Teaching Lame Crows to Walk

“In your arsenal, do you have anything that teaches lame crows to walk?”

My initial days as an independent consultant. I was in a potential client company with the sales manager discussing training opportunities. This company had once been a market leader but had slipped way down over time. As a result the sales manager had been fired for poor performance and a new one appointed in his place. The new sales manager, who I was having a conversation with, was supposed to be the miracle man with a reputation of turning things around.

“What do you mean, teaching lame crows to walk?”

 “I have inherited a useless team”, he replied. “The morale is down, they don’t have the necessary drive to push sales and they have no impact in the market. They haven’t earned their sales commission in over a year and don’t seem interested in doing anything about it. They hop when they are supposed to be running. The only reason they are still here in this company is because no one else will take them. And the only reason I cannot throw them out is because I can’t get replacements. No one wants to join such a dejected team.”

 “Ok”, I said. “I understand about the lame part. But why crows?”

 “Just a figure of speech”, he replied. “Don’t take it literally”.

 Wow! Calling his team members crows… Maybe a topic of interest for some psychiatrist. But I had other things to worry about.

“So what exactly are you looking for?”

“I need a training workshop that will transform the team,” He replied. “I want them to be up and running. I want a highly charged and motivated team that will conquer the market. I want fighters!”

I went back to my office with a load of questions in my mind. In my conversation with the Sales Head, the impression I had got was that the sales team was the main culprit for all the woes that the organization suffered. But were the sales people really responsible for state of affairs or were there larger organizational issues. Even if they were responsible, what had caused it? And finally, how do you convert so called losers into fighters? 

The next day, I met an old colleague of mine who I shall call Mr. A. He had spent his entire working life in the HR function. Now retired, he still kept in touch with people in the HR community.

 I explained my problem to him, and the conversation that followed was not only interesting, but for me an eye opener.

Mr. A: I have heard you. Now tell me what exactly is your problem?

Me: I don’t know who is responsible for their state of affairs, so I don’t know how to tackle the issue.
Mr A: State of affairs of that company is the problem of people who run that company. What is your problem?
Me: If I don’t know the core issue, how can I address it?
Mr. A: You have been given an issue. You have to teach lame crows to walk.
Me: But I don’t know what has caused them to become lame!
Mr. A: Ok… That’s a constraint. Now what are the possibilities?
Me: The only possibility that I see is that I will not be able to come up with anything concrete, and so will not get this project.
Mr. A: Look around you. What do you see in this room?
Me: I don’t understand…
Mr. A: Tell me what all do you see in this room. Everything…
Me: Ok… I see furniture, books, papers, a computer and you and me. I also see tea cups on the table, some pictures on the wall, a carpet on the floor, curtains, fan……………
Mr. A: Now if we were to remove everything from this room, what will be left?
Me: Everything?
Mr. A: Yes… Each and everything, including you and me. Then what will be left?
Me: Let’s see… The walls of this room…
Mr. A: What else?
Me: The air in this room…
Mr. A: That’s good. What else?
Me: Maybe the echoes of our conversation…?
Mr. A:  Ah! We are now moving to the esoteric stuff… I will accept that. Anything else?
Me: No, I can’t think of anything else.

(I strongly recommend readers to do this exercise before reading further. Make a list of what would be left if all the things are removed from the room you are in)

Mr. A: Interesting how the human mind works… It first thinks of constraints, but it refuses to think of possibilities
Me: I don’t understand…
Mr. A: You saw the walls, but you couldn’t see the door…?

I was silent. The door had not even come to my mind.

Mr. A: Not your fault. That’s how we operate. We think of constraints almost instantly, but cannot see the opportunities. You have to force yourself to stop thinking of why things cannot be done before you can focus on how they can be done. Not an easy thing, but with practice you will be able to do that.

My mind was still reeling. Why did the door not come to my mind?

Mr. A: You are a consultant now. An external person. So you will not get every piece of information that you need at all times. You have to make do with what you have and do your best. For that you have to change your attitude from looking for constraints to searching for possibilities.

Me: So what possibility do you see here?
Mr. A: That’s so simple. You don’t have to teach lame crows to walk. They don’t have to walk. They have to fly…. So teach them to fly.

 The next week we made a presentation to the Sales Head. When he asked, “So have you figured out how to make these lame crows walk?” I replied, “No, but I am going to talk about how to make lame crows to fly.”

It worked. We got the project.

 

 

 

Gurukool - The Execution

The date of 4^th September 2006 will always remain etched in my mind. That was the day we launched Gurukool as a workshop with the first batch of 30 participants.

