Author: Pallavi Jha

The Purpose Of Purpose

They have journeyed from vegetable oil, to soaps, to medical equipment, and to IT Services. But despite all of those changes, they stuck to four constants that gave them “a clear sense of purpose”.

Today, they have an enviable record in Corporate Sustainability. They are a blue-chip stock and an ethical benchmark. Even two years after handing over the reins, their founder is in the spotlight for the right reasons.

If Wipro and Azim Premji had viewed their Spirit solely as profound words of no value — instead of using them as their Purpose — we’d all be living in a very different world.

The Mission of a company deals with what it wants to do, for whom, and why. The Purpose provides existential clarity on the “why”.

If we were to compare a firm to an actual human being, its body — which helps it think, move and express — is the Mission. While its heart is the Purpose, since it (figuratively speaking) adds an emotional or a philosophical dimension.

Last year, when the global economy felt the first wave of the pandemic’s repercussions, a study had a few things to say about what a strong Purpose translated into:

1.   Four-time multiplier for purchases.

2.   Six-time multiplier for public goodwill after a misstep.

3.   Four-and-a-half-time multiplier for getting championed by purchasers.

4.   A 4.1-time multiplier for customer trust. 

Purpose can also double up as a North Star for Agility. As depicted in this visual model conceptualized by Dale Carnegie, it works on three fronts: emotional (Resilience), psychological (Social Intelligence) and analytical (Tools and Processes).

Relate Before It’s Too Late

“To be interesting, be interested.”

Seventy four years have gone by since this sentence was first penned. But even today, these words from How To Win Friends And Influence People — a Dale Carnegie classic — ring true. Especially in the context of Social Selling.   

Social Selling has been ranked as the third biggest worldwide digital trend for 2022. In India, it’s a driver for a commercial ecosystem that could have a Gross Market Value of $50 billion by 2025. It’s a cornerstone for every organization which considers online presence as an avenue of growth. The entry of Meesho — which positions itself as a Social Selling startup — and 30+ other Indian firms in this year’s Unicorn Club has underscored one key element for success: building and maintaining strong relationships with customers is a bigger prerequisite than ever.

Social Selling is a process that can be used for expressing genuine interest in the customer; the first step towards forging such a bond.

According to LinkedIn (which has a metric for quantifying Social Selling prowess), leading implementers of Social Selling create 45% more sales opportunities than the rest. They are also 51% more likely to hit their sales targets.  

Social Selling, Not Social-Media Marketing/Advertising   

Owing to its coinage, Social Selling is quite often conflated with social-media marketing or advertising. But, there are two key differences:

a) Social Selling looks at leveraging brand presence for increasing customer engagement and nurturing new leads. In other words, building customer relationships takes precedence over immediate revenue generation.

b) While social-media marketing and advertising have more to do with the brand presence of a firm from a macro perspective, Social Selling focuses on sales personnel making use of their company’s visibility — and other factors — to foster leads in a relatively microscopic demographic.

A company using a paid Instagram post for promoting its organic coffee is an example of social-media advertising (or marketing). If a salesperson from the same company participates in a conversation on a coffee-lover Facebook group and sparks interest in the product, it is Social Selling.

More Social, Less Selling

In the context of the workplace or otherwise, we at Dale Carnegie consider relationship-building as an indispensable trait, be it from an interpersonal or an organizational perspective. Our research has shown that building strong customer loyalty through robust Relationship Selling practices can give sales personnel a 71 per cent sales-conversion edge over competitors, even if the latter are offering the best prices possible. 

These Five Cs sum up the process of relationship-building from a sales perspective:

1)    Connect: Establish initial trust. Use Qualifying Questions to gauge needs, and Credibility and Agenda Statements for creating transparency regarding your operational methods.

2)    Collaborate: Engage the customer by ascribing context to your informational exchanges with the help of the right Questioning Model. Use Summary Statements to show how you relate to their needs. 

3)    Create: Stress on the evidence at hand — facts, benefits, et al — to build on the relationship. The idea here is to move towards Trial Commitments, to get an idea of how far you are in terms of closing the deal.

4)    Confirm: Listen to any objections that the customer has, and respond appropriately.

5)    Commit: Ask the customer for an official deal confirmation, and use the appropriate details and resources to build towards it. Stay in touch, keep following up, and look for opportunities to expand your network through referrals.

