You have read the driver’s manual – now take the keys and drive the car!

It is an early week of a wet August in 2009 as I board a flight to Manila. As the Singapore Airline flight taxies down the rain soaked Ninoy Aquino International airport’s tarmac, I look around into the gathering dusk at the hazy silhouette of the adequately lit airport terminal – nothing much has changed since the ten years I have been travelling to this country! As I disembark, I literally zip thru immigration and customs, I thank my lucky stars that it is early week or is it that the efficiency of the airport has just got better! I had to find out. Frankly, I have had my trysts with destiny while trudging through the crowd at this airport during previous visits and they have indeed been a challenge! My last visit was a year ago - I half expectedly start peering out of the window of the hotel car that whisks me from the kerbside lounge as I am chauffeured down the well lit streets by a chauffer whose infectious exuberance that characterizes every Filipino has thankfully not altered one bit!

Manila did surprise me! The streets are cleaner, the traffic more orderly and as I discovered in the two days I spent there - a tremendous focus on urbanization, infrastructure development and employment. Singapore has always been an influence on the ASEAN. A visit to the Fort Bonifacio, an office, entertainment and residential district a stone’s throw from Makati Manila is a great example of this influence. I was at the Fort to meet a business contact ten years ago and all there was at that time was rolling, dusty & barren land left behind by an army garrison! What I see today is a spanking metropolis, tree lined boulevards, commercial and residential city scrapers with glittering glass facades and enough dining & wining options to keep a social animal spoilt for choice and occupied for a year! The place does reflect the orderliness, completeness and structure of a very modern metropolis! Well done Philippines!

During the couple days in Manila, my agenda was peppered with speaking assignments with customers and business partners and in getting seduced by the lucrative infrastructure development opportunities that the country presents that our organization with its technology can address. I took the time to meet some business associates who I have learned to trust as friends over the ten years that I have known them. It is great to be humbled by their progress and more importantly it was great to see them and share a drink or a meal with them and take a moment to talk about the nostalgic past and the exciting future. Absolutely fantastic!

Manuel Bobiles, Chairman & CEO of NetConnect Technologies (not the real names to retain privacy), a leading network system integrator is a man I have known and respected for long. Manuel came to Philippines years ago as a student, started NetConnect and grew it over the years into a multi million dollar technology corporation. One of the corner stones of Manuel and his organization’s progress is the way the organization hires, trains, grooms and evolves employees while preparing them to take on the challenges and opportunities that the ‘ever changing’ contemporary world presents. What Manuel does within his organization is also a subject very close to my heart!

I have been lately preaching the need to bring our workforce up to speed on workplace readiness and leadership development. I do believe that this is the single largest impediment that we face as a society to tackle the challenges that an increasingly complex workplace is incessantly throwing at us! As I travel around and ask any business leader what their primary challenge at work is, they do not blink an eyelash before saying – ‘people’. Well Asia has no problem with ‘quantity’ – it is the ‘quality’ that is the major concern! I am not downplaying the credentials or the capabilities of our educational institutions – there are many good ones and a few outstanding establishments in Asia. It is just that there is a very large divide between the environment that the typical Asian educational institution provides that an average student grows up in and the ‘work world’ environment that they face the first day they start at work. While the specialized tertiary institutes arm the employee with the hard skills to pursue the careers that they seek, the real gaps are in the soft skills department. Unfortunately, these soft skills or the lack of it within the new employees become glaringly visible as they start work and get them off on the wrong foot in the workplace. Many never recover from this less than desirable start while others pick up some steam as they go along but never attain their full potential!

The trick to get the best out of the people we hire is to choose the ones with the best hard skills needed for the roles that they are hired for - academic accomplishment and documented grades are good measures of these skills. In addition to these ‘hard’ attributes look out for at least some soft skills. Attitude, passion and communication are some that I rate very highly. I will double down and take on an outsider with unproven skill set in my team as long as they come with a ‘first class’ attitude – trust me, everything else builds from there. I have seen many a relative ‘outsider’ make it big despite multiple shortcomings riding on that priceless attribute – their Attitude! On the contrary show me one single achiever with a lousy attitude towards her trade and I will show you polar ice caps in the midst of sub terrain Sahara!

Besides practicing the concept within my own organization, I am recommending the business leadership community to spend time and effort in getting their people workplace ready as quickly as possible and reduce their time to productivity! The exercise routine that is needed to accomplish this is split into two logical parts. One, provide every employee with an opportunity to master the soft skills that they need to excel in their chosen profession. These could be interpersonal skills, operating in a crisis, managing and delivering on expectations, communicating upward, leveraging executives, goal setting – you know there are many! I prefer an analysis on the individual based on feedback from the supervisor, coworkers and the individual herself to determine the areas that need the most development rather than taking very broad swipes and not optimally utilizing the limited time outside of the job function that the employee will normally have to hone these skills! This analysis can be followed by a courseware routine – instruction set, group activities followed by an evaluation process to determine sequential progress. The courseware and its implementation can be developed and implemented within the organization (not the best choice unless you have the breadth, total commitment and the bandwidth to do so) or help from external providers with first class content and delivery consultants can be solicited. This done, most organizations stop at this stage and conclude that they have done a great job. Hardly!

Analysis and follow up development exercises may be great buildup activities to skill building but it is like taking a budding driver thru a well documented driving manual and then throwing the car keys at them and expecting them to drive effortlessly on the rain soaked streets of Manila! Hardly the right expectation! The missing link that most organizations overlook is a stint of ‘Mentorship’. Having an experienced campaigner who has all the battle scars sitting next to the newly minted, instruction manual trained rookie driver, showing the tricks while pointing out the pitfalls seems to me what makes the real difference and effectively closes out the learning process for life. The more sincere the mentor and the mutual engagement he drives with the student, more complete the education and the skill development of the student. Mentorship is not about a single session or even one involving days and weeks – it is an ongoing commitment that the student and the teacher need to sign off on to be able to see real results – fabulously fulfilling!

Manuel and his leadership team at NetConnect are committed to the development of the people they hire. They take away elementary employee concerns around healthcare for the employee and his family, basic amenities of life, small interest free loans for life’s little joys etc. Employees free of these little concerns and consumed by the care that the organization showers on them show up for work with absolute commitment towards their roles and responsibilities. What follows is high quality projects and services for NetConnect’s customers that naturally leads to revenue and profitability! An incredible formula! As we slug our last drinks for the night, Manuel does emphasize that asking his people to read a manual and drive a car would never deliver the results that his team is producing if it was not for the ‘mentors’ in his executive team who are jumping in the car besides the drivers and passionately sharing and helping elevate the ‘young turks’ to the next level!

I am hoping that more Asian organizations are doing something similar. If so our businesses and the people within will very soon start to look as slick as the glittering business districts of Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore or even Fort Bonifacio!
.