A lot of planning and preparation had preceded the launch. The first hurdle was getting the participants to attend the workshop. Most of them, aged 19-24 had never stayed out of their homes. Their parents were a bit apprehensive about letting their children be away for five whole days. This was especially true for the girls. Their parents wanted assurance about their safety and security. “I have never had an experience in any corporate training where participants will not come because their parents won’t allow them”, rued T1. “I think this is going to be a frequent occurrence, so we better get used to it”, shot back T3.

The second challenge was the venue. It had to have enough accommodation to house the participants as well as the facilitators. Second, it had to have large enough open spaces for various activities, a room large enough for the participants to spread out. It had to have adequate security and finally it had to be reasonably priced to fit into the budget we had been allocated. The Administration Head threw up his hands in despair when I gave him the requirements. “You must really hate me to do this. You are asking for a Mercedes Benz for the price of scooter! This is impossible!”

But he did the impossible. He had seen a place which was about two and a half hours drive from the city of Delhi. Three of my team members went to check out the place. It was perfect. When I went to thank the Admin Head, he smiled. “You cannot even begin to imagine how I managed to get the place. I never thought I would be able to do it.” Well, Gurukool had not even started, but it was already making people do the impossible…

Finally the day arrived when thirty participants along with three facilitators, T1, T4 and T8 boarded the bus. I was accompanying them as an observer. The idea was that I would sit through the five days to see how it all went and then suggest course correction that may be required.

The journey was quite interesting. We had thirty excited people who had no clue about what they were going for, except that it was some kind of a training workshop. For most of them, it was the first time they had ventured out of home for such a long duration. Then we had three very nervous facilitators who were either looking at each other or staring into space, and finally there was I. Calling myself nervous would have been an understatement. Even otherwise, launching a new training initiative did give rise to a certain degree of apprehension, but this was crossing all limits. I have heard about how soldiers feel just before the battle commences.  I can now empathise with them.

The workshop began that afternoon, with T1 telling the participants that the program had nothing to do with their work, rather it was all about them. Immediately there were a few chuckles and some side whispers. Each one of the participants was looking at T1, and one could sense their cynicism and disbelief. How could a company not talk about work and business in a training workshop?  Breaking barriers would be much more difficult than we thought…

Later that day, T8 asked the participants what their dreams were. Two participants sprang up. “Why do you want to know about our dreams? Anyway what’s the use? We live in the real world! There is no place for dreams!” T8 persisted. One person stood up and said, “My dream is to survive in this world.” For the first time I saw T8 at a loss for words. Then T1 came to rescue. “If you got the means of survival, would you still not have any dreams?” The participant thought for a while and then replied, “Maybe then I would be able to dream about other things…”

It took a large part of that day for the three facilitators to get the participants to talk about their dreams. A couple of them opened up at first. Then a few more and finally the dam broke. One person had a dream of completing college. Another wanted to become a dancer, and yet another wanted to open his own restaurant. Some had dreams about being rich and successful, one wanted to be a good son to his parents and another wanted to be an artist. These were people who had dreams like the rest of us but had kept them locked because their circumstances did not allow them to dwell on them. T8 handed each participant a huge sheet of paper and colour pencils and asked them to express their dreams in a visual form. These then went up on the walls where they would stay as a reference for everything that would be done in the workshop.

At the end of that session, one of the participants walked up to T8 and said, “This is the first time someone has asked me about my dreams and this is the first time I am sharing my dream with someone. Please do not break them…” It took a lot of effort for T8 not to break into tears.

The next four days was all about reinforcing the belief that in spite of all their constraints, their origins and their issues, they had it in them to achieve their dreams. The day would start at 6.00 a.m. with long walk followed by yoga. Meals were planned using the same ingredients that they would normally have at home. Meal time conversations included giving information about nourishment and how to use the ingredients to make meals wholesome. During the day, it was all about activities and conversations. We talked about fears, strength of self-perceptions, possibility-search attitude. In the evening, we would have an open session called soap box, where the participants could express themselves in any way they felt like. Some sang songs, others recited poetry. Some talked about their future plans, and what they were going to do. We watched movies, staged plays and danced. To an outsider, the entire thing would have seemed like a total chaos. But there was a method to the madness. To a participant, who had not experienced anything beyond the daily grind, being able to sing in front of an audience and being applauded meant something that was extraordinary. Slowly but surely a change was taking place. The participants were experimenting with thoughts, ideas and actions. Where one of them faltered, the others rushed to give support. They were pushing themselves beyond what they thought were their limits, and they were forcing us to do the same. We developed a mantra, which would go on to be the credo for all subsequent participants of Gurukool.

Every Day in Every way, I am Getting Better and Better

In the five days, they shared their innermost secrets with each other. They shared their dreams, their fears, and their joys. They discovered that they were not alone in their circumstances. And suddenly their issues and problems halved. They were forming bonds that would hold for times to come.

