The Generalist

Generalists are often described as “jacks of all trades.” They possess a diverse skill set and a broad knowledge base that spans various domains. Here are some key characteristics of generalists:

Versatility: Generalists are adaptable and can easily switch between tasks and industries. They thrive in dynamic environments where change is constant.

Problem Solvers: They excel at solving complex problems that require a holistic view and the ability to connect ideas from different fields.

Learning Enthusiasts: Generalists are curious and love to learn about a wide range of topics. They enjoy exploring new subjects and acquiring new skills.

Effective Communicators: They can bridge communication gaps between specialists from different fields due to their ability to grasp diverse concepts.

Networking: Generalists tend to build broad networks because they interact with people from various backgrounds and industries.

Generalists can pivot quickly in a rapidly changing world, making them valuable assets in uncertain times. Their ability to connect ideas from various fields often leads to innovative solutions and fresh perspectives. Generalists can pursue a wide range of careers, from project management to entrepreneurship, due to their versatility. Constantly learning about new topics keeps their minds active and engaged.

At the same time, they lack deep expertise in any specific subjects or industries. Some specialised roles or jobs may require deep expertise, which can limit career advancement for generalists. Also, constantly juggling various tasks and interests can lead to decision fatigue.

The Specialist

Specialists are experts in a particular field, often possessing an in-depth knowledge and a narrow focus. They carry deep knowledge and skills within a specific domain, making them sought-after experts. They excel at fine-tuning processes and solving highly specialised problems. Many specialist roles offer clear paths to career progression and higher salaries. They often cater to niche markets, which can lead to less competition and higher demand for their expertise. They take pride in mastering their field and contributing to advancements within it.

Their career paths are often defined and clear, which can lead to a sense of direction and accomplishment. Specialists can have a profound impact on their field, contributing to significant advancements.

Also, at the same time, they may struggle to adapt when their expertise becomes less relevant due to technological or market changes. Generative AI has been disrupting jobs involving deep expertise such as writing software, reviewing legal documents, recommending technical content and researching large quantity of data to find relevant information and sometimes, insights.

Becoming too specialised can lead to a lack of adaptability in a rapidly evolving world. Specialised knowledge can be isolating, as it may limit interactions outside of one’s field.

Which One Are You?

Determining whether you lean more towards being a generalist or a specialist can be a significant career decision. Here are some questions to help you identify your inclination:

Do you enjoy diving deep into a specific subject or prefer learning about a wide range of topics? Are you drawn to solving highly specialised problems or those that require a broader perspective? Do you prefer a well-defined career path or one that allows for more flexibility and exploration? Are you more comfortable with the predictability of becoming an expert in a particular field, or do you thrive in unpredictable, dynamic environments? Do you find joy in constantly learning and adapting, or does the idea of mastering a specific skillset appeal to you more?

The choice between being a generalist and a specialist ultimately depends on your unique strengths, interests, and career goals. There is no one-size-fits-all answer. Some individuals may find fulfilment in the depth of specialisation, while others may thrive in the versatility of being a generalist. The key is to understand your inclinations, leverage your strengths, and continually adapt to the changing demands of the world to achieve personal and professional success. Whether you’re a generalist or a specialist, embracing lifelong learning and adaptability will always be valuable assets in your journey toward excellence.

The post Generalist vs Specialist: which one are you? appeared first on CIEL HR.

This is not the only kind of cognitive bias we suffer from. What are the other types?

Many kinds of cognitive biases come on our way.

Some of us are overconfident and we are more than willing to take a plunge thinking that we will figure it out along the way. There is a deep-seated belief that there is nothing impossible and we are here to win. This kind of optimism in a leader’s outlook often is very encouraging for the followers and builds a sense of positivism and self-confidence in them. However, this could derail the long-term plans if the self-belief does not translate into ground-level reality. A vast majority of people thought that Russia will win the war against Ukraine in a matter of a few weeks, but the war shows no signs of ending even after a year and significant suffering across the world.

We hold some people either with horns or a halo. We are quick to ascribe extreme behaviours or outcomes to them. In reality, this might not always be true. Similarly, we tend to anchor our impressions, perception and inferences on information received first or from a source we trust rather than going into the details and figuring it out in a rational way. Though we do not have the world of time necessary to go into the details, this cannot be the excuse to justify one’s anchoring bias.

