EPISODE 03 INTRO
In the final part of the Contra Minds Timeless Wisdom series, I continue to reflect back on my conversation with Kumar Vembu. In this episode, Kumar Vembu makes a profound statement that if you want a frictionless experience for your customers, you have to remove friction within your teams across the company.
This, he says, was a part of the larger digital transformation initiative that he undertook in his company, which he outlined as a vision of being a zero-follow company. He then shares a lovely idea of resigning every night as a CEO and reappointing himself to break mindsets and attachments to some of the decisions he made in the past. I thought this was a truly powerful idea I have never heard of.
Q8 Building a Zero Follow-Up Organisation
Swami:
Great, great. So, you know, one of the things that I found interesting Kumar is you talked about digital transformation of your own company. And you said we had five levels in our company. And, you know, once we did the digital transformation, we have broken it down to three levels and there is no full time manager in the company today. So there is only a, you know, there is only a player, a coach, a mentor. And that’s really how you have changed it. So talk to me about how digital transformation affects the culture and how this change has been enabled in the organization. This is a very, very important insight that I got.
I wanted you to talk about it.
Kumar:
See, I think there are two, three things right. When we started doing this, so this along with that measuring the emotion and addressing challenge and all the happiness first, everything happened parallelly. That means that the stated intent is that, you know, every team member in the company should have a frictionless experience. We don’t want friction in doing your job. And only if internally we are frictionless, we can give a frictionless experience to customers.
We cannot have a lot of obstacles and challenges and huge friction in how we do the work internally and for the outside, we cannot give a totally frictionless experience. So that means that this ownership mindset is important. I did, you know, identifying where there are frictions. So we did a lot of process reengineering and how to empower the people. Because many times friction is caused or work is paused because I’m not empowered. I have to go and take approval or I’m waiting for somebody to tell me to go ahead or something like that.
So how can we make people empowered? Right. So how much additional responsibility or authority we can give people in responding to a situation. So we looked at all that and how do we make sure information is available at finger tips for people to make decisions, you know, in our mobile app. So how can we, what are all the things we are doing outside of the system. For example, certain communications are kept in emails or certain things shared with customers are in Excel sheets or Zoho sheets. How can we bring those into the system so that there is one version of truth in the system.
Right. And how can we bring the clarity or simplify the role? Where the role is too broad. How can we narrow down the role and create multiple roles? How can we create focus? And most importantly, how do we help all the people make decision to say no. Right. So if I’m doing something which is very high priority, somebody is coming and asking me to do something else. Right. So I encourage people all the time to say no. Meaning, you know, and then we can have a conversation whether what is, you know, this request that is coming is more urgent and higher priority or what you are doing is higher priority. Right?
But just like that, because your coach is telling you or I am telling you, don’t drop what you are doing and jump into what I’m asking you to do. Right. Understand. And if you have to drop it, go back to the other guy who told you the earlier work. Discuss why you are dropping. What is the urgency of this other work? Keep the people informed.
And in the process, we came up with, you know, I came up with a concept called zero follow-up. That means we want to be a zero follow up organization. Because what is irritating for people is, you know, a manager to manage his own anxiety, coming and asking every one hour what happened. Right. So now you have to do the work and you have to keep your boss informed of what is the progress and what is the status. Right. So if we have to be zero follow up, then people have to know when to ask for help. How to, when to update status. Right.
So in many of these things that we have, we have made a significant progress in the last few years. But we are, we still have, you know, many things to improve on also. So I give ourselves a 7 on 10 or 8 on 10. And the 10 gets, keeps getting redefined because of our experience, the depth we can go and things like that.
Q10 Designing Leadership That Stays Employable
Swami:
One of the points that you said, you know, digital transformation, you did not, today you don’t have a full time manager. So therefore, what does say a senior person in the company, when you say mentorship versus coach versus, you know, a player, how do these, you know, start playing in, you know, in development, in product development, in, you know, support, in, you know, marketing, sales. Therefore, how does this change? Because I think this concept of a manager almost sounds like, you know, if I manage 3000 people, I am supposed to be competent. Right. So therefore, that is the thing that has actually been built into people’s head. Okay.
So I don’t need to have any competency, but I have to manage people. Right. So therefore, for me, it struck a bell and therefore, I want you to spend some time saying, why did you remove this full time manager role? And therefore, how, what do you do to ensure that this happens right in the company?
Kumar:
See, the moment you remove follow up, you know, what is left in a manager’s job.
