Yes, they are here to stay. What options do we have if we want to sustain our companies in the coming years? Baby boomers are thinning out. Generation X have about 10-15 years left. Let’s face it, there are not a lof of viable options.

Coming from the Generation X, I personally saw major differences in the work ethics of my generation and the generation Y or Millennials. I was even put in a difficult position when speaking to a group of Gen X and Ys for a water distribution company. I was invited to speak about Managing our Millennial workforce. Before even starting the talk, you could already feel the tension in the room. As the attendees walked into this huge meeting room, you will already notice the divide. Employees from Generation X started grouping together on the left side of this massive meeting table. The Millennials naturally gravitated to the other side.

As I did my talk, there was so much nervous energy in the air that people seem so controlled with the questions they asked. In the end, when I thought that it was over, the most senior executive from the Generation X side of the room raised her hand. She asked permission to raise one final question. I graciously said, ‘yes please’. Her question was ‘which generation was better? Generation X or Millennials?’ There was an extended silence in the room. I was caught off-guard with her question. After carefully crafting the answer in my mind, I replied ‘both generation had their strengths and weaknesses. However, if we can combine the passion and creativity of the Millennials with the experience of the Gen X then we will have a great work environment.’

There are a few fundamental problems in today’s workforce when it comes to multigenerational employees. The first mistake that comes to mind is that we label our workforce and it becomes ‘us vs them’. Employees are employees regardless of generation. Once we start labelling then we start creating a rift between the two.

The second fundamental problem is that both generations expect the other to make the first move to adjust. Like in chess we get a stalemate. Nobody will make the first move to accommodate the other. My advice? Let the more mature generation do the first move.

The third fundamental problem is that Generation X employees always refer to their experience. ‘In my days, this was the way we did things.’ I was in another Millennial talk for an organization of surgeons. At the end of the talk there was a heated debate between two Doctors. They were both in-charge of training future surgeons for their hospital.

The elder Doctor was clearly upset how Millennial doctors could not handle the rigor of their internship. He was complaining that the new generation of doctors did not bother with the long hours and the classroom type training. Their intern doctors had a turnover rate of over 80%. He was complaining that it is very expensive to train doctors through their internship program and the high turnover was not acceptable.

The younger Doctor expressed that his hospital too was in a similar predicament. However, since they were bleeding money as high potential doctors jump ship in the middle of their intern program, they decided to revisit how they were doing things. They started adjusting their program to suit Millennial doctors. Their intern attrition went down from a dangerous double digit to single digits. Clearly, they started doing something right.

The elder Doctor expressed his outrage as to why age old traditions in Medicinal training should be changed. The younger Doctor simply replied with a smile “If we did not change then we will not have any future doctors in the Hospital. This means that in a few years’ time, we may need to close the hospital.

With that, the elder doctor sat down but still indignant.

Regardless of how we feel about Millennials, they are here to stay. The question is how will we understand them so we can manage them better.

At AGMC, we have never had a consulting client that did not have a problem with teams working in silos. One reason for silo mentality is that company organizations are built around silos. Organizational charts are built around areas of expertise. We have silos labeled ‘IT’, ‘Finance’, ‘HR’, ‘Sales’ and so on.

Silos were designed around areas of specialties. However, the silo mentality can get out of hand at times. There comes a point that the silo thinks that their department is the center of the universe. The silos work is the most important above all other work in the company. When Department heads stops collaborating with other Department heads then the employees reporting to them starts following suit. Employees echo the behavior of their managers. Employees starts to slow down collaborating and working with others across other functions of the company.

The silo divide never start from the staff. The silo divide begins at the Department managers level. The entire departments behavior will always reflect the behavior of the department head. As the divide grows, the quality and timeliness of information between functions starts to slow down. Eventually, the silo gap has grown so wide that information stops to voluntarily flow across. This starts to affect the company. The gap affects the product and service that is delivered. The gap affects the quality of service that is provided to the customer.

We should never tolerate silo mentality in our companies. They are counterproductive and even destructive. We do not have multiple companies with multiple company Presidents lording over the silos. We have several department heads managing functions for one company. Multiple departments designed to collectively deliver the company goals and vision.

How do we close the silo gap? We can do the following things to close it.

First, we need to give the departments and department heads a unified vision. A vision where the work of each department is equally important for the success of the company. Department heads must be united under one company vision. A vision so compelling and exciting that people are pulled together to work as one entity.