Sometimes, we tend to consider one’s beliefs and experiences in the past to be the basis for all decisions. Dissenting voices, contradictory viewpoints or unsupportive data trends do not create any impact on us because of our self-serving bias. Sometimes we tend to justify our view or decision by sighting random incidents that prove the point rather than a holistic assessment of the situation. This kind of situation keeps happening often while people drive on the roads. We attribute people jumping the lane to bad driving, poor behaviours, impoliteness and unwarranted aggression; when we do such a thing, we attribute this to the situation we were in. This is a fundamental attribution bias.

In reality, biases cannot be removed.

We analyse the information at hand and lean on the insights we have gathered through our experiences in life while taking a decision. These insights are a result of the lenses through which we absorb our experiences. Hence, the process of decision-making is a labyrinth of a set of objective parameters and a set of subjective considerations. We have to be cognizant of this and work with this rather than battling the clouds of subjectivity that take their seat firmly in the mind of the decision-maker.

How does one deal with them?

One cannot procrastinate on decisions given the speed at which our business environment has been developing. We must recognise the biases that we are prone to suffer from. Rather than battling the biases, we have to surround ourselves with people who have the comfort and the duty to raise questions about potential biases one may be operating with.

One has to be sure that the assumptions made in the reading of the context, the potential dimensions in analysing the data and the possible inferences drawn from past experiences are relevant and meaningful. Leaders have to be humble enough to shed their cognitive biases like over-confidence, authority, self-serving thoughts and faulty causality.

The post Overcoming Cognitive Biases to Foster Growth appeared first on CIEL HR.

The case for a transformational leader

Decades ago, people looked up to the leader designated by someone else and followed his or her words, ideas and instructions without an iota of doubt about the merit of the action. However, given the socio-economic changes prevalent, these norms are no more valid.

People seek independence, trust and fairness; they look for authority and need recognition for successes howsoever small they may be. These are universal and more significant than ever before. Hence, leaders have to adapt their style to suit the expectations of their followers and at the same time, deal with the constantly-evolving situations around them. It is a tall order for any human; one needs the power of multiple minds and perspectives to lead in this dynamic environment!

Thus, the only way before a wise leader is to involve the team in shaping the future course on an ongoing basis and build a culture of collaboration.

A few things have remained constant

In our childhood, we have heard many fables and understood the characteristics of a leader who is successful and celebrated. Accordingly, we form our ideas and shape them as we experience the world around us during the years of our growth into adulthood and our work life. Over the years of our growth, we notice that there are certain qualities that we must develop and nurture if we aspire to be successful leaders.

Every leader has to be humble, caring and strong so that the team looks up to the leader and feels confident that their interests will be taken care of to the maximum possible extent. They feel safe to share their thoughts, raise concerns and discuss their ideas with the leader. The leader listens genuinely and speaks his or her mind rather than trying to play it safe and avoiding disappointments among team members.

Similarly, a leader is respected when one is honest, unbiased and fair. These sound fundamental, yet many leaders fail these at times. They side-step uncomfortable issues and do not reflect on their thoughts and decisions; thus, lose the opportunity of making course corrections and growing stronger.
In the absence of these qualities, no leader can ever dream of being a powerful transformational leader who can influence the thoughts and actions of his or her team.

Can a leader train oneself to be better at influencing others?

We know for sure that the old-styled command structure of leadership does not work in the crucial situations of leading a team towards the organisation’s goals. The influencing style fares better on most occasions and hence, one has to sharpen one’s saw to make progress.

To begin with, one has to practise taking important decisions in a consultative manner. The team must feel that they were consulted and heard. They also must know that all the suggestions and ideas will not be accepted for implementation; some of them will be struck down. However, the process of consultation and listening builds the leader’s credibility and strength. The change agenda can be driven easier by such a leader because he or she has transformed the team into a network of minds that works together towards the same goal.

Secondly, the leader has to set his or her conduct as an excellent example in the firm. All of us know, that it is easier to preach than to practice. A leader is in a position to influence the team’s behaviours and actions only when his or her conduct is a benchmark in itself. For example, if the organisation expects its leaders across the hierarchy to be innovative, the leader must conduct oneself in such a way that teams down the line feel inspired to quote the leader’s words, behaviours and actions, and use those as benchmarks.

Charisma can be learnt!