“Dare to dream, dare to try, No goal is too distant, no sky is too high”, coached a young poetess participant to her colleague.

Every night when the participants had gone to their rooms, the facilitators would meet to discuss the days’ events. But beyond experiences and feelings, there was nothing more to talk about. No conversations about the workshop design or ways of improving it. We were no longer in control. It was as if the participants had taken over the whole program and were directing its course. As T4 remarked, “I no longer feel like a facilitator. These people are giving me much more than I can even think of giving them!”

As for me, the noble intentions of being just a silent observer just disappeared. I was participating as much as anyone else. I just had to live the experience. It was too precious not to do so.

On the final day, we referred back to the representation of their dreams. During the five days, some of them had undergone a change. The intention was to connect their dreams back to the real world. We need not have even tried. They were two steps ahead of us. They spent rest of the day planning on how they would go about the task of achieving their dreams in the big bad world!

Between 2006 and 2009, 2200 sales persons went through Gurukool. To make sure that other development initiatives did not suffer, we created a separate team to manage the sessions. This team was headed by T8.

The organizational response was astounding. I would get calls from the managers asking what magic we were doing. One of the managers sent a mail, “I really value you. I don’t know what you did in the five days, but I have never seen such enthusiasm and energy in the team before.”  Another one remarked, “It is always a manager’s dream to get a high energy and highly motivated team. Well, I have got it but it’s going to a problem for me. It is going to be a challenge for me to keep up with these people!”

For the facilitators, rewards were in the shape of small poems and notes that the participants wrote during the session. In one of the session, the participants were watching a movie, ‘Iqbal’. The story is about a deaf and mute boy named Iqbal who aspires to be a cricketer, and finally does so after a lot of struggle. At the end of the movie, T8 walked up to one of the participants who had a dream to become a cricketer and told him, “From today onwards, you are my Iqbal.” From that day, that boy signs his name and then adds Iqbal in brackets in all his communications. When somebody asked him the reason, his reply in Hindi was, “Is naam ke saath mere sapne bandhe hain aur mein inhe kabh bhulana nahi chahta hun.” (My dreams are tied to this name and I don’t want to forget them ever in my life)

I still have the notes that were handed to me during the workshops. Two of them are very dear to me.

Patthar ki murat sa

Khud ko apne mein liye

Bahar se anjaan
“Main” khud mein khoya baitha
Suraj ki abhed kiran bhi
Na chu saki mujhe
Khud se mein anjaan
Mein khoya baitha
Par
Ek muskurahat si awaaz
Ek kiran sa mukhda hai
Saamne aa khada
Baarish ki halki puhaar
Mitti ki bhini si mehak
Jagati hai mujh mein ek vishwass
“Hum” bhi ek jaan hain
Hum bhi ek kiran hain
Ab khud se anjaan nahi mein
Ab mein bhi akela nahi

Translation

A statue of stone

Keeping the ‘Me’ in myself
A stranger to the outside
I was lost in myself
Even the piercing rays of the sun
Could not touch me
A stranger to myself
I was lost
But
A voice like a smile
A face like the sun ray
Standing in front of me
Like a drizzle of rain
Like the soft scent of wet soil
Gives me a confidence
‘We’ are also life
‘We’ are also like sun rays
Now no longer a stranger to myself
Now no longer alone

Nirasha ke  ghere me asha ki aas liye,
Andhkar ki raat  me roshini ki pyaas liye,
Ulaahas  purn  tum atal vishvas
Khade raho jeevan ke taruvar mein…

Translation

With a desire of hope in the circle of hopelessness

With a thirst for light in the darkest of night
With joy and an unshakable faith in your heart
Stand in the waters of life…

"Its all about Motivation"

It was my third year in the Training Function, when one day our company’s business head barged into my office.

 “Nitin, my team’s performance is slipping. We haven’t met our business targets for the second quarter. I need a solution for this!”

 He looked at me expectantly. Perhaps he expected me to pull out a magical solution for his problem. If I could, I would have loved to do just that. But I really didn’t have even a practical solution, forget a magical one. So I kept looking at him silently.

 “Don’t you get it?” he asked sounding exasperated. “I want a motivational workshop for my team.” “What is a motivational workshop?” I asked.

 Believe me, I wasn’t trying to be sarcastic or humorous. I really didn’t know what a ‘motivational workshop’ was. The look I got was one of total disbelief and surprise.

 “What do you mean you don’t know what a motivational workshop is? I can’t believe that someone from the training function is saying this. Everyone knows what a motivational workshop is!”

“Actually I don’t. So help me. What is this motivational workshop supposed to achieve?”

