Developing 'Informal Leaders' Among Employees

Welcome to the Vantage HR Influencers Podcast. This podcast is sponsored by Vantage Circle, the leading employee benefits and engagement platform. Welcome to this episode of the Vantage HR Influencers podcast. Today I'm really excited to have Mr. Shaakun Khanna, who has more than 20 years of experience and is the Head of HCM Applications for Oracle. In this podcast we're going to talk about developing informal leaders among employees.

Rohit: Welcome to the show, sir.

Shaakun Khanna: Thank you, Rohit. Thanks for inviting me and having me here.

Rohit: I want to understand, how did you come into HR, and what interested you in stepping into the field of HR?

Shaakun Khanna: It's interesting, Rohit, since the topic of our discussion is how we develop informal leaders. I came into HR in a very informal manner. I started my career, and the initial ten years of my career I was in hardcore sales and marketing. Part of sales and marketing is also about training and development. That's where I got fascinated by the world of training and development. I actually started a sales training company of my own, and that's where I realized why leadership development is so important, critical, yet largely unaddressed in the market. So that's the space I got into. The rest is history. After running my own enterprise for a couple of years, I then went into hardcore HR consulting. So I am one of those HR consultants who has not really been an HR manager, an HR professional, but that's what my journey has been. The first seven, eight years of my HR consulting life were in hardcore strategy consulting, and now I deal with HR technology.

Rohit: Very interesting. I wanted to understand, how do you identify influencers inside companies who can be groomed to become informal leaders, and later on take a formal leadership role within the company?

Shaakun Khanna: So, Rohit, what is interesting about these influencers or budding leaders is that you don't really have to identify them. They are very, very visible. Ironically, a lot of managers and leadership teams out there are not very mindful. There are times when people misunderstand a person's capability and the leadership initiative that he or she has taken, and often that gets extinguished or buried under the expectations of a role or a job. So my first advice is that leaders and managers have to be very mindful and watch out for those people who are taking initiatives, who are the people that others would take advice from, who people would look to for influence. If a good manager knows who those people are in their team, that's the first step of identifying these informal leaders. The second step is where these people raise their hands for multiple volunteering opportunities and things that come their way. So it becomes imperative for leaders and managers to constantly create those opportunities so people can volunteer, and in the process these informal leaders can be identified. Most organizations' initiatives to identify these kinds of informal leaders are, truthfully, still suboptimal, and they don't really serve the program well.

Rohit: It becomes really important for young influencers going into these companies, especially with the millennial generation, to find the ability to stay engaged with a company for a long time. What are some of the ideas you would suggest for how to keep such leaders engaged, so they could have a much longer journey with a company?

Shaakun Khanna: First of all, Rohit, when you say a much longer journey, I think we will have to recalibrate our expectations around longevity. The reality is that the majority of people, even the non-millennials, will not want to work in the same role, in the same job, or even the same industry, forget about the same company, for a long period of time. So we need to set the expectations right. That being said, in order to retain your key talent and leaders, it's important to leverage the key levers of engagement. I think the first lever that is coming through very strongly is variety: are you able to create variety in terms of the work, the environment, and the opportunities for the individual? Because most people seek a new job, a new role, or a new industry because they are actually seeking variety. So most career paths now have to be laden with variety for individuals. That's the first step. The second step is flexibility. Now this new generation of the workforce needs to try out new things. A survey that Cognizant did found that 40 percent of people want all their weekends to be long weekends. I'm sure you've read recently that Google announced they would move to a three day weekend, at least for now. So these kinds of things are on the rise, and they will be critical drivers of engagement. Lastly, it's about meeting people's aspirations: growth aspirations, financial aspirations, and mobility aspirations, which are all very different now. They are accelerated. So you will have to look at creating much more accelerated career paths. If a promotion earlier was due after three years, or in some cases five years, it should come down to perhaps an 18 month cycle.

Rohit: All right, and how should we make such leaders align with the company's vision? You mentioned that the duration of their time at a company has shortened, it's not a 30 year journey anymore, it's more like a three or five year journey. What steps should such informal leaders take to align with the company's vision?

