Technology Manager in Leadership Roles - by Rakesh Shukla, Chief Executive and Founder, TWB_
01 Jan

Moving Technical Managers to Management Roles: Leadership Transformations by TWB_

By TWB_ In Communication, Corporate Training, Leadership /  9 No Comments

Technical Managers moving into Management roles is a script that plays out every day in large tech companies. Managers with the best technical expertise and ability to reach performance goals consistently are the first consideration for senior management roles. It is clearly an expectation from managers that they are promoted to management, the management thinks it is great because it represents continuity and that deep understanding of technologies, products and systems. Until it hits everyone.

The new management candidate gets increasingly frustrated because they spend little time using their technical skills and instead on  “people problems,” navigating office politics, and coordinating.  Such a transition hits hard because there is a no clear fit of existing skills to new professional demands and there is no quick way to acquire them. In this article, we’ll explore how the HR/ Management of the company, the Tech-manager can make the transition. This transition can occur from early to mid-career roles, and again from mid-career to management. Here’s what each of the participants in this situation should need to consider to get Technical Managers to move into Management roles:

The HR/ Management checklist to promoting Technical/ Functional Managers

Making this transition to Mangement roles gets harder as the candidate gains years and experience — so the first thing to consider is transitions that come earlier in career say in the middle management level.  To begin with, how do you determine that functional/technical manager is a good candidate for a management role? To begin with they should have demonstrated these skills:

 

  1. Great Communication & People skills: (S)He has strong great writing, oratorial and presentation skills as well as people skills.
  2. Willingness to suspend ego gratification:  to concentrate on helping others succeed: Management is about ensuring success at an organisational level and is not about pursuing personal success or fulfilment as much as it is one’s colleagues and co-workers.
  3. Strong ‘hard skills’: They need to not only have great organizational, project management, and budgeting skills management requires being able to task-switch among them. It also requires overall inputs into detailed deliverables, and to manage — people, time, technology and money — in getting things done.
  4. Strong strategic thinking bias: They need to have a deep understanding of how the technology works to help businesses and organizations meet their goals and objectives. This requires an understanding of the risks and rewards that technology presents, and how to produce the best returns on customers’ investments and activities.
  5. Ability to manage communications in both directions: Success depends on understanding the needs of those above and below them in the organizational chart. Stakeholders are on both sides with management the incumbent has to communicate to both sets carrying expectations, instructions but most of corporate goals and actions to produce the most positive outcomes possible.

The Technical/ Functional Managers checklist to Management position

If you are a technical or functional manager moving into a management position you need to prepare yourself these 2 fundamental shifts:

  1. The first is your mindset has to change — Your technical knowledge is only limited help in your new management role as you now have to focus on the skills and successes that involves multiple functions and teams.
  2. The second is that your identity in the company will change –Being a superstar in your functional role will not save you from starting at the beginning again, and you need to be prepared for this “identity demotion.”

Here are some steps you can take to make your transition into a management role smooth

  1. Solving Strategic Problems: You need to translate problem-solving into a management context. Problems will require multiple functions within the company and other industry players etc to solve. Reading on cutting-edge business thinking can allow you to think & engage on a broader front.
  2. Build a cross-functional understanding: Technical Managers frequently have a narrow worldview. Unless you understand and leverage the marketers, sales, operations and and others, you will struggle to move beyond your role as a technical manager.
  3. Find a mentor — Look for someone in your organization who has succeeded in a management role coming from a functional role. A mentor can help you avoid some of the mistakes that they made and help get across to the right people within the organization critical for your success.
  4. Stay away from technical work– Resist the temptation to get involved with technical projects that aren’t your responsibility.
  5. Meet with your reports and their teams —  Meeting them allows you to find out what interests and motivates them, and they have the professional environment necessary to be successful in their role. It also allows you to find out what your team expects from you.
  6. Be a good communicator —  You need to learn how to write, learning how to speak and learn how to behave as ‘management’. Emails need to be crafted with care and sensitivity. Communication needs to demonstrate your intelligence, knowledge and thoughtfulness.
  7. Dress up: Your colleagues, the industry and ecosystem you inhabit expects it. Always dress the part for the position.

Technical & functional managers from IT, finance, sales, or marketing are promoted to management because they know their job well. The problem is that they have little management experience and most organizations offer very little management assistance.  In a management role instead of focussing on macro influences, strategic issues, and “people aspect” of their new role, they continue to stay in their comfort zone — their own projects and technical skills. It is important for the organization to focus on how to make the transition smooth so the organization benefits from the deep functional understanding that the incumbent brings as well as fresh ideas and thinking.

