Above N Beyond Newsletter: Edition 4

EDITION 4: JULY 2017

Welcome to the fourth edition of the Above N Beyond Quarterly newsletter.

Ever since we started our Above N Beyond journey, we’ve always believed that while strategy is important, it is meaningless if not executed effectively, with the right people and processes.

The importance of people can never be overestimated. Of course, it is not only about having the right people for the right job, but more importantly, about providing the necessary structure and environment that will facilitate individual

growth and align with business priorities.

In the July 2017 edition of our newsletter, we’ve included some interesting perspectives on leadership, scaling up and the importance of execution. We hope you enjoy it.

Read on and do send your feedback!

Best wishes,

Vivek Subramaniam

Leadership in the Age of Automation

Technology has been revolutionising the way we live our lives and run our businesses. Given the quantum of change, leaders need to strike the fine balance between convincing customers that they are acting in their best interest, while also reassuring the internal audience- the employees that they won’t become redundant. This blog talks about how leaders can orient themselves to balance the impact of people, process and profit.

Why Integrating New Leaders Well is Crucial for their (and the Organization’s) Success

All too often, organisations spend considerable time and resources to find the most suitable leaders for their organisations, but they tend to overlook the need for the leader to transition seamlessly into their new role. Instead, new leaders are largely expected to hit the ground running, with just a basic induction process that hardly gives them any insights. In this blog, we talk about what organisations can do to make integration of new leaders truly effective.

Execution: The Secret Ingredient for Scaling Successfully

The process of scaling a start-up to the next level can be quite confusing because it is not just a linear transition. Rather, it is a metamorphosis. And while having a great strategy is good, what is even more crucial is the implementation of that strategy on the ground. Read our blog on things to keep mind while you execute your growth strategy.

Start Building Your Leadership Pipeline Much Before You Need them to Deliver

Often, building a leadership pipeline doesn’t happen as a deliberate effort. It’s only as the organisation scales that founders start feeling the need to delegate. At that stage, they find, unfortunately, that their second rung of leaders is simply not ready to deliver.

The time to start grooming your second rung of leaders is not at the point when you need them to deliver. The process needs to start much before that. This blog talks about the need to build a leadership pipeline early and some tips to do it effectively.

People Matters magazine recently published an article written by Above N Beyond Founder Vivek Subramaniam on how organisations need to align capability quotients with business imperatives.

In the article, Vivek argues that the general approach to people management and training tends to ignore an employee’s emotional frame and work stage, trying instead to force fit people into certain roles. The formulaic approach to managing an individual simply doesn’t work.

Scaling Seamlessly

Most founders will agree that the biggest challenge in a start-up is not the starting up, but the scaling up. This is because start-ups are not just small versions of big companies. Rather they are different in every possible way. Becoming a ‘large company’ entails acquiring a completely new set of skills, executing a known business model, generating profits and achieving liquidity for its founders and investors.

This whitepaper from Above N Beyond is intended to work as a guide for founder-led start-ups to make that transition, where they can shed the start-up tag successfully as they embark on a growth path.

Aligning Culture with the Big Picture in a Highly Matrixed Organisation

Lalitha Indrakanti,

Managing Director & Center Leader,

Cargill Business Services

As the head of Cargill Business Services(CBS) in Bangalore, I lead a highly matrixed organisation that supports Cargill’s global business processes across functions such as IT, HR, Finance, Sourcing and Procurement, Transportation and Logistics, Ocean Transportation. While all the functions report to me from a centre perspective, they get strategic function direction from their functional counterparts across the world. Such a matrixed set-up does create some challenges, especially when it comes to weaving a single cultural fabric that benefits from the vast diversity of thought. Here are some of my learnings gleaned from my own experience over the years.