Shaakun Khanna: First of all, as you would have noted, a large part, some estimates say about 60 percent, of work now happens or will start happening on a project basis. So a long career path is almost irrelevant, because the majority of people are working on project teams, short term projects that last a couple of months together, and the team disbands once the project ends. One of the big things that organizations and individuals are struggling with is communicating the vision itself. Even today, the majority of people don't know what the vision of the company is, how they are contributing to it, and what is expected of them. Those three questions are still not answered properly, to my mind. People want meaningful work. Organizations set targets for them, but people aren't able to connect the meaning they are seeking with the targets they are supposed to achieve, and it becomes the role of the leader to define the vision, where the organization is going, how it will get there, and, more importantly, what each individual's contribution is. That still remains largely untapped and stays in an ambiguous area.

Rohit: You made an interesting point about project based work. If you look at the last 70 or 80 years, that's when the nine to five culture started in the US, but going forward we'll have a lot more project based, freelancing style work, something like what Uber contextualized, with gig workers, freelancers, and project based workers becoming more the norm.

Shaakun Khanna: Absolutely right. In fact, this whole pandemic has accelerated the invasion of gig work culture into organizations. Gig workers are actually secondary, the first step is the invasion of the gig culture itself. The majority of organizations are now looking at engaging more gig workers, not only at the individual contributor level or relatively junior levels, but even at much more senior levels. I know of somebody who started a company that provides CFOs to companies as a gig, so you could be a part time CFO to three companies. What's even more interesting is that some companies have already experimented with part time CEOs. So that's the kind of invasion of the gig workforce that has happened. A lot of people want to try out gig opportunities. We did research and found that this generation, 74 percent of these people, want to create multiple sources of income. That means alongside their regular employment, they would want to pick up a gig opportunity, and there will be a time when they no longer see the sense in committing to an eight hour or 40 hour work week, and instead move to an outcome based model. Interestingly, if you look at our experience during the pandemic, three things have happened. First, the concept of nine to five, or eight to five, or eight to nine, whatever it was, is irrelevant now. We are all working 24 by 7, yet we are all at home and not working 24 by 7. It all boils down to how we are delivering work. Second, the majority of organizations have realized that some of the traditional paradigms of work, for example office attendance or number of hours put in, are of no consequence whatsoever. A lot of organizations, specifically in the technology sector, have seen a significant rise in productivity when people are working remotely on their own. We've seen the behavior of people, at an aggregated level, change, where people are becoming more responsible yet working with more flexibility. So I think all these things put together, over the experience of the last six months, have definitely accelerated the invasion of the gig workforce culture in organizations. It has created a conducive environment, and most importantly, it has changed the mindset of people to start doing that.

Rohit: We had a previous guest on the podcast, an HR leader, who talked about how employees who were earlier recognized or rewarded yearly or quarterly, that's going to change, and it's going to happen the way it does for a lot of gig workers, where they're appreciated or rewarded on a real time basis. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think appreciation, rewards, and recognition would happen on a real time basis rather than waiting for a quarterly review?

Shaakun Khanna: I completely agree with that, because we are living in a world of instant gratification. Today you write a blog, you post it online, and within an hour or two you get all the appreciation, or whatever, right there. Gone are the days when you would submit something and it would come out in a magazine after three months, and you would sometimes not even know whether it was appreciated or not. So our lives are all about instant gratification, both in receiving and in giving. We don't wait for an appropriate time, so that's going to happen. More and more organizations are now building platforms and getting into rewards kind of platforms, and I'm sure you have also calibrated your technology and applications to make sure that instant rewarding is there. Of course there would still be ceremonies and milestones that get celebrated, a Nobel Prize will always be an annual event, it can't become an instant gratification, but when it comes to people working together day to day, I don't think anybody would have the patience, or even the mindfulness, to wait for a particular event and then reward people. We have a very short attention span, and things happen and disappear very quickly, so all of that put together means organizations must change their culture. In fact, many years ago I used to work for Gallup, and one of the questions we used to ask in the Gallup survey was: in the last seven days, have I received appreciation or recognition for doing good work? In those days it was very controversial whether seven days was too frequent. I believe that seven days has now become seven hours: people would actually look at whether they got something in the last seven hours, and if not, it was a wasted day.