He still didn’t believe that I was serious. “Achieve? It is supposed to motivate my people to put in their best and achieve their targets!”

 I didn’t know how a training workshop could achieve that. But I decided to find out. So I asked him to give me a couple of days and that I would get back to him.

 I called a few trainer colleagues working in other organizations to find out what motivational training was all about. The gist of what I got from them was, “Do a training program, preferably off-site to energise the participants. Talk to them about how their individual dreams will get fulfilled if they achieve the organizational targets. Like a football coach motivating the team before a big game.” I understood that. But that gave rise to another issue. How do you sustain that energy over a period of time? How do you make sure that the energy gets translated to output at work?

 I got several vague answers to that. The best one was, do another workshop in about three months. So motivational training was like that energy drink that they show in ads. An athlete has this drink every time he is tired, and he is ready to run another 100 meters in under ten seconds..

 It really didn’t make sense to me. Something was not right. So I went back to the business head and told him, “Look I really don’t know how to dothis motivational training.”

 He was angry. “If you are not capable of doing motivational training, I am going to get an external trainer to do it.”

 So he went ahead and found a trainer who took the team to someplace outside the city where they spent two days. Obviously disappointed with my response, I was not involved in the exercise. However, a couple of days after, the business head did drop into my office to tell me about it.

 “It was a great workshop. Really charged up my boys. You should have been there… learn a few things about motivation.”

 A couple of months later I bumped into our business head again. He looked tense. Naturally I asked him if everything was all right.

 “No, everything is not all right. Business is not picking up. Targets are not being met still and there’s a lot of pressure.”

 No wonder he was looking so stressed out.

 “So the motivational workshop didn’t work?” “I don’t know what’s wrong. They all seemed so charged up at the end of the training. But back at work, they were the same as before.”

 “Let’s talk about it. Maybe we can find some solution.”

 He looked sceptical. But maybe he was desperate enough to talk even to a trainer who did not know what a motivational workshop was. So he came to my office and sat down. It was an interesting conversation. At the end of it, I also learnt something about motivation.

 Me: Forget the word motivation for a bit. Tell me what you want your team to do.

Business Head (BH): I want my people to take ownership of their targets. I want them to do everything to achieve their targets. I am not asking for too much, am I? That’s what they have been hired for!
Me: And why do you think it is not happening?
BH: Because there is no motivation!
Me: I told you to forget that word. Think again…
BH (After a long pause): Because they are not taking ownership.
Me: You told me that. Why are they not taking ownership?
BH:I told you… there is no motivation!
Me: Please forget motivation… The word does not exist. Now tell me, why are they not taking ownership?
BH: I don’t know why they are not taking ownership. If I knew, I wouldn’t be sitting here!
Me: Ok tell me, what does taking ownership mean?
BH: This is such a waste of time! You know what taking ownership means!
Me: No I am dumb. I don’t know what taking ownership means. So please tell me.
BH: Look, I need to get back to work. I don’t have time for these silly games
Me: You have tried things that haven’t worked. Why don’t you give this conversation a chance. Maybe we will discover something that will work
BH (After another long pause): Ok….. So what do you want to know?
Me: I want to understand this word, ownership..
BH: Ownership… These people have been hired to do a job. They have to take responsibility for their jobs.
Me: And what do you do to enable them to do that?. .
BH (Almost exploding): DO?! Every day, twice a day I tell them to take ownership!
Me: What if our CEO also did just that? Just told you take ownership. Would it work?
BH: But that’s what has happened. The day I joined this company, he told me that meeting sales targets was my responsibility. After that I took ownership of sales and have been driving it.

Me: No he didn’t do just that. He also made sure that certain enablers were in place.

BH: What enablers? He does not tell me how to do my job!
Me: Well, he enabled you to create your own team. He made sure Operations team and the service team gave you the needed support. Systems and processes to ensure smooth functioning between departments, things over which you have no direct control.
BH: But these are things that are necessary. How would you otherwise run a business without them?
Me (Smiling): Exactly
BH (Now suspicious): What are you trying to tell me?
Me: Your team also needs certain enablers to do their jobs. It could be the right skills, or the right systems and processes, or even words of encouragement at the right time.
BH: Of course they have all these things!
Me: Why don’t you ask them?
BH: Ask them?! What do you mean ask them?
Me: Well your team is doing the job. They would best know what they need to do it effectively.
BH: (Another pause): I am desperate enough to try even this… But what about motivation?
Me: Come back when you have done this. Then we will talk about motivation.

He didn’t come back. The next communication I got from him was an invite to a party to celebrate achievement of the next quarterly target.

 I still don’t know about how to motivate others. I believe that you cannot motivate others. People drive themselves to do something. All another person can do is provide the right environment. I believe it is all about the enablers.