HR Strategy

Human resource strategies define how a company will manage its people toward the achievement of business objectives—setting priorities for action. Like any strategy, a human resource strategy is a directional plan of action for managing change. It provides a business perspective of actions necessary to gain and sustain competitive advantage through the management of human resources—a focus on priorities in managing people in a changing environment.

Through human resource strategy, managers and human resource staff jointly define and resolve people-related business issues. The planning process adds value by helping managers identify the issues most critical to the organization’s competitiveness and ultimately to its success. It helps management set priorities and define a vision of how it intends to manage its people.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Delegation Skills

It’s not uncommon for managers to resist delegating the work they once did themselves. However, to be an effective and successful manager, it is essential that you delegate work to others.

To increase your willingness to delegate, first determine the reason for your resistance, then identify ways to overcome it. Common reasons for managers’ reluctance to delegation include:

• Insufficient time to explain the task or train someone to do it. While this is sometimes an acceptable reason for not delegating short-term projects, more often it is not. The time you spend teaching employees’ tasks will save you time and effort in the long run. The sharing of knowledge is an investment in time that pays of in many ways.
• Desire for perfection. If you feel that you are the only person who can do certain tasks well enough, be careful; this is a danger sign. It’s often unlikely that you are the only person who can do them. Start by delegating parts of these tasks, and each employees to help them perform to your satisfaction.
• Personal satisfaction and/or reward from task accomplishment. If you enjoy a task or receive recognition from others when you perform it, you may tend to reserve it for yourself when you could be delegating it. It is difficult to give up work you really like. Learn to achieve satisfaction from other parts of your job.
• Lack of confidence in employees’ abilities. If you lack confidence in an employee’s abilities, carefully evaluate what the employee can and cannot do. You may want to check your impressions with others, because people sometimes pigeonhole other people based on one or two vivid events. Then delegate work the person can do, and provide coaching as the work proceeds.
• Fear of failure. Many managers are concerned that if mistakes are made, the consequences will be disastrous. Identify the  possible risk with the employee, if the risks are really large, ask that contingency plans to be made. Ultimately, you need to be  willing to take responsibility for your employees’ mistakes on delegated tasks to help them grow and develop.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Improving Quality

Improving quality is a lot like taking vitamins, eating healthy foods, and exercising regularly. Although the results may not be immediate, long-term benefits are significant. Quality is neither a quick fix nor the program of the month, but rather a way of life for companies who are serious about improvements.

Quality is a fundamental to creating value, yet it is a moving target and must meet the customers’ current definition of quality. Thus, we offer the following recommendations for improving service quality and ultimately delivering superior customer value:

• Design services in cooperation with customers. Learn what customers truly value by incorporating the voice of the customer earlier in the service development process. Also, it is important to determine not only the customers’ preferred service attributes but their relative importance, as well.
• Focus your improvement programs outward, on market break points. Only by defining those episodes, when the customer comes in contact with the organization, and by focusing on the ones most critical can you see things as the customer sees them. Also, visualize the complete sequence of the moments of truth a customer experiences in having some need met. Remember, the customer sees service in terms of a total experience, not an isolated set of activities. Mapping the service cycle helps companies see these activities as the customer sees them.
• Create a triangle representation of service quality. Hotels and restaurants often advertise and display on their properties ratings by one of the major motor clubs, such as AAA or Mobil Oil, Hertz #1 Gold Club service communicates a premium, value-added bundle of services to business travelers seeking a hassle-free car rental experience.
• Use teamwork to promote service excellence—service workers who support one another and achieve together can avoid service burnout.
• Create a service bias based on each of the following service quality determinants: professionalism, attitudes and behaviors, accessibility and flexibility, reliability and trustworthiness, service recovery, and reputation and credibility. These criteria can be used as guidelines for influencing positive service quality perceptions.
• Develop proper measurements. Use metrics that are specific on nature, such as 95% on-time-delivery, customer wait time, or order processing time. Benchmark the best practices for each service are being measured, such as wait time or order delivery.
• Employee selection, job design, and training are absolutely crucial to building customer satisfaction and service quality. Structure the job of service workers to maximize their ability to respond quickly and competently to customer needs. Also, train service personnel in areas of service delivery and attitude. Role play different service scenarios, showing various service recovery strategies. Provide service workers with some basic tools to help control service quality variation and uncover service problems.
• Reward total quality efforts in marketing. Look for opportunities to reinforce quality behaviors when they occur. Employees should be rewarded ob the basis of these behaviors (commitment, effort) rather than strictly on outcomes, such as sales quotas. Rewarding a salesperson for meeting or exceeding quota with a bonus while giving a nominal award such as a pin or plaque to the person who fixes the product or process sends a clear message about the importance of quality.
• Think of service as a process, not a series of functions. Service quality occurs when the entire service experience is managed and the organization is aligned to respond accordingly.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

The New Work of Leaders

Our traditional view of leaders—as special people who set the direction, make key decisions, and energize the troops—is deeply rooted in an individualistic and nonsystematic worldview. Especially in the West, leaders are heroes—great men (and occasionally women) who rise to the fore in times of crisis. So long as such myths prevail, they reinforce a focus on short-term events and charismatic heroes rather than on systematic forces and collective learning.

Leadership in learning organizations centers on subtler and ultimately more important work. In a learning organization, leaders’ roles differ dramatically from that of the charismatic decision-maker. Leaders are designers, teachers, and stewards. These roles require new skills: the ability to build shared vision, to bring to the surface and challenge prevailing mental models, and to foster more systematic patterns of thinking. Leaders are responsible for building organizations where people are continually expanding their capabilities to shape their future—that is, leaders are responsible for learning.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Formal Authority

Formal authority can be thought of as the right to command or compel another person to perform a certain act. Power is the ability to influence or cause a person to perform an act. It is possible for a manager to have formal authority without power, just as it is possible for a subordinate to have power without formal authority. The distinction between these terms may be significant for the manager, who may assume that his formal authority automatically gives him power but overlook the fact that his subordinates also have power, at times greater than his own. The manager in such a situation can encounter difficult and frustrating experiences without knowing why.