Rohit: Going back to informal leaders, do you think such leaders should have KPIs assigned to them, so they can understand what's expected of them before moving into a formal leadership role?

Shaakun Khanna: There's a dichotomy here, because on one side you're saying informal leaders, and on the other you're saying KPIs, which is a very formal thing, so they don't really gel together. As a leader, if you put a KPI on me, then I want to be a formal leader. If it's informal, organizations can't have it both ways. Somewhere I feel there's a controlling mindset: organizations don't want to formally declare someone an informal leader, but at the same time they want to formally track KPIs. That's not going to work, neither at an emotional level nor at an operational level. As I said earlier, informal leadership is all about being mindful. Influence is therefore indirect, and it's up to the formal leaders and their own capability to define how observant they are, and therefore how they can qualitatively assess these leaders. As we work remotely, and that's a trend that will continue, most of these qualitative aspects will go away and everything will become KPI driven. So informal leadership has to retain a humane touch, intuition, a personal touch to it. That said, it can be formalized a bit by having some kind of projects or volunteering that can still be measured in a quantifiable way. But to answer your question, I don't think it's a good idea to have formal KPIs associated with informal leadership development.

Rohit: And how much time do you think should be allocated before moving such leaders into a formal leadership role?

Shaakun Khanna: Well, it all depends, because it's informal, you can't have a fixed timeline. One thing is that this generation is not patient. I remember many years ago in my career I was told I was ready for a new job, but I still had to wait about a year to get that formalized, which was essentially a big change or formalization of my leadership, and I patiently waited, as if I had planted a tree and the next year it would bear fruit. Not with this generation. Today, if you tell somebody they're ready today, but you'll reward them or give them the position a year later, trust me, you will not find that person a year later. These practices don't serve any purpose anymore. The other part is that organizations don't have, in my example there was no dearth of talent, there were fewer jobs and more people, so they had to wait for a seat to become vacant before I could move. But today that's not the case, there are opportunities both for the leader in question and for the organization, so the organization doesn't really have a choice. As soon as you realize the leader is about 80 percent ready, go for it, give it to them. Don't wait until they are 100 or 102 percent ready.

Rohit: And how would you build an ownership mentality among employees, especially with the younger generation, who might lose focus because there are so many different things and so much variety of choice available to them, particularly during a remote setup?

Shaakun Khanna: I think on one side, organizations have to be a little more ruthless, or let me not use such a strong word, but organizations have to be very objective. Six months ago, before this kind of scenario, before the global meltdown and job losses, millennials and incoming talent were spoiled for choice, and organizations were far more patient with them. In that process, some of them became, how should I say, a little irresponsible, in the name of the talent crunch and the war for talent, in trying to engage millennials, we ended up spoiling them, if I can put it that way. So I think it's time to continue giving all the great things we are giving, but at the same time make people responsible for achieving the objectives or outcomes that are defined, which ties back to my earlier point: the vision has to be very clearly defined, and the outcomes have to be clearly stated. During these times, and even going forward, it's very difficult to track what people are doing, so the more viable option for organizations is to track the outcome of people's work. Earlier, people had this notion that by virtue of their qualifications and the fact that they fit into a role, they were, in a sense, a gift to the organization. Now, we don't really know who you are or what you do, what you have produced is what matters. So I think the good news is that part of this responsibility will automatically shift, and part of the onus is on the organization to bring that discipline while still being empathetic yet objective with new talent, and to help the irresponsible ones step up.

Rohit: Interesting. I wanted to understand, what did you do to build engagement among employees in this kind of situation?