The post #GetTheBestOutofUs: Strengthening the Influence to Transform appeared first on CIEL HR.

Why can’t organisations and their leaders implement the obvious?

All leaders are seeing the digitisation around them right from the way we organise our travel, buy goods and services to the way we manage our money. However, all of them have not been able to get their business to take advantage of the possibilities offered by digital. From the smallest of businesses to the large ones, data helps in shaping business decisions – operational as well as strategic. There is no uncertainty around the ROI (returns on investment). Business leaders need to understand this and drive the business accordingly.

Some others have digitised their workflows and asked their ecosystem to go digital. And they want to analyse the data around them, but think that the capabilities and technologies needed to do that are expensive and hard to build. As cloud-based technologies galore, they have been caught contemplating and procrastinating. Forrester says that 74% of businesses want to be data-driven, but only 29% are successful at putting analytics into action.

All businesses do not need to buy a supercomputer or invest in data lakes and hire the smartest engineers to analyse the data their businesses generate. Several tools and systems are now available for each industry sector; these are fairly easy to implement and adapt. We need the leadership team’s belief and resolve to monitor and leverage whatever happens around them objectively.

Making a start is not enough!

Many companies have invested a good amount of effort and money in creating the analytics. The biggest challenge in these firms has been to get the rank and file to absorb the information and analytics being presented to them. Like we need to have the capability to read, write and speak in a certain language, our workforce needs literacy around data to be able to understand and appreciate them; leverage the insights drawn from the information.

A study by McKinsey shows that a large number (~70%) of digital transformation projects don’t meet their objectives. Hence, billions of dollars spent by enterprises failed to deliver the ROI. One of the reasons behind this is the fact that most organisations lack AI and data literacy. Thus, they fail to use the systems provided to them, do not appreciate and understand the reports that come out of the systems, let alone the possibility of leveraging data.

What can we do?

Firstly, the leaders have to align their teams on the significance of data literacy and show them what they can do if they are data literate. The leaders across the spectrum need to understand that they need to develop the desired skills to interpret data and take decisions based on the data. Then, the entire organisation from the top to the bottom needs to cultivate the habit of reading the data, relying on the information that stems out of the data and drawing the underlying trends and insights from the information. This is the hardest part of the execution.

Last, but not least is to identify opportunities for gathering data, building systems for it and developing the layer of analytics on top of it so that new insights can be generated. Business leaders have to anchor their annual operating plans on data-driven insights rather than gut-level presumptions, feelings and opinions. They need to call out the continual improvements they will make in their business in terms of systems and processes.

Organisations capable of making their organisation data-literate will win in the marketplace of tomorrow. It will be a competitive advantage that creates superior value for their stakeholders.

The post #BuildingTomorrow: Data Literate Organisation appeared first on CIEL HR.

Balancing Act

Across industry sectors, barring a few, revenues are down; some of them have drawn a zero. No amount of strategy and business acumen can generate profits when revenues become zero. Though the lockdown is for a temporary period, an organisation’s getting back to normalcy depends upon multiple variables such as the readiness of the supply chain, availability of employees and inflow of orders. Every organisation and industry sector has its unique context; however, in general, the environment presents a myriad of uncertainties before the leaders.

Naturally, one has to look inward, identify the pockets of inefficiency and quickly eliminate those to cut costs. One would lay off people, defer and reduce employee costs by restructuring salaries and benefits, review the productivity metrics to reset targets and tweak measurement systems, reduce supplier costs, optimise supply chains and simplify work processes. Based on the context of each company, the leaders have to prioritise some of these several initiatives over the others. Ideally, all of these have to be done!

It is not enough to look inward to cut costs and improve operational efficiency. One has to look outside and listen to the voices of the customers, suppliers, partners and society. There are opportunities for developing new products or services, new territories to venture into, new partnerships to strike or innovate some of the existing products, change terms of engagement with customers, partners and suppliers. Each of these is an opportunity to grow revenues, profits or brand image for the future.

Leaders have to perform a balancing act between inward focus and outside perspective. Leaning on one side more than the other could lead a company to the extreme of ignoring extremes such as warning signs from the outside world or internal dysfunctionalities.

Resilient Leaders at the helm

Wading through troubled waters throws surprises at us. We need to hold a steady head and a positive mind to be able to get through this part of the trek without major trouble. The leaders have to think clearly, tap into all resources at their disposal and decide their priorities. Since time and resources are limited, leaders have to evolve specific programmes and put their weight behind them. The whole organisation needs to be able to see the leader driving these programmes hands-on.