 

Rakesh Shukla, Chief Executive & Founder, TWB_ I The Agency for Technology Brands I www.twb.in

Rakesh Shukla, TWB_

Entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, Philanthropist, Rakesh Shukla is a 1996 MBA graduate and 1993 BTech. Rakesh Shukla is the Founder & CEO of TWB_ which is the partner for technology & business content for Fortune 500 leaders worldwide. A motivational speaker he speaks on creating success from professional and personal failure. He divides time between his 2 homes in Bangalore and is called the ‘dog-father’ for being papa to the 750 rescued dogs that live with him at the VOSD Dog Sanctuary. Rakesh has featured in 100+ interviews on the BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera, CNN-IBN, NDTV, India’s national dailies, and at TEDx talks.

 

 

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TWB_ (formerly TWB) is the world leader in Technology Content and the Strategic + Creative + Technology Agency for Technology Brands I www.twb.in
29 Dec

Where can HR leverage AI? And what are the biggest challenges

By TWB_ In Corporate Training /  3 No Comments

TWB_ (formerly TWB) in Sept 2017 organized AutomationShift_  — India’s first CXO Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The talks and discussions included that actual on-the-ground reality of AI in engineering, analytics, sales, marketing, HR and other functions across industries. There were excellent perspectives from the senior management of Microsoft, SalesForce, Dimension Data and a host of others on how AI is being leveraged. There are several Indian startups already offering AI based recruitment solutions. It is clear that as with all others AI will reshape how companies manage their workforce and make HR plans to increase productivity and employee engagement in general. Here’s a quick look at what really is the impact of AI on HR?

Automation impacts efficiency & decision making

AI will impact the entire HR value chain from the CV to promotions and the actual experience of being an employee.

Hiring

The bane of a lot of the HR work is the grunt work – hauling information and sifting through it. When that is automated it’s not just the time, but a lot of other benefits that can be drawn through AI:

  • Talent Acquisition: The stressful and monotonous part of talent acquisition which is to scan, read, and evaluate applicants can be automated by as much as 75%. HR can dramatically improve hiring decisions with recruiters spending more time evaluating only eligible candidates.
  • Shortlisting: So far at the most software could do was search through vast amounts of resumes and applicant data by keyword, education, location and years of experience. However, search results are no determination of relevance. Machine learning allows HR to build teaching sets about who the top current employees are, build models around top existing performers and their backgrounds and career paths. This results in matches are made on desired traits on deep background assessment and fitment with current employees.
  • Determining Fitment: How do you engage with 1000s of candidates asking questions that are not there in the job description? Chatbots can help prospective job seekers get the information conversationally, for instance, if they take a job or how flexible an employer is, before they even apply for a role at a company.
  • Eliminating Interview Bias: Interviewer’s “gut” or intuition is not always objective and AI can eliminate that at least at screening levels. For instance, video interviewing technology can help an employer rank an interviewees comfort, level of honesty, even grade the quality of the answers.


Onboarding

New employees demand a lot of attention and it is often impossible to dedicate enough time to each one of them and this causes employee churn. AI is helping customize onboarding procedures for each individual position so the interventions are specific and connected with the entire recruitment experience. 

Training

AI makes possible to determine what specific training intervention is required for a specific employee and then custom delivering that training. AI is also helping build organize, and schedule training programs. 

Performance Management

AI makes a more agile deterministic model of individual and group performance using smaller increments available. Working this way allows constant course correction to keep an optimum engagement to improve productivity and detect team members who show lack of engagement continuously.

Employee Retention

It has been difficult so far to determine individual affinities, manager relationships, satisfaction with raises and life-work balance that determine employees individual satisfaction. With the ability of a large amount of data that can deliver patterns of behaviour AI will make it possible for HR professionals to be proactive work on specific interventions to maintain employee retention.

What is the largest challenges in leveraging AI in HR?

  1. Data: HR data is not managed effectively by most companies. A company may have 5-6 different systems of record and applying an algorithm against any one data set is not possible. The first challenge is to get people-related data into one place so it can be analyzed.
  2. Policy: While most employees agree to their company having access to data when they join, ensuring that insights into individual employees are ‘safe’ is a key determinant for acceptance. 

 

What Next?