Second, the employees must be unified and motivated intentionally to work as one. We can see this when companies organize team building activities, employee engagement and wellness programs. We can see this when collaboration across functions are not only encouraged but rewarded as well. Closing the gap is not an issue only for the department head. It is an issue that affect the entire company and has to be addressed accordingly.

Third, progress must be measured and reported. Like the adage goes ‘you cannot improve what you don’t measure’. Cross functional collaboration must be transformed from an initiative into company culture. Cross functional collaboration and teamwork must be encouraged and rewarded.

Only then a company functions as one organization will it be able to achieve it’s goals. Cross functional teamwork delivers success.

What does your company culture look and feel like? Company cultures have a strong influence on the success of companies. A strong culture attracts valuable human capital. A strong culture also encourages employees to be engaged. A strong culture challenges the status quo and innovates.

Rather than letting your company culture develop by accident, it is worth the effort planning and growing it deliberately and purposefully. These are simple yet difficult questions worth pondering. These questions are worth discussing and agreeing with your executive team.
* What do we care about?
* What do we believe in?
* What do we want to become?
* How do we want our company to act and make decisions in the future?

If there is a wide gap then we need clear actions and accountabilities to close the gap.

How is YOUR CULTURE defined in your company?

Linking seemingly unrelated ideas is an important trait of a great leader. The ability to see the possible impact of an action or decisions to other parts of the organization is vital in decision making. It is also a key ingredient in innovative thinking.

How to develop the ability to see the big picture? For one, only through lifelong learning can big picture thinkers generate enough materials to connect the dots. A Leaders vision cannot be mapped out clearly without big picture thinking. Predicting possibilities from different relationships cannot be done without big picture thinking. People who refuse to continuously learn cannot possibly be big picture thinkers. Learning can come in many forms; love of reading, observing people and events, stepping back and questioning our experience, formal training and so on. If there is no reference point to compare an idea with then how can big picture thinking happen?

Big picture and creative thinking is infectious. Spend time with big picture thinkers. Observe how they think. Observe how they base decisions on. I got the opportunity to observe this when I was in a meeting with both the CEO of a successful HMO company and its owner. The questions they raised were interesting. Their team focused the discussion around two things: the departments they are managing, the process they are currently using. The CEO questioned the status quo. Instead of focusing on incremental improvements on the current process, the CEO asked the executive to look at revamping the entire process instead. He asked how a completely revamped and improved process would affect the respective departments and improve the service to the customer. He stepped back and looked at the bigger picture. He questioned the status quo.

Big picture thinking is about asking the right questions. It’s about questions that challenge conventional thinking. It’s about questions that bring out the root cause of issues instead of accepting the first reason that comes to the collective minds in a meeting. Big picture is about getting the root of the question “why?”.

Finally, big picture thinking is about looking at events and situations through the lens of data. Data drives big picture thinking decisions of leaders while everyone else goes with their gut feel. Gathering data, looking at it, finding relationships between different sets of data, validating cause and effect through data is an important ingredient in big picture thinking. Decision making is made using data.

Do you want to go up the corporate ladder? Do you aspire for a key leadership role? If so then you need to develop your big picture thinking abilities. It is a pre-requisite to leadership success.

Are you a big picture thinker?

We often get sucked into the details for our day-to-day life that we get lost. Stepping back and looking at the bigger picture is a truly helpful exercise. Big picture thinking is a common trait among successful leaders. Getting stuck, holding on too much on the details and refusing to see the bigger picture is a very common behavior.

I had the privilege the work with a few great leaders both in my corporate and consulting life. These people are always on a very fast career or business path. They have the ability to climb to 10,000 feet for a helicopter view of events and situations. Once they have a good grasp of the big picture, they also have the ability to deep dive to the process level.

The core of big picture thinking is learning and experience. They are ‘learning animals’. They do not merely go through life. They ‘learn’ their way through life. They experience it. They learn from the lowest to the highest ranking employees. It does not matter to them what the learning source is. They simply seek knowledge. They are also proactively learning as they go. They are not afraid of looking silly when asking questions. You cannot connect the dots of the bigger picture if you don’t have an idea where the dots are.

They are also courageous enough to take the lead or make tough decisions despite the uncertainty. They can only soak enough data points and knowledge. They come to a point that they have to take a decision or action from what they know.

They are also courageous enough to challenge the status quo. What may have worked five years ago may not necessarily be the best today. The answer “this has been the way we have been doing it for the last few years” irritates them.

