Leadership | Bhavin Gandhi's Blog

Simple tips to create an innovative environment for your team

I really feel proud and motivated when my clients call me up, and give me feedback regarding my work. One of such experience happened yesterday.

Jitesh (my client) is a small business owner, who runs his graphics design business from India. Few months ago, he came to me and asked – “Bhavin, my business is doing bad. Our customers are not happy with our products, and it seems that we have lost our innovation capabilities in the rapid expansion. Can you help me fix this?” Yesterday, he called me up again and told me – “Bhavin, your ideas worked. Our customer satisfaction has increased by 40% as compared to last year, and we are coming up with really great designs. You should check us out. Thanks for your help, buddy”.

So, what happened between now and then? Trust me, I didn’t gave him any magical powers through which his employees started innovating. I knew that he has top performers in his team. What he might be missing is – the innovative environment. And that’s what I provided to him. Following are couple of tips that helped him in creating an innovative work environment.

Implement a suggestion box system: Don’t just have a suggestion box, which does nothing. Have some mechanism to review these suggestions on daily basis (assigning a resource to review these suggestions on part-time basis would be your best bet). Make it a simpler process, there should not be any lengthier forms and long paperwork. I would recommend you to provide an intranet application with four key elements – idea, implementation plan, evaluation, accept/reject. And yeah! Have some mechanism to recognize these ideas. For example: great ideas of the year award.

Have an event for the best ideas: If there is an important issue that needs some creative ideas, then why not have an event where people with the best idea wins something? You can also have a team contest where teams post ideas on an intranet site and everyone can vote for their favorite. Or throw a party where people have to contribute ideas to get treats such as snacks and drinks.

So, what do you think? Do you have any other ideas to create an innovative environment? If you do, then please feel free to share your opinion with me. I would love to hear from you. Thanks. – Bhavin Gandhi

What can Executives learn from Obama’s State of the Union speech? (Part 1)

29 Jan

In the State of the Union speech, Obama touched many critical issues related to the growth of the United States. Delivering his annual State of the Union address to the US Congress, Obama made various references to emerging economies like India and China. He also unveiled his plan to maintain American leadership in an increasingly competitive world marked by the surge of nations like India and China. His plan relied on four key pillars – innovate, educate, build, and reform. These are four few crucial things that Executives should learn from his speech. In this blog, I will concentrate on innovation.

In today’s environment, most of the companies are reducing their R&D spending by drastic amount. They are trying to cut almost everything to reduce their spending and improve their profit margin. This might be the good strategy for the short-term, but it is definitely not sustainable on long-term basis. History speaks for itself. By just one Google search, you will be able to find various companies, who lost their competitive edge by reducing their spending on R&D. Reverse of this is true too. Look at Apple for example, it differentiate itself by bringing innovative products in to the market. Maybe that’s the only reason why they have crazy fan following.

Obviously, just pouring money in to R&D without an actual plan will get you nowhere. So, create an innovation plan before you think of investing in R&D. Define your goals and clarify your objectives. One thing that might help is to create a small research team, who think more broadly and creatively without outside pressure. Don’t be like those big companies, who eat their own children. Create an environment where your employees can feel innovative. Don’t be afraid of disrupting your own revenue stream with a new unit. Empower your employees to innovate, and change the organization’s culture to think out of the box. Don’t ever ditch all the little initiatives to focus on core business without at least acknowledging them.

So, what do you think? Do you have any other ideas to create an innovative environment? If you do, then please feel free to share your opinion with me. I would love to hear from you. Thanks. – Bhavin Gandhi

How to create a perfect Action Plan

23 Jan

Thanks to LinkedIn, this weekend I met my old friend from high school. He is now a Manager at one of the biggest MNCs (Multi National Companies) in India. While we were talking on skype, I came to know that he is also facing similar work challenges as other Managers.