They need to clearly and openly acknowledge the challenge faced by their organisation, restate the purpose of the organisation and rekindle hope in the minds of their employees, suppliers and shareholders at a regular interval. When a company is laying off people, delaying payment of wages, cutting down employee benefits and rewards, it is not easy to boost employee morale. When cash flows are down, reserves are dwindling and additional credit lines from financiers aren’t coming up, leaders are having sleepless nights. That is the test of resilience!

Execution is the key

Most critical elements to keep up the journey are cash reserves or access to finance alongside the confidence of the shareholders. Unless these two elements are in place, no leader can take the next steps of planning for cost optimization and investments for the future.

Sometimes the leaders enjoy the confidence of their shareholders and have the needed cash to keep the machine running through the troubled times. Yet some fail to steer the ship well because they do not make the right choice of plans or fail to deploy the rigour of executing their brilliant plans. Large organisations need the right systems and processes to execute their new plans; leaders need to review the plans regularly and make course-corrections boldly and quickly. They need to be visible while steering the ship.

Ref: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/09/what-happened-in-every-us-recession-since-the-great-depression.html

The post #Lockdown Times: Steering the Ship forward appeared first on CIEL HR.

Our actions are guided by our way of thinking and opinions. It is interesting to see people in the same circumstances behave differently. Boss throws a tantrum at the team for missing its target. It is interesting to see how members of the team deal with the reactions of the boss. Someone goes defensive explaining that no stone was left unturned, the targets were unrealistic and challenges were unforeseen. Another person keeps the past aside and comes up with ideas about the future. There could be someone else who goes on an emotional trip responding to the boss’ frustration. Each of these examples reflects the mindset of the respective individual.

Align your priorities!

The way of thinking and deeper beliefs make us respond to a situation differently. Not many leadership development programmes focus on helping the leaders understand their mindset and appreciate why they do what they do.

Moreover, every organisation has its context and every team within it has its unique context as well. Hence, the leaders for each team need to behave in the way the context demands. It is easier said than done. For example, an organisation might have a stated ambition of growing its revenues by increasing its scale of operation. So, the leader needs to exhibit an execution mindset so that one is focused on the goals, processes, customers and metrics. Other priorities such as innovation, diversification, sustainability practices, long term thinking become less important.

Read also:  Engage employees before you do with customers

Challenge the status quo!

Each business faces a set of known situations, some are encouraging while some are challenging, such as customer complaints, employee performance issues, price wars by competition, the arrival of disruptive ideas, new opportunities in the market and many more. Leaders deal with each of these multiple times in their career and develop a certain style of dealing with them over time. Based on the results they get each time, they tend to develop their ways which become their muscle memory.

Secondly, leaders know that they must have a strong conviction in what they say and do. They consciously exhibit sure-footedness in their actions. This belief leads them to act quickly from their muscle memory every time they face a situation similar to what they have faced in the past. This builds blind spots for their leadership practices and cannot change their mindset if the context demands a different style.

Leaders must take efforts to understand this reality and be conscious of the fact that they could be prisoners of their old habits. They need to unshackle themselves and consciously reflect upon situations, explore new ideas and ask people around if there is a different way. They need to tell themselves that leaders are not meant to be omniscient. Seeking opinions from others, copying best practices from other businesses and admitting the fact that they do not have an answer do not imply incompetence or vulnerability.

Read also:  The ideas we did not learn at our B-school

Get hands-on!

Leaders must get hands-on in a few tasks along with others in the team. This allows them to interact with their team members closely, appreciate ground realities better, help to break silos which may be getting raised within their organisation with any deliberate attempt. Leaders can earn their stripes when their people can know him or her as a person from close quarters, interact and work together. Some organisations have formal platforms such as open houses, town halls, floor walks, market visits, focus group discussions and CEO clubs to facilitate close interactions.

The idea is to help the leaders keep their ears and minds close to the ground and coach them to adapt to the emerging realities better.

Read also: Captivate your audience

Ref:

https://hbr.org/2020/01/to-be-a-great-leader-you-need-the-right-mindset?ab=hero-subleft-1

https://www.inc.com/young-entrepreneur-council/12-ways-to-shift-your-mindset-and-embrace-change.html

The post What is your mindset? appeared first on CIEL HR.