They are curios enough to go outside the normal boundaries. They will seek what other areas their decisions will impact rather than whats obvious. They ask questions like “Who else will get affected by this decision? What other departments will be involved other than what is mentioned?”

Do you want a more successful career? Start practicing “big picture” thinking. It will bring you closer to your ‘big dreams’ and goals.

Strategies are applicable to both the corporate and our personal lives. Without strategies or a structured approach to planning, we might as well float around in the ocean of life. Floating and waiting where our company, career or personal life takes us.

There has got to be more to life than waiting for waves influencing our direction. Well, there is something better and it’s not limited to companies. From October all the way through December, most of our engagements are for facilitating Corporate Strategies. It is interesting that creation of Strategies is not a normal exercise for a lot of companies here in the Philippines. It is a very important exercise that a lot of our local companies do not practice or do not practice well.

The art of creating or modifying strategies is simply looking a few years down the road and asking what will our industry look like in 5-7 years?

Both in corporate strategy and personal life, we often forget to focus on growth. Company strategies and personal goals are half-baked if they are not rooted in growth somehow. When designing business plans or new products we need to take into account scalability. Can my product, service or business grow? Will there be room for growth or is there a limit to the product and service I provide? This goes the same with personal strategies. Am I planning to grow in the coming few years? It is a waste of time to plan to be in the same situation for the coming five years. That is boring and meaningless.

Agile programming has become a recent hit because it allows the company to keep development projects moving forward. Parts of the application are being programmed or coded then it is immediately tested. The traditional “waterfall” approach was to write thousands upon thousands of programming codes before the system actually hits testing phase. This usually takes weeks and even months.

The same should hold true for strategies. There are no perfect strategies. Strategies need consistent reviews and adjustments. We cannot predict a hundred percent the effectiveness of our strategies. Corporate Strategies need not be written in stone. The same with personal or career strategies. There will always be at least two uncertainties. One, the soundness of the strategy. Two, our ability to execute it well. We need to keep our eye on these two in order to have a successful strategy and execution of plans.

Strategies are usually looked at as high-level concepts and activities. Like most things in life, it can be simplified. Simple is good. Simple works. Simple strategies bring better results.

Lately, I read something truly interesting from the book ‘How Google Works’ and emailed a few questions companies may need to answer to 36 Senior Filipino Executives and 3 Senior Foreign Executives. It was odd, but not surprising, that all 3 Foreign executives replied and only 1 Filipino executive commented on the questions.

Now, these questions are from one of the best-managed company in the world – Google. These are questions that drive Google leaders to think hard about where the company will be five years from now. These questions drive the strategies and policies they make.

If these questions are interesting and important enough for Google executives to have sleepless nights, why are they not enough to raise a concern from our own Senior Filipino Executives?

Is it because the best companies in the world are humbled by the fact that success does not last forever? Is it because we are focused too much on tactical and day to day operations to think about where we want to be and how to get there. Is it because we accept mediocrity? Is it because we find such questions too hard to answer? Is it because we have no sense of urgency? Is it because we don’t care enough about the companies we work for? Is it because we put our own agendas before the companies? Is it because we don’t know where to start? Is it because we are ashamed to reach out for guidance?

Whatever the reason, we need to resolve it. The questions are important enough to have the Regional Manager of a large Japanese conglomerate, the CEO of the largest Shipping company and the Marketing Director of one of the biggest software development company in the Philippines respond back.

The question is important enough to have Google constantly think, debate and come up with answers.

These questions may be important enough to have a second look and come up with possible answers. We then need to take these answers and implement them in our own businesses.

• Do you want your company to stay relevant in the near future, here are questions we need to answer

• What do the ongoing changes in technologies mean for our company?

• How will our industry look like five years from now?

• Do customers currently love our products or service? If not, what can be done better?

• How can our business be taken away by a smart and well-funded competitor?

• Is hiring great talent a top priority of our management team?

• What percentage of our new products or service are built on data?

• Does our internal decision-making process lead to the best decisions? Do we compromise our decisions to please most stakeholders?

• Are our employees free to try something really innovative for the company?

• Who does better in the company – information hoarders or information sharers?

• Do internal silos facilitate the sharing of information or restrict it?

“No business wins forever, it is inevitable. Some would find it chilling. We find it inspiring” Eric Schmidt

“How Google Works”
A book by Eric Schmidt & Jonathan Rosenberg, with Alan Eagle