Almost all the Managers create Action Plans to make sure that a particular amount of work gets done. But most of the times, they forget to follow up on the assignments. I have seen many managers, who work on problem-and-solution kind of approach. They will have many action plans for other items, but they don’t get any priorities until failure to execute those plans disrupts the normal operation of the business. In that case, they forget about the old action plan and work on resolving the current issue. This keeps on happening again and again. So, what can you do to ensure that Action Plan is taken seriously?

I can’t tell you the perfect answer for this question, but I have developed few strategies throughout my experience, which helps me in ensuring that my Action Plans are implemented properly.
– Request your managers to kick off biweekly meeting, stressing the import-
ance of the Action Plan. This meeting will help you in getting all mangers on one page, and ensuring the importance of the Action Plans.
– Invite different team leads in these meetings to share their stories about some of the key competencies and why they are critical to the success of the organization.
– Don’t forget to send a copy of the Action Plans after every meeting. This action plan should contain: action item, person responsible to finish that task, probable end date for that task, etc.
– Ask the group members to set up a meeting with their supervisors to
go over their Action Plans as homework.
– Make sure that your supervisor or leader must attend this meeting on regular basis to stress the importance of these meetings.
– As homework, ask each participant to meet with each of his or her team members to informally listen to each worker’s career goals.
– And yeah! Don’t forget to review the results in a follow-up session. Even if your goals have changed from the last meeting, you should still follow-up. This will give you the opportunity to at least document the to-date progress of that particular action item.

So, what do you think? Do you have any other ideas to create a perfect and workable Action Plan? If you do, then please feel free to share your opinion with me. I would love to hear from you. Thanks. – Bhavin Gandhi

4 Comments

Posted by Bhavin Gandhi on January 23, 2011 in 21st Century, Leadership, Management

Tags: Action Plan, Leaders of Tomorrow, Leadership, Management

3 simple ways to make your business like Apple, Inc.

10 Dec

Recently, I was called upon for a consulting opportunity in one small business. Their major problem was to acquire new customers. Due to recession, they were getting less businesses from their existing customers. And that’s why they were very entusiastic in acquiring new customers to survive. This business problem kept me thinking about today’s businesses. For first few days, I didn’t have any answer. I was asking myself, how can you make a good customer base? how can you create demand? how can you establish a recession proof business? And I looked at my iPhone and realized that there are few companies (Apple), which are creating huge demands for their products even in this economic crisis.

Those days are gone when we used to manufacture a product and hope that someone will buy it. If businesses wants to be successful in the 21st Century then they need to have customer centric business approach. The key to your business future is – how can you create an extraordinary customer experience for people? What can you do to delight your customers, so that they will decided to do business with you again? Well, I am not a business creation expert by any means, but here are three simple ways to create a business like Apple.

Make your employees love your company: Great companies are always built by great employees. The key to an extraordinary customer experience is to make sure that the people in your company, who don’t want to be there go somewhere else. You only want employees who wants to work in your company, instead of people who just wants to cash their paycheck on every week. If you can create an employee base like this then they will focus on doing something that they like, and you can focus on your customers. Wouldn’t you want your customers to hear that – your company is a great place to work?

Quality is more than you think: The bookish definition of quality is – your product or service conforms the customer’s standards and requirements. But I would define quality as customer experience and more. We should always deliver a product/service which not only meets customer’s standards but exceed them. I am not saying that you should over build your product, but make sure to act as a user of that product when its ready. Ask yourself a question – will you buy your product if you were a customer? If you ask me, Apple had done a really good job of maintaining its quality. And that might be the major reason for creating a loyal customer base.

Make everything work for your customer: I really love to visit Apple retail store. And I am always amazed by seeing the crowd in the store. The key is in their service. They have revolutionized the retail computer industry by providing on-site training classes, amazing customer service, and friendly environment. Their sales people will always help you in integrating your new Apple product with your other products, so they actually work together as one package. What a concept! Customers today are more impatient than ever. Thus, any business that offers to serve its customers faster immediately becomes the preferred supplier, even at a higher price. So, make everything work for your customers, and you can also create a business like Apple.