We respect people who speak their mind, especially when they do this tactfully. One is able to influence others when one’s ideas are understood and received well. Great leaders are crafty communicators. They do not hesitate to assert their views even if some of these are not the popular choice. How do they do this? They learn assertiveness and practice the skill over a long period of time.

Why don’t we?

Given the personality traits that we inherently possess, the values and beliefs with which we grow up and the environment around us, we develop our habits. On one hand, some of us want to stay away from confrontation, argument, and debate; conform to majority views; keep others happy; have a strong desire to agree with the others; bend over backward to be amenable. On the other hand, there are some of us who are aggressive, want their own ways to be followed, throw tantrums if someone doesn’t follow it, do not hesitate to make personal comments on others. This is a wide range of meekness and passivity to aggressiveness and authoritarianism. Neither end of the spectrum is desirable.

We have also seen that the same person behaves passively in some situations while being aggressive in another set of situations. So, speaking one’s mind and being assertive cannot be generalized as low self-esteem. One’s tendency to speak up is dependent upon the context.

 What is it?

Assertiveness is a situation where one is able to fearlessly express one’s ideas in a manner that the listeners receive them actively. There are situations when one is asked to take on a lot more responsibility than what is fair, one is not awarded a promotion that one considers well-deserved, asked to do something that doesn’t seem right and so on. A passive soul carries it out, broods over it, whines about it to others. An aggressive mind protests, walks off, argues, resents and throws tantrums. What does an assertive mind do? It expresses the feelings, states facts, sets expectations, leverages emotions in the communication and builds a vision for the future.

Know who I am!

It is important that I have to be self-aware of what I believe in and why I behave the way I do. This is the first step on my journey towards emerging as an assertive person. If I nurse the ambition to be a great leader, there is no alternative to communicate assertively. I have to learn and master the skill.

One has to discover the obstacles on the way and work towards overcoming them. The obstacles could be the fear of losing affiliations and good will, the habit of tearing someone down, low self-confidence due to lack of knowledge in a subject or social skills, fear of being judged incapable, the habit of being pushy, lack of empathy, wrong conception that disagreeing with someone is tantamount to disrespect and so on.

Develop new habits

Most often our audience behaves rationally. They care for me. If I want a change in the external world that cares for me, I must convey how I feel about their behaviours towards me. When they know how I feel, they make adjustments in their approach. Secondly, I must be able to explain how the changes are going to help them and me. In the process, I win and they win.

When I want a new program to be implemented, I drive the program by explaining what changes are desired in the behaviours and how these are going to benefit all of us. If I boss over my team, resistance kicks in. If I fear rocking the boat in spite of knowing that a change is desired, I fail being a leader.

Along the way of implementing the program, I come across challenges. As the leader navigates through the challenges, one’s assertiveness comes to test again. Does the leader slip back into the old habits of being passive or aggressive? Does he or she ignore the lack of involvement of the team, let the plan drift and take the path of least resistance? Some leaders act crazy, publicly admonish the folks not pulling their weight and sermonize them. Neither of the two styles help one emerge as a great leader. One has to learn the right habits and practise them again and again.

Along the way of developing a new behaviour, it is helpful to have an ecosystem around the person supporting his or her growth and development. All human beings need a feedback on how they are doing, especially when they are on a new course. Peers, subordinates, managers, partners, people in the family are in an advantageous position to provide this valuable feedback.

The Guru arrives when the disciple is ready. Is the disciple in you ready?

Get Well Qualified People For Your Job

The post Speak your mind appeared first on CIEL HR.

Democracy is the largest form of governance in the world now… close to 60% of the world’s population live in democratic nations. Our societies value freedom of speech, majority view and the power of making choices. Organizations are microcosms of our societies and hence, we behave the same way at work. We expect our leader to be consulting us, acting upon our views, figuring out the majority view and updating us about the state of affairs from time to time.

Long and Arduous

Leaders often are worried about the time it takes to arrive at a decision if they open out the process to their team. Given the diaspora of our society, it is natural that the manager gets wide-ranging opinions and perspectives. Firstly, it takes time and effort to explain the issue to the team; secondly, it takes time to listen to the opinions of people. And most importantly, given the diverse suggestions one receives, it is not easy to decide. In the leader’s mind, there might be something very compelling but the team might not be seeing it with equal fervour. So, the leader takes time to re-position the issue and repeat the process. This is undoubtedly a long and arduous process.

