Do Senior Leaders need Mentoring?

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In my high school debating days, I would have provocatively re-phrased the aforementioned question as – Is there any age in which one stops learning from others? The answer to the first question would be tempered with a lot of qualifications such as – age, position, stature, context and suitable mentor availability. One could even go on to argue that the question is not only one of need, but would there be a supply of even more senior leaders? For e.g. who can mentor Mr Manmohan Singh or Mr Tata? .

The answer to the second question would be an unqualified no – One never stops learning. At a philosophical level the ancient texts would argue that even the cosmos learns from our collective and individual experiences! Approaching the issue in a more micro context, as professionals all of us need mentoring and guidance in order to get the best out of us.

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Life Cycle Contribution of an Employee in a Role

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The past fourteen years, six different roles in four different TATA companies has lent me experience enough to tempt me to make some hypothesis about employee contribution to a business.

There are research reports that claim that the optimum life cycle of an employee in a company/role is 3-5 years. That is the time period required by an employee to learn, implement & ratify business interventions in any industry. There is more than an element of merit in what is countenanced in these reports. However this piece, would argue that, an employee could consciously shorten the period required to assess their impending contribution potential to a business. The model proposed offers a simple design of utilizing conscious introspection to ascertain one’s life cycle in the current role. Read More →

Social BPM takes Customer Experience Management a step further

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Engaging with customers today has to be on their terms and the customer today expects service not just from traditional platforms like phone and email but also on platforms they use more frequently viz. social media and smart phones. Hence, omni channel customer touch points are the need of the hour. No matter what channel customers use, no matter what departments they contact, they expect a consistent response from the company.

 

Not only is it important for companies to adapt to this change from better customer engagement POV but also because it is good news for their P&L. The new ways of customer service/engagement have lead to cost centers becoming profit center. Managing a customer on social media is less cost intensive as compared to a live agent on a 1-800 number. Read More →

Evolving the brand identity of TBSS

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Back in September of 2013, we started asking ourselves two really troublesome but deeply thought provoking questions – Why are we here and what do we do?

POE – The Purpose of Existence, The Start
Thus started an exercise to define Tata BSS’ brand identity model. A rag-tag team of people representing the cross-section of the company - from Operations, Sales, HR and Marketing – came together as the The Marketing Circle (TMC) to take on this onerous task. We asked ourselves, what must have appeared strange at the time, questions like Purpose of Existence, Brand Personality, Attributes, Rational end Emotional Differentiators. We hotly debated about whether choosing our kid’s school and choosing an outsourcing partner were same so far as the anxieties of the parents and our clients was concerned. Read More →