5 Levers to Optimise Learning

“Nothing is ever Achieved without Enthusiasm”, Emerson

Ever wondered how Uber, ANT Financial (Alipay), Xiaomi, DiDi Chuxing, or Airbnb turned into world's largest unicorns in 2017 (and yes, please note that 3 out of 5 are actually from China) ?

Perhaps it was the early market lead, a disruptive technology, platform inspired business model, successful fund raising rounds or simply favourable government policies. Each firm hacked growth based on different mix of factors but shared one similarity. Their leadership and workforce was able to keep pace with the supersonic growth and recalibrate repeatedly to the next future state.

Entrepreneurs whom are in constant pursuit of new knowledge and finds a thrill in the perils of solving difficult business problems are effective learners. They promote sharing of information, inferences and team collaboration for optimal execution of every business function. Making optimising learning capacity of individuals and teams in organisations an imperative measure in driving and sustaining growth. A metrics closely observed by leaderships and funding ventures alike.

Technology to Assist and Augment 

Businesses operate in an extremely fast environment today, where advancements in consumer gadgets and enterprise technologies have enabled us with massive computing power capable of deciphering quintillion bytes of data in nano seconds. Artificial intelligence and machine learning is further sophisticating automation of softwares, machines, neural networks, robots and humanoids.

Ignoring such developments and their benefits in assisting and augmenting work in sectors such as health, legal, high tech, retail and financial will only leave the business irrelevant to market over time. Instead every technology disruption provides a purposeful learning opportunity to move higher in the work chain that should be embraced.

Make Sense of Data

Similarly online business models, platforms and devices are flooding us with data and information. Researching a customer or partner, means pulling and collating information from various sources internal and external (e.g. within the enterprise walls, certified agencies and what is available publicly).

Using analytics to make sense of the different data sets and correlation to business helps to build better reasoning for business cases, speedily scratch the surface of critical operational issues, dive deeper into situations, or anticipate an upcoming threat (or avoid the ‘boiling frog’ phenomenon). It expands cumulative ability to uncover answers to inherent business questions and expose unchartered frontiers for seeking new understandings. This improve resources allocation and focus for all the right business activities in product innovation, sales, marketing and support.

Practice Problem Solving

Growing startups exposes entrepreneurs to various types of business constraints. Some problems are clearly defined with goals, while others are inhibited by vagueness, thrusting us into a panic zone. The iterative process of identifying, classifying, defining, diagnosing, understanding and breaking down the problem, results in expansive mental progress that improves strategies and methodologies in problem-solving over time.

However, exhausting teams with repetitive problems (which is a target for complete automation anyway) will only erode this cognitive exercise to an inertia. Instead refocus them to address complex challenges, where the process of active revealing and listening in search of a solution mechanism takes place. It is here, where many startups stumbles over a lead, growth engine, untapped market, or a golden opportunity to gauge market share from conventional players.  Riding back on the iceberg parable illustrated in the previous point, the deeper you dwell into business inhibitors, the more questions you will uncover. The journey to answer these questions will lead to breakthroughs.

Failures multiply Worth of Lessons

It's bizarre but success and failure lies in the same direction. Success is reiteration of adjustments made from failure to failure without ever loosing the excitement for the venture.

If Abraham Linchon would have shied away from numerous disappointments and feared the angst that may arise, it would have taken a lot longer to abolish slavery and build a modern America. If Nelson Mandela would have stopped fighting apartheid in South Africa at the thought of being imprisoned for life, South Africa will still be torn in civil wars and severe human rights crisis.

Failure teaches value of resilience, focus, reflection and to bounce back stronger each time a pursuit hits a dead end. Only by apprehending the lessons of defeat, one can gain clarity to amend path forward and avoid repeating mistakes. In fact, no one successful is ever reserved from having to confront calamities, criticism, and temporary standstills. After all, success is sweet when you can tell a story that can inspire others.

Performance Support Tools

Performance support tools, such as collaboration platforms, portals, advance analytics (including bigdata), case and content management solutions (e.g.  JIRA, G Suite, Slack, Asana, and other SMB SaaS Services) that are integrated across the various business functions in the organisation is a great way to distribute and update team members of newly available learning assets. In addition, the design and representation of these tools across functions can influence how quickly complications in process or product can be resolved.

The Act of Perfecting the Game

Using the levers mentioned above will speed learning pace and get us quickly to the deeper composite nature of any business riddle. This creates more room to effectively piece personal mastery with cumulative learning assets garnered from others in a collaborative manner. Pushing teams to increase adoption of core capabilities to understand complexities, prioritising what matters most and develop effective conversations to perfecting the game.

Practise does make us perfect (or at least better) but equally important is to break away from bad habits of not seeing the big picture quick enough, getting stuck in management myths, or living in a delusion that learning comes with experience (The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge). As they say, you can’t gain without pain or by being oblivious.

