Nuts & Bolts

Does our expectations increase as we achieve something? It surely does and we start expecting something more, better, bigger or higher? That's human nature and it's true for everyone, but the type and quantum of expectations are different for different individuals. Now, why am I discussing expectations? We all know this! But do we as leaders or business owners, consider fulfilling expectations of our teams or only ours for fulfillment? This is where many business owners / leaders do not feel comfortable. I have had several instances of heated arguments with business owners about why they felt it was better not to create opportunities or reward teams adequately so that their expectations do not grow! They felt it could cost them more, and /or retention could be more challenging. Does this make any logical sense? If I am expecting higher revenues and profits, how do I go about it? I will naturally expect my teams to achieve higher or steeper targets to fulfill my expectatio...

It is absolutely essential for the small businesses to hire right talent to grow business. Every small business owner understands the importance of getting the right person to work with him. However, very few are able to break the hiring jinx! Let's understand why. The recruitment process involves the following steps Defining the job specification for the vacancy  Inviting applications through advertisements in portals or newspapers or through placement consultants Screening applications and shortlisting candidates Conducting interviews / evaluations to select candidate(s) for final consideration Job offer and acceptance  Joining and closing the vacancy To get the right fit candidate (or top talent for the business), we must do the first 5 steps right. We all know this and try to do it well too. But does it still get us the right candidates? No is the more common answer. Why? Because success of the steps also depend on the response of the job seekers.  ...

Is Sales the most important activity to grow the business? We can't disagree that its the only function that gets revenue. But should every business owner focus on the sales first, to increase the amount of business and achieve that elusive growth every year? Apparently, this looks good enough. If you increase sales, you get more money and so your business ought to grow! In reality, nothing can be far from the truth. Sales is a key function, but may not be the one that holds a business back from getting to it's growth targets. Let's look at what happens when we look to get more sales. We set higher sales targets. If we have the manpower to go for it, we rush for it. If we don't have the manpower, we hire more people or appoint sales associates, dealers, agents etc. Let's take the first case, where we have adequate manpower to get more orders. So we bring more orders with some delivery commitments. What happens down the line? Pressure on procurement, production...

Learning happens from within. We set ourselves a learning goal for achieving certain advancements in career or business. Once this learning goal is fulfilled successfully, a leader is not expected to stop. A leader must continue with the same zeal as before and set new learning goals for scaling newer heights. In doing so a leader not only uncovers new opportunities that help an organization to look ahead, but also sets higher standards of expectations from the members of the organization. This impacts the learning practices in an organization and thus the culture. The systems in an organization (L&D / HRD) can facilitate and encourage the learning behavior of the people. As the outcome of the learning is owned by the learners, they feel stronger, empowered, confident and involved. This has a remarkable impact on the commitment level of the learners as members of the organization. We find the people in such organizations to be more energetic, positive and contributing. These ...

Every small business owner understands the need for good people but very few are able to hire the right talent. I realize those who do are the ones that are able to scale up and sustain in the longer run. Let's look at the problem more closely. How does a small business look for new people to hire? If they have in-house help, they buy access to a job portal and start filtering CVs based on conditions that they select from the available search criteria. If they do not have anyone to do the legwork in-house, they go to a placement consultant to help them get CVs for further consideration. Let's understand that the placement consultants source the CVs from the same of job portals. So the sourcing pool of CVs remain the same irrespective of the approach followed in recruiting candidates.  Problem 1   If we choose the incorrect criteria to filter CVs, we get inappropriate CVs. If we get inappropriate CVs, either we end up not recruiting someone or recruiting someone who...

Most small business owners have a common major constraint in managing their businesses effectively. They want to be free from day to day operations, decision making, coordination, tracking task completions etc. to devote time for developmental activities. However, they hardly get a chance to address anything but the 'Urgent' category tasks. But why? We all understand and want to be accountable for the tasks that are assigned to us and want others also to be accountable for the tasks that we assign to them. In a typical work environment in any business, on a normal day, we plan several actions besides the regular operations related ones, e.g. customer asking for a special visit, purchase officer responding to an interesting vendor presentation that needs owner's intervention, a change in process suggested by an operator, an urgent analysis report request from the bank, sales report analysis that predicts change in consumption in certain products, and so on. How does one ha...

I prefer to work with family businesses than so called professional organisations. My reasons are simple. Family businesses have always appeared to be more sincere in their objectives. Hence, their chances of implementing changes / improvements successfully are always higher. And so, working with them I stand higher chances of tasting success and satisfaction.  However, family businesses, particularly the more unorganized ones and smaller ones face one serious business challenge. They find it difficult to pass on the baton to the next generation smoothly. Sometimes (a) in smaller businesses, the next generation may not find the business appealing enough to get involved, or, (b) even if they join the family business, their ways of doing work isn't acceptable to their predecessors.  In the case (a) above, the business owner loses motivation in scaling up or running a good business and performance gradually worsens. In the case (b), there is regular conflict in the two g...