Apply it in the right context

It is not possible that a manager builds consensus for each and every decision. As long as the guiding principles and values are clear, governance becomes easy and non-controversial. So, first of all, organizations need to create appropriate methods and platforms to co-create the guiding principles which determine the way of life. Secondly, a manager must recognize when the issue is complex either because of the inter-dependencies or it has a conflict with one or more principles. Those are the situations which need a larger involvement of people at different levels of the organization.

This is easier said than done. When one opens up the issue to the larger audience, various possibilities come at play. Some people see various lacunae in the capability of the boss; some people come up with utopian ideas due to their lack of knowledge or experience; some people in their quest of coming under the spotlight raise various issues. So, a manager ends up spending a lot of energy in cancelling the noise.

One needs to know which level of the organization needs to be involved and to what extent in the process. At times, discussions with colleagues help simplifying the issue and evolving new possibilities. Hence, participative style of leadership has to be applied in the right context!

Sustainable method

It is unlikely that the manager or the leader knows all. And at the same time, one must have the humility to learn new perspectives and develop solutions in collaboration with others. While making a decision, one has to be clear if the decision has a long term impact on the organization. For example, evolving the 3-year strategy, introducing a new product, launching a new advertisement, entering into a new wage agreement with the union, modifying the rewards scheme and so on have far-reaching consequences on the organization.

An organization can ill-afford to let all such decisions rest squarely on the shoulders of one person or a handful. While building a consensus takes time and calls for efforts to dialogue, it is critical to invest these efforts for the long term health of the organization. Participative style on all strategic issues for the organization assures sustainability.

The leader has to know when to apply democratic style and involve whom in the process.

Get Well Qualified People For Your Job

The post Do you build consensus? appeared first on CIEL HR.

The last five years in our lives have been transformed significantly with the advent of social media, cloud computing and smart phones. Traditionally companies held brainstorming sessions, appointed consultants, conducted site visits, gathered information about the behaviours of competitors, held surveys, asked users of their products and services to draw insights. They converted some of these nuggets into a few implementable ideas. This process took time and required efforts of senior people right from designing the process to leading it.

The power of Social Media

Business leaders are enthused by the fact that using the social media, one is able to reach a large number of people across a large demography and engage them in a conversation. Secondly, the results come fast because there are many tools available to capture and process the opinions and ideas from the crowd. Last, but not the least, they are able to generate ideas from several perspectives and at times, such ideas could be extremely powerful. Hence, it is very useful to leverage on the power of social media to source ideas to solve a problem.

There is a dark side too!

Several experiments to engage with a large number of people elicits numerous responses. It takes a huge amount of energy to process those inputs in spite of all the modern automation such as natural language processing. And at times, such efforts give a very little output. The problems of such crowd-sourcing initiatives often are that the respondents might not have the required expertise and knowledge to provide meaningful responses. Secondly, the herd mentality works at times and people might just want to vote up an idea rather than challenging what many others spoke before them. This does not help the leader; rather this drowns the other voices. Hence, it is important that crowd-sourcing is done in the shape of ‘crowd-wisdom’ing. Else, the cost of the exercise could be higher than the returns. It is important to involve the right people and the discussion has to be moderated in such a way that no respondent influences the process unduly.

Let’s not hype it! This calls for rigorous execution!

Often people think that crowd-sourcing is successful when good ideas have been generated. However, the fact is that the rubber meets the road when the transformation is visible. Often ideas fail to generate the desired output because the execution was either poor or the idea was put to use before the market was ready to accept it. They say, the Guru arrives when the disciple is ready! So, the leaders have to execute the idea well and at the right time.

One has to judge what is the best time for an idea before one starts the process. The first step will be to target and onboard the right audience to engage in a conversation. The audience should be able to relate to the issue at hand and feel passionate about it to be able to contribute meaningfully. Many times, the respondents or participants of the process are either skeptical or disinterested. This doesn’t lend a good foundation for the process.

The next step will be to generate insights which become the food for choosing the right idea and the timing. Hence, asking the right question and guiding the discussion in the right manner helps one generate the required insight that is new and ultimately paves the way for an innovative idea.