Finding the Right People – The “5 Questions, 90 Minutes Conversation” Rule

Finding Good Talent, Remains a Challenge for Startup Community Everywhere

Whether it's China, U.K. or the US, hiring good people continues to be a painstakingly difficult task to accomplish for startup community, due to a number of reasons. A limited domestic talent pool, disconnected talent networks, competitive market and even public policies, are just some culprits to name.

Recruiting is a time and resources intensive business activity, especially for businesses that are in midst of scaling for new growth. The process of identifying the right candidates in terms of expertise, behaviour, attitude and compatibility with work culture is arduous. But asking over recycled interview questions and employing self-discriminating filtering criterions, will only lead to a suboptimal process that eliminates much of your “A Team” potentials.

Interview Questions that fails to extract useful Candidate Informationh

For a start, we should question why executives tend to use the same 10 to 15 standard interview questions, that we so often find on the Internet, if every business has a different DNA? Even worst, when the same questions are repeated by several executives in different cycles of the job interview. Shouldn’t questions prompt response to reveal or demonstrate the qualities that you are seeking in a candidate?

Questions, such as “What is your strength, weakness or tell me about yourself ?” existed since the seventies. Back then, there were no social media, mobile devices, cloud, or widespread Internet service to submit applications online. These questions were created at a time when most job seekers carried their printed CVs  into walk-in interviews. Many of the questions asked by hiring managers today are redundant and is only an echo of the CV which was also used to filter for the first interview.

Start by Outlining Assessment Criterions and Expectations

Preparing interview questions starts with the listing of categories of expertise, qualities and traits you are seeking in the ideal candidate for the role you intend to fill based on the responsibilities and expected outcomes. You also need to factor in a weightage to the criterions to assist in decision making process (e.g leadership – 20%; sales – 30%; pipeline management – 30%). This process should be initiated even before the job advertising begins, to ensure that the adverts clearly communicate key requirements and will serve as a guidance for candidates to respond accordingly. For example, if you are looking for a senior enterprise sales hire for large deals, the following can serve as the baseline for your expectations;

Listing the criterions helps to keep focus on what really matters and fully utilise the interview cycles to gather incremental information on the shortlisted candidates. The filtering criterion shrinks and expands your talent pool. For instance, by inserting ‘startup experience’, as a necessary filter, you may automatically turn away from other credible candidates with a broad background in building businesses from ground up. As such, practicing a bit of caution as to how the criterions will impact your search is necessary to avoid over filtering very early in the process. Phase the filtering based on the weightage.

Align Interview Questions with Business Requirements

Once you know what you are looking for, designing the interview questions is swift. Ensure, that the questions are geared to obtain information according to criterions that you have set and prompts spontaneity from candidates. Spontaneous reactions are reliable benchmarks on how one would react to situations in reality. Thus, reveals a lot more about the candidates’ true character and attitude to their surroundings in stressed or difficult situation.

You don't need many questions, use "Let's Kopi's" 5 Questions, 90 Minutes Conversation rule to substantiate constructive conversation in each cycle. Ensure the questions are phrased cleverly to extract and capture incremental information on the candidates in each cycle. Also, allow for clarifications and subservient questions from both parties, in between. For example, falling back on the previous sample of criterion above, the following questions can help pull the necessary information;

1. What can you tell us about the market you are currently covering?
2. How does enterprise technological advances e.g. Internet, web, cloud, mobile devises, AI, AR/VR and etc. are affecting your role and the sales process?
3. What are some of your favourite projects to date and why?
4. Describe how you manage a crisis situation ? E.g a team member turns into a loose canon in front of a client during a crucial meeting.
5. Moving forward, what is a lucrative deal to you and what strategies you employ to stay ahead of quota requirements?

Apart from being a good instrument in helping the hiring team to match candidates’ skills, expertise, attitude and character;  these questions serves as a blank canvas to the candidate in demonstrating creativity, communication maturity, conflict management, negotiation, curiosity, intelligence deployment, exposure to various situation, relationship building and their unique differentiators that sets them apart from other candidates.

Smart Companies Develop People for Tomorrow

Good people will continue to be the success foundation of startup businesses, no matter how much automation and digitalisation infiltrates the future. Making scrutiny of the interview process, imperative. Just following the increasingly “talent only” focused best practises of larger companies puts startups at risk of not having the right team in place to take on opportunities and grow the business.

The wide-spread adoption of SaaS HR services, to a certain degree is adding to the problem as most systems simply mimics processes of large enterprises instead of allowing the flexibility in creating the right filtering tools, assessment criterion, flows or interview execution functions suitable for startups.

Your business success, lies on your ability to pull high potential individuals that you can cultivate. People who in return, turn themselves into the backbone of businesses to deliver business functions that maximises outputs of human, machine and carbon resources. So pay close attention; dare to flip outdated processes and tools; search for balance between talent, traits and potential.  Envision a future workforce optimised for learning, to ride a highly competitive tomorrow.