I hope my article was helpful, and I am eager to hear your feedback. Thanks. – Bhavin Gandhi

4 Comments

Posted by Bhavin Gandhi on December 10, 2010 in 21st Century, Leadership, Management

Tags: 21st century, brand awareness, brand management, Management, Marketing

3 simple tips for empowering your virtual team

28 Nov

Wow! What a busy last month? With holiday season approaching, I wanted to make sure that I finish all of my work before people leave for their holiday break. Just a few months back, I worked with a company in India, where I worked as a liaison between the company and ERP consultants to implement a new inventory management module. This month, my biggest challenge was to train their personnel in using the new system with the help of those consultants. The road was full of obstacles with many challenges of virtual teams, but I somehow managed to do finish that task on time. And with this blog, I will discuss some of the methods that I used to make my virtual teams succeed.

Set clear expectations: To get your teams off to a running start, you must set clear expectations. Before coordinating the training effort, I had created a training plan, which was far more detailed than my current MBA classes. It clearly stated roles and responsibilities of each person involved in the training with the training schedule and a back up plan. This plan really helped me in reducing those redundant e-mails and other wasteful coordination efforts.

Pass on the torch: In real life, it is not a good idea to keep all your eggs in one basket; in virtual team environment, it is not a good idea to have only one contact person. Thus, my policy is not to allow team members to dominate a team by force of personality. I like to rotate team captains. In my team, every member will rotate leader and follower roles. This mechanism helps me to get to know each individual, and helps each team members to practice their leadership skills during the project.

Give tools to communicate: I believe that in a team project, team members should have as many tools as possible to communicate with each other. When I got the names of team members in my team, I distributed their e-mail addresses, skype id, and telephone numbers to everyone. I also establish team speciﬁc synchronous chat rooms in which conversations are automatically archived, giving all members a record of discussions. I also provided team with a private asynchronous message board. I would recommend you guys to use tools like Google Groups, Windows Live Space (Skydive), etc.

I hope my article was helpful, and I am eager to hear your feedback. Thanks. – Bhavin Gandhi

3 Comments

Posted by Bhavin Gandhi on November 28, 2010 in 21st Century, Leadership, Management, Virtual Team

Tags: 21st century, Leadership, Management, Virtual Team

Got my first part-time consulting contract, now what?

24 Oct

I can’t believe, it had been a whole week since I wrote my last blog. This week was really busy with lot of sleepless nights and lot of ice tea. Working full-time and consulting part-time is not an easy task. I would not recommend you to consult a business part-time, if you can’t keep up with all of your appointments in your outlook calendar.

Anyways, I am not here to tell you how to manage your time well (at least not in this blog). Before I start, I would like to thank my readers to read my blog and sending their replies through e-mails and comments. In their responses, lot of people asked me to write about the next step after getting the first client. Through this blog, I would like to answer that question.

I do management consulting on part-time basis, so most of my views would be helpful to part-time consultant instead of those full-timers. Following are few tips, which might help you when you get your first client/contract.

Communication, communication, communication: This is the key element of every consulting business. Being a part-time consultant, it will be really hard to communicate with your clients. Whatever may be the case, you need to communicate with them on regular basis. If you are consulting local businesses then invite their executives on lunch. You will be amazed to know – how much you can talk over the lunch. Voice conference will work too. I would also suggest you to gather and read as many documents as you can. Defining the business problem CORRECTLY is really important. And yeah! Try to keep your clients informed in EVERY STEP of the process in implementing the solution.

Leverage technology: If you are a part-time consultant like me, then you want to be transparent about your progress with your clients. If you are a management consultant, then it becomes even more difficult to provide some tangible output every day. Thus, I would advise you to use solutions like – Google site, Google docs, Windows live documents, etc. This will provide proper visibility of your work. Using skype for video conference is another cheap way to communicate with your clients. I have lot of clients from my home country (India), and skype had really helped me to better communicate with them. YouTube can be helpful too. I create separate private channels on YouTube for my clients, if there is any training required.