Emphasis on a Uniform Culture

At the CBS, each function is at a different level of maturity, with different team profiles, based on the type of work as well as organisational maturity in the area. For example, our IT team in India is quite mature and focuses mainly on architectural work in areas such as system design and mobility. As a result, the average IT team member has 8+ years of experience and comes from a deeply technical background. Our work in finance, on the other hand, cuts across the entire spectrum. While we do a lot of value added work such as building a CoE; we also do a large volume of transactional work such as payables, which mostly requires freshers and younger workers who are as far removed as possible from the mature IT experts. Bringing them together to build a common Cargill culture isn’t easy! While these teams might not need to interact during the regular course of work, there is an immense opportunity to create diversity of thought, which needs to be leveraged. For instance, IT can benefit greatly by better understanding the work of the highly skilled functional teams sitting alongside them.

To facilitate this, our approach has been to help them find common ground to come together. We’ve found that culture and sports are both great ways to facilitate this. We have a cross functional fun club called Synergy that celebrates company-wide cultural events. The ownership rotates across functions, making it a truly function-agnostic club. We also have an active centre-wide sports club that acts as a great unifier.

Creating a Sense of Ownership

Given the highly siloed nature of work, we place special emphasis on ensuring that each employee and each team understands how their work rolls up to the larger organisational goals. We need them to understand that their role is as important as that of the person who manufactures our products or who sells to customers. Getting people to see the big picture and develop a sense of belonging is absolutely crucial.

Cross-functional leadership training is one approach. We also have a strong 90-day onboarding program that doesn’t focus just on their role or functional area, but talks about the company as a whole. Also, we ensure that each leader (irrespective of their functional area) meets all the new joiners once a month, to update them on their functional area.

We also did a leadership alignment exercise with Above N Beyond early on, to understand organisational goals and break them into actionable pieces for each team to own and run with – Extremely crucial to drive the sense of ownership towards overall goals, and ensure that they percolate down.

Brand building is Important

Despite being a large MNC, Cargill is privately owned and quite media shy. When we first started, this created a considerable challenge in hiring since there was no brand recall. People simply didn’t know what Cargill was. We went on a deliberate brand building initiative to subtly and strongly build industry connect. Through participation in industry events, CSR initiatives, platforms such as NASSCOM, and selective PR, we worked to build the Cargill brand in India.

Your First Set of Leaders are Key to Growth

Leaders often think they should first get things off the ground before they focus too much on finding the right people. But in my experience, I’ve found that investing a disproportionate amount of time in finding the right leaders, even at the start, is important. These first leaders will be your brand ambassadors. They will also be the ones who pick your next set people. Therefore, your first set of leaders play a key role in defining company culture.

Over the years, we’ve worked to build a productive, cohesive team that is aligned to overall company goals. Of course, there’s always work to be done, but we’re on the right track!

Successful leaders focus on strong execution

Executive Search Firm Heidrick & Struggles conducted an extensive four-year study to understand why some companies succeed and others don’t. They looked at 22 industries, expecting that the top-four companies in each would be doing different things strategically from the bottom four. But the strategies of all the companies in an industry were usually similar, even if the differences in results could be huge. The difference, they found, was in the execution of the strategy.

Execution Is a People Problem, Not a Strategy Problem

However hard it is to devise a smart strategy, it’s ten times harder to get people to execute on that strategy. In other words, your organization’s biggest strategic challenge isn’t strategic thinking — it’s strategic acting. This article from the Harvard Business Reviews talks about how execution can be done right with the right people on your team.

10 Truths for Making Change Successful

Every change initiative is unique, but the truths about making change succeed are, by and large, the same. Here’s a good common-sense checklist for managing change within an organization.

For Your Next Meeting, Take a Walk!

As we’ve all heard by now – Sitting is the new smoking. Given that we spend most of our workday sitting, whether at a desk or at a meeting, any excuse to get up and walk is welcome! That’s why walking meetings are great. Not only do they count as exercise, they also have other benefits such as the ability to break down formalities, relax inhibitions and foster camaraderie. The fact that it’s tougher to constantly check your phone while walking is another plus, because it minimizes distractions.