three things –

1. Having a vision
2. Ability to communicate the vision
3. Get people around you to build the vision

Mapping this to the elephant story, a leader, firstly, should be able to have a holistic view of the product and service. Creating this vision is easier said than done. Secondly, a leader should be able to communicate the relationship between parts and the whole. Since multiple teams and people work on smaller parts, the chances of mismatch are higher. Like how each blind person thins about different parts of an elephant.

Lastly, as the team starts building the product, a leader should be able to identify the deviations from vision and guide the team to build the right product – be able to call elephant an elephant.

This is no way different from creating the cohesive picture that I described earlier. I guess this leadership is what many organizations need today.

What do you want to be in your career?

Posted in Analytics, People & Culture
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Career development is a challenging problem to solve for most individual themselves as well as managers on behalf of their team. Many individuals find it difficult to clearly define their career aspirations and what opportunities or possibilities are available to them. One of my friends after attending a staff meeting of several managers said – “It is tough for all managers to get career development goal from their team members and I was thinking it was just me.”

This issue compounds for managers as they have to think on their team’s behalf – what is best for them and what aspiration do they have. The message is simple – you have to think about your own career development choices. But how? I created a short survey to find out more about people’s career aspiration and what the trend is.

I need your help in filling a 7-question survey on career aspiration. Here is the link https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/GG36D2J

career

If it takes more than 5 minutes, I owe you a beer. Make sure to leave a comment 🙂

Update: Thanks to everyone for filling the survey. The current average time for filling the survey is around 3 minutes. No pressure 🙂