Leaders need to lead the transformation process from the front and shoulder the responsibility of engaging the right audience, asking the right questions, guiding the process in the right way, choosing the best of the ideas and driving its implementation! It sounds simple but is hard work and finesse in reality

Get Well Qualified People For Your Job

The post Is it worth Crowd-sourcing? appeared first on CIEL HR.

The historic move on 8th November by Government of India to tender 86% of the 16 trillion Indian Rupees illegal, has understandably evoked a variety of reactions across the world. While a lot of well-meaning citizens have taken it in their stride to convert their cash into legal denominations, some are angry, some are hopeful of seeing India stronger as a result of this move and the unscrupulous are sweating it out to innovate methods of saving some or all of their undeclared wealth and escaping from a potentially harmful noose around them! What’s the impact on our economy and the job markets?

I read an article in Forbes that says, economy of a country has so many moving parts that one cannot easily predict the macroeconomic impact of a change that is introduced. While this is interesting and technical, let’s make an assumption that the *real* intent of this action is to make our economy transparent.

Let us hope that de-monetization is just one of the first steps towards the day when cash supply is minimal, all sale transactions are made by tax invoices, donations and gifts are made easy and legal and whatever else needs to happen to give all the citizens the trust and assurance that there are no unfair ways by which one can get wealth or win undue favours.

In this backdrop, let’s think how our job markets will be impacted.

As we transition towards a cashless economy:

All of us know, we in India predominantly use cash transactions. As history has shown, we will move towards transacting through cheques, plastic money, online payments and mobile wallets. 47% of our countrymen do not have bank accounts now, 80% do not have credit cards and possibly 90+% do not use internet banking. That being said, in the next 5 years, the situation will alter dramatically if the Government of the day wants to focus on its tax earnings.

Banking and Financial Services sector will see huge actions as the market size will grow exponentially. Jobs will grow,accordingly in the area of sales, customer service, credit control, risk assessment, collection, product management, financial technology and big data analytics. If the industry grows by a modest 50% in the 5 years ahead, we will see proportional increase in jobs. We are talking about creation of 1 million new jobs in this sector in 5 years!

As Technology kicks in:

Our large-sized cash economy creates a smoke screen for thousands of people around the financial health of an enterprise; involves many middlemen in the process of employment leading to low and irregular wages at the hands of the worker; prevents a worker from taking up jobs at the right wages and one’s own free will. Further, the savings of a worker do not give adequate returns because they are not banked the right way. In India, we have nearly 45 crores (an overwhlming 85+% of the total workforce) working in the informal sector : daily wage workers, small business owners, artisans, freelancers and millions of so-called employees without a clear and clean contract of employment.

As the economy gets more streamlined with the power of technology, banking and social awareness, citizens will be aware of the benefits of working with a clear contract of employment and understand their responsibilities as employees. They will be able to see how a business is doing, what kind of jobs are in demand and what fair wages are for a job. This transition will increase the contribution to social security funds and hence, more money available with the Government for investing in the social infrastructure such as roads, police, sanitation, water supply, science, technology and so on. Thus, the core sectors of economy start getting busy.

It has been proven again and again that investment in the core sector of the economy results in growth in the output of Manufacturing sector. That leads to growth in demand of raw materials, power supply and transportation services. This increases the number of jobs and hence, the number of people employed. With disposable income at hand, the demand for consumer products, housing, automobiles, entertainment, travel, hospitality, healthcare, outsourcing and so on.

Sources say that each job in the core sector of the economy leads to 6 new jobs in the overall. So, we are talking about at least 10 million new jobs in the next 5 years!

Hope, we are ready!

The Govt has said that they would create 400 million jobs by 2020.The estimate of 15 million jobs referred above seems small on the canvas. Sine there is no single magic bullet that can make us reach the target, this move can be a good beginning if the next few steps are orchestrated well to take our economy towards cashless-ness and technology is leveraged in the right way. Majority of our population has to change their habits of dealing with money and the government has to make swift changes across various sectors to make things transparent and connected.

Get Well Qualified People For Your Job

It’s a mammoth task that needs great commitment to start and stronger execution skills in seing it through. Given the fact that 10-12 million youngsters are joining the workforce each year, the government has limited choices. Better they execute!

The post Impact of Demonetisation on Job markets in India appeared first on CIEL HR.