Keep record of your work: This would seem obvious for any consultant, but you will be surprised to know that only 20% of the independent consultant keep DETAILED LOGS of their work. Keeping an engineering log will help you in many ways from tracking your time to reusing your material. I, myself, don’t have the fix pricing model for my clients. Sometimes I charge them on a contract basis, sometimes on commission bases, and sometimes on hourly basis. Whatever may be the case, keeping track of your time worked on a particular project will help you to provide competitive pricing to your next client. Keeping all of your historical documents will help you to not only reproduce your material but also you can learn from your own mistakes. After all, we all learn from our mistakes, the key is to RECORD your past and learn from it.

I hope my article was helpful, and I am eager to hear your feedback. Thanks. – Bhavin Gandhi

6 Comments

Posted by Bhavin Gandhi on October 24, 2010 in 21st Century, Leadership, Management

Tags: Consulting, Leadership, Management, part-time, skype

Manager’s triplets for today (Part 2)

08 Oct

We live in the 21st Century, businesses are becoming more and more complex with increasing government involvement, outsourcing, innovations, etc. I believe that we are on the verge of big paradigm shift in – how we do business. In this article, I will provide few suggestions for tomorrow’s manager to cope up with this change, as a follow-up of my last blog.

Be flexible: In recent years, the dynamics in business world have changed. Thus, management techniques should become more flexible, more in tune with the needs of the business, employees, and the environment. Managers should work to be more adaptive to new ideas, new technology and brand new processes. If managers become more flexible then they can create a win-win situation for their businesses or their employees. One of the good example to be flexible would be: Re-evaluate your mission, strategy and goals more frequently than before, in order to adjust to the uncertain and changing environment.

Be humble and open minded: Today’s managers should not assume that they know the answer to everything, because more often they won’t. Things are changing so rapidly that your yesterday’s knowledge might not be valuable in today’s situations. Thus, as a manager, you need to be willing to hear hard truths from your employees, your customers, your suppliers and anyone else closer to a changing marketplace than you are.

Be up-to-date with information: The world is changing faster than ever. Today’s technology might be obsolete in 2 years time. Thus, today’s managers need to be up-to-date with the information. They not only need to know what’s going on with their customers and competitors but they need to be informed about recent innovation in their field. For example: A.G. Lafley, former CEO of Procter & Gamble, who required his top executives to go out into the field and talk to the ordinary women who use P&G products.

I hope my article was helpful, and I am eager to hear your feedback. Thanks. – Bhavin Gandhi

“5Cs” of Leadership in the 21st century

30 Sep

Leadership is becoming more and more critical for all the businesses as they change rapidly with the time. Researchers have proposed many leadership models over the years in an attempt to develop theories that describe, predict, evaluate, and develop better leaders. These efforts to develop leadership theories have been only marginally successful and thus new and more complex theories have continued to evolve in an attempt to fill this void. In this article, I will focus on five important concepts of leadership, which might help you to be a better leader.

Critical thinking and problem solving: Today’s organizations are highly dynamic, and variety of problems can arise on a given day. Thus, it is important for a leader to be able to identify critical problems and resolving them in timely manner. Today’s leaders should look beyond the immediate issue and identify the source of the problem, so that it doesn’t happen again.

Creativity and innovation: Creativity is not necessarily about become another Einstein or Picasso. Creativity can be as simple as new ways for old situations. For example, on the board or with management, you might get new energy by changing meeting formats, or seeking to solve old problems in new ways. This approach has worked for many big companies like Google, Apple and Twitter; and it can definitely work for your business too.

Collaboration and teamwork: In today’s complex businesses, collaboration is becoming really important. For example: TCS, an Indian I.T. consulting firm, has more than 100,000 employees and more than 40-50 verticals. With collaboration between these large pool of employee base, TCS can share its best practices within these different verticals and employ efficient processes all over the organization.

Cross-cultural understanding: With existing virtual teams and increasing outsourcing in the businesses, today’s leaders need to understand the importance various cultures. When communicating with people abroad, leaders need to know both the strategy and structure in cultural and communication patterns. As a leader we need to develop a strategy to foster cross cultural ideas and opportunities.