Right. We have to look at that component, right. Because a significant portion of, see why, you know, middle management people, see every time there is a trimming of the workforce or layoff in our software services, people always talk about the middle management people getting laid off. And a lot of those middle managers are unemployable in the industry, because they might have been rockstar programmers before becoming a middle manager. But if they have spent five years as a middle manager, they have become an expert in Excel and they have become expert in following up. Right.
So that is why, you know, the problem comes. So we talk about it openly to people. We don’t want to be like that. Whether you are a 10 year experienced manager or 20 year experienced manager, you know, any day you are not happy here, you must be able to find a job within a day. Otherwise, it’s an insult to me. Right. So that is the theme we continue to talk about. Right. So that means it is very, very important, right, if you reduce the follow ups, because follow ups create stress, follow ups create unhappiness.
So now we try to make everybody, in fact, we follow this, everybody manages something. So, for example, in a development team, if there are five projects scheduled for this weekly spread, you can say most of those five projects, all the five projects will be owned by some team member or the other. Right. So the reporting manager kind of a person is only a facilitator there. The projects are owned by different team members. They do the project plan for that project. They conduct the stand up of that project, whether it is a cross functional team or within the team or whatever. Right. And things like that. OK.
Now, this traditional manager’s job is to coach. That means if there is a critical challenge, how can he do joint work with the team member? Right. How can the manager review the plan and to make sure the plan is very good? Everybody’s responsibility is very clear. You know, the milestones are very clear. The plan is very agile. Right. So the manager spends in, you know, contributing to every project by reviewing the plan, by working as a team member in some of the projects, by doing joint work with some of the people in the plan. Right.
Maybe by reviewing the requirements and giving feedback, reviewing the test plan and giving feedback. And these reviews and feedback are actually coaching. Right. So that is how, because, you know, most of the projects also get front loaded. We spend more time in the requirement stage and planning stage and use cases review or what we call as BDD or TDD reviews. The later stage follow ups can be totally eliminated because the team is very confident of executing. And there is visibility on what needs to be done during execution phase. And this coach can take his eye off in the execution phase. So the coach actually spends on, you know, uses experience to front load every part of the work.
So same thing happens in sales. So our sales managers listen to recordings of demo, recordings of calls and coach the person. Or they go to the customer calls where they observe how the person is doing and help him, you know, get coached. So I would say that joint work is very important.
Q11 Resigning Every Night to Stay Relevant
Swami:
Great. So I’m going to ask you a last question, though I had lots of questions. I think I overshot that time. So this is largely a culture discussion, which, in my opinion, is absolutely gold as far as I’m concerned, what you said. You said as a CEO, as a founder, you resign every night and reappoint yourself every morning so that you don’t defend your decisions. Talk to me a little bit about it. And why is it important for senior leaders to do this?
Kumar:
Yeah, I think, see, many times we get attached to, you know, what we already know or what we have already done. And the market is changing so much. The customer expectations are changing so fast. New threats or new opportunities are emerging every day. So how do you you know… I take my responsibility as, you know, there are, let’s say, today, 350 team members with us. Right. My responsibility is to their career. Right. So that means my first responsibility is any day they are not happy, are they able to find a job next day? Right. That means we have to continuously make sure we are aligned to the market, not only as a company, as a team member is also what we do. Right.
So that is very important because that confidence is what will help us build better and better products, offer better and better service. So if we have to be relevant in the market all the time, I think we have to spend some time looking at where is the market going? And if I am an outsider, how do I see myself in this new market? In fact, I love a quote by Narayana Murthy, right? He says progress is the distance between the mind and the mindset. So even when you know a reality, right, your mind can acknowledge the reality, but your mindset will fight it. So when you resign in the night, right, you basically put your mindset to a little bit of a rest. Right. You openly look at, you know, where are you? You know, are you going to be relevant six months from today, one year from today, five years from today, 10 years from today? Right.
And if I have to be relevant five years from today, I know if I am going down the same path, I will be obsolete in three years. And if I have to be relevant in five years from today, what should I do differently? What course correction I have to do? What new initiatives I have to start? What investment I have to do? So it becomes easy to make those decisions. Because we keep reading a lot of things. So the mind does acknowledge the reality and the future. And by resigning every night, I make sure, you know, I also act on what the mind is acknowledging as the reality and new future.
EPISODE 03 OUTRO
Thanks for listening to the Contra Minds Timeless Wisdom series. I hope you really enjoyed the unpeeling of the timeless wisdom from a conversation with Kumar Vembu. If you like this episode, do comment, like or share it within your network. It helps spread the message and get us more people into the contra-minds community. Thanks for listening.