If formal authority were dependent upon physical power only, life would be even more difficult than it is. Ultimately, formal authority is dependent upon the law, but most frequently it results from a  shared perception that those with formal authority have rights that ought to be acknowledged. This “ought” is so widely believed that those with formal authority may very frequently have real power as a result.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

New Product Process

New products actually build up the way rivers do. Great rivers are systems with tributaries that have tributaries. Goods that appear complex are just collections of metal shapes, packaging material, fluids, prices, and so on. A good anology is the production of automobiles, with a main assembly line supported by scores of subsidiary assembly lines scattered around the world, each of which makes a part that goes into another part that ultimately goes into a car in that final assembly line.

 If you can imagine the quality control people in auto parts plants evaluating each part before releasing it to the next step, you have the idea of a new product evaluation system. The new product appears first as an idea, a concept in words or pictures, and we evaluate that first. As workers turn the concept into a formed process of metal, or software, or a new factory site preparation service, that good or service is then evaluated. When a market planner puts together a marketing plan, its parts are evaluated separately (just as minor car parts are) and then evaluated again in total, after it is added to the product.

 The fact that we evaluate the product and its marketing plan as separate and divisible pieces is what lets us telescope the development process into shorter periods of time. There was an era when we went through a new product’s development step by step, nothing “ahead of its time.” But today we may be working on a package before we actually have finished product, we may be filming part of a commercial before the trademark has been approved and finalized.

 This sometimes causes some backtracking, but the cost of that is less than the costs of a delayed introduction. It does require, however, that we have thought through carefully the item’s overall development needs—and, which of those needs are crucial, and which not crucial. Any evaluation system must cover the crucial ones.

 My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, Line of Sight

Corporate Strategy: Another Route

In most companies, corporate strategy is formulated by a small, select group of top officers; it is then transmitted less and less fully to successively lower levels of management and, perhaps ultimately, to the rank and file. With each step in the diminishing communication, the ability to translate strategy into training needs is diminished.

 

A few companies distinguish between strategy formulation and strategy decision. Although top management can never delegate the responsibility for decision, it can, if it chooses, involve every level of the firm in formulating strategy.

 

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please contact www.asifjmir.com, Line of Sight

Empowering People

Empowerment gives people more control over – and responsibility for – their work. It is based on the idea that those most closely involved with operations are in the best position to make decisions about them. So it delegates responsibility as far as possible, with people using their knowledge and abilities to manage the details of their own job, free from the instructions and control of a more remote supervisor.

 

You can see the difference when you go into a shop to exchange some garment. Marks and Spencer has empowered employees, and the first person you meet will happily refund your money or change the garment as you prefer.

 

There are five main types of management style:

1. I decide and you do – which is the traditional authoritarian approach;
2. We discuss and I decide – which involves some discussion but responsibility remains at the higher level;
3. We discuss and we decide – which is more collaborative and has some real delegation of control, but ultimately authority and responsibility remains with the senior manager;
4. We discuss and you decide – which delegates most control of the decision;
5. You decide and I’ll help if needed – where the senior manager hands over control, and acts as a coach and consultant if needed.

 The last level is closest to empowerment and is the approach that is becoming more widely accepted. As Bill Gates says, ‘Empowering leadership means bringing out the energies and capabilities people have and getting them to work together in a way they wouldn’t do otherwise.’

 

Empowerment gives more authority to people lower down the organization, and it also puts more demand on them. They must be willing to accept this responsibility, be able to make good decisions, work without supervision and probably form part of a team which completes in identifiable part of the whole process.

 

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please contact www.asifjmir.com, Line of Sight

Self-employed Businessmen:Getting Help from Experts

Many self-employed businessmen believe they do not earn enough money to need financial advice, but anybody with an after-taxes income of more than $20,000 can use financial advice. This goes double for someone in business for himself. Many kinds of advisors are available, such as stockbrokers, lawyers, accountants, credit counselors, bankers, and insurance agents. One of the newer services is that provided by a financial planning consultant, a generalist who can help you with overall financial planning.

Before hiring the services of anyone of these people, though, think about who has the expert’s loyalty. Many insurance agents, for example, earn commissions from insurance companies and as a result charge you nothing. This does,’t mean you don’t get good—free-financial advice, it just means the agent will be trying to sell you insurance along with the advice. His loyalty goes to his employer. On the otherhand, you pay a financial planning adviser or an accountant, and his loyalty is strictly to you. Both kinds of advisers can be very helpful, provided you understand the situation.

Before getting involved with any financial expert, check his references. The best reference, of course, comes from a satisfied friend. You can also casually ask the person the first time you meet him about his background and training. Ultimately, though, before you trust anyone with your money, you should like him. Personal chemistry accounts for a lot in choosing anyone with whom you will have financial dealings.

The one adviser a self-employed businessman is most likely to have is an accountant or an accountiong service. It is strongly suggested that you have an accountant do your taxes. In fact, if you feel you cannot handle the records systems, you can hire an accounting service to set up a record system for you, but it is expensive. A one-time setup will cost something between $200 to $500. Alternately, the accountant who handles your taxes may be willing to help you set up a records system for a small free. When you are negotiating with him, remind him that any system you work out is only to his benefit since he goes over the records at the end of the year, anyway.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please contact www.asifjmir.com, Line of Sight