Shaakun Khanna: Luckily for us, if you look at it, we are an organization where flexible working was always a way of work. I don't think that at any given point in time we had more than 45 to 50 percent of our total workforce actually coming into the office, so that also means 50 to 55 percent of our people were already working remotely. So we had an advantage there, culturally. But I think, importantly, during these times, the extent to which an organization has to be empathetic needs to be very, very high. So we've become far more concerned about the well being of our people, and we're offering far more support, whether around ergonomics, mental health, physical health, and so on. The other thing we've done is look at how we can bring the extended employee, which essentially means the families of employees, into the safety net and support ecosystem we have. Because when I'm working from home, my work has invaded my house, and it's not a choice I'm exercising, it's a compulsion. So my family can't be shut away for the whole day, and I can't feel embarrassed about my dog barking or some noise coming from the kitchen. That's just how the world is evolving, and organizations have to be more empathetic. If you look at it, in the first few days or weeks, there were new kinds of control freaks emerging. I know of an organization where it was mandatory for people to keep their video on. Later they realized that was creating a lot of stress, so other organizations went ahead and said, if you're not comfortable, don't put your video on, it's okay. At Oracle, for example, we were doing a lot of these videos and Zoom calls, so we declared one day where nobody would have a Zoom meeting, essentially like declaring a day off, since a real day off doesn't really happen otherwise. We mandated that nobody would use Zoom on that day, so it's not that I choose not to log in, but my manager also couldn't call me. So we declared it like a no Zoom day, which was very encouraging and had great benefits from an engagement perspective. Those are a few examples I can share.

Rohit: You interestingly pointed out that before the pandemic, 40 to 50 percent of your people wouldn't come into the office. But do you foresee a fully remote setup for a company as large as Oracle? I know smaller companies have done fully remote setups, but what are your thoughts on this?

Shaakun Khanna: I think the big learning during the pandemic has been two things: one, the nature of the industry, and two, the size of the organization, have got no role to play in the evolution of this remote culture. I was talking to the chief HR officer of a large steel company, and he said they never imagined they could run a steel company remotely. When it comes to a technology company, everybody says this can be done, but they were able to do the same with a steel company. So, as I'm saying, the size of the organization and the nature of the industry make no real difference. To answer your question, yes, a lot of companies will move toward a more permanent remote working environment. It will definitely start with technology companies, because they're more adapted to being able to do that, but then it will spread to other industries. Some organizations have even gone ahead and decided to relook at the role their offices play. Facebook, for example, is now saying that the office might become a hub of social interaction rather than a place where work happens, so employees would do most of their work elsewhere but might still want to come in to chat, meet, and probably have a meal together in the office, just to feel good. I was earlier joking that there's a case for us to learn from Indian housewives: they have a concept called kitty parties, where they do nothing but catch up and have a meal together. That could be the new office, somewhere we go just to catch up and chat with people and have a slightly different taste of life.

Rohit: I want to ask, what's your favorite business book?

Shaakun Khanna: I have a couple of favorites, but these days I think the one I'm really fascinated by is Factfulness, more so in the current times, when data and information have become so important. So yes, my all time favorite is actually Factfulness.

Rohit: And do you follow any HR leaders?

Shaakun Khanna: Well, I do follow all the usual ones, but I'm particularly impressed by the work Simon Sinek is doing, and I follow that more diligently.

Rohit: Do you have any advice for young HR leaders, especially graduates coming out of schools specializing in HR? What advice would you give them?

Shaakun Khanna: I think a lot of people choose HR, at least in my generation that was the case, thinking they may not have to really run businesses or be subject to the strong pressures that come with business and operations. The only advice I have is: let go of that thought. If you want to succeed as an HR professional, you have to be a business professional. You need to roll up your sleeves, understand how the business runs, perhaps run a business yourself for a while, and be a contributing member to the business, not just to HR support. That's the only advice I have.

Rohit: Interesting. And what is the best way for people to reach out to you and learn more?

Shaakun Khanna: Follow me on LinkedIn, Shaakun Khanna is my LinkedIn profile. I also have a YouTube channel where I invite peers and friends from across the globe, much like you're doing with this podcast, to talk about all things related to the future of work. So go on YouTube, subscribe to that, and of course, if you're connected with me on LinkedIn, you can definitely reach out. Google my email ID or whatever, I'm very accessible that way, and all of you are welcome to connect with me if I can be of any help.

Rohit: So we'll put those in our channel show notes. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us about developing informal leaders.

Shaakun Khanna: It was a pleasure being here, Rohit. Thank you for inviting me, once again.