I was at the association get-togethers held every quarter and today the invited speaker was my friend Mayur, the HR head at Alkal Ltd, one of the large companies headquartered in the city.

I watched with a smile as Mayur began the success story on how his organisation had been transformed in the last three years with a culture of candid conversations. With a hint of mystery he credited the success to the ‘Iceberg' concept. As he proceeded to present with a flourish, I recalled our first conversation about the ‘Iceberg'.

It was mid-July some three years back and Mayur was sounding more than a bit worried. As HR Manager in charge of the Northern region and nearly 50 managers, he had just wrapped up the annual appraisals and it appeared that he was about to launch into the usual lament that I have come to recognise around this time of the year.

“The senior managers are convinced that they have done a great job and been fair in handling the process. When I meet reportees, they have a totally different story to tell. Sridhar, I really cannot understand how the perceptions about this process can be at two diametrically opposite sides,” he cried.

I could easily list the reactions that he'd have faced from the line managers —

‘Last year he gave me a ‘B' and, hence, this year I get a ‘C'. After all, he needs to distribute the good ratings across the department, isn't it?'

‘Does it really matter? It's merely a percentage point change in terms of my salary.'

‘In any case, it does nothing to me. I continue to do the same thing I did last year.'

“This keeps repeating year after year. Something is just not happening. We continue to live in this make-believe world that all is hunky-dory, while the organisation is struggling to retain key talent for today and tomorrow. I am tired and done with playing the fall guy in all this,” he concluded.

I thought it was time to put an end to this lament and try to make him look at the possibilities. “I hear you Mayur. And I hear the hidden question — Is there anything at all I can do? To that my answer is, “There definitely is.”

“I would invite you to look at this not as a frustration but as an opportunity — the opportunity to inspire people; to bring about change; to engage them so that they understand the organisation better. You could look at it as a chance to hold up a mirror to the behaviours that have become obstacles to growth,” I continued.

“Yeah, all that's great in theory Sridhar and after all your efforts, what you finally get is zilch,” said Mayur, interested but far from convinced.

“Have you talked to your training and development department about working on this?” I tried to change tack, but to no avail.

“Sure, I did, and they come back with their own concepts of 360 and how it's important to give feedback regularly and all that…” Mayur launched into another harangue.

“Do you know about the Iceberg?” I interrupted him mid-sentence. He seemed more than a bit flustered, though he responded, “I know only the iceberg in the movie Titanic, but what about it now?”

Happy to get a chance to steer the conversation to a positive note, I continued, “I am referring to just such an iceberg — the behaviour-belief iceberg. Beneath behaviour is a set of beliefs.” “What is the connection here?” Mayur seemed confused.

“You need to consider the iceberg when you look at people also. What is on the surface – the behaviour is the tip of the iceberg and that is emerging from a much larger, invisible but very powerful base of beliefs. Are there some core beliefs that are central to the people in your team? When you address them, your desired behaviour will emerge. So, when you are looking for change, you don't look at behaviours, but need to look at beliefs which are the drivers in this case. You might want to consider whether your actions to bring about this change in feedback and appraisals have been engaging the beliefs or the behaviours,” I clarified.

It appeared Mayur found the light. “Ha Sridhar, now I get it. It looks like we have been attacking the wrong end of the spectrum, i.e., the behaviour. Now we should figure how we can change from the belief level.” That was three years back. Now at the Forum, he was presenting the journey of Alkal on this interesting quest.

On getting back, Mayur curbed his urge to rush through a proposal to take this Behaviour-Belief battle head-on right up to the board. He had ingeniously brought together a band of dynamic managers from sales, finance, production and HR to a brainstorming session. At the end of a lively session of different views and divergent solutions, they all had agreed on one thing. That it would be best to work with an organisational consultant. In addition, Mayur ensured that they committed their support to whatever plan resulted from this. Things moved a bit soon after that. Mayur sought out an old hand at organisational consultancy Veda Krishna, who had earlier worked with the board and had their implicit trust. Working with Veda, he had put together a proposal to review the role of people assets in the competitive advantages that Alkal was driving since the last four years.

The round table discussion with the board and the CEO, Anand Kannan, anchored by Veda marked the first milestone in Mayur's presentation that evening. Skilful facilitator that Veda was, with insightful questions and provoking statements, she brought the discussion onto a self-discovery mode. It was not long before the wise minds at the table narrowed down to the fact that ‘Sustainable advantage' for Alkal from the current state of growth and stability can only result from enhanced capabilities at the collective and the individual levels; and then on to how to build these capabilities. Much to the delight of Mayur, the top management wholeheartedly committed to go the whole hog and gave a free hand to Anand to script his way ahead. They also were keen to have this completed in 18 to 24 months.

Building capabilities as a sustainable advantage was easier said than done. Based on the recently concluded employee engagement survey and the brainstorming session, Veda boldly presented to the board the bottleneck in this pursuit — honest and timely feedback. Even as the company had been progressive to adapt a lot of the newer practices in manufacturing and management, the one vestige of the olden days was the entrenched belief that honest feedback would amount to disrespect.

This was the ‘Iceberg' insight that Mayur and Veda wanted to address. In a following strategy session discussion with Anand, they worked on two key organisational actions that would help change this belief-behaviour continuum — An enterprise-wide mindset change programme that would work at the belief level and a conscious road map for all hiring and training programmes that would incorporate the change into every activity.

Veda prepared for a stormy beginning to the mindset change programme designed to present the advantage of honest and candid conversations in building capabilities.

It was Anand who came up with the most powerful third anchor for the entire programme one day. “Veda, I think it's important that I put all my weight behind this and visibly. And that too taking from your Iceberg model only — our managers are more likely to follow the leader than a set of new things individually on their own. Who better than me to start this process? From today, I am planning to start ‘Being the change'. It's going to be honest feedback for all my direct reportees and God help that they don't faint when they see the new me. Without this, your mindset change programme will take too long and I am impatient to see results.”

They didn't faint. But quite a few did express scepticism and disbelief, more comfortable to write this off as another fad.

To his credit, Anand stayed resolutely on course and the managers realised that the change was here to stay. Slowly the concerted effort of organisational change programme and the Role Modelling by Anand, took a foothold and within two quarters, the change started cascading down. Senior managers did not wait to give guarded feedback at the end of the year, but started feeling more comfortable to share them as and when. Slowly the next rungs followed suit. By the time the next appraisal cycle arrived in 10 months, the change was palpable.

The recruitment and development filters also started having an effect — belief in honest feedback and candid conversations were added to the ‘must have' list of attitudes.

“Well, we couldn't meet the target deadline of 18 months, but we did make it in 24 months. In two appraisal cycles, the change was obvious. In fact, the managers started looking forward to the feedback sessions and even mentioned them as what they valued most in working with the company. All thanks to the Iceberg concept,” concluded Mayur.

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