Communication of information: In today’s business, it is important that an organization’s leader get beyond providing information and direction. Communication is an act of gaining understanding and commitment from individuals, in order to learn from others and build an exceptional organization. Thus, as a leader we should use tools such as the intranet, emails from the Leaders, All hands meetings and blogs as a means for the Leaders to communicate with employees. This will definitely help you in creating the best organization.

I hope my article was helpful, and I am eager to hear your feedback. Thanks. – Bhavin Gandhi

1 Comment

Posted by Bhavin Gandhi on September 30, 2010 in 21st Century, Leadership, Management

Tags: Communications, Critical Thinking, Leaders of Tomorrow, Leadership, Management, Team work

Manager’s triplets for today (Part 1)

25 Sep

If you’ve stepped one foot inside an office these days, you’ll probably be struck by the diversity of people inside. There are young and old coming together. Introverts and extroverts go about their daily business shoulder-to-shoulder. There are simply all kinds of people, motivated by different things. If you’re a manager of people, you likely already know this. One of your employees might be totally self-sufficient, easy to work with, and take criticism well. Another may not be able to get over the fact that you went with TFS 2010 when they wanted a different product, and now they’re letting you know about it. In this article, I will provide few tips for better managing your employees.

Better communicate: Businesses are changing drastically, those days are gone when Managers were just focusing on the day-to-day operations, and still performing well. In today’s businesses, Managers need to effectively communicate with cross-functional teams, customers, clients, and stakeholders to survive and thrive.

Cross-train your people: As a Manager, have you ever been in to the situation where you had enough man power to accomplish certain task but you didn’t have the required skillsets? I am not sure about you, but I have been in that situation before. At that time, it becomes really hard to justify hiring of one other resource. Thus, it is very essential in today’s businesses to cross-train your team. Cross-training will provide you with the team of people with multiple skills, who aren’t qualified for just one narrow task, and who can be redeployed as the situation demands it.

Be a colleague and not a Boss: In tough economic climate like this, manager’s involvement in their employees goals and career is becoming more and more critical to empower your employees to deliver their best. As a manager, you can no longer afford to be seen hiding in your office and ordering your employees. It is really important that you get along with your employees to give them confidence and build trust. If you are successful in recognizing yourself as their colleague instead of their Boss, then you would be surprise to know the positive result in your team.

I hope my article was helpful, and I am eager to hear your feedback. Thanks. – Bhavin Gandhi.

1 Comment

Posted by Bhavin Gandhi on September 25, 2010 in 21st Century, Leadership, Management

Tags: 21st century, Communication, Cross-training, Leadership, Management, Team work

Learn Leadership from the fundamentals of Physics

21 Sep

Yesterday was – one of those days, where I was helping my nephew with his 5th grade physics homework. While explaining him the fundamentals of physics, I got to realize that there are many similarities between physics and leadership. What is physics, after all? Physics is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves. And Leadership is about analyzing people’s abilities, and encouraging them to contribute in making something extraordinary happen. In this blog, I am going to talk about – how physics can teach us a great deal about leadership.

One of the fundamental laws of physics states that “for every reaction there there is an equal and opposite reaction”. The same is true for leadership, “for every action a leader takes, there is a corresponding reaction from followers”. As leaders we often underestimate the influence we have over our followers. Thus, we need to make sure that – we ask the right questions, tell the right stories, and set the right example. We should be conscious about what we say and how we act.

Have you ever proved/disproved any hypothesis using scientific method? The method is very simple: you just need to find out one observation to disprove the given hypothesis, if you can’t then you proved the hypothesis. This scientific method of proving hypothesis is directly related to leadership. Leaders are always under the microscope. People will only need one observation to hurt the reputation of the leader. Look at BP, Toyota, and Tiger Woods for examples. It only took one bad incident for them to destroy their brands. Thus, as a leader – we should be consistent in what we do, not often, but each and every time.

Basically, leaders should always be cautious about what they say and what they do. As a leader, we should try to set a good example for our followers.

I hope my article was helpful, and I am eager to hear your feedback. Thanks. – Bhavin Gandhi.