 

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Business Transformation & Corporate Training I www.twb.in I TWB_
22 Nov

How effective training catalyses business transformation

By TWB_ In Corporate Training, Leadership /  7 No Comments

Corporations spend millions of dollars on business transformation programmes. These are in the shape of mergers,
restructuring, or transformational IT systems and processes. This change management strategy is aimed to unlock value and growth by aligning people, processes and technology more closely with its business strategy and vision.

Extracting the full benefit from these enormous investments depends on employees having the right attitudes and skills to adapt. Change management also means tremendous learning throughout the organization. While change is not easy to initiate, it’s an even greater challenge to keep friction low within the organization when it happens and it is equally tough to ensure that the real value of the transformation is unlocked.

Most change management focuses on the business context, process and role changes, less on transitioning employees and even less on culture. Though people are the centre of transformational change since they are the ones who execute the new environment most organizations do not assign explicit responsibility for transforming people. The sheer scale of such transformation means that learning is a critical part of a successful solution. Training can transform & impact:

  • Leadership & vision: Change Leadership involves creating a vision for where you are going, ensuring the conditions for success and driving the team towards real business results that transformative rather than incremental. This involves management of different geographies and backgrounds to communicate openly, agree and execute. Training transforms communication.
  • Transferring process understanding: Once the business transformation is underway, processes need to be codified and transformed but this ‘new way’ also needs to be understood and become the everyday work plan and requires a tremendous amount of training to be delivered. Training transforms how people work.
  • Increasing innovation capacity: Having a strong innovative capacity within the culture of the business can be the make or break of a transformation process. Training unlocks innovation. 
  • Transforming Culture: The culture of an organization, more than business strategy, determines how the business grows and transforms. Culture is driven by people’s belief systems. Effective training can convince people that cultural change is necessary and then internalize an alternative belief system that drives a new set of behaviours.
  • Create a vision: A strategic vision for change is more than a well-articulated objective it is a compelling story about the new reality once the change has been achieved. But vision needs to be articulated & communicated to what people can see and feel and implement. Training can make a clear connection between the initiative and measurable business objectives.
  • Upskilling: An essential component of transformation is to have someone at the helm with the skills, experience, and leadership necessary to be successful. Many complex projects are doomed from the start, for not having the right team skills on board from the onset. Upskilling to meet new challenges and direction is key to getting a team to deliver on discontinuous transformation. 

TWB_ has supported scores of multi-million and multi-hundred million dollar business transformation moves in mergers, IT transformation and restructuring. Some of these instances are:

  • World’s leading bank acquires a leading investment bank and turns to TWB_ to unify business processes, develop training and deliver it over 30,000 people and 100 countries
  • World’s leading wealth management company acquires businesses in Asia, South America an Europe and brings in TWB to develop processes and deliver process and culture training.
  • World’s largest systems integrator moves its IT operations from US and Asia HQ to India and TWB_ develops culture, product, process and compliance training and delivered to over 2000 employees.

TWB_ Corporate Training for Business Transformation

TWB_ Corporate Training has catalysed multi-hundred million dollar business transformations. Across the US, Australia, Europe. Businesses to find better efficiencies in Banking, Telecoms, Pharma, and Product Engineering with TWB_. Leaders like AXA, BearingPoint, Fidelity, Genpact, DimensionData, and ABB rely on TWB_ Corporate Training to catalyse learning, transfer processes and implement smoothly.

What Next?

 

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02 Feb

TWB creates success through effective online training across India I LiveMint

By TWB_ In Press & Media /  4 No Comments
As Nitika Wadhwa flips through newspapers, the absence of advertisements for walk-in-interviews does not bother her at all. After working with a BPO for a short while and then an NGO, she is today working as a technical writer. She says she hasn’t seen even a single person in her function being handed a pink slip even in these recessionary times.

“Everyday I get 5-10 mails which say you’re short-listed for an interview. I’m getting calls from consultants. A lot of my software engineering friends ask me about what I have done. They want to do this course and become a technical writer as it is a comfortable job, more imaginative more creative” says Nikita.

“There is a requirement of 200,000 to 250,000 people with such skill sets,” says Rakesh Shukla, founder of technical writing firm, TWB, which also delivers the TWB Certifications. Simply put technical writers are people who communicate technical information in a manner that even non-technical reader can understand. And Rakesh says that in the next 4 years technical writing will be roughly a $1.5 billion industry. And even in the current slowdown, his business has been growing.

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