While the nuances of Social Selling may vary depending on various situational factors, do consider these aspects as well:

a)     Status quo: Have a clear-cut idea of your brand and how it ties into your intended positioning, target audience and medium of outreach.

b)    Strong credentials: Reputation does precede people, especially when it comes to building trust. Get endorsements from previous professional contacts. Do your due diligence while sharing information.

c)     Flowing narrative: Spark topical conversations, and keep customers apprised about pertinent developments. Engage with your audience in an organic manner, instead of bombarding them with messaging solely intended to on-board them.

d)   Observations: Take cues from interactions and pivot your narrative in real time.

Shift happens. With the pace of our world today, business moves at hyper speed. While employees are more mobile than ever, the task of leading them still remains. The balance of understanding the needs of your people versus. executing business strategy has never been more challenging. Are you prepared to lead at the speed of today? If you’re a leader, being aware of the new realities is important.

Hybrid workplaces are one such reality. By bringing together employees in two or more ways, such workplace demands more valuable leadership. Today, a leader is no longer just one person. The African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child”, when interpreted in the context of leadership in hybrid workplaces, rings even more true.

For context, here’s an interesting statistic – A study conducted by Apollo Technical found 83 percent of businesses believe it is critical to develop leaders at all levels. Despite this, less than 5 percent of businesses have implemented leadership development at all levels. How can this be improved? 

Hybrid workplaces are governed by three guiding principles namely collaboration, innovation, and productivity. Let’s focus on collaboration. Collaboration is key for the 21st-century workplace, with its evolving knowledge economy. When inculcated among employees, collaboration can give workers a sense of purpose for coming to work each day. It can stimulate innovation by reducing competition between individual departments as groups work together to solve problems and also circulate new thinking through peer coachings.

Why peer coaching?

It is a learning and development system designed for organizations to promote teamwork and skills development which ultimately leads to individual and organizational growth. When two individuals with different levels of knowledge come together, they learn from one another and in turn help their team or organization grow by being able to see things from a different perspective.

Peer coaching is proven to be the most effective form of learning and development while also being cost-effective, results-driven, and quick. Though it is often referred to as mentoring, it is slightly different. Instead of the individual being mentored, both individuals take turns as a mentor and a learner.

Engage with your employees better.

According to a recent survey conducted by the Economist, 34% of respondents said that interruptions from colleagues were the most common reason they lost focus at work. Sometimes, leaders organize too many meetings in the hopes of engaging with their employees, which frequently backfires and leaves the employees feeling burned out. How can leaders deal with this situation?

There is a fairly new concept called Small Moments of Engagement that helps leaders groom their employees with training, education, and motivation.

What are Small Moments of Engagement? More importantly, how do you define them? Small moments of engagement are friendly, everyday interactions among employees that make them feel good about their work and company. They encourage greater productivity and performance, lower turnover, better morale — all of which benefits the organization. What makes them especially effective is their imperceptibility. They’re so subtle that recipients don’t realize why they feel good – this is because they like to be engaged with in genuine ways that bring the team together. 

Build skills to match the current environment

The future of learning hints at a need to build skills to match the current work environment. Organizations require a unique approach that provides a structure for developing not only IT skills but also soft skills, helping them transition from a process-centric to a team-centric environment.

To do this, educating people on how they fit into the bigger picture is the best way to start. After defining their role, leaders can build skills to match the current work environment. Quick response learning will help leaders bring their skills to match their changing workplace.

Is hybrid workspace just another trend that will fade away?

All said and done, the hybrid work environment could also harm workers’ social lives with fellow employees, making it more difficult to collaborate or seek workplace advice from their managers. Some people might experience difficulties switching seamlessly between the two workplace environments because there would be no clear boundaries distinguishing home time from office time. This type of workplace will need to make sure people clearly understand the benefits and consequences. Managers, in turn, will need to tailor leadership styles and coaching techniques to workers with hybrid needs.

It’s hard to say how long the culture of hybrid workspaces will last. For the moment, the draw of a work-life blend is strong. However, as employees spend more time working outside offices, they may start to miss certain things about working in an office or they may adapt and find new ways to make their hybrid arrangements work.

This raises the question of whether workers will ultimately reject the hybrid work environment. Given how new the model is, research on its advantages and disadvantages has barely begun. But it is apparent that this shift is reducing workers’ quality of life, their time with family, their sleep hygiene, and even their health. Employees also fear that their work will go unnoticed.

All of this leads to the imminent question – will employees eventually move away from this way of working? The answer depends on how the leaders pave the way to success.